The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Growing as a software engineer (Interview)

Episode Date: December 2, 2020

Gergely Orosz joined Adam for a conversation about his journey as a software engineer. Gergely recently stepped down from his role as Engineering Manager at Uber to pursue his next big thing. But, that next big thing isn't quite clear to him yet. So, in the meantime, he has been using this break to write a few books and blog more so he can share what he's learned along the way. He's also validating some startup ideas he has on platform engineering. His first book is available to read now — it’s called The Tech Resume Inside Out and offers a practical guide to writing a tech resume written by the people who do the resume screening. Both topics gave us quite a bit to talk about.

Before Uber, I thought you need to have a perfect system up front or something. At Uber, I realized when you're growing, it's a great problem. And you can solve things by throwing money at it in terms of hiring people who are coming in to fix certain things or just buying more infrastructure. At some point, we were bleeding. We were using so much infra, but it didn't matter because we were already growing. And on the other side, it doesn't matter if you build a perfect system. If your business model doesn't work, you're going to have to shut down later.

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at retool.com slash changelog. Again, retool.com slash changelog. Again, retool.com slash changelog. What's up? Welcome back, everyone. This is the ChangeLog, a podcast featuring the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators in the software world. I'm Adam Stachowiak, Editor-in-Chief here at Changelog. On today's show, I want to talk with Gergay Oros about his journey as a software engineer. Gergay recently stepped down from his role as engineering manager at Uber to pursue his next big thing, but that next big thing isn't quite clear to him yet.

So in the meantime, he's using this break to write a few books and blog more to share what he's learned along the way. He's also validating some startup ideas he has on platform engineering. His first book is available to read right now. It's called The Tech Resume Inside Out, and it offers a practical guide to writing a tech resume and is written by the people who do the resume screening himself as well. Both topics gave us quite a bit to talk about. So here we go. So Gary Gay, happy to have you here. It's been, I guess, an interesting journey because in the pre-call to this show, you'd mentioned the recent Spotify show we did on Backstage. And when you don't meet people face-to-face, you see their

avatars kind of going around i saw the conversation and pinned that back to you and i was like i saw this book you were writing at least a couple books and some of your journey and i was like gotta get him on the show so here you are nice to have you here yeah it's great to be here and that story was really cool with backstage so i listened to the change log on and off and probably maybe two weeks ago so a few days before you reached out i was listening to this show on spotify and backstage and i just left my job at uber and one of my kind of you know not so secret goals is to start a startup potentially in like a couple of months or so and i'm in the kind of idea gathering phase just being a sponge as i'm writing a book

pretty much full time. And I listened to this show and a lot of things just clicked because the ideas I'm looking at for startups are around platform engineering. I saw how much Uber invested in this. I know a lot of companies are investing big time. And I'm pretty certain that in five years time, there's going to be a lot more tools that you can buy that are great tools. And a lot of companies will use these tools as opposed to trying to hire these platform engineers. So long story short, I listened to this podcast and I was like, oh, wow, this backstage scene is really interesting.

I wish we had this at Uber, which led to other ideas of like, hmm, this could be an interesting idea. I connected with a founder who's actually started a company building on top of backstage. And this is in a stealth round right now but the same founder told me that he got multiple listeners reach out to him because they found from that show from that show yeah gosh jared and i even i mean like i was i felt so fortunate to have that conversation with jim and stefan and you know i'm just sitting there like aha moment after aha moment listening to this show because as they explain what backstage not only does for their infrastructure – and by the way, this show is not particularly about that, but we're covering that at least a little bit.

So listeners, that episode was 415. Go back and listen to it. But several aha moments. I'm just kind of seeing how it was a social network and how it enabled things. It just like this you know very i guess easy lever thing inside of an organization and i guess you know one thing we uncovered in that show was really at scale because like small orgs may not benefit so much from backstage but large orgs like uber or shopify or spotify or inside of google even like that's really where you see these kinds of things thrive which to some degree points back to some of your history. You've been an engineering manager. You've written a couple of books. You've done some pretty cool stuff. Maybe we can begin there.

Maybe we can kind of start with what you've been doing over the last several years. What have you been working on? Yeah, let's start there. So I'll go back to where I started, which was a long time ago. I'm originally actually from Hungary. I lived a couple of years in the US,

so a bit all over the place, but I graduated in Hungary at university computer science degree. And funny enough, my first few years of college, I hated software development in terms of coding. My first language is the language C and I was just really bad at it. I thought I'm going to quit,

but I persisted because I had to. It would have been embarrassing to drop out. And that actually reminds me of just how difficult it is these days to get started with programming. My wife's a self-taught developer, and it is hard. Anyway, from there on, I worked at smaller companies initially, agencies, consultancies, and then I moved to the UK and London specifically. And I worked a year at an investment bank, JP Morgan, which is a great name. In hindsight, it wasn't a great tech shop,

but it was a really interesting experience because I work with the trading floor and there's all sorts of stories there that are kind of true. Like it's a high stress environment, but it was a good learning experience. And then from there on, I was lucky enough to get into Skype.

I like to say Skype it was Microsoft really Microsoft just bought Skype but they had this policy of leaving their acquisitions alone for 18 months so it felt like Skype we were just building stuff I was on the founding team to build Skype for Xbox One which was a year and a half before the Xbox One was out and ship some some cool projects there and this was the beginning of working at really high growth-based companies. So when I joined Skype, there was probably like 70 or 100 engineers in London. And two years later, there was 350, and we just kept growing and growing. And then from there on, I went to another startup where Skyscanner,

you can find the cheapest flights. Not that during COVID it matters as much, but they're market leaders in Europe and Asia. And it's kind of like the equivalent of kayak in the US. And the same thing there, I joined the London office and there were three of us when I left about a year later or a year and a half, it was 60 of us. And then I went to Uber in Amsterdam. And at the time, Amsterdam was quite small, about 25 engineers. And again, about four years later later we maxed out about 150 people before there were some layoffs so now it's a bit smaller but throughout all these places I just had a lot of

professional growth I changed stacks back in the day I started with the thick client stack C sharp XAML WPF I then moved over to the web I then did back end and I did native mobile as well so all over the place and at Uber I moved from being a senior engineer to becoming an engineering manager. And towards the end, I was on track to managing managers. I had a manager under me. I had a team of 30. That's where I am. And then I left Uber to write a book and potentially start a startup later.

Not often you hear somebody leaving a position like that or a company like that to write a book. But then the caveat there is to start a startup too. So where are you at in those phases? I know you've written a couple of books. One we'll talk about, one that's coming out next year. We could talk about where you're at in both of those phases in terms of promotion of the current one out or the written material for the future one. And then maybe the startup ideas.

I know you'd mentioned at the beginning of the show, backstage and some of these side conversations as a result of that conversation we had around it. But where are you at, I guess, on the latter front versus the former front? So not on your books, but your startup idea. Where are you at there? So the way I think about startups is when I entered the industry, I have a brother and we have two very different paths. He's a younger brother. He always is a startup. So out of uni, he already a brother and we have two very different paths. He's a younger brother. He always has started. So out of uni, he already had a startup. We collaborated very briefly, but his startup took off.

The startup was an agency initially. It got acquired later by Skyscanner. And there was a brief time where we worked at the same company, which was a really interesting conversation. His company just got acquired by Skyscanner. It was a great exit for him and his co-founders. And the very next day, I get a phone call from a recruiter who I knew telling me, oh, we just acquired this company by Skyscanner and we want to hire you to head of mobile development there.

I'm like, no, what? Well, like the CEO is my younger brother and I'm not going to report to that guy. And then they call me back saying, hold hold on we actually acquired a different company and we want you there and so in my contract i never had that but i had it written there that i will not report directly or indirectly to my brother who was now at a higher level he was executive and i was a principal engineer so he was a few levels higher um so but the point is he always is startups and i saw firsthand how stressful and difficult it is. He had a great exit, but there was three or four years of extreme stress, long nights. And he told me that sometimes it was a relief when he got acquired because he no longer had to worry about paying wages and

taking care of the admin and he could actually just focus on building. So for a long time, I said, I'm never going to do a startup. But working at Uber gave me the confidence. And I talked with a couple of other people who worked at Uber for a couple of years. When I joined, it seemed pretty small. And I just saw the inside of how things were built. I saw some ideas that turned into billion dollar businesses, and we were building it. And it wasn't as much rocket science as I thought it would be. It was just like good execution, but it was nothing special. So as I reflected on where I want to go, there was an option to keep growing professionally, becoming a manager, one day maybe a director, and that path probably would have been feasible. But I realized that I really, really enjoyed doing stuff small. I felt that I kind of saw how it was done. So I figured it's time to take a risk. And it was nice timing because I really wanted to get this book out of the way.

So it gave an excuse to have something to do for the next few months, as opposed to either leaving and just getting ideas or not leaving Uber and on the side, doing ideas and then raising some sort of fund. I have some people who do that. It's also very unusual. Very few people do it. And I'm also kind of thinking i'm at the point where i realize it takes a couple like it took many years to realize that i don't need to follow

what others do yeah i just figured out this is this will feels right for me i'm taking a bet on myself and a bit of the environment around me and let's see what happens so far i'm really happy i did it i'm having really interesting conversations with founders or other people. I get to come on podcasts like this just to talk and it's been great. I feel I've, during COVID, I'm connecting with people on the other side of the world. And some of these connections will be just really useful, I think, for years to come. Yeah. So too often do we just follow the default path, you know, whether it's a presupposed or impressed upon us, or I don't know, like one of your, one of your heroes is going down a certain path and thinking, well, that's my path then because I'm a fan of them and whatever

they're doing, I'm going to do that too, because that, that makes sense. And it takes courage to forge your own path. You'd mentioned in particular inside of Uber, you saw some things happening. Can you be specific about, I suppose, the ease at which you were building certain things or innovating certain things that made you feel that I could do this on my own, I could do that. What were some of those things for you?

So I'll give an example. I'm not going to narrow it down exactly. Let me actually talk about a story, which is not a secret. And I think it's a good one. It was a long time ago. It's a really, it's really typical of how you feel. So before I joined Uber, I was thinking that if you do a startup and you know, oh my God, what happens if it takes off and you're not ready? That's probably the worst feeling. And you're not ready to scale. You don't know how to do the next, like you're probably doomed. That's probably the worst feeling. And you're not ready to scale. You don't know how to do the next like you're probably doomed. And I was I would have been super stressed, I would have kind of been really careful to not get into that position. When I was at Uber, we had this product called cash. So TK, the CEO of Uber, when he founded Uber, he had two

kind of baselines. One, we're never going to use cash to we're never going to tip because he hated those two things about cabs in San Francisco. And later, one of the teams in India said, we really need to do cash because in India, people don't have credit cards. And TK said, no, we're not doing that. But in Uber, there was this way of like, let data win. So this team in India reached out to team in Amsterdam, where I was, and they said, can you guys borrow less an engineer or half an engineer to build this this thing cash and we somehow did it or was it wasn't me it was some people I was working with and this product started to take off and it started to take off like crazy like like hyper growth and at some point there was about hundreds of millions of dollars going through

this product and there still was one engineer and one data scientist and half a product manager and they were just holding the whole thing together with duct tape. And this is when I joined. And I couldn't believe this massive product generating so much revenue. It was spreading in other countries. And they still didn't get more funding for it for different reasons. But they still held it together. And later, as the product got bigger, eventually, there was a team there, they managed to do it, but people held it together. So what I realized is if you have growth, it's a great problem to have. The people who worked on this product were super motivated. They were fixing problems. They didn't care what their title was. They were just doing it and they were having a blast. And these people

who worked there, they became so much more senior in such a short amount of time in terms of growth, ownership. And that's when I realized, huh, you know what? If you're on a rocket ship, it doesn't matter. You're going to sort it out. That's the feeling I had at my early days of Uber. It was a rocket ship. It was going really fast. And we could have crashed and burned so many different ways, but we sorted it out.

We had some long nights here and there. It wasn't that terrible. And we kept hiring and whenever we hired so before uber i thought you need to have a perfect system up front or something at uber i realized when you're growing it's a great problem and you can solve things by throwing money at it in terms of hiring people who are coming in to fix certain things or just buying more infrastructure at some, we were bleeding. We were using so much infra, but it didn't matter because we were already growing.

And on the other side, it doesn't matter if you build a perfect system. If your business model doesn't work, you're going to have to shut down later. And I also saw that at Uber. So there were some parts of the business which weren't running that great, and they got shut down.

You know, like a case study, which is publicly known, Jump. They were a great team, going really fast, and then, like, as a business for this or that didn't work out, so they were shut down. Before that, I saw the Jump code base, and some of it, you know, not all of it, some of it was pretty kind of hacked together, and some people in my team or around me were making a bit of, like, fun of them, like,

oh, they're not writing unit tests, and I kind of looked at it, and I said, hold on, like, why are we going to have a hard time? They don't know if they're going to survive. They don't know if there's going to be a team and there was no team actually in six months. So they actually did the right thing by moving fast. So I just had a lot of these firsthand experiences. And I think it's different when someone sees it. And I now look at the kind of hacker news crowd or the forum crowd who give you couch architecture lessons of like, oh, why is Uber having 5,000 microservices or why don't they just rewrite it?

It's very different on the ground. And it doesn't really matter what anyone thinks. As long as you're solving your problems, you're fine. And if you're going fast, you're going to solve your problems. I guarantee that. And I've seen this. So I guess I don't have that fear from this. The only fear i have now is what if it doesn't take off and

you know that's a different problem to have well i think the fear you're talking about may have come from intimidation yeah you know intimidation in terms of like man these are difficult things to do i'm intimidated by what might be possible what might happen you know these and these are sort of these untruths that we make truth in our own mind. And once we sort of see, we sort of like do the Oz effect, right? We peek behind that curtain and that veil, and it's just one person. It's just this little person, this little guy in terms of the Oz metaphor versus this big projected thing.

That's true. And when we minimize those problems, we can sort of get over them easier. Also, when I joined Uber, this was 2016, when they had amazing press. This is when they raised $10 or $13 billion at $70-something billion valuation. They were the fastest growing company in all time. Everything was perfect. And when I joined, I was also intimidated. I was like, oh, wow, I'm joining this amazing place, which is probably in my head,

it was like Google 20 years ago, or 15 years ago, or Facebook 10 years ago. And when you go in there, you realize it's just people. And by the way, it's the same people in the industry. So some people, they go back and forth between companies, but it's all just people. And it's good people, it's decent people. Maybe you have a few people who are not as amazing, but it's just people. It took me a while to realize it. So what's your next step then, since your fear is at least reduced? I'm sure there's still some fear there because you're not completely fearless, but you've got reduced fear. What's your next step? Where are you at right now in terms of, not so much what's your idea, but are you in the process of beginning to code, beginning to write, beginning to execute any sort of ideas?

So normally, that's what I thought that I would have done if I wanted to start a company is start to write an MVP. I'm taking it a bit differently. Because what I've seen is, and this is also coming from Uber. Uber wasn't just a company, like just an everyday company. I kind of thought of it as a massive VC fund with a dozen or so startups. And my organization, the money organization, was also kind of a startup because we went to pitch to CFO and we said, hey, we'd like to ask for, you know, 100 or 200 million dollars for the next two or three years to build these new teams. And you're going to have a return of, you know, like 500 million or a billion in this time. And we were doing the pitch decks. And it was like pitching a series D or a series F

to your VC and it was our VC and all the other lines of businesses were doing it. Jump was doing it, Freight, Uber Eats, Uber Works and so on and there's a couple of one that people don't know about because they're not public. So that was a really interesting experience and so my step is evaluating ideas that I'm excited about and the ones that would make business sense. Because I think to start a startup, you need to first have something that you're really darn passionate about that you're happy to do for three to five years or more. You can't do it otherwise. And you need to do something that's going to make business sense. Now, in my view, I don't know too much about what makes business sense, but I do

know one thing. To be successful, you need to build something today that will be higher demand in three to five years than it is today, because it'll take you about three years to get something pretty good out there. So good examples, if you look back at what engineers did at Google 10 years ago, they had A-B testing inside Google. It was not in the industry. They left Google, said, oh, we should build this. And that's how Optimize and LeanPub were built by Google engineers. So one of the advantages I see at Uber and in the industry as a whole, and this is an open secret or some ideas to listeners, is there's a huge shift. All these companies, all tech companies are investing huge in platform teams. I saw that Uber, Stripe, Airbnb, they have a good 10, 20% of their engineers

are doing platform work. This means infrastructure or building stuff. They're filling gaps for the tools that don't exist today because the technologies move so fast from containers to mobile architecture to analytics, all that stuff. And I see that in three to five years, there's going to be tools that you can buy

and a lot of companies will want to buy. Uber would buy if there was, and those tools need to be built. So what I'm doing is I'm, I'm actually looking at the market on and I'm doing more talking with both founders, people working at companies to see what these pain points are and validate that the stuff I saw at Uber is not just a one off, I don't want to build something that, you know, could only be useful for Uber. So that's where I'm at Uber is not just a one-off. I don't want to build something that could only be useful for Uber. So that's where I'm at. It's the idea gathering phase and just validating some stuff in the industry and talking with people who are also thinking about similar platform stuff.

And then my plan is that about three to four months, I'll start into narrowing down the ideas and then potentially then take it from there, maybe building a prototype maybe raising funding our friends at digital ocean launch the app platform get apps to market faster now build deploy and scale apps quickly using a simple fully managed solution they handle everything the infrastructure the app runimes, independencies. So all you have to do is push code to production with the click of a button. It's that easy.

Learn more. Check it out at do.co.changelog. Again, do.co.changelog and get $100 in free credit. so four years you were at uber if i can understand your story correctly so correct me if i'm wrong but four years uh give or take a month or two you're there enjoying it leveling up in many ways as you mentioned and then you decide to step away so exit you know that team do something different from what i understand one of the things you're going to do is you got one book written but you have another one coming up in 2021 and that that one is titled Growing as a Developer. It's a guide for growing as a software engineer. And you mentioned kind of coming up from the ranks from college or university with your computer science degree, kind of getting

into C and some different stuff. You know, you shared some of that part of your story, but then moving into an engineer and into an individual contributor and then into management. But why would you step away from Uber? I mean, it seemed like such a cool gig so i guess your intimidation turned fearless in there i mean you seem like you're on the winning path how is that not the winning path why is this new writer going the route for you i guess when i joined uber i told myself let's have a check-in in four years like if everything goes well uber is the first company that actually were when joint companies like uber you often get shares which or equity this is not anything new for people in silicon valley but for example in europe this is quite rare and i had some equity in my previous companies which were worth in the end mostly zero and so i told myself well let's

see what happens in four years and then see where I want to go from there. And I was really happy to Uber. Professionally, I grew tons. Financially, it was also rewarding. Uber went to IPO and people will argue, but I think it was a successful IPO because it happened. Unlike some companies, for example, Airbnb, it still hasn't happened. And Uber and Airbnb were similar, which just meant liquidity for employees who had some shares there. And what I told myself before I joined Uber as well, if I have the option at some point to have the safety net, maybe I'll try something else. And I looked back and I said, well, hold on, I do have a safety net now, I can take a risk if I want to. And the other option was to stay at

Uber and, you know, keep like, again, keep working with the team, keep leveling up to the next levels. As I reflected on what I really like doing, the most fun I had at Uber and previous places was always working with a small team, and getting something done kind of against the odds. So when I joined Uber, but this memory is very vivid, we were a small team and we had this giant project of rewriting the Uber app and doing a lot of our part in it, which was just almost a death march. But it really bonded the team. We somehow got it done.

And later I was also, I'm really fond of the first, maybe a few years where I had a small team. It was, I was not experienced as a manager. The engineers around me were not as experienced as engineers working in this environment. And we had so much fun and we got a lot of things done. As I moved into managing on the path to managing managers, I kind of missed that.

And I always had most fun working with smaller teams like this. And I wasn't looking as much forward to going to the point where I would manage managers. And I was missing this kind of fire in the belly of doing something that is high growth and it's going to expand. So that's what made me make the decision. Whenever I make big life decisions, I usually have this test of what I really regret if I didn't do this. This is when I changed from JP Morgan. I was really happy with JP Morgan

and back when I was there in London working in finance, I had a really supportive boss. I had a good salary. And then Microsoft reached out and said, do you want to build Sky for Xbox One? And I first said, nah, I'm really happy. Supportive boss, I'm going to be promoted. But then as I went to sleep and I tossed and turned in bed, I thought, huh, I could be building Skype for Xbox One. And I had the feeling I would really regret if I didn't do that. And it was the same here. I felt I would really regret if I didn't give this a go for two reasons. Coronavirus is oddly one reason.

This is a crisis. A lot of people are losing jobs, including in software. It's a hard time for everyone. But I tend to look at things a bit differently. Some of these situations are some of the best times to start a business. Because there's a lot of venture capital out there. There's been really high returns on all the companies. You see the IPOs that are happening right now. A lot of that money will go back to the ecosystem. It's one of the best times to hire people. If you're a business and you want to hire people, it's a lot easier to hire now than it was a year ago, or it will be a year later.

So that also helped my decision. So in the end, I think it's a mix of, I sensed an opportunity for a big adventure and I wanted to do it. And so far, I'm really happy I did it because again, it's been a very different experience, but I'm doing something different than I've been doing for 12 or 13 years, which is being full-time employed door-to-door. I left my previous job set on Friday and started the next one on Monday. It's a little bit less predictable, but I think it feels a bit of my sabbatical or my taking a risk. I would recommend, well, if you have the right appetite for it, at some point it can be interesting to try it out and also by the way it's super safe like i'm not taking a huge risk i i can go back into the industry or the likes of the companies i've been to i'm a big believer in

industry is very small like on my way out i did everything i could to have a really good exit you know like like kind of going the extra mile make sure people are good i'm not leaving anything unattended i hope i didn't leave anything broken because those relationships will run for a long time. So whenever you leave a company, like I've seen people, especially when they were junior, just do brash things and it hurts them for so many years after. Reputation is everything. Even beyond reputation, which is self-serving, being a good human being pays dividends, right? Like be kind. And how do you exit and be kind? Well, you don't leave. Well, I mean, you can't fix all your bugs, right? But you know, you can at least mend or, you know, unify or be clear about any relationship,

you know, like I'm leaving for these reasons or just, you know, when you're on the process of leaving, you're not like, Hey, I'm not checked not checked out i'm still involved i want to make sure that this team this manager this boss this group this cohort whatever is in a good place and if there's any questions i have that are sort of like encapsulated to me because we do you know get a lot of domain knowledge that sort of like gets stuck inside of us and it's we've had a couple shows recently where it's like that process of sharing that knowledge is storytelling to let them know that hey if you have some questions i'm here i'm all i'm all ears let me know i'd be glad to walk you through the details or whatever it might be i'm assuming you did that based upon what you just said is that a rough kind of gauge of how you mapped out your exit? Like,

Hey, I went to different people and made myself available, made it know what my intentions were that. Well, yeah. So I did a bit more than that because me leaving Uber, it was a bit easier because a year ago, well, in terms of process a year ago,

I took a parental leave Uber. I had my second child born and Uber had this brand new policy, which is four months off for, for dads. You can take four months, which is four months off for dads. You can take four months. You can take it in two portions. You can do one month plus three months or two plus two. And I hesitated for a while, but I decided to do the whole four months in one go.

And before that, my team had a lot of stuff going on. So I actually made a structured plan of how to hand over, you know, who's going to take over what part of my job. So that helped. And by the way, what I realized there, I thought that by me leaving for four months, the team would be in big trouble, you know, they would not be able to deliver this, this really important project, which I was kind of a key part of. And what actually happened is I came back, people stepped up to or two or three people went an absolute extra mile. At the end of the year, they got really high recognition for it

because everyone else saw what they did. Their professional growth accelerated. Basically, by me not being there, I created opportunities for others. And companies like Uber, and I think most companies where you have a good culture, people are eager to step up. So I'm also pretty sure that me leaving Uber,

it created opportunities for other people to step in there to grow faster. So this experience helped me. And then to your question, I actually prepared a lot for my leaving. So I actually had a notice period, which I extended to talking with my manager. We had a plan. I talked with everyone. I tried to do my best to do handovers.

As a manager, it's really important that you have that continuity with people. So I did that. And then hopefully, so far, I didn't hear anything exploding behind me. I hope that's how it actually happened. I think it's interesting the way you mentioned that, too. I'm assuming it was fairly humbling to feel like if you stepped away, your team may, for lack of better terms, crash and burn. Or have a difficult

time because, you know, you left the vacuum. But what happens often is that I've experienced this in my life with leadership, like when given an opportunity to stand up and lead, I was able to rise to that occasion. But, you know, you can't do that unless there's a vacuum, right? Unless there's an opportunity or a space or an enablement, you know, and so too often do we just sort of like, I don't know, I guess think we're cooler than we actually are, better than we are and, you know, and that our team won't succeed if we step away and then we burn out, right?

Because we never give ourselves time off and especially around, you know, either exiting or in the other case you mentioned the parental leave, you know, like those are crucial times in your life. Like you get one family for the most part, you know, you have kids only a couple of times in your life. Those are unique, special moments that you need to like that are good for you as a human being to be the you you are for your team. Yeah. And to not give yourself that time to take. Just to be clear. Yeah.

And on that parental leave, I didn't look at, I deleted all apps from my phone, didn't look at emails or anything. I told people if there's something, they can text me, and I did zero work. So that was also, I consciously did a hard blackout. And again, I was really worried what would happen because I had so much context.

I knew so many people there, and a lot of things were going through me. And it was the best thing I could have done. I would, since then, I recommend it to every, any leader and also to any engineer. Some people are like, oh, you know what, maybe I'll only take two months and then maybe I'll take the next two months. Usually people don't take the second one. So yeah. And same thing with holidays. Like if you're a leader or if you're a senior engineer, just take two or three weeks of holiday and do not answer anything and see what happens. And I'm pretty sure you're going to be surprised positively. You got two books, one that's in progress, as I understand, one that's out. The Tech Resume

Inside Out is the one that's out now. When did you write that book? Yeah, so I wrote this, I published it about a month ago, and I started writing it around May after coronavirus started. So the story behind that book is, I was writing my original book, which is about growing as a software engineer, kind of going from this entry level role to senior to tech lead and all the way to staff levels at the likes of tech companies that I worked at and what I saw. And the idea was like, I both went through this journey, and then I mentored a lot of people as a manager to go through this journey. And when the coronavirus started, I paused writing this book, because it was just, there's a lot of stuff happening. And then the layoffs started

happening. So both at Uber and at my old company, Skyscanner. So I knew people who were actually being let go. And then I thought, you know, is there some way where I could help? And one thing that I offered is just doing resume reviews for both people I knew. And I offered to do this on Twitter. And I got a lot of response about like, I think I expected a few dozen. And I got like 300 people who some were laid off and some were just looking for a job because they knew something was coming. And I figured, OK, it was 300 was too much. And I did what I usually do.

And I think a lot of people do or hopefully you scale yourself so i started to reply to first like 50 in detail and i made notes and i i compressed those notes as the most common observations into a pdf and i send that to the other 250 people with kind of some notes saying all right pay attention more to this or that and then some people said that they really liked it and it got forwarded as well. And then I was thinking, hold on, I'm writing this book, which is going to take for a long time, maybe I could do an MVP, maybe I could just do a short book on writing a resume, which could be a dry run of how to write a book, I'm self publishing this book. And I was like, okay, let me do a dry

run on this. And my plan was, let's, you know, do a really minimal product like 80 pages and I started writing it but it's such a fluffy topic resumes uh in the sense that even my wife was telling me like surely you're not serious about writing resumes that is like you know like it's such a cheap like who writes about resumes it's usually you get like career coaches who who are often not even in the industry giving us advice and I was well, if I'm writing something, I want to write something good. And I saw a lot of resumes, I had ideas, but the people who see the most are recruiters.

They literally see 10 times as much as any hiring manager. Like some of them see hundreds of them weekly. So I just reached out to all the recruiters in my network and I asked them, can you tell me your input, your advice for specifically software engineers on what a good resume means and in tech companies. And a long story short, it turned into a proper book with about 200 pages. About half of the book is actually examples. Cause one thing I never saw in any guide is an example of here's a, here's a resume or here's a refactored one. And why are you doing certain things?

And about a quarter of the book is not even on a resume it's about giving you the background how actually what happens with your resume because most people like when i wrote my first resumes i just kind of followed a pattern they didn't think too much i just put my all achievements but most people don't think about like your resume has a very clear goal and that goal is to get to that a recruiter screen that should be your goal once you're there your resume has a very clear goal. And that goal is to get to that recruiter screen. That should be your goal. Once you're there, your resume doesn't really matter anymore. Yeah. And because of this, the biggest mistake that people make, and this is, you know, it's in

the book as well, but you can just use it. If you apply for 10 different positions, you're doing cold applications. Well, first of all, the best thing you can do is get a referral, you know, if you can. But the second best thing you can do is customize your resume. You should be sending 10 different resumes. People send the same, and then they're surprised that they're not hearing back as much. And the people who tailor them will have, and you don't have to spend too much effort. So if you just do these two things, you're already going to hear back.

And the feedback for the book has been pretty good. So first of all, the book is free and it will remain free for anyone who's out of a job as a developer. I'm just doing some basic validation to avoid spam, but there's no string attached. People get that. I really don't want to make any profit off anyone who's in these shoes. And the feedback has been that people saw just an increase in feedback from from across the board from large tech companies now some people still couldn't pass the the interviews but but most people yes and most people were able to improve their resumes so yeah my takeaway from the book is i hope it would be

nice if we didn't if we did not need this book but the reality is that if you're cold applying you need a resume and again like the best thing you can do is get a referral but in the absence of that this book tries to just like there's no fluff it's just the stuff that actually matters there's a lot of interesting and false information out there on the internet that's just mingled with with good advice so hopefully this is useful for some people and it was also a good dry run for me to see, you know, how long it takes to write a book, the editing process. It's a different format. It's on Kindle, EPUB, PDF. And I went through the whole publishing process. It's professionally edited. So. Well, that's good to do an MVP dry run for, you know, your 2021 book, which is,

I think what you're really trying to do, but as you'd mentioned, let's start with resumes because that at least get me started and give me some momentum in terms of how to do it. And to your wife's credit, you know, in terms of like, should you have written about resumes and surely you can't be writing about resumes. When you search on Google how to write a tech resume, all the results are what you had suggested. Like, it doesn't seem like it's from the trenches. Like you're somebody who is who has been down the path. And so if you're going to get advice from somebody

on this very particular thing that you need to do to get in the door, and then to understand how to do it well, it makes sense to get advice, I suppose, from somebody who's been there and cares. You seem like somebody who cares. And that's why you write the book in the first place. And so I think it's wise for you to have written it. Yeah. And the thing

I'm happy about is not just me. It's about 20 other tech recruiters and hiring managers. And they've all some of them have added content to it. And a bunch of them have reviewed it. So that's the one that actually made me confident to release it that it that it is practical advice. There's one of the recruiters, she's told me she interviewed 6,000 people in 20 years because she's been in this industry for 20 years and she reviewed, yeah, like tens and tens of thousands of resumes. And, you know, for example, she went through and she critiqued the manuscript

and I had a lot of changes after that. And there's been a bunch of them. And I also, I tried to reach out to recruiters across the world in all continents to get that, for example, I wasn't sure if this would this advice would apply in places like Africa. And so I reached out to some people who are working in tech companies in that continent. And again, there's some things for a good example is photos. The biggest advice is do not use photos for the US and Western Europe and most countries, including countries that like Germany

where traditional companies expected, but in tech, you don't need it. But in the Middle East, it's not as clear cut. And there's a recruiter who works there and he was very cautious. And it's in the book as well. He's saying, use your judgment,

but maybe you'll want to use it there. So yeah, I can say to say it is the most thorough book right now on this specific topic. If you'll ever need to write a resume, you know, check it out. If you're out of a job, it is free. Just get it. If you have people who know, and this, by the way, it goes to the same if you're, if people are students or don't yet have a job, also free.

Yeah. Well, let's break down, I suppose, the mechanics of the book then. So you'd mentioned it's written by people who run the tech hiring process. So this is a co-authored book, not so much just simply authored by you, but if I understand correctly, authored by many contributing experts, people who are hiring managers, technical recruiters at various tech companies. As you mentioned, one of the women involved had been in the industry 20 years. 9,000, was it 9,000 resumes she's reviewed? I mean, that's a lot.

Well, it was 6,000 interviews. And it must have been like, that's interviews. So it must have been like 10 extra resumes. So like, yeah, tens of thousands. I bet. So what, 60,000? Okay. So let's just estimate 60,000 resumes, 6,000 interviews.

This is a lot of experience basically behind this book. So MVP, some people say you should launch an MVP and be embarrassed by it. This is not something I would be embarrassed by. You know what I mean? It seems like you put a lot of effort into this. Well, because it's a topic that I think is pretty fluffy, I wasn't comfortable with launching something that is just halfway there. And also one of the things I really was debating whether I should charge for the book or not, because I'm a pretty profiling blogger. I write a lot of blog posts and people get a lot of value out of it. I wanted to dry run this theory of my goal with this book was to get engaged readers.

I have some blog posts that are read by 100,000 people, but I never know if they're engaged or not. My theory was, well, it's a lot of research and a lot of effort has gone into this book. I'm trying to price it at a decent range. It's 20 bucks in the US. And across the world, I have purchasing power parity. So for example, in India, it'll be 60% off in a good part of the world similarly. So based on your IP, it's a lot cheaper. What I'd like to know is how many people are engaged because what I find myself is if I buy a book, which is usually all decently priced, like 20, 30, 40 bucks, I actually end up reading it because I spent the money.

And I wanted to test a theory of like, can I get engaged readers? And the engaged readers, either people who buy it or people who need it. And the people who need it most, they can get it for free. And I assume that they're reading it. So for theories going pretty okay, I they're reading it. So, so far, the theory is going pretty okay. I have about a bit over 2000 engaged readers, I should say. So either people who bought it or are using it, and I'm getting like a lot better quality feedback as well.

So some people are giving me specific feedback on what they've seen. And so far, I have zero refunds, which I think is like, usually from what i understand ebooks usually get like i have a full refund policy if you don't like it you get your money back like no questions asked and no one's asked for that yet and usually there's like a half percent in the in the ebooks business for similar authors from what i asked around yeah so hopefully people are finding it useful or or it's just you know there's no false advertising there and again it's just learning experience for me.

It's I share all the revenue I have and all the kind of marketing I did on indie hackers. I'm fully transparent because this for me is an experiment and I'd love to inspire other people, have people learn from it. It will be nice if people created more long-term content. I see a lot of, you know, Twitter creation, a, a lot of videos, but I don't see too much long-term written content from people. So hopefully, maybe some people will be inspired to do this. I'm glad you mentioned any hackers too, because we're a big fan of what Cortland has done. I think there's so much happening there too, and the fact that you're sort of

giving that as feedback. So this is one learning for you, but then synthesizing that learning for others to follow along. I'm not going to ask you for any URLs right now, but we'll definitely put those in the show notes. So we'll collect that after the show's up. But listeners, if you're following along, we're going to drop some of those notes in show notes. So check that out.

But on the idea of pricing, if I understand you correctly, so it's free, as you see on the site, complimentary copy, given certain criteria. But you do have two tiers, the book only and the complete package, which I think is pretty cool because you've added director's cut, essentially commentary behind the scenes of specifics. Almost like that next layer, as you mentioned, in terms of interaction and whatnot, the slides behind it, and then actually a discount, which seems like to something called Standard Resume Pro, which is a resume builder. And many of those resume builders out there are kind of like, I don't know, I don't know,

icky. Let's just say icky. Sketchy. Yeah. Sketchy, icky. Yeah. And you've chosen this one. So help me understand.

And then you mentioned price parity across the world, which I think is super awesome. Thank you for doing that too, because we've had that conversation recently. We have a membership out there called ChangeLog++. As a listener to the show, you may have heard of that. We haven't yet gotten to that pricing parity because we're using a platform to do it. But when we actually inherit that as our own inside of ChangeLog.com infrastructure membership, we've written the code behind it. We will have it then, but for now, we don't.

We're using Supercast to launch that because like you, MVP, we're using it to learn. And what we have learned is that people want us to have a membership. And so there you go. So to you, pricing, let's break this down. So free for some, paid for some. How do you break this down?

Have you made a ton of money from this? Can you share some of the insights into the indie hacker stuff you may have shared already? Yeah, absolutely. So with pricing, again, I experimented. I've read about how you can maximize value by adding additional content. And my original thinking was, well, let me do the book. And the book comes with resume templates. It comes with multiple formats. So an idea that I originally had is, well, maybe I could just get a PDF. And then for more expensive, you get like resume templates and multiple formats. And then for the last year, I'll just do a video. So the video is, is me,

like some people prefer this with me talking through the whole content, I create a specific slice for it. In about two hours, I summarize the book and I add just my take on it. Like the way I think about it is, you know, people will get it either who like me or want to support me, or people who just kind of don't want to spend, like reading this book will probably take you like, you know, hours, and they just want to get a shortcut or they want to get that as well. And I didn't know how this would go. But then, again, the first principles of this book, I want to help and I don't want to focus mostly on making money, even though I share and you'll see there's some money to be made there. So I decided, you know, I'm not going to like penny pinch, the book will come with everything like the templates,

the formats, all of those things. And then for the video, I originally just wanted to do the video. But and I had a section in the book where I looked around all the resume sites that the research on all of them, most of them. And the reason you find poor quality advice is it turns out there's a whole SEO industry behind this. Those sites make money from memberships. They have a customer lifetime value. And they optimize with content writers for everything. Like when you search for software engineering resume, you'll go to a generic site that has content writers for software engineers, accountants, all that stuff. And I accidentally came across a site that was founded by a software engineer at Dropbox, who their site, so all the templates at all these resume sites, they're selling for you, the consumer, they want you to

pay. So they'll give you a resume that looks nice, and you're going to be very happy with it. As a hiring manager, they're terrible. They're hard to scan. They include bias. For example, photos include bias. Never, ever add a photo unless you're in certain countries. And you're paying for that. You're putting yourself at a disadvantage. But again, the resume site doesn't optimize for long-term thing. And so I came across a site which had clean templates. This site had hiring manager recommendations from the like of Slack. And they also had real resumes of people who use these resumes. And I reached out to them saying, all right, well, you're doing something pretty cool. What's up? And so we talked with the founder.

They're also an indie hackers, by the way. And they created a site because they were frustrated with there was no, when they were applying for Dropbox, the founder previously, he just wanted a site where he could have a PDF and he could send a web link and he could track when someone opens it. So they built the site. It took off from Product Hunt accidentally and it was a side project.

And now he left Dropbox and I think his co-founders might still be working somewhere. Maybe they're not, but now they're looking to turn it into business, into a more ethical resume site where they do give you for your money. They give you a service of really clean templates of web-based resumes where you can just send the link, click tracking and some

of these things. So I really liked this and I liked how they were transparent. I liked how they seem to be doing something similar to what I do. And I also don't want to stay in the resume advice business. I don't want to do reviews. I don't want to do like long-term too much to do with this beyond having this resource. So I figured, can we partner so people who want these kind of templates can go to you and you can get a discount. And I'm not making any money off of it. They give a discount. I just like what they're doing. Yeah, I also help them create a resume templates that I thought would be better, which is a really cool collaboration. So it's, I think it just I just found found someone who I identify with.

I like that they're doing ethical things. They seem to be doing the right thing. They also want to, they need to run a business. So I learned a bit about their pricing strategy. And then I'm also happy to talk about the numbers that are in the hackers one. So I actually donated all of, there was a beta where you could get everything for nine bucks and I had a all of, there was a beta where you could get everything for nine bucks. And I had a bunch of customers. I donated all of that to STEM organizations and diversity organizations.

So I made about $3,500 from the beta over while I was writing it. I wasn't advertising it too much, but I think I had people who either knew me or there was a worth of mouth. Some people were looking for jobs. And then after the launch in the first 14 days, the book brought $14,000, which is pretty cool. There was a Hacker News launch. It made it as a Hacker News front page. And I was responding to comments as they went. So about half of the sales came from there. And the other part came from social media. And following the launch, there were more than 1,000 customers, about, I think, maybe like 700 or 800 paying customers,

and about 200 people who didn't have a job. And I approve all of those requests. There's a couple of spammy requests, so I just ignore those with fake profiles and really weird email addresses. Yeah, you always have that. You're going to get something, right? You're going to get some sort of weird inbound from somebody. I mean, we get it all the time.

Gosh, we get so much email here at Change. It's just so much. And you want to be kind and respond, but sometimes you're just like, you didn't even try. You didn't even try to be kind or to be relevant. Also, by the way, when I launched on Hacker News,

it was really interesting because Hacker News crowd is a tough critic. And one of the feedback I got, originally for the free copy, I asked people to register with their like, shoot over their LinkedIn account and just do something like share a post about this book. So I see that as their LinkedIn account. And some people said, well, that's not great, because some people won't have it. I was thinking to myself, hold on, if you're looking for a job, you need to have a LinkedIn account. But turns out there are people who just either don't have it or don't want to use it. And at first, I felt really defensive about this. But I was like,

you know what, this person's right. So I quickly added an option, just, you know, if you don't want to have a LinkedIn account, just shoot me an email. And I did have, but a couple people shoot me an email, they actually legit didn't have LinkedIn accounts, maybe they were in college, or they had zero connections on it. And I was like, oh, this person was right. So, and actually that came out pretty well. This was one of the top voted comments of, it was a really negative comment.

And then the original author changed it around saying, oh, you've just changed your site, thanks. So it was like the Hacker News launch was great. If you ever find that thread, there's a lot of interaction going back and forth with the community. And it was really positive there was in the end i think the only negative comment i got that i couldn't do anything about is someone said that there's too many uber people from uber and uber's culture is terrible and therefore they're not going to read the book so like yep i i worked at uber that's true and some of my network worked there as well i won't

be able to change that yeah you mentioned so is it the post that says, for the title, 14 days, 14 canned sales, 1,000 customers, and what worked for me? Is that the one? Yes. All right, we'll link that up in the show notes for sure. I broke down all the stats, all the things that I did. Again, it's an experiment, and if it helps people, great.

I didn't have high expectations. This surpassed it already. So the way I think about it is I have about now 2,000 engaged readers, which I'm very happy about. And the money is, well, it's a bit secondary. It's kind of nice because my first month of leaving Uber, I still got basically a salary. But outside of that, you know, that's not my main focus here. The hard part about monitoring incredibly complex architecture means that you're probably monitoring with a dozen different tools. And when something goes wrong, you can waste a ton of time

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Visit metal.equinix.com slash changelog. Get $500 in free credit to play with plus a rad t-shirt. Again, metal.equinix.com slash changelog. Get $500 in free credit. Equinix Metal. Build freely. what I find interesting is I guess your perspective on rewinding back a bit like why should I write this well I want to ask how at the time of COVID obviously a lot of things changing and happening in terms of layoffs and a lot of unemployment you know you

ask yourself how can i help and the way you said you wanted to help was to offer advice and then one of the things i think is kind of hidden here is is the idea of who the resume is for and so there's some debate whether you know resumes are even useful or not and whether it's the right way to even screen engineers, which is probably a gigantic debate. We can crack that if you'd like to. But, you know, I think just simply sharing with people that the resume isn't meant to be pretty or like obviously well-designed and informative and, you know, share a story about who you are, but just the sheer idea of like sharing who the resume is actually for hiring managers, you know, who specifically reads this, you know, cause that's what gets you in the door. And it's often like the question you mentioned

before, you know, obviously if you get a, a referral, that's better, but getting your foot into the door is half the battle. And that CV or the resume isn't just simply, and it's especially hard if you've got so much career history. How can you condense it into potentially just one page? I think that might be the requirement, or at least you can share with me what the best practice is. Is it simply one page? That's hard. But who's reading this thing is just the simple aha moment for me i think is not everybody thinks oh hiring managers and that's not even half of it because it depends on where you apply to if you apply to big company chances are so with every company there's always a hiring

manager who gets the head count like they say i need to hire a person and i got the budget to do so and they know who they want to hire maybe jo Joe quit the other week and they want a new Joe. Or maybe the team is growing and they have 10 headcount and they're okay hiring a couple of juniors, a couple of seniors initially, but then once they hired four juniors, they actually want seniors, that kind of stuff. Then small companies, the hiring manager will review the resumes. As a company grows and it becomes midsize, there's going to be some sort of HR person who doesn't really know what they're doing, But the hiring manager says, can you just look at these resumes and make sure I want someone who's got Java and five years of experience. And then you'll have this person who is not a recruiter, but they're just looking for whatever the hiring manager told them and they

have no clue what they're doing. Once the company gets a bit bigger, they hire a proper recruiter who kind of knows what they're doing, but they still need to do whatever the hiring manager tells them to do. So as the company grows, and then finally, at really large companies, we have this thing, Uber had this thing called inbound sourcer, a full time person who only looks at inbound resumes, and the recruiter tells them what to look for. So they're now two levels away from the hiring manager. So it is just good context. And where this comes to is you want to spell it out on your resume. Why are you a good fit for this job?

And do you meet those requirements that are there? And we can go into, again, to answer your question, is this a good way of filtering? No, I wish we wouldn't have. I actually have a chapter on the book. A lot of people, I believe, who are doing this resume, at one day they're going to become hiring managers. My ask to them or anyone listening to it, if you will have the opportunity to be a hiring manager or improve the hiring process, remember how messed up this process is.

Change it. And you can change it multiple ways. First of all, any rejected resume have a different process for it. Like do a coding challenge. There's services like Wolven who will actually, they go through all the rejected resumes and they screen people and they get a bunch of hires from those rejected resumes.

So there's a lot of ways that we can make the process better because right now it is a sales pitch. People who are good at writing sales pitches about themselves get that first call, and people who are not often don't, and it's not fair. Maybe this is fodder for some, but what else beyond the resume plays the role? I mean, because sometimes you look at the resume and maybe that's part of it, but there's other things like, you know, profile, blog, LinkedIn, you know, being prolific, as you mentioned, you're a writer, maybe that's part of it. How much does these other things come into play? Is it simply after you sort of get through the door? Is it is that these are also must have requirements to to some degree, like, once they've vetted you and confirm your real human being with some talent,

do they go through other things and confirm these things too? I'd love to say that they play a role. But in reality, as a hiring manager, or even as a recruiter, you're busy. And resume screening is something you spend little time on. So as a hiring manager, I would busy. And resume screening is something you spend a little time on. So as a hiring manager, I would typically, I know I need to hire people, but my team's on fire. We just lost Joe. We need to fill into it. Another guy's about to quit.

I need to do them. And then finally, when I have 30 minutes at lunchtime, I have 100 resumes. I need to go through them. And all I care about is I just want to get a couple of people who look good enough. And I very quickly look through them. I'm not going to spend too much time looking into all the extra career luck or stuff.

So like the resume needs to show that you're good enough. And in every hiring manager, every recruiter has like three buckets in their head. Yes. Maybe no. You look at the resume, you do a first pass and you put it into yes, maybe,

or no, you get the nose quickly. You see some strong yeses, everything else you put in the maybe pile. And if you don't have a, you call the yeses. And if you don't yeses. Everything else you put in the maybe pile. And if you don't have, you call the yeses. And if you don't have enough yeses, you go to the maybe pile. It's kind of as simple as that. And it seems very cruel, but it's just the reality of how, and again, if it's a small

company and there's only seven applications coming in, I'm going to spend the time to look at those. And this is why one of the advices I give is don't, like a lot of people just go on LinkedIn or Stack Overflow and look at jobs. Those are what we call, they're the kind of job sites where companies have to pay to post there. Those sites contain about a good maybe 30 or 20% of all the jobs. There are the job aggregators like Indeed that crawl the companies and whatever websites which have all these jobs. And I'll give you an example why this is important. The first mobile engineer at Uber and engineer number three,

employee number five, the way he got hired, Jordan, it's that story is in the book as well, because I knew him very well. He just went to indeed.com, applied for 20 different jobs, he heard back from three, one of them was willing to do visa relocation because he was in Europe. And this company happened to be UberCab back in the day. And later he asked them, why did you fly me all the way out from France and hire me as a mobile engineer? And they said, we couldn't find anyone. And no one found us. On our network, no one believed in us. And we just didn't have enough people respond to our ads because they did not advertise in these publications. So this is how he did very well. And not every company will be Uber, but this is how he got it as one of the first Uber engineers. It's crazy.

He just went to, you know, like he applied for a job that no one else applied to. The obvious question I think is, you mentioned the service that you linked to as part of the 50% discount and that sort of helps you, but what does a resume, a good developer resume look like? Is there a particular look to it? Does it need to be plain? Does it need to be formatted right? What are some of the kind of criteria you can break down that gives it a specific look? Is it unique design? Does it need to be designed at all. So a good resume, it's if you've got, let's say, five years experience, unless it's one page, if you have like five or 10, or it could be two pages, but don't go above that. It should be very easy to scan your dates. What on the first scan, people want to take away a couple of things. What

is your location? How many years experience do you have? What languages do you have? What are your companies and your titles? You want a very clear formatting where, again, recruiters do this, where it's very easy to see like, you know, when your first date is when you graduated or when you started work, make you've actually moved the needle. And so like a lot of people will talk about the responsibilities or be afraid to give specifics. I was in charge of having to build like multiple services. Well, that doesn't sound very impressive. So you just want to be specific, you know, percentages, numbers, those things. And on those points, you want to reflect on the job. If the job is about, if you're applying for a web developer where it's on a product team

mention that you built a product with the same words like i built this product or if it's a back-end team with distributed services where they're expecting you to do high load systems if you've done that mention that i've done high load systems again kind of reflecting because there's going to be a person there and a lot of people think that a resume is perfect it needs to have all the information in case you get a job offer. No, it's just get through that first Boolean check, yes or no. And once you're talking with a recruiter, it doesn't matter. So, you know, don't put in things that are not negative.

If you've got a poor GPA, don't put it in there. No one cares. It's a sales pitch. And again, this is where I cringe. It shouldn't be like this, but it is. But it is. And by the way, it is if you don't have a referral, because referrals are the shortcuts. So yeah, that's good advice.

I mean, cold calls are hard. Warm calls are easier. So if this isn't a good process, even in our Twitter DMs as we're planning to do this conversation, you'd mentioned quite simply that this isn't, you wrote a book about it, you think resumes are necessary, but they're not the best way to screen engineers. If there's a different system,

maybe you haven't written this book, maybe that's your next startup, I don't know. Yeah, maybe. But what's the right system? What's the right framework? What do you think? I mean, we've got whiteboard interviews, we've got resumes.

I mean, there's a lot of hoops and unique facets in the hiring process. So I'm going to say something controversial here, because I've been on the other side of the table. There's a lot of posts saying how hiring process is broken. And it's typically written by people who have been on the hiring process side, and they're frustrated. They've gone through hell and high water. I've been on the hiring manager side where I sell the other side. You're a popular company, say Uber, you post an opening and immediately, especially if it's a junior opening

with not much requirement, you get 500 resumes and whatever you put on or applications, I'll say. And two thirds of them, whatever you put on there, people ignore it. And some people also ask, why do companies not post salaries? Well, I know some companies who posted some silicon valley companies to posted salaries and they get even

more they get the teachers the the people who are not qualified because it's so much money you're now seeing you know like 200k and it's worth a shot so you have this problem on the hiring side where you need to decide how much resources do you invest. And you can have an amazing hiring process, but your engineers will spend 50% of their time interviewing hundreds of people, and you're going to hire one. But the other 100 will walk away thinking, oh, I actually got to talk with a person. And it's a trade-off. It's a bit like building a distributed system. Do you optimize for latency, for cost? What do you care about? Do you want throughput? It's just like that. And it's not great to say, but the company is the one that's making the call.

They're going to decide how much they want to invest their engineering time. And are they thinking long-term or short-term? The reason Google and Facebook and other big companies have a pretty good hiring process because they invest their engineers' time to have a bit more humane process, even though some people might disagree, but you have a lot of face time with engineers, because they're in it for the long run, they want you to have a pretty good experience. And for example, Uber, we ran surveys about people's experiences. Sometimes we have people complain about interviewers, and we took it very seriously. Sometimes we took people off interviewing afterwards. And we, we had trainings, we I spent a lot of time training people, shadowing people, doing all these things.

Not every company does it, but ultimately hiring is the company's decision. Don't forget that there are some companies that have amazing hiring processes. I'll give you an example, Basecamp. There's a problem though. They never ever hire. And when they they hire they're open they get more than a thousand applicants so you know you have that as well it's it's our problem it's uh i'd like to think of it as a systems design problem you have two very different goals here and and there are some by the way there are some companies that are helping solve this so triple bite is an example where they do a bunch of pre-skinning and they tell you you know if work with us, we're going to give you people who can go straight to on-site and they're going to do that one-off screening.

And there's Wuvlin, who are a great startup. I really like their founder, who work with companies saying, pay us a little money. We're going to go through all the resumes you throw away and we're going to find you the hidden gems. And so you don't need to spend more time on them. And they're doing great there. And there's also HackerRank, who says something a bit more controversial, but from the kind of hacker news crowd,

they say, you know what? Let everyone give them a fighting chance, you know, look at resumes, but whenever resume is not good enough, give them a coding challenge. Yes, it's kind of algorithmic. Yes, it's them, but you can prove yourself at that point and you have a fighting chance.

Yeah, that is controversial in terms of, I kind of like that actually. I'm going to agree with the controversial aspect of it, but I think it's better than a no. Yes. The fighting chance aspect, you know, like at least it wasn't a no and you may not really care for the coding challenge or it may not be, you know, the most applicable coding challenge, for example. There's a lot of scrutiny around that but i think i'd rather get a chance to say okay i can i can show you i can do this versus just thanks goodbye yep and and that's kind of it and also the the other part that you need like a lot of people don't know is or don't see is sometimes you apply for a position and you do everything right and you still get a rejection yeah it can also be because these companies a lot of times they get a bunch of bunch of inbound and i'll give an example i'm a hiring manager i have two openings i can hire two

people we get a bunch of you know like interest and we start interviewing people we have two people and we're giving them an offer and they're now taking their time to accept it do i stop my recruitment process or do I keep recruiting? The answer is you keep recruiting because those people might reject. And if they reject, and they often do, I'm left with nothing. So now you have a third person who's amazing. Maybe they're even better. But the first two accept.

And now he needs to go back and tell the person, sorry, you're a no. Now you're not going to tell them, sorry, someone else accepted. You're just going to go like, well, you're not even going to you're not going to tell them, sorry, someone else accepted. You're just going to go like, well, you're not even going to say we ran out of headcount. So that's why hiring is asymmetric. Like the company will never be able to share what's going on behind the scenes.

You also have some weird stuff where I hired for someone who quit and then they unquit. And of course we took them back. It's a lot easier to take them back than probably to go through the process of hiring somebody else. Well, yeah, and we had to reject people who were good,

but we no longer had the budget or the headcount. So yeah, hiring is hard. Getting your first job, especially if they're listeners, getting the first job is hard, but hang in there. Once you're in there, it can be inconvenient, but as you grow your network,

again, with a referral, you get more information with a referral as well and those things so that part is never going to go away any tips on uh getting a referral since it's so crucial like i mean knowing somebody is probably one key there maybe making a relationship simply for the referral kind of iffy on that but you know how do you get referrals is there a somewhat easy button on that on that front well if you're looking for hacks you know there's very few and like yes you can try to reach out on linkedin you can go to forums like blind and you can post your resume and be really clear about what position you want to go because there is a bit of a gaming of the system i'll be honest a lot

of big companies give you referral bonuses and so people often refer someone who they think is good and you can go to these again team blind is an anonymous forum where you can go to big tech companies and ask like can someone give a referral and just be clear up here's my resume here's why i'm qualified for this job and some people will refer you so it's yeah it's kind of gaming the system but the best way to and this will not you know most people will not like this answer, but the best way to get a true warm referral at some point is be a great colleague. Be a great colleague to your teammates when you're leaving, leave on a great note. And then years later, you're going to get a call back. I'll give you an example.

During COVID, I had one of my friends who is doing a startup and they got some grants and they were able to hire someone for only four months, but they needed a senior engineer in the UK. And they asked me if I knew someone. I haven't lived in the UK for five years. And I was like, I probably will not know anyone. But then I looked at LinkedIn and I saw this guy who had been looking for work. And I knew him from a meetup and he was a super nice guy 10 years ago. So I reached out to him saying, hey, I have this, you know, there's a setup. This guy's really good, but they can only get someone for a contract for the short term.

In the end, they hired this guy. They never had to advertise a position. And I knew him because we were on a meetup. I think we did a project together at some point. It was 10 years ago. So whatever you're doing now, you're going to have a network by working with people. Those people will be there. And I do the same thing.

There's a couple of people I would give a call and there's people who I will always answer for. The people who I network by working with people, those people will be there. And I do the same thing. There's a couple of people I would give a call. And there's people who I will always answer for the people who I really enjoyed working with. So you know, obviously, this will not help people looking for jobs. But even if you're not the more, the most important thing, the industry is very small. I'm now in it for 15 years. It's ridiculous. I'm feeling that I'm so close to a bunch of people. And there's a lot, oh, we both know this person I heard about you, those conversations so yeah, just be nice, as you said, consider it you'd be surprised what happens when you're kind, honestly

or you're just, I don't know just kind, I suppose so don't send you any resumes because you're done reviewing that's why you wrote the book the techresume.com that's the URL for the book you got a book in the works growing as a developer coming in 2021

so that's soon and this book you've just done is an MVP to learn a lot so I'm assuming you learned a ton but you mentioned being a good colleague and something that you've done well is being a good colleague leaving Uber and we talked about this earlier in the call, but I want to ask you to get specific as you shared

several kind of insights you learned as you exited. And I'm wondering if you can get specific and share some of that learning here on the show. And we'll link to the blog post where you go deeper into this in terms of the wild ride you had there and how it's unforgettable you'd mentioned stick your nose into things and learn under promise and over deliver be an owner not a renter which i love that one by the way embrace change then start taking more risks which of these four lessons for you is the one that's like if i can only tell you one lesson learned this is the one it's like, if I can only tell you one lesson learned, this is the one. It's being an owner, not a renter. This was actually a Uber cultural value when I joined.

It's now changed a little bit. But when I joined Uber, it was really striking to me on how when I was brand new and on some of the first meetings, someone brought up a problem and someone said, hey, are you an owner or are you a renter? Someone said, this is not working. And they're like, oh, okay. So there was this, let me try to fix it. And there was this culture from day one of like, well, sure, let's, let's call out problems. But let's bring solutions. And this really stuck with me. Again, the community in Amsterdam at Uber was was around this. And I

started to do this a lot. And I felt people always appreciated it. It made me feel empowered. And it makes you challenge yourself. So whenever you find yourself complaining about something, see if you can fix it. Because at companies like Uber, what I noticed, again, from the outside, Uber looked like this great company. And this is true for any company, like you look at the ones that are really hot, these Zoom or Snowflake or whatnot, I guarantee you go in there and a bunch of stuff is pretty messy. But there are those people, you know, they follow the scout principle of making things cleaner as they go. But you fix things as you go.

And like you can start with small things. You can do big things. People notice because you have to go the extra mile. It's more work, but you get a lot more responsibility. I became a manager because I was doing a lot of the things that managers do. I didn't want to become a manager per se when I joined there, but I just took care of a lot of these things. Later, I was able to, as a manager, create new teams because I was already just solving the problems with the team I had. This is the way I saw people grow the most. I also see people stuck in their careers

where they're asking, what should I do to get to the next level? Tell me what to do. And it doesn't work like that after a certain time. You need to go there and fix problems. In fact, I heard a podcast with one of the Lyft staff engineers who said like, well, the way to get staff

is try to look ahead for the business and solve their problems ahead of time. And then the rest will just follow. And's it's harder it's easier said than done but the same thing here so uber really taught me this and this is also why i'm more confident into going into a startup and this is the one thing i would instill from day one is giving people the autonomy helping them understand this because what i found is after a while when people join from more traditional companies, they worked at let's say consultancies

or places where they were given Jira tickets, they really struggled with this thing. They were not used to, they were just, why don't you just tell me, like, what do you mean? Should I not talk about problems? Like, no, it's just, you know, try to figure out if you can fix things.

So this really sticks with me. And I really liked the idea of this and how it empowers you to do more. And I really liked the idea of this and how it empowers you to do more and you do the stuff that you care about, really. Yeah. We didn't talk much about your other book, unfortunately, but it is coming soon around the career path of a software developer. So I'm really curious about this. We didn't cover a lot of it. We'll put the link in the show notes and whatever, but it's coming in 2021. You're going to have it as an ebook. So pretty much copy and paste what you've done with the tech resume inside out,

you're going to do for this book. Can you maybe at least tease what you plan to do with it? Yes, actually, it's going to be paperback as well. That's a big difference. Wow. It will be on paperback, which I'm really looking forward to. And it will be the book about, it's going to be the book that I wish I had both a few years into my career when I just didn't really know what this whole career thing is,

what is even a senior. And before I got into a place like Uber and I didn't really know what the setup was there. It's also the book that I wish I had when I was a manager, when I was coaching people. So it'll have a lot of advice, both for myself, and I'm going to reach out to various people in the industry for their tips on how they grew into senior lead principal.

And yeah, it's just been a career journey from software engineer to senior tech lead, all the way to what some companies call staff and principal. And for levels, you should think about the levels that the likes of Google, Facebook, Uber, et cetera have, which I found, again, if you're living in these, working in these companies, it's not a huge surprise, and you might have good mentors, but it can be harder to break into without knowing what's there. Yeah. So yeah, it's coming early 2021. I'm working on it pretty much full time. I'm also going to be sharing some of the drafts that I'm because I'm self publishing,

I'm able to share drafts, which I'm excited about. So if you want to follow it in the show notes, you'll be able to go to the URL and subscribe to a newsletter, you'll get regular updates on the book as well. And you can also just decide to only subscribe to get notified when it's out. I read your blog a lot. So is that a good place to send people to first? Yeah, the private engineer.com. You're always writing. I love a lot of what you write. We don't cover every single thing because, hey, we can't cover everything you write, but I do read a lot of your blogs. So that's blog.pragmaticengineer.com. Check that out. You've got links in your sidebar for I'm Writing a Book. It talks about the one

you're writing now, the tech resume book, all that good stuff. Thank you so much for taking this time to share your journey with us and kind of behind the scenes to how you're thinking about progressing your career, how you want to give back to those out there who don't really have mentors as you're talking about for this future book. And then even writing resumes, something as simple as that, it seems so complex. And just, I guess, being willing to step away from an awesome career at Uber to pause for a bit, focus on you, write some books, and then prepare for your next big thing. But I really appreciate your time today. Thank you. Yeah, I joined being on here. And again, to any listeners, just keep listening. Like before the

show, we were mentioning that I become a lot more regular listener to ChangeLog because of these end of conversations. So if this is one of the first episodes you're listening to, you know, listen to some of the other ones. See if it resonates with you as much as it did with me. Yeah, I appreciate you saying that, too, because it's fun to have listeners of the show on the show. So if you're listening, reach out and say hello. Editors at ChangeLog..com we love to hear from everybody who listens to this show if you got some ideas for us

we might not like them all but we definitely want to hear plus we have a community changelog.com slash community you can come there hang out in slack it's a place to call home and you are welcome

and everyone's welcome so but thank you for saying that we really appreciate you being a listener and then for sharing all this feedback and coming on the show it's been awesome all right this is great thank you for saying that. We really appreciate you being a listener and then for sharing all this feedback and coming on the show. It's been awesome. All right, this is great. Thank you.

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