Develomentor

Welcome to our second panel on Develomentor. Today's topic is tech hiring as an employee and as a manager.

Today's guests are:
Aline Lerner – Aline is the founder and CEO of Interviewing.io, a hiring platform aimed at making interviewing and finding a job in tech way less painful. You heard her first on the show in episode 44 where she shared her career path from MIT computer science to being a professional chef to tech recruiting and software engineering. 

Daniel Tunkelang – Daniel is a computer scientist and early employee at Endeca, the search company acquired by Oracle for over $1 billion. He also spent time at Google and LinkedIn before going out on his own as a, to use his own words, a High Class consultant. 

Renee Saint-Louis – Renee is a long time product manager and the author of the Manager Mentor blog series, which you can find at develomentor.com. She was also a guest of the show way back in episode 2.

Key Milestones

1. Why is talking to employees often a better way of getting a job than talking to recruiters?
2. What are common mistakes people make in the tech hiring process?
3. Ways to assess whether a company is a good fit for you or not.
4. One of the controversies in hiring in the tech field relates to giving candidates homework as part of the screening process.
5. What do manager's look for when adding to their team?
6. Negotiating as an employee and as a manager. 
7. What is the “pipeline problem” as it relates to diversity and inclusion in hiring in tech?
8. How to deal with 'brilliant jerks' in tech?

Additional Resources

What is the pipeline problem? https://blog.interviewing.io/we-ran-the-numbers-and-there-really-is-a-pipeline-problem-in-eng-hiring/

Check out our Manager series on Develomentor - https://develomentor.com/2020/10/28/avoiding-conflict-erodes-trust/

You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/

Connect with the panelists:
Aline Lerner: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alinelerner/
Renee Saint Louis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renee-saint-louis-cbap-6bbb2a/
Daniel Tunkelang: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dtunkelang/Aline Lerner:

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Twitter: @develomentor

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Chris Samiullah. 

From self taught developer to teaching 10,000+ developers, our guest today has turned a degree in English Literature from York and a Master’s of Science in International Business and Management into a 7+ year in tech as a developer. Over the course of his career, Chris Samiullah has worked in consulting doing dental practice acquisitions, healthcare and fintech, holding down titles like analyst, software engineer, developer, development manager, AI Software Engineer and tech lead. 

Chris has also worked globally, spending three years away from his home in the United Kingdom working in China. In addition to his day job, Chris teaches two popular Udemy classes on machine learning with over 10,000 students.  

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Quotes

“Project based learning is so important and its definitely been the foundation for me. It has kept me motivated. Early on I had a series of projects, first of which was a choose your own adventure Brazilian jiu jujitsu game/tutorial.”

“For a structuring project learning I would start with something I could realistically do in a day then go on with something I could finish in a weekend. Whenever talking about the self taught route, difficulty calibration is something I talk about a lot. And I feel like its what boot camps are giving you, just in a structured way.”

“I think people want to help others if they feel like they are people who are ready to be helped. So its about demonstrating that you’re ready to be helped. The way I did that was by building all of these projects. It’s not just saying ‘I’m really interested’, but showing it. So I would send them code snippets, I would send them screenshots of what I was building, etc.”

—Chris Samiullah

Additional Resources

https://www.udemy.com/user/christopher-samiullah/

https://coursemaker.org

You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/

Connect with Chris Samiullah
LinkedIn
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Monica Lent

Monica Lent is an American software engineer and engineering manager living and working in Berlin, Germany.

She started coding when she was 10 years old, and hasn’t stopped since then. In her 10+ year technical career (not including coding as a kid 😉), Monica has worked in a wide range of domains such as cloud services, natural language processing, e-learning, and fintech.

She has taken on roles ranging from individual contributor to technical lead and manager.

Most recently, she was leading a distributed team of 15+ frontend engineers at SumUp, a German fintech company. During her time there the company grew from 80 people to more than 1,500 people over the course of 5 years.

Today, Monica is building her own startup called Affilimate, a tool that helps bloggers earn more from their content with actionable affiliate analytics. It’s currently in private beta, but you’re welcome to email her for an invite or about partnership opportunities. In my spare time, Monica blogs about travel and photography on Not a Nomad Blog, which reaches over 60,000 unique readers per month.

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Quotes

“I never really planned to blog for money or to be a successful blogger. So when I started this travel blog it was primarily just to document my time living in Europe. During that Time I also learned more about photography so it became sort of like a side project for me. And slowly what happened over time is Google became more and more interested in my content.”

“If you want to write technical tutorials it’ll be a better investment of your time to optimize for SEO. So in the future, when you’re googling your own problem, you come across your own blog post. You just have to put yourself in the mindset of whoever will be discovering your content.”

—Monica Lent

Additional Resources

Learn more about Affilimate – https://affilimate.com/about/

Learn more about Blogging for Devs – https://bloggingfordevs.com/

Check out Monica’s blog travel blog – https://notanomadblog.com/

Connect with James Tucker
LinkedIn
Twitter
GitHub
https://jamestucker.dev/

Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter

You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/

Connect with Hilliary Turnipseed
LinkedIn
Twitter

Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter

Support the show

Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is James Tucker. 

James Tucker is a developer, husband, dog dad, and former aspiring pastor.

Currently, he’s working at soona as a full stack engineer, building out a content creation platform primarily with Vue.js and Ruby on Rails.

James is passionate about making things and teaching others code. When he’s not coding, you can probably find him spending time with his wife Megan, reading, playing ice hockey, or camping.

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A note from Grant

In yet another first for the show, we have our first Theology major turned developer as a guest today. That’s right, James Tucker, a once upon a time aspiring pastor with a Theology degree from Northland International University, spent three years working across manufacturing and insurance before deciding to go to a tech bootcamp and become a full stack developer for the likes of Journey Tellr and soona. In addition to his developer roles, he’s an avid blogger and public speaker. Be sure to listen in as we learn about James Tucker’s calling to code.

-Grant Ingersoll

Quotes

“When I took Strength Finders and I started thinking about my past and I remembered that I was really creative as a kid and I love legos. I loved painting, I loved drawing. And we sort of thought that coding and being a developer was somewhat like an adult version of playing with legos. That’s really when I decided to go off to my bootcamp.“

“One thing that really helped me with my job search was building out side projects and making sure I had these listed on my resume so when I got interviewed I had something I was really passionate about. I got actual feedback from hiring managers that this was one of my strengths of my approach to getting a job“

—James Tucker

Key Milestones

Additional Resources

Podcasts:
How I Built This – https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this
Hardcore History – https://www.dancarlin.com/

Note Taking:
Obsidian – https://obsidian.md/
Roam – https://roamresearch.com/

Connect with James Tucker
LinkedIn
Twitter
GitHub
https://jamestucker.dev/

Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter

You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/

Connect with Hilliary Turnipseed
LinkedIn
Twitter

Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter

Support the show

Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Hilliary Turnipseed.

Hilliary Turnipseed is an experienced talent acquisition and management executive, specializing in early-stage startups, as well as the education technology, media production and advertising industries. Companies she has worked with include Discovery Communications, Black Girls CODE, POLITICO and Blackboard.

While Turnipseed’s primary expertise is in recruitment, she also focuses on implementing diversity and inclusion strategies along with employee engagement and wellness program initiatives. She is well known for her creative approaches to optimizing workplace environments and policies for the Millennial and Gen Z generations.

In addition to consulting, Turnipseed currently serves as a Director for Women Who Code, while also leading talent and employer branding initiatives for digital content media company, Women 2.0.

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A word from Grant

Hilliary Turnipseed has turned a bachelor’s in History from American University into a 15+ year career helping companies in and out of the tech industry find and hire talent. Having worked for the likes of Axios, Black Girls Code, Discovery Communications, Blackboard, Women 2.0 and these days, on her own as the founder and president of Hill Street Strategies, Hilliary helps companies not just hire talent, but build stronger, more inclusive cultures. 

When Hilliary isn’t recruiting top talent, she is often found volunteering for groups like Women Who Code, Tech Rebalanced, or speaking on podcasts or at DC Startup Week.  

-Grant Ingersoll

Quotes

“I love people and I consider myself just an organic connector. So I stumbled upon this industry that I didn’t know really existed. I did not go to school to recruit or for HR.”

“For me, it was really important to link the importance of people with the overall business strategy. So I view people as the most valuable asset within an organization.”

“Women apply to roles where they meet 90 to 100 percent of requirements whereas for men its usually 10 to 20 percent. So if you just take that one stat into consideration, your job descriptions alone could be preventing that pipeline from coming through.”

—Hilliary Turnipseed

Additional Resources

The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Secure a Seat at the Table – https://www.amazon.com/Memo-Women-Color-Secure-Table-ebook/dp/B07L2WRVSW

Check out Women Who Code – https://www.womenwhocode.com/about

Look into Hilliary’s talent consultancy – https://www.hillstreetstrategies.com/

You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/

Connect with Hilliary Turnipseed
LinkedIn
Twitter

Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter

Support the show

Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Raz Shuty. 

Raz Shuty has held titles like Director of Engineering, Head of Engineering, Founder and CTO throughout his career, but he didn’t start there. In fact, after getting his degree in computer science he took one of the routes I believe can make for the strongest of developers: he went to work as a test and QA engineer before working his way into software engineering and lead software engineering roles. 

Along his journey, he’s worked for the likes of PicScout, Wikimedia Deutschland, Auctionata, and fring as well as started not one, but two companies. In addition to his day job, Raz is a co-host on the podcast Techpoint Charlie, a podcast focused on topics in tech. 

-Grant Ingersoll

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A word from Raz

I am a parent to an awesome frog called Ethan, annoying spouse to Yael, Ironman Triathlon and many Marathons finisher, 12 years Software Engineer and 4 years Engineering Manager. I like to talk about culture, and I try to be a product driven Engineering Manager and I truly believe that Product and Engineering should talk more often and the earlier the better.

Sometimes our industry is so stuck in finding the perfect solution. As developer we all criticize product people for being waterfalls but we as developers tend to over engineer so much. We tend to always try to find the best solution to deliver to production instead of finding a solution and then iterate.

-Raz Shuty

Quotes

“If you do end to end automation you can have a product view, you can have a holistic view of a product. Whereas, as a software engineer its sort of hard to get your head out of the trenches and to see how things actually relate to each other in the big scope of things.” 

“Sometimes our industry is so stuck in finding the perfect solution. As developers we all criticize product people for being waterfalls but we as developers tend to over engineer so much. We tend to always try to find the best solution to deliver to production instead of finding a solution and then iterate.”

—Raz Shuty

Additional Resources

Raz Shuty’s blog on Engineering Management – https://somehowimanage.blog/

Check out Raz Shuty’s podcast, Techpoint Charlie – https://techpointcharlie.blog/

You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/

Connect with Raz Shuty
LinkedIn
Twitter

Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Edidiong Asikpko.

Edidiong Asikpo is a software engineer from Akwa Ibom, Nigeria. She is a passionate professional with multi-faceted skills and experience spanning across Software Engineering, Developer Relations, community building, technical writing, and Open Source contributions. Edidiong is one of the leaders of the devlopement of tech in Nigeria. 

She is a strong advocate of sensitizing people, especially women about the importance of starting a career in Technology. This passion has led her to play a major part in building communities such as Developer Circle Uyo from Facebook, She Code Africa, and Women Will. She is an eloquent writer, speaker, and communicator with a keen interest in making open Source contributions and inspiring the next generation.

In 2019, she was one of the 40 people recognized by Facebook as an Icon of change because of her impacts and strong contributions to building the Technology Ecosystem in Nigeria.

When she’s not coding, you can find her exploring the beauty of nature and analyzing movies.

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Quotes

“If you ask me that’s definitely how I got into tech, not necesarily because I studied computer science but because I went for that industrial training and learned how to develop mobile applications“

“You might be a newbie in tech for 2 weeks but there is someone joining who is a newbie in tech for one week. So what you know in two weeks you can help the person joining with one week. So never feel like you don’t know enough or there is no one who is going to listen or you’re not good enough or something. Just start.”

“Being a developer advocate is just an opportunity to do a lot of things at the same time. I get to write, I get to speak, I get to also code and I also get to meet amazing people.”

“Some of the things I do is try to ensure that developers who integrate with our product have a good experience. So it can range from improving on documentation, writing tutorials, and creating demos of some of these different APIs that we have”

—Edidiong Asikpo

You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/

Connect with Edidiong Asikpo
LinkedIn
Twitter
https://edidiongasikpo.com/press-kit

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Twitter: @develomentor

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Ann Lewis. 

Ann Lewis is the CTO of MoveOn.org. She is a technical leader, architect, and active coder with 15+ years of experience in software engineering and software management, with a focus on distributed systems and scalability. In her work at MoveOn, she in-housed tech and hired a tech team, modernized and upgraded MoveOn’s software infrastructure, created and scaled up new systems for MoveOn’s 2016 presidential election program, 2017 Resistance programs, and 2018 midterm election program, and co-ran and launched a rebranding effort across all MoveOn web properties. 

Ann sees opportunities for new collaborations between the tech and organizing worlds, to modernize infrastructure, bring in best practices, and scale impact of tools. Ann is passionate about using tech and data to scale the impact of organizing, ensuring that systems of power are fair and accountable, and harnessing people power to hold governments and corporations accountable. 

You can find her on twitter here: @ann_lewis

If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us

Quotes

“Political Tech as an ecosystem has a relatively small market cap so there is often not enough organic competition to make it so there is a good product offering for each price point in each thing that needs to happen.”

“When I discovered programming in general I realized that you can move at the speed of thought and build things as quickly as you can imagine them and I’ve been excited for that my entire life.”

“In the early 2000s, I think Amazon’s identity was largely based around having survived the dot com bubble burst and a lot of other tech companies had gone under. So Amazon survived and so did google and Microsoft. They were hiring up all the engineers out of college. There was a lot of pride around doing things efficiently.”

“At Amazon, without meaning to, I got deep experience in massively scalable distributed systems. It’s interesting, these big tech companies have so much data and so much scale. Even the smallest system you can build is going to have to handle thousands of request per second.”

—Ann Lewis

You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/

Connect with Ann Lewis
LinkedIn
Twitter
https://annlewis.tech/

Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Kent C. Dodds!

Kent C. Dodds is a world renowned speaker, teacher, and trainer and he’s actively involved in the open source community as a maintainer and contributor of hundreds of popular npm packages. 

Kent is the creator of TestingJavaScript.com and he’s an instructor on egghead.io and Frontend Masters. He’s also a Google Developer Expert. Kent is happily married and the father of four kids. He likes his family, code, JavaScript, and React.

If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us

A note from Grant

After considering a career as an accountant, some time spent as a missionary and a small business owner digitizing compact discs, Kent C. Dodds has steadily spent the last decade building up a career as a web developer and software engineer for the likes of USAA, Domo, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and Paypal. 

These days, Kent is on his own as a world renowned speaker, teacher and trainer on software and software quality, especially in the Javascript and frontend development space. His work can be found on several leading sites like egghead.io, Frontend Masters and his very own EpicReact.dev and TestingJavaScript.com. In addition to all that great educational content, Kent also is an active contributor and maintainer of hundreds of popular open source Javascript libraries. 

-Grant Ingersoll

Quotes

“I ended up switching from accounting to information systems which is in the business school. II still wasn’t convinced that I wanted to program. But I thought ‘hey I really enjoy computers, I’m really good at these computer things, and business seems interesting.’”

“I think that’s what got me started into UI was just that really quick feedback cycle of seeing the impact of the changes I was making.”

“Right around the time I graduated from college I started making videos for egghead. My first course I created was using JWTs with AngularJS. And My first month I got my royalty check and it paid my mortgage for that month. And it did so thereafter.”

—Kent C. Dodds

You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/

Connect with Kent C. Dodds
LinkedIn
Twitter

Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor

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Welcome to our very first panel on Develomentor. Today's topic is compensation in tech.

Today's guests are:
Jacqueline Nolis – Jacqueline joins us from Seattle Washington. She was a guest on the show in episode 76, has built a 10+ year career in data science and analytics and is the co-author of “Build Your Career in Data Science”. 

Gary Flake – Gary is the former CTO of Search and Data Science at Salesforce and is now an independent inventor, author and advisor. Gary was also a guest on the show in episode 42 and 43.

Renee Saint-Louis – Renee is a long time product manager and the author of the Manager Mentor blog series, which you can find at develomentor.com. She was also a guest of the show way back in episode 2.

Quotes

“Unless you’re willing to leave a job and investigate and do interviews, you never know really what you’re worth” – Gary Flake

—Guest

Key Milestones

1. What are different ways of negotiating salary?
2. Salary differences between big companies and startups
3. Negotiating total compensation including stock options
4. A few effective ways of negotiating a raise
5. Is sharing salary information with colleagues a good or bad idea?

Additional Resources

You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/

Connect with the panaelists:
Renee Saint Louis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renee-saint-louis-cbap-6bbb2a/
Jacqueline Nolis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jnolis/
Gary Flake: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garyflake/

Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor

Support the show