About Josh:
Josh Cole is the CTO at InsideOut, an award-winning mental health platform for employees across organisations. He has worked in the technology industry for over a decade doing software engineering, team and performance management, cloud infrastructure, secure development lifecycles, shiring, and product development, to name a few.
Interestingly, Josh has never studied in an engineering school. He explains that coding was always the thing he knew better and believes that schools and universities need to better focus on the other aspects of the industry like innovation, management, and hiring. Josh, in fact, graduated from the University of Portsmouth with a First Class Degree focused on entrepreneurship and innovation in business.
Synopsis:
In this episode of The Technology Leadership Podcast, Josh discusses creativity and innovation as pre-requisites to hiring in the technology industry. He talks about employee well-being, and the steps companies could take to ensure their associates are in good health. Josh also explains the metrics for evaluating new candidates, including problem-solving, creative thinking, and programming fundamentals. Additionally, Josh explores emerging programming languages and frameworks and explains how they compare with native languages such as JavaScript and what we can expect of them in the near future. Listen to this episode to learn what it takes to be a solution-driven engineering leader in today’s times.
Key Takeaways:
- Innovation and creativity are at the heart of engineering.
- Mental health issues are a common occurrence in workplaces. Even if you are mentally resilient, it is possible that the individuals around you are not. It is especially true for males, who are conditioned to believe that they should not be vocal about their mental woes.
- Practising meditation, journaling, gratitude, and setting goals can greatly benefit your mental health.
- TypeScript has massive benefits in terms of increasing productivity and reducing the number of bugs for developers.
- Go developers have to follow specifics while writing code in the language. Although it’s an easy way to write code, it’s harder to reason and understand the language.
- Today, you cannot build a complex application without automated testing. Many tests, including unit feature integration, end-to-end testing, UI testing, regression testing, have to be performed to ensure code optimisation.
- Education in schools or colleges rarely ever teaches problem-solving. And that’s the thing most engineers need to aim for.
Episode Outline:
[04:41] - Do you need a computer science degree to get into coding and development?
[05:45] - What are the skills you need to make a more significant impact in the world?
[08:04] - How are Josh and his company helping employees manage their mental health?
[10:04] - Why men find it more challenging to talk about mental health than women
[12:29] - What is Josh doing with InsideOut to innovate and create something different to help employees' mental health
[13:43] - Steps taken by InsideOut does for the mental health of employees across organisations
[18:22] - How does InsideOut function?
[21:50] - Josh explains his role in helping InsideOut grow
[23:57] - What does Josh’s tech ecosystem look like right now?
[27:04] - What are the benefits of introducing TypeScripts to their code?
[29:44] - What technologies or tools does Josh plan on introducing at InsideOut in the future?
[37:54] - Will JavaScript be replaced in the next few years?
[40:24] - Why are Go Developers very specific about how they want developers to handle exceptions and errors in Go?
[58:36] - The biggest challenges to technology in the next few years, according to Josh.