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Ryan Burgess
Welcome to a brand new episode of the front end happier podcast. In this episode, we're joined by three special guests to talk with us about recruiting at startups. Please welcome Matt, Zack and Chris, Can each of you give a brief introduction of who you are and what you do and what your favorite happier beverages?

Matt Stephenson
I'm Matt Stevenson, I lead recruiting at shift. We are a startup focusing on peer to peer use car sales, which sounds super sexy.

Ryan Burgess
So you're a salesman for sure.

Matt Stephenson
Right? My favorite Happy Hour beverage, generally old fashions

Ryan Burgess
right on good choice.

Zack Skelly
My name is Zack Skelly. I lead recruiting at a startup called 0x. We are building a protocol for the decentralized exchange of any tokenized assets that exist on the Ethereum blockchain. So some pretty interesting stuff, happy to dig into more detail but peer to peer exchange of assets on a blockchain. Prior to this, I led recruiting at a small YC analytic startup called heap. Before that, Chris and I worked together at Dropbox. And prior to that all three of us worked together at Google for a little while. My

Chris Ahsing
name is Chris lossing. I am in recruiting engineering recruiting for a company called plaid. We are a platform that actually powers a lot of everyone's favorite FinTech app, everybody from Coinbase, Robin Hood, little bit of stripe and a whole mess of others. Zack is all lies. I didn't work with him. I don't know who he is as first time I met him. But actually Matt was no juggling enough. And that was my lead at Google. So I've learned everything from him. So anything I say poorly is a reflection on him. Just putting that out there. That's awesome. But my favorite Happy Hour drink actually, I go for a really hard like straight up. Lime Lacroix. Like, just neat. Just, you know, I get after it. But yeah, no, I don't drink so that's that's gonna

Zack Skelly
happen. I may have skipped my drink. I guess if I have to choose. I like a good sour beer from time to time. There's a brewery in Berkeley called Rare barrel that I'm quite fond of. There's another one in Portland called cascade that I like a lot but sour beers.

Ryan Burgess
Very good. I like sour beers as well. Alright, so let's go around the table and give introductions to the panelists. Jem, I'll start off

Jem Young
Jem Young Senior Software Engineer at Netflix,

Stacy London
Stacy London. I'm a senior front end engineer at Atlassian.

Ryan Burgess
And I'm Ryan Burgess. I'm a software engineering manager at Netflix. In each episode of the front end happier podcast we like to choose a keyword that if it's mentioned at all, in the episode, we will all take a drink. What did we decide today's keyword is offer offer. So if we say the word offer, we will all take a drink. Alright, let's jump right in, in your opinions. What separates a good recruiter from a bad recruiter?

Jem Young
I'll take that since

Stacy London
Jem has opinions.

Jem Young
July, I have an opinion. I usually wait till 15 minutes and people have a few more drinks. And they're like more agreeable. So random backstory that no one needs to know is that Matt actually reached out to me. He sent me an email as recruiters do. And it was a really good email, he took the time to actually look at my website and like, say something personal about me before jumping into like, what shift is and things like that. I'm like, I'm not looking to change careers right now. However, you're a good recruiter like we should like, let's talk more, we want to do an episode on like a recruiter. So so far, I'd say, Matt, you're a pretty solid recruiter for what I know. He could be murdered for?

Matt Stephenson
Yeah, no, I think a lot of it has to do with the, like, the research that you do, and the effort and the time that you put into it. Especially I mean, this is I think there's two ways to answer this question. Because I think there's what makes a good recruiter, a big company, and there's what makes a good recruiter, a small company. And that is something that I definitely find out in trying to search for more recruiters myself, it takes a lot to actually craft a good compelling message. And build a personal relationship with somebody 99% of time is a long term kind of relationship, like this market, nobody's looking to like leave because of this, like crazy, passive message that I sent you in my ear. So it's just like leaving breadcrumbs. And you know, we'll turn back around later, or it will get me introduced to somebody else that you know, is looking or something like that, right. So I can't assume that everybody's gonna be like, Oh, wow, this sounds amazing. Like, I'm ready to leave my job for this. That day, I feel like ended in 2012. So,

Ryan Burgess
yeah, especially dealing with engineers, especially

Matt Stephenson
engineers. Yeah, harder. So yeah, I talk to a lot of engineers at our company. You know, in trying to find other recruiters. I'm like, You must get hit up a lot. Like what do you do with those messages? And they're like, I just archive them. I don't even read them. And I'm like, That's great. Like, this is perfect. That's like probably what's happening to 99% of my emails to you like, despite all the effort and like time that we put into them like they're probably still going to the archives And so it's just like, it's just a realization to me is like you do have to do something different to stick out. Like, you know, we always joke about this like as well, it's like, you can't just be like, Oh, I found out your profile on LinkedIn or like, I really like your experience in your background, right like, and like we get this all the time to like recruiters and also in high demand right now. And like the amount of terrible emails that we get on a regular basis, it's just mind blowing. And it just makes me like, hate the fact that I have to be labeled as recruiter, because like, I'm not I don't want to be associated like with this.

Ryan Burgess
And then you can just be better. Like, I love our recruiting team. There's one recruiter we've had on the past, Bianca Berta, Lucy, and she actually asked us, like, send me the bad ones or send me the good ones, that you get reached out to like, What compelled you to maybe respond? I'm like, that's a great way to is like so that even with your engineers, like, are you getting these? Or like, are you responding?

Jem Young
And we do we have a private slack group with me, Ryan and Bianca, where I share all the bad recruiting and we laugh. Yeah. If you've ever sent me a bad recruiting email, I've laughed at you. Yeah, like so many

Ryan Burgess
mistakes too. Like, honestly, we've got spellcheck. It's just used that please.

Stacy London
And there's like a fine line between like standing out from like those emails and also just being like obnoxious. Like, there's an email or one of them. I got my favorite one of all time I think it was had a subject line that said, Are you the Beyonce of JavaScript?

Jem Young
Wait, I got something like that. Except is are you the Steph Curry of JavaScript? I think I knew is a template I knew is a template. Yeah.

Chris Ahsing
Do you like basketball? Do you like JavaScript?

Jem Young
I love what you said about long term versus short term. I feel like in today's market so much short term, it's just like, I need to get paid this month. So let me just mass email everybody versus let's build a relationship. So maybe in a year when I'm looking again, I'll think about this person, but no one ever thinks like that. It's always like, now now now now now not interested. Okay. But right.

Zack Skelly
I have a role to feel I have Roseville right. I feel like it can pay dividends in terms of like other people they might note to or even other related asks, I often try to, you know, in the course of building relationship, tell people that I'm happy to help them out over again. And we end up connecting on lots of different things aside from just this opportunity that I'm trying to offer. So

Chris Ahsing
I do cheers. I think for me, and this is a big reason why I think Matt and Zack and I really connected was this thing that I've coined that I've still somewhere. So if anyone's out there listening, please don't sue me, is the thing called like tactical empathy, right. And the big thing that I realized with Matt, when I was under him, and he was my lead is that he cared, right? It wasn't a sense of like, I'm the best recruiter, I'm going to go in there, I'm gonna go shoot and I'm gonna fight and all these things. It was just he literally cared about the quality of his work. And then this something turned in, turned on in me, I can't remember where exactly, I think it was Dropbox, where I became friends with engineering managers I supported, I became friends with the people that I hired. And then it became one of these things where like, Hey, I was responsible for really making sure that their teams are set up for success. And I really wanted and cared to build, I think, something that I knew that, hey, this is my, I see the stress on their faces, I know what they're going through in the sprints, I understand how hard these things are. And just knowing like, Hey, I put my best foot forward, so then they can too. And it just turned into this thing where it's like, I care about my work, I care about the organizations that I build the teams that I support the people that I bring in. And that's just reflected and I think everything you do, right, and the sense of tactical empathy, it really is like putting myself in the position of you getting that email, or maybe not sending it, like just understanding like, this person across the street from me, is a person and just like if I send, hey, do you like Java, I like Java, like those emails, it's just not gonna hit. It's, it's, it's way more important to understand that like, I think so a good recruiter versus a bad recruiter is just, I think having some kind of empathy for people. And then obviously caring, no matter which way you you know, you want to care about something, it's, you know, whatever it is just caring, just caring about the work that you do. And I think recruiting gets a bad name. But I think it's a really important job. Considering the fact that I think the most important resource a lot of companies have today is people right? And we are the I like to carry I don't know, I'm blanking on a word here. But like we are, I think the forefront of that. So I'm gonna get off my soapbox at the moment.

Jem Young
But this podcast is all about mostly mine, but you're welcome to join in and I was

Chris Ahsing
they were telling me that I shouldn't come because I'll just ramble.

Ryan Burgess
We have editing rights. All this carrying stuff. I completely agree. I think it's an even having the relationship with the hiring manager, I think is super important. That's where I've seen very successful recruiting and hiring manager. It's like a partnership. But I'm curious too, as we talked about these reach outs and putting this effort in, do you get how do you get creative? How do you get someone to not archive the email like what are you doing? Are you playing with like subject lines? Are you Doing some research like before to say like, Hey, Jem, I hear you're a tall guy. I'm like, you know, feel your pain and Exactly. Like, are there some things that you tend to, like lean on to try and get someone's attention? Because it's not easy?

Matt Stephenson
Yeah, it's, it's the only reason I saw the Facebook profile actually is like, for for due diligence of stalking. Yeah, generally, for me, it starts with, like, you know, there's a LinkedIn profile out there, which is kind of your digital resume or footprint, the best people don't have LinkedIn. And so you're trying to find other places. Right. And so sometimes that's cross referencing, you know, GitHub. I mean, I think a lot of recruiters will say, Oh, GitHub is like, where I find a lot of people's like, there's limited information and get from GitHub. Have anything and get Yeah, a lot of people, a lot people like, oh, yeah, I can go through like the repositories and see if they're good. It's like, no, like, every time I've ever asked an engineer to check this guy's code, they're like, I don't understand the context. And I, this doesn't give me anything, right. So you really can't find out much signal from GitHub, but like, at least it shows like, are they passionate in the community, and maybe you can mention something about that. If it ties back to what you have to offer. There is Facebook, there's Instagram, then you can mention something about like, oh, like I see, like travel, like, you know, our head of engineering was just there a couple months ago, or something like something relevant, where it's like, oh, cool, like, there's a culture here, or,

Ryan Burgess
like you're making the connection to like, it's like, or head of engineering was just in Dubai, I saw you were in Dubai. Yeah, that's pretty cool.

Matt Stephenson
It's always so you just try to find something that's not just like, hey, like, we're, we're used car marketplace. They're like, in every one of these outreach emails, though, and I hate to break it to you that there's template in there, right? Like, there's definitely like, I'm not gonna sit there and try to like pitch shift in a bunch of creative ways. Like, there's going to be some boilerplate in there. But like, usually, the first line has to be just like something completely custom to try to grab the attention.

Zack Skelly
Yeah, with regards to GitHub, I feel like a lot of recruiters and I could be wrong, but they may just focus on things like number of stars and forks without kind of the context. And

Ryan Burgess
I think, yeah, you actually miss out on the wrong types of people, too. There is a lot of great engineers that have a lot of open source work that yes, you can find those people. But then there are a lot of people who are working at companies. And they're just like, I'm not contributing to open source. And they're like, I'm busy and doing my job. And so then you miss out on all these other people as well.

Stacy London
Yeah, that sources sort of unfriendly to women and minorities. And so sometimes it's not very friendly. So you avoid it for your safety. soapbox.

Zack Skelly
I think open source can be one good data point. But that's essentially it. For me, it's a data point alongside what might be many others to indicate what a good profile could potentially look like.

Matt Stephenson
Going back to the question, though, because I was just actually brought up something that Zack is amazing at. And what makes a great recruiter is listening. And I think once you once you do get somebody who's engaged on the phone, or even maybe they are passive, but it is a matter of listening and understanding, right, because I think the what the battery hears will do, they'll act like they're listening, or maybe they will listen to you on the phone, but then they're gonna hang up the phone, and they're just gonna do like what everybody else would do, which is just shotgun you to a bunch of like, if you're an agency's talking to a bunch of companies, or just like, put you forward for something that just isn't a good fit or like for what you just said. And I think that the best people can listen, understand that there is a fit here, sell that fit, or just at least like back it up, through like, whether it's data points, or like Project matches, and things like that, and move forward with your best best interest in mind. I feel like there's a lot of recruiters out there who are just like, in such a rush to just like meet their numbers or hit their targets or like whatever it might be that like, they're the whole care for the candidate and like listening to like, what might be best for them, is like totally thrown out the window. And again, I think in a startup in a smaller company, like the number one thing you can do is make sure that you're placing people in the company who are going to succeed. Because if you don't like that can bring the entire company down or the culture down for until you get rid of them or until they leave. Right and then

Ryan Burgess
it's not, then you're back to square one.

Matt Stephenson
Yeah, you're back. Yeah. I want to be incrementally filling not backfilling.

Chris Ahsing
Yeah, right. Tactical empathy copywriter something that's

Jem Young
noted. So I've been on the phone with recruiters for just because like, I like to what people are working on if they have any interesting ideas. And in my mind, I time it. And it's like, if we have a 15 minute or 30 minute conversation, how much time was I speaking? How much time are you speaking, it's almost I have like maybe two minutes in there. And the rest is all them like snowballing me with information that I don't necessarily need at this stage of the game. But it tells me a lot about like, what they think of me and what they like how they treat recruiting, it's just like you are but here's a seat. Would you like to take it versus like you're an individual who has tastes and like dislikes and passions and all these things and like treat me that way. Very few people do that. It's just like, I can't continue your conversation with like that.

Ryan Burgess
Do people do recruiters leave you time to ask questions? No, that's not good. Never almost. Yeah, like I always think that's super important. I don't know how each of you feel but I think that's super important is like really giving time because you're also you're trying to pitch the role to someone. And oftentimes a lot of it is just letting them ask the questions and answering the questions because they're going to tell you what they care about. They they're going to tell like, oh, I want to work out scale like, how's the scale? There are? What's your technologies that you're working on? Okay, well, that person cares about the technologies that they're working on. What's the team dynamic? Okay, well, you know, it just helps really, you're pretty much pitching the role to them by answering questions.

Chris Ahsing
The funny thing you say about that is that I will tell everyone that I'm like, training or onboarding, or even if I'm just going to be mindful about it, and try to follow that 7030 8020 rule where you know, someone else is talking. And if I find myself talking way more on that call, I know, oh, gosh, this is not going well, like I am struggling right now to make a connection.

Zack Skelly
One other general thing that I think is helpful for recruiter to think about is setting the right expectations. I feel like on initial calls, you can even set expectations up front around this stuff, like, hey, you know, I don't have too much of an agenda. But I'm happy to answer specific questions you might have about us, or just kind of give you a general overview of what we're up to. I'd love to know a little bit more about what you're interested in. You know, are there any specific things like you're hoping to kind of like learn in this call, getting that information up front can encourage a better conversation? I feel like sometimes question out

Chris Ahsing
to the good of the group. Is this like, what's, uh, what are good questions, I think to kind of invoke, or maybe you start a conversation, right? Like, what's a good question to kind of open it up? Because this is sometimes I struggle on the phone is like, Okay, I'll set expectations or we'll kind of have like a warm kind of intro. And then it's like, what are good questions you've been asked in the past that just make you feel like, oh, this person genuinely cares about me and wants to learn more right? than the standard, like, what are you doing? What's your team doing? What are you working on? Like, are there any other questions that you've gotten in the past? That just was like, hmm, okay. Like, this is interesting. And it opens up that dialog, right? Because I think sometimes, really, I'm just trying to figure out a way to just Hey, open up once again, tactical empathy. Really listen and learn more about, you know, are you a right fit? Actually, unlike because I'm on my side? I'm thinking Hmm, okay. Right. Is this actually going to be something? Is this actually gonna be something we can carry on to? Maybe another conversation? Now the robot? Once again, rambling a little bit on the question? What are good? I guess I'll call them conversational conversation starters, from recruiters. And that you,

Ryan Burgess
you're not gonna lie. I do like the like, what am I working on? Like, that's a great starter, because it also tells me, are you listening? And like, what can you leverage out of that conversation? So if you're the recruiter talking to me, and I'm like, oh, so what are you working on? I can talk about that, then you can maybe relate it back to your role, or we can have a conversation that kind of speaks to the listening aspect that Matt was seeing. But another one I have actually had right off the bat that I kind of liked was, what am I interested in the next role? Or what challenges Am I looking forward? What other kinds of things are important to you? It wasn't even specific that they were trying to sell me on that particular role. It was more like the challenges that what are challenges that you'd like excite you? And that could be in my current role? And I think it was just kind of an interesting concept that, you know, got me outside of the like, typical question, an interesting

Stacy London
question that pulls out something of like maybe why you're maybe either not happy your current role, or would be exciting in a different roles, like, if there's something that you're working on, on your product. But maybe you would like to work on some something else, like some other feature, but it's not on the roadmap, like what is? What are you excited about on the product that you're currently working on? But you know, it's never going to happen? And why? Like, because I think that's an really fascinating question, because then you find out more about, like, the current work structure that is in place for that person, what they're excited about what they, they're obviously passionate enough to have an answer to that question. And like, you know, maybe there's a disconnect between the company and what they want to work on something like that. I think it's kind of interesting.

Zack Skelly
I think it's a technical component to it, which is really cool to dig into. And often there's a non technical component to it. Like I like to ask, you know, even aside from the project that you might end up working on, like, is there other stuff that you really care about? An often people will talk about work life balance, or culture or diversity, or whatever else it might be. And it's kind of a nice opportunity to dive in and highlight other things that they care about to beyond just technical aspects.

Jem Young
I totally agree with Stacy and what you're passionate about. I think, if you're good at what you do, then that's an easy question. Like, we didn't all make senior engineer, senior, whatever level you're at, by just like sitting on our butts. And there's something that like, drives us. And for someone to take the time to find out what that is, like, right there. I'm gonna, like knock that person up a few notches, like, well, they actually care about me, and maybe I don't care about working at their company, but like, I will keep this person might in the future,

Ryan Burgess
and maybe refer someone else because you're like, Wow, that was a good person. That company sounds cool. Not right for me right now. But yes, it does kind of help build those connections, like you guys talked about. I have an interesting question for you guys. And this is something that often gets thrown out. I'm sure you've heard this too. Should engineers or someone that you're speaking to if you ask them their salary and their current expectations, like should they tell you that I have thoughts on this? Yeah, no,

Ryan Burgess
this is a good one.

Stacy London
Like, isn't it against the law in

Ryan Burgess
California, it is against the law to ask their current salary. There are loopholes in that Yeah, but it's more on the fact is, should they offer this I guess is the better question. It's

Zack Skelly
not against a lot of ask what their expectations are.

Matt Stephenson
This is actually something I'd picked them on Slack earlier, was we because one of our friends was recruiting for recruiters and is like, Hey, join my company. And I had recently just got to reach out that was along the lines of without knowing nothing about, you know nothing about my background other than the fact that I've worked at Google and I now work in a start up, hey, come here, we can offer you way more impact and a sizable salary increase. Like I'm like, you know, nothing about me, right, like, so who am I not to say that, like, I make X, and I really would love a sizable increase in that and like, just totally anchor a false number. And so like, I feel like, well, first of all, I don't ever ask compensation questions in the first chat with somebody like I in the valley right now. I feel like either engineers or any other role, like you kind of know where you're at relative to market, or you should, and if somebody is, at the higher end of that, and it's very important to them, they will bring it up themselves, I usually don't let it get in the way of my first conversation, because I think that more and more out, like will relatively be like on par. And again, there's, there's got to be certain, like things that you'd be willing to trade off when talking to a startup versus a bigger company, right? And like, how important is equity to you? How important is a bonus structure to you? How important is the base salary to you? And again, like listening to candidates, like kind of needs, so there's not a lot of candidates that I just have not been able to move forward with? Because like, they value cash, and like at a early stage startup, I am not going to bring the cash, you know, and so you're

Ryan Burgess
betting on the like, X we've got, yeah, there's the equity there. Right. Could be very, very powerful.

Matt Stephenson
Right. And so I think that, yeah, it's not something I actually like to get on the first call. And so if people disclose it, it's generally because it's a major factor for them. Yeah, they want don't wanna waste anybody's time. Or it's just like, it is one of those Guney asking what's most important to you and your job search? If comp is number one, and like, it's noted that, like, I'm gonna be up against like, the highest bidder, right? And as a recruiter, it's kind of like, it's not very comforting. But you know, I know that.

Zack Skelly
Yeah, I agree. I think timing is important. And to be totally honest, if I was advising a friend on this, my general advice would be like, No, don't necessarily share what your compensation is up front, I think it's totally fair to ask for a company to pay you what they think you're worth. And if for some reason that offer is not in line with what you're expecting, and you have good reasons and data to show why you should feel comfortable bringing that to them and having a conversation about it. I will say though, as a recruiter, I have asked what people's expectations are. And I think the reason that it's useful for me to do this, in many cases is, again, around expectations. If someone comes back to me and says, I want to get paid $280,000. And I know I'm not gonna be able to do that. Sometimes it can be very helpful in that initial call before I actually give them the numbers to say like, Hey, that's just outside of the realm of reason. And here's why. But I think you have to be careful with that. Because there are some recruiters out there who may use that as an anchor, they might be thinking, like, oh, you know, this person is worth n dollars in my head, and that person comes back and give something that's significantly lower than that. And they'll kind of just give like a little bump on top of whatever the candidate requested. So my general advice would be like, No, don't share it. But as a recruiter, I may ask, and I'll be happy if you don't share with me, to be honest,

Jem Young
I respect your honesty on that.

Zack Skelly
I do want to say, though, like, Don't hate the recruiter, if they do ask for expectations. I don't think I don't think

Ryan Burgess
that's a bad thing. Like even to your point is that it's like it sets the tone and conversation. And if you can't make it or you can't speak to the cash offer, at a startup, you're going to say, Okay, well, we can't give you that cash. But we can give you all this equity. And this is why I think it's really it's an investment in the sense that you think this company can be worth something someday. And being able to speak to that can be a really good conversation starter. And maybe the person is open to that maybe they're not like they're you could be trying to get someone from Google who's making a bigger cash offer. And they're like, Yeah, I can't I can't move on that because that's my expectation.

Zack Skelly
Yeah. And I think certain people value certain things differently. Like you can also ask, you know, like, do what's your risk tolerance, give a preference towards salary or equity or, and kind of, are there other intangibles that you really value? Some recommended reading on this if anybody wants to dig a little bit deeper into it? I'm really close friends with a woman named Aileen Lerner who's the CEO at interviewing IO. She just like a couple days ago, I wrote a blog post on this and referenced another very long like what I would call like a compensation negotiation Bible, which was written by this guy named Patrick McKenzie, also known as Pattillo 11. on Hacker News, he's a pretty prolific commenter there. He wrote a lot about this. And if you're curious, it's definitely worth checking out. That's, that's my Broad Thoughts.

Ryan Burgess
So we've been talking about ways that recruiters can maybe you know, emphasize or get creative to try and get response. How can candidates engineer stand out to a recruiter who is looking for the right people? We've talked about LinkedIn? I'm a huge fan is like just to have a LinkedIn profile. It's to me is like better than a resume, but I'm interested to know like GitHub, Twitter, Instagram portfolios, what are things What you're looking for even the fact that there exists, but what are things that you're looking to stand out for an engineer? When I

Jem Young
have a funnier question, we can answer that second, what is the worst ways people try to get your attention? Like what's the most annoying? Like VHS cassette tape of like, Wait resume?

Ryan Burgess
You know, it's one, I'm gonna seek to a LinkedIn profile photo. Shirtless engineer, male flexing muscles? No, oh, I saw it. I ignored it very quickly, even

Jem Young
though it's a professional network, right?

Ryan Burgess
I mean, professionally, showing his professional he's not he

Matt Stephenson
was an engineer. And that was inbound to you trying to get your attention.

Ryan Burgess
I think I came across it. So to be fair, I just, you know,

Jem Young
wait, what if he worked for a weight loss startup, and he's really proud of all the weight he's lost in this app? Yeah, like a fitness app.

Matt Stephenson
In the intersection of a candidate's resume one time put all their personal records for their Olympic lifts, which I kind of appreciate it. That's

Ryan Burgess
cool, actually, for it caught your attention. My attention? Yeah,

Zack Skelly
I think is actually going to differ depending on the company. And the kind of role and the stage different companies look for different things for different roles at different stages. That's it, I tend to think of things in terms of data points, like, you can have some really strong data points. And if you do, then I might not care if you have some of these other things. But in general, I would say, and this probably isn't exhaustive, but things that I really like to see and kind of deciding whether I might move forward with someone from just looking at their resume or their LinkedIn. I think if they've been part of an engineering network that I or we respect, like part of a team that's known to be good at a good company, or solid degree or a solid engineering program, like, that's great, that can be one good data point. Then again, like I've talked to some really brilliant self taught engineers, and again, like that's, again, just a data point. If somebody has really seen something scale, I find that to be kind of interesting, like if they were an early employee, or a founder or an early team member, I think some recruiters look at things like career trajectory to like, if you've been at a company for five years, you know, how has your career evolved over those five years there? I do think cool. Open Source work can be another interesting data point. This might be a little bit subjective, but like, has someone worked on something that's particularly technically complex? And if so, like, what degree of ownership? Did they have over that thing? I think that can be really interesting thing to kind of consider

Jem Young
how would you judge technically complex is that's something that totally subjective.

Zack Skelly
Yeah, I guess. And often, if I have a sense that something might be interesting, in that vein, I might leave in an engineer who I trust to kind of like, dig deeper into the project and give me a little bit of a sense if I have to, but you know, if they built an entire distributed system, and they were like the architect for this, and it's like, some really complex sharted Postgres thing with, you know, just distributed query infrastructure, like, then this probably sounds dumb. I don't want to sound lame and do nail and engineering, or when Kubernetes,

Jem Young
Zookeeper.

Chris Ahsing
containerization

Zack Skelly
thing, you know, thing, Java. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Ahsing
I know, Java, version seven,

Zack Skelly
I think those are all data points again, like, Another simple thing could be like if somebody who I trust recognize that person, whether they're internally or externally, that could be enough for me to want to talk to somebody. So yeah, and again, I think different companies care about different things,

Jem Young
our audiences global, there are people around the world that have listened to the show, there are lots of people who are not at one of the big tech companies did not get an Ivy League. So from that perspective, like what is the best chance of getting them who may be really good engineers for you to run across their, their profile or whatever, like, get a reach out? Or

Chris Ahsing
I'll answer the first question you had about like, what's a way? Thank you? So just as much as you hate getting templated emails, right about like, hey, come work for me in this company. Recruiters get oftentimes LinkedIn messages from candidates that are for sure templates, like Hello, I'm a recent grad from this university, please hire me. Like, it just is like, that is an automatic like, Look, you did not take even one second of the time to just look at the company. Let me know that, hey, if I'm going to spend time, like having a conversation with you, like I know, it's not just a Hey, throw it out there it I understand from the job seeking perspective, I did Career Services in the past. So it's like it is a numbers game. More applications out there that the more you do, but there is something to say like hey, taking a little bit of care and pride in where you want to go and work.

Ryan Burgess
It's like why why did I choose to reach out to you at this company? Just same? It's a reverse

Chris Ahsing
and I believe from there, and I totally respect that that hustle to answer the second question of somebody who doesn't come from I think the normal channels that I think a lot of like big companies are going to look at I actually, literally just a day ago, applicants at plaid can apply via an API and my founder, Slack me, he's like, This dude just took a picture, put it on Twitter, and he's applying to and just wrote this whole thing about, hey, this is awesome. I'm applying, and we got his application in and like he tweeted at us, and we looked at it, we call them on the spot. And you know, he's he's in the mix, right? And he's not from one of these major universities. But I think the the, the one check, that's not a, I think it's not the they're just stories, like, I did a conversation with him. And I listened to him like, really? Hey, I love what you guys do you guys done this, you did this, he had so much information that I was like, Look, I, I'm like you and me, we're going together, like we are taking this trip together. I'm gonna see you right through it right

Ryan Burgess
as the offer.

Zack Skelly
Cheers, cheers. And I think that carries through beyond just getting your foot in the door. Like if you're passionate, and you know a lot about the company that you're applying to. And you're asking good questions like, people respect this,

Chris Ahsing
he backed it up, right? That's the thing that I'm trying to say is like, I think he's like, okay, he did all this, he did all this, like we have, I think for our governing organization. At this point in time, we're very sensitive to every media outlet that we have, we're sensitive to every channel we have, we understand that people come from different backgrounds. So we're a little bit more empathetic in terms of like how we look at these things. Some other companies, not my work, but for us, literally co founder just as like, you need to email this person talk to this person right now. Right? And like we're, and then just he backed it up. Like he backed it up in the conversation. It was almost like he was prepared for that moment of like, having that conversation. And then he'd spoke to he had a 30 minute conversation with another engineering manager, and engineer manager loved them. And like, we're like, We're his advocate now. Like, we we want to see him really try to make it to the process. And it's fair, as much as we can. It's objective subjective, like the whole interviewing question. Topic I won't get into but yeah, we we really, that's one way to stand out. Right? So back it up, right? If you're gonna say you're gonna go off these things, back it up, please don't send me an email that you know, Kubernetes, Java seven? Because

Matt Stephenson
for me, it's impacted ownership. Really, it's it's what did you do? And can you explain that in an articulate way? Right? Or can you communicate that clearly. And even from like, first call, I mean, Zack is way more technical than I am. And so like, my technical knowledge will run out pretty quickly, I can, I can hang there for a little bit. And if somebody can clearly communicate what they did, the impact that it had, like, how it affected the business, like, to me, those are all like really great things. And if you do that, in a way, where it's just like, it's simple, short, and just like very metrics driven, and there's like, there's a high degree of ownership there. Like, to me, there's just like, okay, like, I don't care what school you went to, like, it was a like it takes, it takes a good engineer, communicate that way. And then also, like, you can obviously tell that this person is the leader on their team. And so, and you can do that, like, I think, especially like even like recruiting resumes, even for example, it's like, what did you do? And what impact did you have, like, I don't care that you threw a sourcing party, and like, invited all your engineers to come like eat pizza and drink beer and give you names? Right? Like, what did you do? Right? What impact you have on the business? And so like, it translates across the board, whether you're an engineer, a biz ops, you know, strategy consultant, like it, all of these things, it matters.

Jem Young
I love that, what impact did you have on the business? Because like, if you can't answer that, then like, What the hell are you doing? Like, if you're just building forms, or like putting data entry, then like, why would I hire you.

Ryan Burgess
And then we're gonna be actually very impactful, though, is like, forms that are like, very impactful. But I hope too, that you're understanding why you're creating what you're creating. And I think that, to me, is the most impactful.

Jem Young
That's the biggest failing, I see of a lot of people, particularly outside the United States, where engineering is not like held in such high degree. It's people that are just, oh, yeah, I did this thing. And I'm going to Java, and I'm good at PHP, and I could do some sequel to my cool, like, what do you passion about like, what did you do for your last business? Well, I built this thing. And it's awesome. And it's just like it. It's a different mindset about like, I don't want to work with that person. Like, yeah, sell yourself you do do you just need to think of yourself as like, I am more than engineer I'm like this, this game changer that they brought me to the business. I did this thing. And maybe tiny play. I'm proud of it. I like I made a pattern library and CSS. It's one file. But it's a game changer. Because like, here's why. If it's small, like you should be able to own that. And speak to that. Yeah. The why.

Matt Stephenson
Exactly. I think it's because all that stuff on your resume is fair game in an interview.

Ryan Burgess
Sure. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yeah, this got you in the door. So now, let's say we've made it past the interview. Everything's all good. We're down to the offer stage. Cheers. Cheers. There's been this meme that's kind of out there that people shouldn't negotiate salaries. I've seen this a few times. I think Stacy's brought this up with like, especially new college grads and like someone from a boot camp that they should just almost take the first offer and just go How do you each see that is like should there be a back and forth on negotiate? How should that work?

Matt Stephenson
I would highly advise. And this is my personal opinion, but I highly advise anybody making decisions purely on compensation. Like you can go, I mean, there's going to be plenty of companies that pay you a lot more, but like, make sure that you're sticking to the kind of list of criteria that you set out for, and make sure that all of your boxes are checked, because you can it I see this time and time again, candidates like, alright, like you want a small company, you want to impact you want to ownership like we've demonstrated to you, all of these things are met. What is hesitating, like, what is your hesitation from signing this off right now? Oh, X company just came in and offered me 50k. More like, that's great. You mentioned compensation not being you know, it's always going to be some sort of a tiebreaker. But if you're making decisions based purely on compensation, I don't think you're approaching your jobs correctly.

Ryan Burgess
I don't disagree. I think compensation is important. But it shouldn't be a driver. I always look like all those things like what are my challenges? What is the impact? Where's the growth, all the areas that I want to focus in? Yes, compensation matters. But I've often taken jobs actually even talked to the Netflix job. So I took the Netflix role, not really caring what the compensation was, it was more what as long as I'm getting paid the same as I was previously getting paid. I'm not that concerned, I took it because of all the things that we were doing at Netflix, and that I wanted to be a part of. And that was the interesting part. Yes, if you feel undervalued, that could be a showstopper. Like, if they were like, We're gonna pay you half of what you currently make. That's a deal breaker, that's a really tough one to choke down. But I agree with you on the salary, it shouldn't be a driver.

Jem Young
So I'll push back a little because there are people that I know for a fact have gotten screwed, because they just didn't negotiate. They took their moving from state or just somewhere else in the world where they got paid less. And the company took advantage of that by paying them like, a lot, but not a lot for the barrier. Recently, when my friend interviewed for a company, I won't say which company because Shame on them. They're offering like 90k For someone who like seven years of data science experience, which in the Bay Area, I know, it sounds like a lot dress the world in the barrier. That's like insulting, and they're like, I don't know if I should take it or not. And I'm like, no, like, you're worth way more than that. And like screw that company for offering that. So I don't know, I agree. It shouldn't be all about money. And I wouldn't want to work with someone. But I think it comes

Ryan Burgess
down to actually what we talked about earlier, is getting the data points. No, I agree. Right. Right. Is so you should feel comfortable that yes, we're on the same page. If they're completely off base, then yeah, like that's a that's a game changer right

Jem Young
there. So on. On that token, though, there's a lot of like faith, we put in recruiters, especially if you're not familiar with the barrier, or the salaries or anywhere else. And like Seattle or New York, something like that, we have to put trust that you all are making a fair offer based on our top of market or like what you can afford. And that's hard. Because again, it's that personal relationship, that you really have to trust this person because you're literally changing the course of their lives. That

Stacy London
was the impetus for the My question was that I've, I've talked to people that are new, they've just graduated, or they came out of a boot camp, and they actually don't have a good sense of like, they've done some research that kind of the data points of like, what's a fair salary, but they were told by, you know, recruiter from a company. Oh, this is, you know, what, what the offer is cheers, but like, but we won't negotiate, you can't negotiate it. It's, it's like not negotiable. And, and I, and they're like, and then that's what I went with. And I was like, Oh, my gosh, like, I think it's always negotiable. And you, you know, you should probably should have tried a little bit just because it's this, this area is very expensive, and maybe what they're offering you wasn't necessarily totally fair. So I felt bad for them not understanding that, and then just taking at face value, what the recruiter told them.

Chris Ahsing
Yeah, I think, you know, you're you're touching on a key point that I think any good recruiter has to overcome, right? Is this sense of there's there's a lot of misinformation. There's a lot of bad advice. And, you know, you touched on the major point of, I think, for me with the whole, do you ask calm in the beginning expectations. And more of a personal note, for me, it's just building trust, right? Is this, if I'm going it's such a taboo hard topic to start negotiating, right? And so it's just figuring out like, Okay, well, can we talk about this in the first call, like, they really good advice, if someone's really cares about it, they'll bring it up in at the point. But at some point, like I'm setting expectation, like, after the onsite, we're gonna sit down and have this conversation and I'm gonna make it easy, right? It's just really building that trust. So, to answer the question coming up, is we're overcoming a lot of this negativity that comes with the critters, they want to come up on me. I'm gonna anchor low, they're gonna come lower. Like it's just, there's a lot of stuff that we're just trying, like, really good recruiters are just trying to get past and my direct answer to your question, Should you negotiate? I think it really is not a one size fits all answer. It's, do you trust that recruiter? Right? And if it's do you, I mean, you can do it. Like, just look at the company that you're interviewing with. Read the reviews, sometimes it's fake sometimes. Yes, it's true. Just realize like this situation, I can negotiate, right? I feel like Hey, Matt, Zack, two great people, we vibe, the hallway. Everything they said happened. It's true. They have nothing but shown, I think respect for me as a candidate. And also like everything they said has been, you know, the right thing like, right, they said this, this happened. There's a lot of trust there. I can see you should feel comfortable in that sense, right? Because there have been negotiations that I've experienced where it's broken down, right? Like, literally, I feel okay. We've been same thing with Matt, right? You said X, you said Z, you said why everything is delivered, like, Hey, we're on the table, we're on up and up. And then we comes negotiation, like this change happens. And it just like it throws you in recruiting for a loop. And we're like, man, what did i What did what did I do to make you feel like this? Like, this shouldn't be the case. So the answer the question, and I'm pontificating and rambling, is it's case by case. You should feel like you have a relationship with the recruiter. If there's trust, I think you can push back. I think there's more than enough resources for anybody to go out there and look at I'm with you. If I'm, like actually negotiating for a friend, I tell them, this is going to be so bad. If I'm negotiating for a friend, I do have them shop offers. I have them go and get another offer. Right? I have them go get an offer and have an anchor point, right? Because that way, ah, oh my god. Yeah.

Ryan Burgess
Three times. Cheers. Yeah. Cheers.

Chris Ahsing
We get you guys drunk. No, I think it's just like, Look, if you don't know what your market value is, go find it.

Jem Young
So on that, on that topic, what is everybody's take on exploding offers. And for those who don't know, it's an offer that, hey, we're gonna pay you X, but you need to respond by Friday or next week or something like

Matt Stephenson
that. We have a pipeline review every Tuesday. And it's funny, because today was literally an hour of us re strategizing the way we think offers because I know at least I advise everybody like deadlines in especially in Silicon Valley. Deadlines are bullshit, right? Like, there's no freakin way that a company's gonna pull an offer because you couldn't make a decision in time. The only case that can happen is if there's one headcount left. And if there's two offers out, and one headcount accepts, there's not another head for the other person, and we have to pull it over. But if you're one of many software engineering roles, which like, I think every tech company in the valley has infinite of, like, there's no freakin way that like, after three days, if you can't make your decision in time, they're gonna pull their offer, like you have every right to do what's fully best for you. It's a life changing decision. Like, and this is where I come in, like, again, like with this like, not like, hassle free kind of recruiting policy, where it's just like, look, I'm never gonna twist your arm to accept this offer, because I need to know that this is right for you. Right? If I if I twist your arm, you come here and you're not happy? Like, I'll take that personally. It's not gonna be good for the team. It's not gonna be good for the company. Right? Like, let's not do that. Yeah, so I feel like for me, it's more like, Hey, we're gonna make you an offer. Now it's your turn to kind of like interview us. Right? Cheers. Cheers. Save us today are very much a stressful situation where cannons are trying to evaluate you just as much when we're trying to evaluate the candidate, right? And so there's just like, kind of tense, like, did I get a good enough read. And so what I like to do is say, hey, we want to make you an offer, and kill me

Jem Young
refills.

Matt Stephenson
And we'll get to a point where now we want you to tell us what you need in order to like, have all of your questions answered and all your data points figured out to where like, you know, this is the best opportunity for yourself. And so for me, I say go interview in multiple places, like get three offers, and like, make sure you're laying them down at the same time, and looking at what's most important to you. And if you know, we need to talk, then we'll talk

Ryan Burgess
then I don't mind the deadline, because I think there's a bit of a balance of Yeah, like, this shouldn't drag on forever. But at the same time, you've built that trust with your recruiting partner and saying, Hey, I actually need a bit longer. No, no recruiter is going to be like, Nope, it's three days. That's Max, like, so I think that kind of goes back to negotiating, or whatever you want to call it. It's just be upfront with that be open and honest. I'm going to wait for this weekend, I'd like to think a little bit longer. Can I get back to you on Wednesday, instead of Monday, no one's going to be like unrealistic on that. So I like the idea of like putting a time box to it. But also being both on the same page.

Zack Skelly
I also think a recruiter can do a lot about, again, setting expectations up front. Like a lot of the times if I'll talk to a candidate, and it's an initial call, and I know they're interested interviewing, I might ask them, like, Hey, give a general sense of kind of what your interviewing timeframe looks like, from here, like do you know when you hope to decide on what your next job might be? And then I'll kind of lay out what our interviewing process looks like maybe about how long it typically takes us between each stage. And we're kind of staying on the same page the whole way along. And you know, when it times to, when time comes to give someone an offer. I'll just kind of double click on this and say like, Hey, you know, I know when we first spoke, you'd mentioned you're hoping to decide two weeks from now, does that still seem about right? Oftentimes, it does. And yeah, like, you know, within reason I think if they need a little more time to talk to family or you know, something came up like cool. I agree. There are very few circumstances where like it really makes sense to have a super hard deadline, maybe if there's one headcount, like like not said, but I'm

Stacy London
actually had no idea about this, like I thought that like it's done at that point.

Zack Skelly
That's my personal opinion. I also do think like, you know, there's something to be said for inertia from a recruiting perspective to like, I think recruiters want to keep the ball rolling, to be honest.

Ryan Burgess
Absolutely. You don't want it to drag on forever. Like, even if it's the right person, you found the right person, you're like, Great, let's get them in, like they're going to be great for this role. You care about closing the role? And in some sense for the right person,

Zack Skelly
I think there should be mutual respect and transparency,

Ryan Burgess
because I can I don't, it's not fair to you. If I'm like, Yeah, I'll get back to you. I'll get back to you. Like I'm dragging you along. That doesn't feel great either. It goes both ways. It's a two way street.

Matt Stephenson
I think what Zach just mentioned is the key. And I think any tips any job seeker is transparency, right? I think a lot of people feel like they have to keep things close to their chest. It's like this protected. Like, I can't let you know who I'm talking to, I can't let you know when I'm interviewing for anything like that. And to me, like the easiest transactions I've ever had are the ones where I can actually have a meaningful conversation, understand exactly where you're at, whether that be salary, whether that be who you're talking to the positions you're being considered for. It just makes it so much easier. And generally what I find the people who are reserved, I don't get them to open up until after I have a competent like discussion with them. Or like we give them an offer. They're like, Oh, that's really low. It's like, well, you know, I kind of went in blind because you didn't tell me what you were making. And so like, let's have that chat now. And like, what's important to you, or like, if it goes on for like, two and a half weeks or whatever, and like, we keep pushing it out? It's like, trying to sit down be like, hey, like, I'm just curious, like, what is your main hesitation for signing this offer? Like, there's something out there that like you, you know, hasn't checked that final box for you? Like, I want to know what that is? And like, maybe it's risk? Or maybe it's growth? Or maybe it's career development? Like, now you have that point? And you can speak to it? Or maybe you can't, and maybe it's like, hey, you know what, like, we can't offer that right now. And like, it's just not gonna be the right opportunity for you and like, and you have to be okay with walking away from that. Again, like, they come in recruiters, like, that's, that's a sin, you just need to hit your offers, like small company, like, I don't want you there. Right. And so I think it's a it's a big difference. direct question,

Chris Ahsing
I think with with exploding offers, you know, there is only one case that I know of, and that's like, if there's two people for the job, and, and the hard thing is just really discerning whether or not that's true, right. That's the hard thing. Like if I was the candidate on my end and said, there's one spot and I've been a victim like of this, like you need to come in now. Or I think what's a little bit more common in the valley today is like, look, we might raise here a little bit, and that equity is gonna go like, it's just, you know, Tommy wise and creating a sense of FOMO is like, Fear Of Missing Out is a huge, you know, tactic I think in a lot of sales and recruiting organizations. So that's its present there. But do I believe in exploding offers? No. And my advice to people listening out there is, hey, set your own timeline, but also be respect for it, right? If you say, hey, I want to make a decision by September, stick to it, right? Because and if you need more time, like be open in front about it, because nothing is worse, when from a recruiting perspective is like, if I'm recruiting Zack and Zack, and I tell everybody on the team, I tell my boss, I tell the founders, I putting my reputation on the line as a recruiter, and that Zach's going to sign or he's making a decision in September, and then it takes till November. And then it's not like Man, that is the most scary thing is recruited one. Like I said one thing, but I didn't mean like it just it's a really tough thing. So look, I think the short and sweet answer is you have power to set your own deadline, and timeline. But just be respectful about it and be open. So I think it

Zack Skelly
can be helpful to be intentional about that upfront. If you have, if you're considering multiple, multiple companies, you can kind of set the pace yourself with your recruiters when hopefully when you enter the process, and maybe just say like, Hey, talking to a few places, I hope to wrap all my interviews up in the course of the next three weeks. Like I'd like another two weeks, I think about everything and like, I anticipate that we'll have a decision by the middle of November, or whatever it goes back to that trust and just open combat. I mean, at the end of the day, like I care about the people that I'm working with candidates, I really do, and I care about the company and like that I work with and I want to balance both of those things as best as I can. And like I think transparency and mutual respect is kind of at the core of this, like, we're willing to be reasonable. Just you know,

Chris Ahsing
yeah, I think that I just realized something I think the really hard thing is that like we're probably a small percentage, right? I think of companies that are think think this way I think a lot of people I did some consulting back end like the Midwest and like like the east and like just, I think there's a lot of companies out there unfortunately, we'll try to pull some of these things so retracting a little bit my advice, everyone I think you just be mindful and yeah,

Jem Young
I've like three the rapid fire questions. I know we're like alright me over. I know, but this is gonna say, all right, a cover letters with resumes yes or no?

Chris Ahsing
No,

Matt Stephenson
I can't tell you the last time that cover letter.

Ryan Burgess
I haven't looked at one in forever. No, probably not save

Matt Stephenson
the time, right put into your resume formatting. Yeah, yeah.

Jem Young
summaries on your abstracts or whatever, on your resume.

Zack Skelly
No. Now, if there's the same two, maybe, probably no, if I'm from

Jem Young
the middle of nowhere Georgia, how is the best chance of getting my profile seen by? And if you

Zack Skelly
show up at my office? No. Please do not do that really?

Matt Stephenson
Well, they may be qualified for the open role, right? We've had so many people who have applied for certain roles, you know, it just comes in, and then they go, Hey, can we make the title like senior, you know, like, data scientists, for example, like, we make the title senior data scientist, like, there's way too many junior people coming in here. It's like, yeah, it's not gonna change, like the flow. But like, I see what you mean. Right. So like, make sure you're reading JavaScript, and then you're qualified for it. Be impacted ownership is like making sure you have a resume that like, speaks out to me, like, I don't care if you went to the best schools. But like, if you can prove to me that you've carried impact ownership, and you know, you're talking about like, we'll talk.

Ryan Burgess
Alright, I got a question, resume or LinkedIn? Do you need a resume?

Zack Skelly
I think this varies depending on the stage of the company. To be honest with you, I think at larger companies, your resume will carry through and I could be wrong, this might be true of start some startups too, but like, your resume will carry through the entire process, a lot of interviews will end up seeing it. And I know of some smaller companies where that might not be the case, like they depend on a recruiter, or maybe the first interviewer to kind of get that out of the way. And the resume is not as important throughout the whole process. I TLDR, like I think it's more important for getting your foot in the door, but it can be worthwhile to invest in it. For sure.

Matt Stephenson
I think LinkedIn profiles that have content, as like, what you did, what team you're on, and things like that is incredibly important, because every engineer who's gonna interview you needs to know like, kind of, yeah, the background and the kind like what you're doing. So we don't spend 1020 minutes on like, Hey, tell me about yourself. And like, you know, like breaking the ice a little bit. And also, yeah, that's, that is kind of your qualifications. And like, you know, if I see it, just like a shell account, like, Hey, I think it's kind of fake because a lot of other companies are doing that right now. It's like bait other recruiters, which is kind of an interesting tactic. Yeah,

Ryan Burgess
that is a gross tactic. Yeah.

Matt Stephenson
And then yeah, otherwise, it's like, I don't know what you do. And so I can't a like do a meaningful reach out. But also like, I can't really use that as like, Yeah, that's great that you worked at, you know, specific companies, but we just need to know what you do a little bit.

Ryan Burgess
That's fair. All right. And each episode we like to share pics of things we found interesting. Hopefully, you all have had time to think of some interesting things to share with our listeners. Let's go around and share pics for today's episode.

Matt Stephenson
Obviously your page Zach's book, Elaine Linares blog. Yeah, it's a great book. There's some straight gold in there. Yeah, definitely check that out. You can spend hours in there. There's a lot of good stuff.

Jem Young
Awesome. The interviewing.io blog.

Zack Skelly
Yeah, a couple things that I really like. The Y Combinator podcast just went live on Spotify. There's some really, really great episodes there. If you're serious about hiring in particular, the first episode is with a guy named Aman, who's one of the co founders at triplebyte. And there's some super interesting insights more about like interview processes and things but great podcast. I learned the other day, there's a programming language called Rockstar, which I thought was hilarious. So if somebody's looking for a rockstar Dev, you can now be a rockstar Dev. For my own personal interest. Andreessen Horowitz has this really cool reference called the crypto cannon if you're at all interested in blockchain and cryptocurrency there's like an enormous really fascinating list of what's happening in the cryptocurrency space. And so I'm biased in that way. But check it out. If you like crypto,

Ryan Burgess
very cool

Stacy London
to fix for tonight. The first one is called. It doesn't really have like an official name just package dependencies. But it's a it's a visualization that Mike Bostock did, who's the founder of observable, then the creator of d3, he worked at New York Times graphics as well. This particular site, essentially visualizes your transitive dependencies and any package that you have an NPM. It's just kind of a cool thing to see like how complex the thing you're working with is and how many like things it depends on and I guess you can like, look at that through your node modules directory, but it's cool to see a visual of that. And then the second pick is a sound pick. It's called somewhere else by Elsa Hewitt. Sort of a trip Hoppy, tons of samples really interesting to listen to with your headphones on. I've been really enjoying that. While I Code

Ryan Burgess
Jam, what do you have,

Jem Young
say I have to fix today? First one is a note package called NDB. No debugger, it is fantastic. So if you've ever tried to debug Node, you know, it's like one process, blah, blah, blah. It really sucks, especially when you're running like multi process node NDB will show all of your processes and you can have breakpoints on each one of those. And it opens its own Chrome Inspector, which is it's it's way way better than standard. No debugger. Fantastic. Second one is a song by a band that you probably will know called godspeed you black emperor, if you ever heard of it. Yeah, the song East Hastings, which is fantastic. It's from 20 days later. It's so good that Danny Boyle director, one of my favorite directors, he was like, I cannot make this movie without putting the song in the movie. But some of the other stuff is really solid too. So if you never checked it out, it's worth doing. I don't have a valley silicon pick, because,

Ryan Burgess
you know, people are going to be upset.

Jem Young
I know I'm upset. Here. It's fair. I can make something up. We're like, No,

Ryan Burgess
we're gonna expect a really good one next step.

Jem Young
I'll have to for next time. All right,

Ryan Burgess
Chris, what do you have for us?

Chris Ahsing
Oh, yeah, well, I screenshotted if a close friend of ours in the group, I just found out he left his job at a well known tech company and then he turned around and started recruiting all of us at the same time. And I realized like even though Hey, we're recruiters and we do it for job I think there's a lot of room to be improved even amongst the people I respect. He's he's gonna flip out when I

Ryan Burgess
love this pick. Yeah. All right. So I have two picks Jem Marrs and I just got back from React Rally, which is a conference in Salt Lake City, we decided to film a little video of us traveling to React Rally, spending time at React, rally and traveling back home. So I'm going to share the front end Happy Hour React Rally video. And my second pick is actually a music pic of a album of a speaker from React Rally, which is Ken Wheeler has, if you know who Ken Wheeler is, yes, he has made his own album. It's actually amazing what Yeah, it's like it's a tech Neue like 80s vibe. It's really good actually. Sorry, can is very good. But the best thing is the album is called Love Songs for your mother, but not his mother, everyone else's. So it is on Spotify. I thought that was pretty good. He literally shared this at his keynote at 9am in the morning after the you know, night of karaoke, before wearing a suit is talking about this love songs for your mother. So I was like, I gotta share this pic. Like more people need to listen to this album. Alright, before we end the episode, I want to thank Matt, Zack and Chris, for joining us. It was a pleasure having you all join us with so much knowledge so much great knowledge working on thank you for coming. Yes, cheers. Where can people get in touch with you? Where can they send spam to you?

Matt Stephenson
I do not have a Twitter profile which might want throw off some recruiters in Silicon Valley. I know where can you find me that? Calm? Yeah, you can actually manage solid guests. And then we also have I mean, my LinkedIn profile. I think I'm M Stevenson, three to five but you can also look up manage shift on LinkedIn. You're the

Jem Young
first person I've ever seen. That not I wrote about ironically,

Zack Skelly
my Twitter handle is Zachary Zork ar y which is a weird spin on my name, Zachary. I'm a bit of a lurker but that may change so feel free to shoot me a follow. My email is Zach at 0x project.com number zero letter X project.com.

Chris Ahsing
I think I have a Twitter account. I think I have one but as to follow an ENTJ managers post on a blog so I don't know what it is right now. I will just say my email it's C acing H s ing just like it's sound we sing i Sing we all sing for Austin. At plaid so that's the Aussie cat flat.com Shoot me a line.

Ryan Burgess
Awesome. Well thank you all for listening today's episode, make sure to subscribe to front end happier podcasts on whatever you like to choose to listen to podcasts on. And follow us on our Twitter account at front end H H. Any last words that

Zack Skelly
follow you now