Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 33: Damaging Your Credibility and Meeting Potential Employers In School

Episode Date: October 31, 2016

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How can a developer damage their credibility online? How can I meet potential employers while I’m still in school?

It takes more than great code to be a great software engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering, the podcast where we take your questions and answer with ultimate wisdom. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your other host, Jameson Dance. And that was a joke. We don't really have ultimate wisdom. Not yet.

We have penultimate wisdom. We do, however, have exciting news. We do. This episode is brought to you by a sponsor, DevMountain. more about them later in less exciting news so like the vain person i am i was listening back to the episodes i just caught up with episode 31 and the question about how do you know if a job is worth applying to kind of stuck in my brain it's like yelling at the at the stereo while i was listening to it you're like you idiot why why don't say that no but the main thing that

i was thinking about was that the the characteristics of like an air quotes cool job um were way more important to me at the very beginning what was the question that was asked uh how do you know if a job is worth applying to okay so it mentions how do you know kind of what what are the good things that you should look for in a job and things like that and when i was first starting off i was really excited about and interested in all the kind of like startup perks where the startup replaces your mom um so you get like free laundry and like video games and rad ping pong table to hang out with all your friends at and your boss ties your shoes for you even though they're velcro childish um like cool party fun things and those were just the idea that

you could get paid at a place that also didn't care if you played video games for a little bit during the day, it was just so novel. But as I have matured, I feel like those things have kind of fallen away and, and they aren't that important and even can be just detractors at some point. So I feel like there are underlying things, but it's easy to be swayed by the shiny perks,

but perks are not a great way to know if a job is worth applying to definitely dear listener if you ever yell at the stereo or yell at your headphones uh when we are giving our answers feel free to send us a tweet and let us know your thoughts if you like air fight because you're so distraught at what we say and then you look like a crazy person on your morning run however you listen to this, then especially let us know. Absolutely. I will read our first question. So this is from listener Willie Ovali. How can a developer damage his or her credibility online? This is from a listener named Willie Ovali. I'm preparing for interviews as a software developer and I'm building a tiny automatic torrent downloader. Can publishing it on my GitHub damage my reputation

to future employers thank you you're welcome prematurely you're welcome didn't you make a torrent downloader or something like that dave yeah i did it was open source too yeah and there you go yeah not not damaged i think all torrent downloaders have implicit in their code like this doesn't do anything illegal even though you could do illegal stuff with it yeah this this is just code so i think that specific example you don't really have much to worry about yeah probably not but uh yeah also uh this might make you sad but uh you might be overestimating the effect that publishing that will have on the wider scope of the internet honestly you'll probably do it and like five people will look at it ever uh so it won't it won't be that bad

even if it is a doomsday device yeah I just published my doomsday device on github it's got three stars it's because it doesn't have a cool logo and like a fancy art for it and it doesn't have all the open source marketing it doesn't have all the badges

yet it's not gamified yeah yeah it doesn't have the pull request welcome contributor badge on there so i i think that it's actually more i think it's easier to damage your reputation online by saying something stupid than by publishing some code and i actually have an example of this from my own life would you like to hear the story please at one point in the distant past i was a tester at a well-known software company and there was an online discussion forum

that I was participating in that was actually bad-mouthing the products from my own company. And including some employees of the company were bad-mouthing some of the products. And I chimed in with a me too comment, like the idiot young whippersnapper that I was. And sure enough, the next day, my boss called me into her office and said, hey, we got some feedback about the things you said online about these products. and you need to prepare for the worst but hope for the best turns out that means you're on the brink of being fired which i was because one week later i got called into the hr office and i was at that point officially quote not a good fit which is a very

gentle way of saying you're fired so yeah yeah that was a way that uh you know i learned a lesson about what to say and what to keep to yourself online in a public discussion forum. And I did get fired. However, the interesting side of this story is I learned a really valuable lesson in what not to say online. And in the long run, I think that this didn't really damage my reputation in a measurable way over the course of the next decade. Do you think that was partially because you were so early in your career though i mean if if you point you you would not do this i know you and you're a great person but if you just went online right now and blabbed a bunch of horrible stuff i feel like it might now be more damaging because you because you're more

established i i don't really know why though it's like maybe i have more to lose or or the expectations are a little higher about i don't know professional behavior or something like that like like i i i know better now i think is what you're saying yeah yeah it could be i would definitely have to talk my way out of that one yeah well you'll just not do that no i think i'm not gonna that's an experiment i'm not gonna perform results unknown so i have uh i'd call it a loosely related example um there was a particular technology i was pretty interested in learning and I kind of dabbled in it a little bit and while I was learning it some of the community around that technology was very involved in marketing and pretty aggressive marketing and some of their

it wasn't everybody and it wasn't really condoned but but some of the people in the community chose to market the technology by making people who either didn't get it or didn't use it or use something else feel and look really stupid and that totally turned me off of it um it it made it so i wouldn't put up with the pain that comes with learning any new technology just because of the the feeling i got from the people that used it so this isn't a person it's more of a an inanimate object um but it it made me not use it but then on the other hand lots of people still did use it and it didn't die or anything it's it's it became more popular after i stopped using it maybe maybe that's why maybe i didn't you were holding it i wasn't associated with it i allowed

it to blossom just let it go jameson let it fly yeah be free so i don't know how i feel about the moral of that story i think results inconclusive yeah results inconclusive do you have any more data we'll call it data instead of stories so it will sound more scientific it's called anecdata yep do you have any more proof by which you mean my personal opinion yep so um jameson and i were going before the show we were kind of reviewing a list of about a half a dozen high profile cases of people making inappropriate remarks or doing negative things online that we would have expected to really damage their reputations. And we kind of also came away from that brief analysis with a result in conclusive thesis as well, right?

Yeah. And I don't know if that's because the cases where we have heard about this are from people who are famous already so they can rebound or if it's just how it works but it seems like even when they did things that i think are legitimately horrible uh it's all right for them and even in some cases they were better off because of the controversy and the added attention yeah it's almost like the more famous a person is the more likely their bad behavior is to be well you know widely reported um but it's also the less likely that it'll do any long-term harm to them yeah maybe so the corollary to that is that you know joe blow developer who nobody knows about or you know only a handful of people know them uh their naughty behavior won't be published from

far and wide i guess i don't know um yeah it this kind of ends with a weird taste in my mouth but that's what it seems like it just seems like there are definitely temporary consequences people get fired or they lose some credibility or their project or whatever it gets it's looked on with a kind of uh people kind of back away from it but i feel like in the long run all those cases i can think of i mean the people still make money doing basically what they were doing before which okay i i guess i was thinking of it as a bad thing right there's no justice in the world like they should i don't know what i expect like they should die or something if you go to jerk prison but maybe maybe yeah go to jerk prison until they reformed um but maybe this is could

be a good thing because i am a human being who does dumb things all the time and and maybe that indicates that there's some leniency if if i genuinely make a mistake uh it won't ruin my life forever are you saying the internet is merciful it's fickle and has the attention of a gold yeah that's it it's fickle and so even if that goldfish is just like gnawing at your jugular you just wait and then your jugular is fine later yeah we're certainly not saying that you can get away with whatever bad behavior you want and there's no repercussions because there are there are repercussions and like for example I got fired you know yeah you know there's there's usually nothing so harmful that you can't dig yourself out of it again I mean other repercussions

are say you say something just just really wrong and offensive you might recover and get a job later but there are definitely people that will have in their mind forever this person is the person that said x and i don't want to work with people that say that kind of thing yeah definitely um so so it does change some things even if it doesn't put you in jerk prison forever and depending on the seriousness of the thing you do or say it could very well close certain doors permanently yeah you know um like here's an example when i got out of college after having been fired from this job two or three years later one of my former co-workers reached out to me and said hey would you like to come be a developer at this company i said oh yeah sure and he looked

into it and came back and said oh nope sorry they've got like a permanent mark by your name says you can't wait what yeah this actually happened yeah from from the getting fired issue yeah that's what it was he he said he asked hr and they said nope can't do it was it the same company yeah same company oh okay same sorry sorry it was the same company from which i thought it was a different company and there's some secret permanent record it's like a credit bureau for bad developer behavior yeah that one time dave rage deleted prod because someone didn't let his code through hmm i think you may have just stumbled across a startup idea you can tattle on your on your co-workers what could go wrong it'll go in this permanent record

have we shed all the wisdom onto this question that there is to shed well that's okay maybe that's a high bar do you have anything else you would like to say yeah i do i want to say one thing actually i want to say a couple more things the first one is that i think it's much easier to damage your credibility with your direct co-workers than it is to damage your credibility online even though the internet tends to latch on to bad behavior and broadcast it far and wide if you are consistently bad to your co-workers treat them badly rude lazy or whatever it is um i think that will have a more lasting and more harmful effect on your credibility and reputation than a flippant twitter remark or

a questionable github project so kind of because you're more closely associated with those people so maybe more people will will briefly think you're an idiot if if you have some kind of internet controversy blow up but there it'll be a deeper impression on people that know you better is that kind of what you're saying absolutely absolutely yeah that makes sense so what are let's just go over a brief list here what what if i ask really stupid questions online can that harm my credibility heck no i think that can help your credibility well as long as you're not selling yourself as an expert on the thing that you're asking questions about yeah but i think it it demonstrates that you are willing to learn and you're excited about new things those are great

things what about participating in some kind of illegal hacking activity and then publicizing that okay yeah yeah probably that not good um i wouldn't recommend that i mean if you're an infosec though like kevin mitnick sure makes a lot of money now after spending a while in jail yeah after after spending what like 10 or 15 years in jail yeah maybe it paid off see credibility restored yeah that's all i want to say about that i think all right go forth and answered don't be a jerk on the internet yeah avoid this problem in the first place our sponsor this week is dev mountain which is a coding boot camp in salt lake and provo and instead of doing the traditional boring sponsorship message are you tired of your dead-end job come to dev mountain it's only 9.99

we are actually going to do something a little different we're going to talk to a couple of the dev mountain grads and just do an interview to hear what their experience was like what they liked what they didn't like and hopefully if you're interested and and excited to learn how to code or to pick up a new skill set this will make you um make you want to check out dev mountain our first interview is with a software developer named barbara leo do you want to just start off by stating your name uh yeah my name is barbara leo so what were you doing before uh dev mountain before that i was working for an arts university which was a lot of fun like i always wanted i like art a lot that's what i wanted to do when i was younger but it it wasn't very fulfilling i

guess i kind of got drawn to coding just it was creative in a lot of ways so it kind of hit some of the same buttons that art did yeah exactly you know there's a lot of different ways to solve the same problem in a lot of very elegant ways and but it was also very challenging at the same time you know it's always changing always something new always a new way to get better so even though barbara spent some time teaching herself how to code before dev mountain she says the actual experience of being there was pretty different oh it's so different like you know it's always hard to learn something new and when i was learning by myself i remember just like agonizing over it like oh my gosh like it's so hard like who who can I ask you know for help

and that's a big difference going to Dev Mountain was you know I could agonize about it and just lay on the floor and be like oh my gosh I don't understand it but you know there's going to be someone there who understands how I feel but also someone who is going to be able to help me and you know point me in the right direction I'm not just like clicking everywhere on the internet trying to figure out the right, you know, the answer to the question. So it was just really nice, the guided, you know, the mentorship that was at DevMountain. Yeah, like that hunt through the enormous pile of stuff on the internet

to find the one thing that's like kind of related to your problem. Someone out there has probably done it. And a lot of times, especially when you're learning to code, someone has already been there. And it's nice if they can just, you know, point you to the right answer and help you versus you just kind of floundering around by yourself. What was the pace like?

I mean, what did it feel like to attend? Yeah, it was definitely challenging. It was a little bit, I kind of cruised a little bit at the beginning. And I think a lot of that had to do with I had done a lot of prep work prior to. Okay, so you kind of had a head start. Yeah, I kind of had a little bit of a head start, which I really liked. It gave me some extra time to really kind of dive into everything. I think in a lot of ways, it's as challenging as you make it.

Um, myself and several other students, we spent a lot of hours, you know, after, after class and, um, a lot of long nights. Um, and you can, you know, you kind of get what you put into it. DevMountain has full-time 12 week programs, 16 week part-time programs. They have iOS, they have web development, they have UI and UX. They actually offer free housing with your tuition. So if you're coming from out of state, that really helps you just focus on learning. If you are interested in DevMountain, you can go to devmountain.com

to learn more about it we're actually going to hear more from barbara and some of the other graduates in the next few weeks as well but for now back to our show okay i'll read the next question excellent this is from listener jaunty and the question is how do i meet people working for potential employers when i'm still in college and know absolutely no one and let me just read some more details here hey guys you mentioned in one of your recent podcasts that knowing someone at a company is the best way to get hired i'm in my last year of cs now and i was wondering how i could get to know people in the industry to make finding a job easier once i get out basically i'm asking for networking tips big fan of the show keep up the great work cheers cheers right i raised

my water bottle to you all right a hearty toast so james and i were talking about this a minute ago and we both realized we didn't do this at all when we were in college right no not not explicitly well i also because there are so many people that come to programming uh through other avenues i think you can kind of substitute like in a boot camp or yeah teaching myself to code or kind of in the learning phase right like i'm a i'm almost going to enter the professional development industry how do i meet people yeah well maybe that's a way in which it is pretty different in a cs program there usually is kind of a funnel from graduation to getting a job like they have career fairs and it's kind of automatic yeah it's not you might not get the best job for you or a

job you love but yeah if you graduate with a cs degree there's a lot pushing you towards a job of some kind yeah there's a whole i mean literally a whole system people employed to help work you through this pipeline of meeting employers and stuff so at least as far as making connections go a lot of that is handled for you once you're in the job searching phase but what about before that like a year before i i didn't do anything see i didn't either i didn't either and what a waste right like um here's where we give that advice that's like okay age 12 do these steps to start preparing and then make them feel horribly guilty about how unprepared they are how far behind they I feel like that advice happens all the time.

Even though we didn't do it. Yeah, like how to be a doctor. Okay, age five. Let's begin. So as a 20-year-old college student, it just didn't occur to me that I should go out and meet people in the job market. I don't know why, but it didn't. I guess I was just too busy doing other things, maybe homework. but as now someone who's been in the industry for about 15 years i think if a college student

introduced themselves to me and wanted to meet me i would be perfectly happy to go do it um oh in fact james and i just remembered a program that my university set up after i graduated it was a lunch program thanks what thanks they waited till after you graduated yeah thanks a lot guys it was actually a lunch program where you could sign up to go to lunch with local developers who are working in the industry and they the developers like me would sign up to take college kids to lunch and then just kind of chat with them about you know what it's like to work in the industry and stuff like that and i only had one student sign up for that i was in that program for like two years and only one student did it with me anyway they were like oh dave smith

nope next okay but i just think students just didn't take advantage of that opportunity even though it was right there so good on you for for being concerned about this that early yeah i think you probably have a leg up um well the other takeaway was just ask people and they would say yes probably yeah it's not like people are getting inundated with these requests um how do you know who to ask though i mean there are there are probably local employers you could probably find a lot of them if you just go to meetups of some kind wherever you are. If there's a college there, there's probably some kind of meetup. Maybe it's small. I don't know. But there should be some opportunity to just meet local people and then you can kind of get a feel for what kind of jobs

are out there. Yep. I suspect you may already be aware. Now, maybe you're in a college town that's out and really remote and there's not a lot of tech jobs around. And in that case, it might be a little more difficult but you know i would start by uh listing the companies who employ people or that you would like to meet and then try to find connections with those companies you could even just hit up linkedin or twitter you know and just try to connect with these people you mentioned networking tips specifically and i think one thing that doesn't that i don't hear a lot about networking is that it should be mutually beneficial it's not just you kind of walking out to people and shaking their hand with a business card in your hand already so they

like have to take it and you just say hey my name is so-and-so got any work um because that's not beneficial that's stressful that would terrify me if people did that they you should have something to offer this person besides an item on their to-do list and through the internet that's actually pretty easy it's pretty easy both to meet people and to offer them something even if it's just like a little little happy stroke to their ego like if they tweet you could I don't know you could like their tweets and and if they're working on some project you can use it and then give feedback on some some way to introduce yourself to them that isn't just like hey i'm a stranger can you help me with this thing give me give me stuff yeah yeah i mean that that might work sometimes actually but

but it's so much easier and and it's so much more natural if you're if you're interacting beyond uh just asking for stuff if you're interacting around some project or some idea or uh just having having some something to offer. And you do have something to offer, even if you're pretty new and pretty new to programming. One of the things that I thought of in this case that you could offer is you may not know this, but almost all tech companies are hiring almost all the time. Has this been true in your experience, Jameson? Like, I think sometimes college students think, well, maybe they don't have any openings, right? But the fact is that most tech companies are always trying to hire, and they're just constantly unable to have enough developers on their teams to

do the jobs they need to do. So as a student, you could say, hey, I'd be happy to advertise any job openings that you have in my classes, you know, I can stand up at the beginning of class and take a minute, most professors will allow this, at least in my university, and say, hey, there's a job over at tech company, so and so. And it sounds really cool. And I went to lunch with one of the, you know, engineers over there, and they seemed really cool, you guys should all apply. and just say you could offer that and say in exchange i'd love to have lunch with you and hear about your company and then maybe i can talk about your jobs to my classmates yeah i mean this is also easy to not easy it's it's so much more possible to do though because of open source you

can just find an open source project and uh and find some way to contribute the one scary thought i used to have is that big open source projects are so frighteningly complex that there's no room for for me to contribute if i'm not an expert but i think it's actually the opposite that if an open source project is big enough there are there are enough things to do that some of those things will be within your skill set that's a good idea so yeah if you just hop on an issue queue and start i don't know become known as the person that that helps create reproducible examples out of bugs or or really good so you're not even error messages or something yeah like you're not even necessarily writing code yeah that's a really clever idea there's a lot a lot that open source

maintainers deal with that isn't writing code and if you can help them with that that's both a fantastically valuable skill that you're demonstrating and it's it's a great way to help them which is a better basis for a relationship than than just asking for stuff totally awesome another thing that this can accomplish is it helps you demonstrate competence and that's really important for me at least because i want to make sure if i'm recommending someone to people that i'm confident that they'll be able that they'll be a good fit i don't want to just um introduce people and say like check this person out you should totally hire them and then they go in an interview and and they are not a good fit at all or they've misrepresented

their skills somehow or i don't know where they feel like i've wasted their time does that make sense yeah it wouldn't reflect very well on you yeah and i am selfish so i i would rather protect my reputation in my network than then risk it on helping someone that i'm not sure uh is a good fit if that makes sense yeah so if you can demonstrate competence then that makes it easier to recommend to recommend you to people basically yep does that sound i don't know i feel really elitist and awful now that i just said that like i'm silently judging everyone or something let's put it this way you would never ask someone to write a letter of recommendation for you if they don't know you and by the same token don't ask jameson to refer you to someone if

jameson doesn't know you because jameson wants to be able to pass along a recommendation is that what you're trying to say does yeah when jameson says it in a third person it sounds even better oh yeah it's so royal yeah it's it's it's not like elitism or snootiness or like are you good enough to hang with me it's more like i i want to respect everyone's time and i want to make sure that there's a high chance of it working out like i don't want i don't want the person i recommend to be super disappointed and i don't want the people i recommend someone to to think i'm a joker or spammy or taking advantage of them yep so yeah if you can demonstrate competence it makes it easier to to get around that also jameson really likes it when people show up and wash his

motorcycle and if you just do that you'll pass along anything you want yep well so one last thing i had happened to me a few months ago actually is a local college student emailed me out of the blue and said hey i'm doing an assignment for an engineering class where i have to interview a handful of working engineers can i come to your office and interview you for 20 minutes i've got some questions i'll ask and i was like oh yeah no problem and i think once you know the people you want to connect with actually connecting with them is so easy and i never even verified that it was a real class you know maybe this kid was just super ambitious just made some stuff up i've got this sweet angle but i mean people are generally quite willing to give you

a few minutes of their time especially if you're like hey this interview is going to be you talking about your life people love that oh yeah everybody loves to talk about themselves it's flattering to have someone listen to them yeah yeah what he didn't know is that i was going to stand up on a like a pulpit with a microphone and blast the answers over a mic back at him and pretend there like thousands of people listening even better for your ego it's all about the ego yep so a lot of these tips when i say them sounds scary to me because there are still people it's not like this goes away where once you get in the industry you're like oh i'm fine i know all the people i need to know there's still people i would love to get to know and work with someday

and it's still kind of scary for me to think about just cold approaching them so i think if this feels hard i think it's because it can be hard it's not that you're defective in some way yeah uh it's but it is it can be super worth it it can change your life if you if you get an opportunity that you wouldn't have without a little bit of potentially uncomfortable effort i mean yeah if you get a job out of that it affects years of your life absolutely plus human relationships are one of the most rewarding parts of life anyway, you know, getting to know new people and having those relationships be kindled over years. That's what, that's what happiness is made of. And I think research actually backs that up. So this isn't just a Dave fact. It's a

fact fact. There are many kinds of facts. This is a true fact. There are Dave facts and there are true facts well question answered question answered all right john person helped get out there and leverage a network yep i hate saying those words yeah i've said a lot of words that i hate in this question but it's because i love you listener and i'm willing to say business things what a sacrifice in my mouth to make your life better all right jameson where can people go if they want to spread the soft skills engineering podcast love they can go to softskills.audio on the internet there they will find episodes and that is about it you should use a web browser just so you know people have been writing in saying how come it

doesn't work with the gopher protocol look that died in like 97 okay i drove to soft skills and there was nothing there it was just a barren wasteland in probably i don't know west virginia isn't that where they the data centers are yeah uh don't drive there yeah use the internet to go there you can't use ftp either just keep that in mind okay use the the world wide web yes hypertext transfer protocol only is that specific enough you can also find us on twitter we are at soft skills eng on twitter that's where we collect all of our questions so if you have one you would like to ask then hit us up there either at just just publicly or in a direct message also rate our podcast on itunes even if you don't use itunes go click the little rating button uh pick as many

stars as you want one through five give us what you feel like we have earned with our sincere and in incredibly earnest efforts how many stars was this episode worth to you do you see the puppy dog eyes that i'm transmitting through audio right now how many stars would you give these puppy dog eyes like 10 10 stars five per eye all right i think we have finished all right see you next week