WEBVTT 0:00:00.000 --> 0:01:56.340 Programming Throwdown Episode 183: Landing a Software Job in 2025. Take it away, Jason. Yeah, hey everybody. So um okay, so we pushed an episode out last month that was about AI-assisted coding, and a lot of people reached out to me—emailed me personally on LinkedIn. There were some comments. A lot of people reached out with questions, asking... I actually met several people. I did a Zoom call with who are asking for help, you know, landing their first job. So since that episode, I've met, I think three or four people over Zoom, and so it really gave a ton of feedback. Like it had a big impact. And you know, I was looking at the show statistics, which to be honest, I never really do, but this will kind of prove it. I was thinking, wow, you know, this episode seemed to resonate with people. But you know, we had less downloads than the last time I checked, which was about a year or two ago. And then I realized back then we were doing two, three shows a month. And so what that means is we actually hit like more than double the volume of people, or the audience size is actually more than double for that episode. And that showed me that you know there is real interest here. And um you know, Patrick and I have—you know, we're pretty senior in our careers, and so you know, I thought who's a person who could really give good advice to people who are in college, just getting out of college? And that's what made me think of Mark, a good friend. 0:01:56.340 --> 0:02:04.399 of mine over here in Austin. And Mark, why don't you kind of introduce yourself a bit and tell us like kind of a bit about your background? 0:02:04.737 --> 0:03:24.083 Thank you. So I've got the good fortune—I've got this incredibly close team. We're a three-person technical recruiting firm, and it was never done strategically, but I've had the very good fortune of top one percent executive engineering leaders like Jason Gauci and like Patrick Wheeler that have come to me through the years. Mark find me a software engineer. So my team, as they've joined me—who is Troy Rudolph and Caleb Garan—they're both incredible. We've spent decades literally reaching out to top one percent software engineers with opportunities, and we're just kind of... we put that—we network that market together in the formal sense of running searches. We do contingency only, so in that manner a company compensates us only if we make a placement for very hard-to-find roles. Our demographics have been geographies rather have been Austin, New York City, the Bay Area, Atlanta, and such. And the brand has just been built through a modest sense of service to other parties and whatnot. So we've never tried to grow. I've taken a lot of heat from people; they want me to try to scale this recruiting firm and oh, and sell it. What the hell am I gonna do? Right? I do miss it. So but we enjoy what we're doing. It's a true sense of service to another party, which are startups and even established firms here in town. But yeah, we're a technical recruiting firm. 0:03:24.606 --> 0:03:34.005 That's awesome. So how did you personally get kind of started in this space? Have you been a recruiter for your whole career or how did that start for you? 0:03:34.292 --> 0:05:30.696 Wow, you're gonna love it. I had the good fortune, and I don't think it's something either one of you guys—well, y'all have had moments when you were younger when you were struggling. But in my mid-20s, I was doing really poorly. I was a valet on Palm Beach Island. I believe one time I actually parked Jeffrey Epstein's car, but I wanted to get into white-collar employment, and so I moved from Florida to Texas, and I got a non-accredited MBA program—MBA from Texas State University in San Marcos. But how about this? I'm walking down the campus and I see a recruiting firm looking for technical recruiters in 1995 because their owners had mentioned that software engineering profession was starting to boom in the Austin, Texas area. I couldn't find a job elsewhere. I had an offer from the State of Texas to manage cotton volume that are produced here in Texas, and then I had a job at a truck stop up in Waco, Texas, to work the midnight to 8 A.M shift when 18-wheelers come in and get them gassed up. So I had those three options: technical recruiter, managing cotton deliverables, and working at a truck stop. So I take the recruiting role, but how about timing? Because I desperately needed something. So I dove into it into Austin, Texas, in 1995. Damn, that's like jumping into the Bay Area in 1972, getting a hold of a young Steve Jobs and a couple of his hiring managers having hiring needs, and you don't even know it. So I had the good fortune of stepping into something. I started my own firm in 1999, and again as both of you well know when you provide a sense of service to particular demographics—in our case, the top one percent software engineers in Austin—you kind of build a pretty good brand for yourself. And that's just kind of what we do. And in these tough times, a lot of recruiting firms have gone out of business, but we've got the good fortune; we're doing pretty well. Shoot. Yeah. 0:05:31.236 --> 0:05:47.183 That's awesome. So I think yeah, we all kind of agree that these are tough times, but there is this paradox where you see people getting like a tenth of a billion dollar offer, right? And so how do you—do you kind of reconcile that? Like what is going on? 0:05:48.769 --> 0:06:37.622 Out there. And it is only for the smallest amount. We did—we recently worked with a Machine Learning Engineer. I have to keep his name confidential here in Austin, and we had a couple of firms jumping after him. Wow, Apple stepped in and dropped some crazy cash on him. He's 28 years old; he's kind of set for life. So that is a little—that's interesting dynamic. But then on the other hand, we are also working—we want to help impacted software engineers. There are software engineers who have been out of work five to six months, and technically their skills have right now in the software engineering profession. If your skills go from 99.5 percent bound to about 97, that technical assessment will recognize that that slip, and you might not make it to the on-site. That's another thing that's being scrutinized really hard right now. So yeah. 0:06:37.825 --> 0:07:33.681 wow yeah wow yeah we will dive into into all of that but but before we get into that mark cunningham thank you so much in advance i'm really excited about this i'm pumped about this uh mark is a great guy if if uh you um you are in the area or if if uh you know if uh you know he can help you i think you should definitely reach out to him i'm really excited to do this so let's jump into it the first step is finding a job um maybe i can i can kick it off because i'm very unorthodox uh take on this i have a hot take on this and i'd love to hear patrick and mark your opinions on this i feel like today you can't really apply for a job online um i'll give you kind of my very quick background um the way i got into my first job was um um 0:07:35.660 --> 0:08:47.155 was through a friend so i have a i have a friend uh at lockheed and he said hey this is like an interesting place i had some friends at some other companies and so it's always kind of friends who suggested places and then i interviewed at a few places but i didn't seek any of them out and admittedly that probably meant i left some places on the table but it also meant that that i've never really experienced just like throwing my resume anonymously at a company um uh and then from there it's always it's pretty much always been either friends or inbound i did have a situation where um uh we're at meta so meta reached out to me personally and uh um you know i was i was content at my current job um but you know they reached out to me and and it was a really interesting opportunity and this isn't this isn't these offers we're hearing about now this is a decade ago but um uh so i have never applied you know just like check the box uploaded my pdf anonymously and i feel like it doesn't really work uh but mark what's your kind of take on that like how do you find 0:08:48.269 --> 0:10:45.420 the job okay you're right i agree blindly applying to companies doesn't work and then i loved your word friend and in our professional lives the definition of friend can be different from personal uh i've got buddies from high school and college but i would never rely on them to try to help me find a job um you know uh one time is this a friend how about this uh i had helped nate foreman he's an incredible leader over at hotel engine and i one time helped his dad who had a great run at ibm i tried to help him on a search he had another relative i helped and then he one time went to the vp of hr at amazon he said hey put mark cunningham on the vendor list and so uh and amazon did that uh it's amazon business here in austin so is nate foreman a friend nate foreman i call him brother he's like a family to me for what he did so software engineers as you start a new job search no matter your rank um identify some people that know something about your qualities what you can do as an engineer uh who would maybe lobby for you would maybe take your resume and put it in front of the hiring manager and endorse you uh build that network so that takes some curating spend a weekend to find from your college days maybe even two or five to six co-workers both of you probably have upwards of maybe nine to ten co-workers that you would go to the executive team at the company you work at say wow got to talk to this person very talented i've always enjoyed working with them and then that endorsement does contribute so that's the first thing to do um if you work at a company that has similar uh firms of a similar industry in your same area like healthcare technology is pretty hot here in austin you can target those as well and you can present your resume you can let them know that you understand the healthcare technology 0:10:45.420 --> 0:11:38.402 space really well and then another thing i've been advising software engineers go ahead and invite to connect with the vps of talent at those companies on linkedin or maybe even the cto and say hey i recently submitted my resume to your application uh company i think very highly of the opportunity i just want to reach out and connect hey have a great day ahead and that's often accepted it's not going to guarantee an interview but it's better than just cold applying because yeah i know a lot of great software engineers they're sending out 25 to 30 applications a day and they're getting nothing um find relevant companies curate a list of six to seven people that would endorse you to that company and then also find maybe related firms uh fintech healthcare technology real estate tech you know there's realtor.com in town and there's also setpoint uh yeah 0:11:40.697 --> 0:11:53.927 that makes sense i think if you if you don't have that friend group i think maybe the next best thing is is is is building that friend group through things like meetup and and other places where you can network damn 0:11:54.265 --> 0:12:18.025 Good point. And again, in the software engineering space, in your space Jason, the friends you've developed haven't been at happy hours having beers—maybe a couple of folks—but it's a solution you've provided and then the whole team got recognized for it, and everyone goes, 'Damn, it was Jason's code that made that shit happen.' And then those are five friends that you just picked up. 0:12:18.025 --> 0:14:07.172 For life. I'll make a slight addendum. I'll say I think there is—having worked at a number of large firms—and I think there is a difference between like really small places, medium-sized, and then like large corporations or whatever. But I think working at large corporations, there is targeted university relations, university targeting. So if you do go to a traditional four-year, you know, master's degree, PhD, there is something to just applying to the blank box or at your, you know, recruiting event on your campus. There is like special handling where I think you can get more traction because it can be a bit like, 'Well, I'm in school, I don't really have people who can vouch for my work.' And I think there is like some amount of special cases where that can work. And then to your guys's point though, applying with a friend—though just so people know again at large companies, there's two levels. There's giving a friend a resume, and then when they put it in, they're going to say, 'Do you know this person? How well do you know this person?' I think Mark kind of referred to as like endorsement. So there are two levels: asking someone to put your resume in really isn't that big of a hurdle because they normally just submit it to the internal box, which probably adds a little extra juice. But if they're willing to write a comment at all about like some vouching for your technical capabilities, then it takes it to a new level where you're sort of unlocking that—at least someone's going to look at it, you know, try to talk to you, try to put it in front of someone. And so there are kind of like levels there and slight division. So a blanket statement is a little hard, but no, absolutely the advice is if you can go through those channels of people, you know, reaching out is definitely better. But there can be times and situations where other stuff does work. Yeah, that makes sense also like, you know. 0:14:08.944 --> 0:14:17.804 There's kind of like a joke about this that there's like a Reddit community for everything. Like no matter how esoteric it is, there's a Reddit community for it. But I think that 0:14:20.487 --> 0:15:06.100 Like, you know, if you're really into—let's just say reinforcement learning—and you just spend all your waking hours about it and you surround yourself with other people who are interested in it, either online, in person, all of the above. That network is actually smaller than you think. And if a lot of companies need that thing that you're interested in, chances are somebody in your network is going to get a job at a place that you want to work at. So it sounds like, 'Oh, I have five friends. What are the odds that one of them wants to hire me?' Or is that a company wants to hire me? But again, it's like five actually might be a lot in the community that kind of specializes and what you specialize in. 0:15:06.100 --> 0:15:40.643 For our young software engineers, there's just incredible value that they build relationships between 22 and 27 years old to where their co-workers would go to either one of you and endorse them. That simple—that they should talk to them. I mean, damn Jason, you can imagine anyone. And you too Patrick, if I refer anyone to y'all and enter offer up a coffee meeting. Wow, that's bold on my end. You've got to automatically assume the person's a badass, you know, and they're not going to sell you multi-level marketing, and what? Okay, so 0:15:43.782 --> 0:16:19.600 You—let's say you get past that first hurdle. And now a recruiter from—we should use a company, let's just say IBM because we're going to be constantly talking about the interview process. Let's say you're interviewing at IBM, a recruiter from IBM is reaching out to you, and they want to talk to you on the phone. I'll give my tips on how to go from that initial phone screen and maybe a technical phone screen to an interview that is going to be successful, and I will do kind of a similar round table so 0:16:21.126 --> 0:18:20.399 um i see a lot of um people who feel like they have um who want to use their agency to get the best possible interview so here's an example my background is in reinforcement learning if someone starts asking me about support vector machines uh or or maybe a better example is like pre-training and llm uh you know the pre-training part of of of chat gbt or these things you know i'm not going to be an expert in that now over the years i've of of grown right but definitely if i came out of college with a reinforcement learning degree and i and someone asked me really deep questions about supervised learning i'm not going to have the same depth as if i studied supervised learning right and and i feel like you build breadth over time so so i might be inclined to tell the recruiter hey um you know don't give me a supervised learning interview or or i want to do reinforcement learning in my opinion these are all honest mistakes you know i see the point or something like um you know just a heads up i can't work on the weekends or just a heads up i have to uh work remote uh even though the office is five miles away like like these kind of things like like trying to set yourself up early on i see as just like a common common categorical error when people are interviewing and i'll explain why yeah if you're on the other side of it if you're a recruiter you know you have a you have like a certain position that you're trying to fill and you're looking at a bunch of candidates and talking to the hiring manager you've synthesized down like this is the kind of thing i'm looking for and a good example is like like uh if you're on a water slide so if you're on a water slide you know the water's like rushing down the middle of the slide right if you ever been to like typhoon 0:18:20.399 --> 0:19:22.240 lagoon or any of these places right um and so if you ever start sliding up onto the side of the slide or driving in the rough in like formula one your car starts to slow down right there's a lot more friction it's just not slipstream right you want to be in that middle of the slide where the recruiter and you are aligned the hiring manager you're aligned and you're just flying forward and i see so many times people say here's another one people say like oh i'm a data scientist so like you know i might not pass a coding interview like these kind of things like saying them up front i i get it that you don't want to be you know you don't want to to uh be in an interview where you can't pass i i get the intent but i think it does tremendous damage because it does you end up kind of in no man's land where the recruiter like doesn't really know what to do with you or they pass you on to another recruiter that isn't organically interested in you and and it just falls apart i've seen it so many times 0:19:23.629 --> 0:19:27.578 agreed 100 patrick feel free to interject bro yeah no i 0:19:27.764 --> 0:21:26.979 mean this is this is good advice i think the reverse you get people who stuff pad resumes so you really get this distribution where some people are lying and just like straight up saying i'm a machine learning expert and you ask them and say well i watched a youtube video once from uh jay carpenter or whatever you know like i know all about llms now um and then you get people on the other side like well you know i don't know i'm not sure i'm an expert in llms i only studied it as a phd and wrote you know a preeminent paper in it and and so like you get when you interview people it's it's very strange and it's hard because i think when you sit on the other side of the table you see dozens hundreds of people and so you you kind of try to sift between it but it's this information asymmetry which will come up again and again as part of the recruiting process and educating yourself about it and you know we've talked about before about making sure you're aware of it is really only a net positive same thing bringing up like salary discussions people like oh from the very first interview you should say well can you pay me x dollars and it's like no this is a horrible like no that is not and you have to realize again at most of these places to jason's point that first person you're talking to isn't the decision maker it's literally their job to just like either pass you on to the next person in the chain move you sideways or or you know basically dump you out of the process and so don't lie i don't think that's appropriate but to jason's point i mean just like have enough self-confidence not too much just like be and it sounds really be normal like just be like appealing without overselling you're like find that middle ground where you have confidence but you're also not you know trying to be like listen i'm i'm the number three rl person in the world so you you better be ready to pony up for this guys it's like oh weird introduction there uh or asking tabs of our spaces i've had people do that you know first first time you talk to them oh do you guys use tabs i can't work at a place that uses tabs instead of spaces okay interesting 0:21:26.979 --> 0:23:20.892 you want i'll add go ahead yeah go for it mark upon an initial interview with the company i'm a big fan of this to your words jason is uh you let that individual know from high level i just find the opportunity super exciting i'm all ears kick it off as you know when you engage with another person when you invite that person to talk and control the conversation that's very well received so you start the process with that yeah then also too both of you know this well too you've now presented yourself as an audience to that person we love having audiences and then lastly all three of us can under identify with the great joy of proper interjection not interruption but interjection so as you listen to another party they paint the landscape for you and um as they paint the landscape you can fill in that landscape in that initial introduction like wow jason and patrick they get it they know exactly what i'm talking about because all you did was just comment a little bit on their words and they're like wow what a quality conversation i presented the opportunity they have a good idea granted uh jason made it clear he's mostly machine learning uh type engineer rather than reinforcement learning or this or that but he made it kind of clear but wow he got exactly what i was saying i think we take him to the next round so invite the other party invite the internal recruiter or the hiring manager to speak first they'll paint the landscape you'll finish out that landscape you properly interject and that goes really well and then you finish it off by saying wow i'm super excited have a great day yeah that makes sense no reference to salary no reference to what your core specific uh proficiencies are just a good quality conversation makes you feel really good when you hang up that virtual meeting yeah that makes 0:23:21.398 --> 0:25:19.560 A ton says Patrick, you hit on something really interesting when you said don't lie. So there's—I think I think there's two kinds of lies, so to speak. There's, you know, 'I'm an expert in C++,' right off the bat. Everyone knows I'm not an expert in C++. I'm never going to be an expert in C++. That would be a bold-faced lie on my resume. But then there are things where like they're not true yet. So it's like, if you're—if you have your heart set on interviewing for, you know, an Android app developer, maybe you've done like a little bit of Kotlin. It's like at what point can you put Kotlin on your resume? And kind of, you know, figure it out through the interviews. Like how much do you sort of bend reality in the resume? I think that yeah, this is a fair point. And I guess I would say and maybe like it would be interesting to hear Mark's perspective as well, like as he sorts of coaches people on like how to kind of curate a resume here. But I think it's fine to list things as like, 'You know, hey, I'm interested in,' or 'Language I'm familiar with,' or 'Language like as keywords.' Cool. Like I don't think that's lying. But then if someone for instance like, 'I need people who are proficient in C++.' So if you say to your point, 'I'm aspirational in C++,' but without saying aspirational, and the very first thing I'm going to do is pass you to someone who's going to ask you a C++ coding question, and then if you can't write C++, like it's a big miss. There. Now if you say, 'Hey, I like—I have done a little bit of C++.' You know, I'm happy to learn it, happy to work in it, but it's been a while,' or, you know, I think kind of playing that middle ground there is okay. But I mean, I've interviewed people before like, 'Oh, I'm a programmer, you know, I know these three languages.' And you sit them down and it's like 0:25:19.560 --> 0:25:59.213 And I've told them any language you want is fine. You know, do this something, and they go to write a for loop, and they're like, 'Oh, I don't remember how to write a for loop.' And it's like, wait, what? Like any language you want? How does it go again? Like, how do I reckon? It's like, okay, you're not like, I don't know what code you did, but you're not a programmer. So, you it really leaves a bad taste when someone gets caught in a like, wow, this isn't a stretch; this is just a straight-up fabrication. Yeah, I know Mark. What do you—when you ask, when you like help people, I presume like you know going through resumes or helping them curate resumes, how what kind of guidance do you give about putting the right stuff there at the right level of communication? 0:25:59.466 --> 0:27:41.610 Good point. They can itemize that or make it specific on their resume what their core languages are they're also familiar with something. Some words I've shared with software engineers and interviews is that their proficiencies have been earned. They've had the good fortune—I say, hey, let them know it's a good fortune that they've been at times thrown into environments where they've had to scale immediately, and it's non-negotiable. And uh like they could even say, 'I'm I've got to say my strongest language is Python,' but I joined a company three and a half years ago where I was not too good in Python, but they made it clear to me: I had to be up and running in three to four weeks or they were gonna have to talk to me. And so I made that clear. And so what I'd love to do in terms of a technical assessment is if you had a project that you wanted to give me with a seven-day deadline, because there's often two types of projects: 60-minute deadline—they give it to you, open it up, you got 60 minutes. But if you want to give me something a little bit more detailed with a seven-day deadline, and yes, I haven't touched TypeScript in about 13 months. I might be a tad rusty, but uh I'm ready to dive into a book and do my best. So you can communicate to the interviewer that your entire career has been made up of basically being thrown into environments where you have to get up and running immediately. Both of y'all have probably had the luxury of engineers that have kind of ramped up nicely in your eyes, and to the point to where they could say that they told a company that they ramped quickly. So just kind of keeping it optimistic again. You know, I mean rather than saying to a firm, 'Hey, these are my best languages, these are my second best, and these are the ones I'm kind of rusty with,' they always just scale every time they're thrown into something. 0:27:42.184 --> 0:28:34.598 That's great advice. Go ahead, Patrick. Oh no, on the lying thing though. I will say like don't put like projects or companies that you've worked for that you definitely haven't done and you're not ready to talk about. So first of all, if you put just as a like if you put down a company and you've not worked there—a degree, like they will most of the time do a background check, and it will surface up that you've not been there. And no matter how good you are for lying, you will—and you see it in the news sometimes even high-level people do this, which is nuts to me. But like that's a straight-up like don't cross that boundary. Um but then also putting projects down, like if you put a project down like from college or a GitHub, you know, thing that you worked on, and then you know someone asks questions and you don't have some narrative, some story to—Mark's point, this is an example of this. Like if you're not ready to talk, don't put it there. People put stuff down, and then it's like, 'Why don't why did you put it here?' Like Patrick, yes that's a 0:28:34.598 --> 0:28:42.850 Good point. Overrepresentation—we build ourselves up too much and we disappoint to the downside. Humility matters. Sorry, Jason. Yeah, no. 0:28:42.968 --> 0:30:37.100 That's a fantastic point. You know, there's that saying like master of all trades, jack of—or wait, no, jack of all trades, master of one. Did you know it's actually supposed to be master of one? Master of none is a joke that came out like also in the 1800s, and that actually became more popular than the original, which is 'jack of all trades, master of one.' And so I think that is the approach here. It's like, you know, if you know that that Android companies building Android apps need Kotlin, and maybe you haven't done a lot of Kotlin, you need to be a master of something, right? So you can say like, 'I am a master of C++.' I know C++ inside and out. But I also uh, you know, you can put Kotlin as one of your languages, and then you know, and then if you get—and you should be able to at least write an interview answer in Kotlin, like a for loop, for example, like that would be pretty egregious, right? But you know, if push comes to shove, like you can kind of say, 'Hey, you know my core language is C++, but you know I'm learning Kotlin. I've done some things in Kotlin,' and I would say that that have something you're really good at that is coding software related, right? That's your core.' And if you have that, you can it's much so in Patrick's example. If someone said, 'Oh, you know, I picked Kotlin because I know you know that matters to you, Patrick,' but 'But I forgot how to write a for loop,' but 'I know in C++ it looks like this.' That would be a very different conversation. You'd say, 'Oh, here's the difference,' and you could move on from there, right? Um so so jack of all trades and master of one, I think can help a lot. I do think stretching the truth a little bit is okay. Um, you know when I was starting out, I put um uh, you know I wrote uh 0:30:37.100 --> 0:31:27.044 CUDA kernels from my PhD dissertation to make it run faster. And it was one of these things where I mean we didn't have CUDA code, but I basically I wrote—I ran it, I got the wrong answer. I fudged my way through it. And um and I wouldn't really say that I could write a CUDA kernel efficiently. It would be Stack Overflow and fudging my way through it till I got the answer, but I still put CUDA as one of my you know kind of things that I've done. Um uh and so in that sense, I do think that that's kind of where you can kind of play that game. So so you don't want to be so humble that you don't put things that are important, but you also don't want to be a liar. You have to find that place where like most people would kind of understand where you're coming from. 0:31:27.887 --> 0:31:44.307 And especially for both of your levels I gotta throw some praise at y'all is that if a candidate—candidate's resume gave the impression to both of you that they're strong in AWS or particular language but then they didn't meet their bar? Your bar it's over immediately, right? Right. 0:31:45.505 --> 0:31:46.298 I had a 0:31:46.298 --> 0:31:48.424 situation that person again. Yeah, yeah. I 0:31:48.424 --> 0:32:48.769 had a situation where someone did ask me a ton of questions. I mean, this is showing showing my age a little bit, but they asked me a ton of questions about Support Vector Machines which were popular you know in the early 2010s pre-2010s, um and I just didn't know, and I failed that interview. But you know what happened was they kind of uh saw my background. They I kind of got a chance to do another interview on, you know, the area that I did know. And um and then also it taught me that there's an area that I don't know as Support Vector Machines is at least interesting enough that this company was willing to make it a whole interview. And so maybe it is something I should know about. So so failing an interview, you know, to wrap this up, you know like getting the interview and failing it is actually better for you most times than not getting the interview. And so um you know and so yes, a learning 0:32:48.769 --> 0:32:52.178 It's a learning experience. You nailed it. Yeah, yeah. 0:32:52.178 --> 0:33:03.467 Yeah, yeah, as long as you're not like what Patrick says—very egregious—if you if you haven't mastered one skill in the field, you have to go and do that first and then come back and listen to this. 0:33:05.880 --> 0:33:31.140 Episode. Um, okay, so you landed the interview. We talked a little bit about this, but what are some tips to passing the interview? Obviously, you have to know your technical stuff, but you're going beyond that. What are some or maybe you know like what are some general tips that any suite can use to pass an interview? You want to start, Mark, kick us off. 0:33:31.140 --> 0:34:43.975 I'll kick it off. Um, there is value especially for both of you whatever the answer might be in volume, in the time that you deliver that answer and to the point. Everything that you're just looking for in the answer. Sometimes when we are asked questions, we go on narratives that extend well beyond what that person was even looking for, and that will immediately test your patience too, in addition to missing it. So you go, 'Okay, oh so okay.' In terms of the code, Patrick, this is what you're—okay, all right, this is what you're looking for specifically TypeScript? Okay, here we go. And then they'd start delivering that answer and it would be nothing more than what you asked for. So, uh, and again starting originally how you invite both of you get invited to kick off the process, you drive the whole process. You drive the direction of the interview, and then your answers are specifically what you asked of—uh, this day and age, the majority of people their answers aren't enough or they're too much. Ouch. Yeah, if I were on a job search for both of you, our phone calls wouldn't even last three minutes. I'm sometimes on calls that are eight and a half minutes long, and my eyes are just glazed over, you know, because it was more than we needed. Yeah, that's a 0:34:43.975 --> 0:35:48.299 Great point. A lot of people don't give the interviewer time to talk. And one thing to recognize—well, there's actually two things I want to talk about. One is interviewing is a very, very insecure. It will challenge your security and your confidence. And the reason is the interviewer has asked that question a hundred times and has the answer right there in front of them. You don't—you've never seen this question before, and so that can feel really intimidating. I've had interviews where like I actually did really well and thought I did terrible because it felt like the interviewers were always one step ahead, and I just didn't take into account the fact that—well, yeah, they know the answer already, right? Um, and so your interviewer knows the answer. And if you if you show that you know your general stuff and you engage in a two-way dialogue, sometimes you can actually get hints that that you know you wouldn't have got otherwise. 0:35:50.547 --> 0:37:50.420 Yeah, I think the—a couple of things also to your point, Jason. Sometimes the person asking the question can be missing an assumption intentionally or unintentionally, or just be straight up wrong. Like, 'Oh, you're and...' And as a person being interviewed, you have to handle that very carefully. Like, you can say, 'You know, hey, there's an issue here,' or 'I'm not sure I understand.' 'I don't agree,' or 'Can we—can we like can I do it this way?' Or sort of. And to your point, if you're gracious about it, the person will kind of just tell you what they're looking for. And you think that's a black mark, but if you handle it with grace, it's much better than if you become—which I've had before—they become very inflamed and combative. But I also think that a lot of people who conduct interviews are themselves which is very unfortunate insecure. So they're trying to prove by virtue of having picked a challenging question that has some trick to it that they're, you know, that they know what they're doing. And there are a lot of bad interviewers out there, but their managers also somewhat know that. And so the feedback from those interviews is taken based on the person doing the interview. But coming back to something that Mark said like a lot earlier and I think makes sense here, and this is like one of those—like it's actually just general life advice, I guess. But people like talking. So the more that you can give a succinct answer and let the interviewer talk, the more positive they feel about the conversation because when they reflect back on it, they're left with this experience of like, 'I like that guy,' you know? And it's like—well, you're just like yourself. But we all like ourselves or you don't have massive issues.' So I mean, I think that's like a very, very real part of it. And the way to get there in my mind, I think mentally can be realizing that like you are good enough to like apply for this job. They wanted to talk to you; they want to ultimately hire you, so they want to have time to pitch you. So in every one of those interviews, yes, they're like grading you. 0:37:50.420 --> 0:38:37.508 But if you're a good candidate, you should feel like you're a good candidate. To have a little bit of that confidence. Maybe you have to do with that thing in the mirror where you make yourself big and roar or whatever. I don't know one of those techniques, but then you should realize that the reason they're talking is because they want to pitch you. They want to convince you. I think a lot of candidates get this belief that like, 'Oh my gosh, I would be so desperately lucky to work here.' And I guess maybe that gets into dating advice or something, which I have also not done in a very long time, but you know, you don't want to be desperate. Like let them pitch you. Let them sell you. Now don't ask them like, 'Well, why should I work here?' Okay? You got to be subtle about it, but there's a—there's a craft there, and it takes a maturity to answer: not too short, not too long. And like that comes with growth. 0:38:38.318 --> 0:38:56.121 And everything you talked about, Patrick, it's the hidden emotion underneath is that individuals are curious. We love curious individuals. They just want to know, 'Wow, what is Jason and Patrick doing?' I find it super cool. I'm all ears, and I'm just going to give you what you ask of me and nothing more.' You know. 0:38:56.121 --> 0:40:49.980 The answer. Yeah, I think you because interviews are like, you know, artificially demoralizing for the things we talked about. You have to kind of—I love your example, but I imagine Patrick in the mirror like, 'Oh, I'm a lion.' You have to be artificially moralizing to really cancel that out, you know? I think you know I remember I had an interview where, you know, this is becoming less of an issue nowadays, but this was a big issue before—well, one before I really knew about the other areas of AI and when reinforcing learning was not really, really known or popular. And I got asked all these kind of tough questions, and then I just remember like in between that and the next interview, you know, and you should do this no matter how your interview went. In between, if you have a bunch of interviews back to back, take a moment in between and just like, you know, just remember that like you're awesome. Like just say to yourself like, 'I'm an awesome. I'm great. I deserve love.' You know, 'I'm good enough,' and then go into that next interview. And I think you know having optimism is maybe the number one thing, you know, being optimistic. I think like every job that I've left—um well, there's been like a couple of jobs I've left because the next opportunity was way better, and so I kind of like left on a high note and sort of, you know, use that high note as an investment, right? But but every other job I've left, and this is, you know, tracks, you know, and you know broadly, you know people leave the number one reason people leave is they don't like their manager. Right? The number two reason people leave is they don't like their company. Right? This is the data, right? And so you're gonna leave on a low note statistically, right? It's not at least some percent of the time you're gonna leave on a low note. And so if you're already coming in on a low note, then 0:40:49.980 --> 0:41:20.399 You're like a flight risk before you've even started, right? So so like you need to show them that like yeah, you really care. You're interested in this and that you have sort of a long runway at this company. You're going to be at this company four or five six years. Um, you know that I think is something that comes through with with sort of curiosity and with optimism. And and you can kind of feel these things so so so kind of projecting that has a huge impact even if it might not seem 0:41:20.399 --> 0:42:04.959 That way beautiful. And your words also spoke to surprising to the upside. Jason, aren't interviews they just come away very happy with the interview? It went well, and they surprised to the upside again. Jason, I've got to drop praise on you, bro. You're special. You're freaking special. But what's amazing at the time that you were coming out of University of Central Florida—you maybe had a little bit in the back of your mind, 'Oh damn, what are they going to think of me compared if I'd gone to University of Florida or Georgia Institute of Technology?' I went to Florida State. I went to Florida State at a time when you couldn't get into University of Florida. You went to Florida State—that's where all the dumbest went. So that's where I went to school, but I always had perceptions about what other people thought of programs than they interview you and you knock the damn thing out of the park. 0:42:04.959 --> 0:42:19.313 Right. Yeah, I think to the upside optimism. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Um yeah, definitely. Okay, what else, Patrick? Mark? What other thoughts about passing the interview? Um a 0:42:19.870 --> 0:43:05.399 Nice closeout. So it's a nice conversation. Hey Jason, Patrick, I really enjoyed my time. This is an awesome conversation. If the next step is a technical assessment or some code assignment, throw it at me. I'm all game. I just really enjoyed our conversation and thank you so much. You shared a lot of details about the opportunity. I'll stand by on my end. And again, this was after you allowed them to kick off the interview. You properly interjected after they painted the landscape a good quality conversation, and you let them know that you're still—and no questions about salary, no questions about coming into the office. We saved that for the offer stage. This was just an awesome conversation. I'm looking forward to next steps. Let me know what you need me to do. Hey, have a great day. Take care guys. See you later. Bam. Yeah, nice and positive ending. Yeah, that is great. 0:43:05.736 --> 0:44:00.715 Okay, another kind of thing that I'm thinking about this is brand new in my mind as I've been interviewing people for Circuit. I kind of feel like in today's day and age you should ask for an on-site interview. I kind of feel like um you know if if the interview is done online, I think both parties aren't really getting enough of the right kinds of information to the point where you know if if God forbid like Circuit, you know falls over and we run our money and I have to go look for a job, I feel like I'm going to demand—and we just talked about not doing this—so I'm going against what we really said, but I feel like I'm really going to push hard for an on-site interview even if that means I have to fly somewhere versus doing it all on the internet. Uh, you know, Mark, Patrick, what's your takes? Go ahead. 0:44:02.267 --> 0:44:03.719 Patrick, I'm all ears, bro. 0:44:03.719 --> 0:45:17.140 Yeah, I mean on my opinion, I could see there's value there. And I think this again we should be mildly careful. When I came out of college, the idea of flying somewhere to do an interview when I was a very low amount of money would have been very onerous. So I think we have to take that into consideration. But if you're further along in your career where the reality of like hotel and flight for, you know, a couple days is really not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, if you can offer that—if, like, you said pushing for it—I think I'm fine with. But I mean, depending on the company you're interviewing with, if it's a large conglomerate or whatever, they might just have a policy and so they may not be set up to host you on site. So just be aware that like you can say, 'Oh hey, is there an option to do an on-site interview?' And I think that could be fine, but you'd have to know your audience a bit, I guess. Because yeah, I mean, I agree 100% on that. I mean, yeah, I think there is definitely upside to it if you are willing to accept it or offer to do it even if it's at your own cost. I think you're right; there's probably enormous, you know, initiative that you're showing by doing that. So that alone could be like definitely pay dividends. 0:45:17.140 --> 0:46:16.778 And another neat thing is that as we well know, there is still a pretty material delta between virtual meetings and in-person. So you could reference, 'Hey, I've really enjoyed the process from here, and if you need me to fly out just to meet everyone in person, I'd love to.' And then this is special: if your consistency results in a very positive in-person interview after two to three positive virtual interviews, you basically kind of slam dunk that process. I mean, we already know if the three of us got together for coffee, it'd be a damn good time. Patrick, Jason, and I got together; we had a hell of a time. I even felt like I don't even belong in your presence, but we still had a damn good time. It was awesome. It was awesome. So point being, you can say that you are hungry and you'd love to try to come out. 'Oh my travel schedule is kind of rough for the next couple weeks, but I'd love to meet everyone in person.' And then when you have that positive in-person experience that's consistent with the positive virtual experiences—bam, slam dunk. Yeah, that. 0:46:16.778 --> 0:47:51.680 Makes sense. So I guess I guess to kind of like reconcile all this. Yeah, definitely, you know, don't say, 'Oh, if the interview is remote, I'm not interested.' Like, definitely you don't want to set ultimatums like that. Good point. But I think it's good to say, 'Hey, is it possible or, you know, given the choice, I'd love to do the interview on site?' And you know, I actually interviewed at a place where I was in the middle of getting my PhD. I didn't end up taking it; I finished the doctorate program, but they actually had this system where you could book the flight and the hotel, and they reimbursed you because they figured, 'Oh, PhD students are all broke,' which is totally right. And so most companies now—we have this, it's all pre-Zoom talking about 2007 or something—but yeah, but you know, so companies have the option to interview remote, and that's definitely cheaper for them. But you know, you can always float that, and if you can float it where they pay for it, that's the best. I would highly recommend taking them up on that and doing the interview in person. If you're going to spend four, five, six, eight, twenty years at a company, it's probably worth it to fly over there and meet the people before you pick which one that is. So even if you have to pay out of pocket, I think if you're really serious about a company, then I would probably make that flight. 0:47:51.680 --> 0:47:57.740 And in fairness, the company probably—if it gets to that point—the company probably would pay. 0:47:57.740 --> 0:48:10.482 Yeah, I mean, it's a relatively small amount of money. I mean, there's some logistics around how do you pay a flight for someone who's not an employee? So they have some logistical things, but yeah, they should from a financial standpoint, should. 0:48:12.844 --> 0:49:49.082 Totally do it. All right. So you pass the interview. Now this next step is really interesting because sometimes it's not even a thing that you can even do, and other times it's the most important thing. And this is the reverse interview. So if you interview at a big company, one of several things will happen: either they will basically tell you, 'Look, you have to accept the offer, and then we're going to place you wherever we think you belong.' That can happen. That happened to me at Google; I ended up writing JavaScript for a year, and it actually was fine. And so in that case, so I didn't have a reverse interview. I took whatever job they suggested for me. But as you get more senior or as you interview at smaller companies or whatever, you can have the opportunity to do a reverse interview. So this is where you might have an offer or you might just have a verbal offer, but the company has said you passed your interview went great, and you get an opportunity to meet your boss, talk to the rest of the team, maybe talk to the executives, right? So Mark, I'd love to hear from you because you have such a diverse set of folks that you've helped. What is the kind of reverse interview process like in general, and how do you sort of coach people through that? What do I 0:49:49.791 --> 0:51:48.700 often say when we get to that stage is let them know again you're super excited to meet with your hiring manager, and if you don't mind me asking, 'Hiring Manager, what will my core function be? What do you need out of me? The primary requirements? Ramp-up time?' It's usually over three months or something like that. But whatever you need for me, I can start prepping now so I walk into this ready to go. As we well know, the number one thing for all new employees at a company is to get up and running as quickly as possible with the team. So what do you need on my end? What do you need me to do? Again, my constant theme is the sense of service. So even though we've made it past the interview stage, it does make an argument: 'Okay, well, what are you going to pay me? What are my benefits look like?' We can politely do that stuff, but you're my boss. What do you need me to do? Nothing is more better received than the sense of service to another person. And so when the boss feels that he or she will drop those requirements—what needs to be done, what they need to have done in the first 30, 60, 90 days? Okay, awesome. Thank you. I'm on it. Hey, I might talk with HR. I haven't had a chance to look at the health care benefits. I don't take much vacation, but I'm going to check into PTO, and then something else—the itemized if we'll talk about that when it comes to negotiating salary. Is that, 'Oh god, I know they came in at 170; if you could do 180?' I'll open up that DocuSign, fill out all the fields, and set my start date when you set definitive actions. If a company can do something there, there are candidates today. Oh, if you can do 180.' Yeah, I feel a little bit better about it. Shit, I'm not going to give you 180 then, but when you do a defined—you know anything that you ask of your manager to give to you, that 0:51:48.700 --> 0:52:06.023 you will do includes signing the offer. Whatever flying out in person, it's well received. So you can say to that hiring manager, 'Hey, what do you need out of me these first 30, 60, 90 days?' And I'll start studying now.' And again, it will just be so well received. Yeah, yeah, that. 0:52:06.023 --> 0:53:06.790 Makes sense. I think the reverse interview is a rare opportunity for you to potentially meet somebody who is—I don't know how to say this—so for example, I did a reverse interview with LinkedIn. I ended up not taking the offer; I ended up going somewhere else. But I met Deepak Agarwal, who's super famous in the AI world, and I actually met him again years later at kind of a dinner event. But the reverse interview sometimes you meet people who, you know, at least like who might not be in the circles that you're in, and that's a really good opportunity to really learn a lot about that person. So you'll get some great opportunities to learn how people think, how they talk, how they think about, you know, the company, and how they think about their working style, and get sort of like a glimpse into the future. 0:53:08.427 --> 0:54:32.319 And then when you talk to your hiring manager, I think the biggest thing is think like try to imagine yourself talking to this person all the time. You know, is this someone that you really want to spend hours and hours a week with? I think that's important. You know, I've seen people take jobs that were given amazing compensation packages at very reputable companies, but the sort of honeymoon phase, you know, wears off quickly. And at the end of the day, like after the honeymoon phase is over, it's you and your immediate team, especially your manager, talking to each other, you know, for a huge portion of the day, and you writing code for the rest of it. And if you're junior, you might do less talking and more coding, which you know is kind of nice sometimes, but you will still do a lot of talking with this core group of people. And it doesn't matter ultimately, you know, like at some point once you've been working with people for, you know, a year, two years, three years, it almost doesn't matter whether the company is making phones or a website or if the company is a law office; like you just end up forming sort of this community, and that becomes your life. And if that is really unhappy, makes you very unhappy, nothing else can really fill that void. 0:54:32.319 --> 0:55:26.549 Love it, Jason. And again, both of you got to levels that you did not only with your brilliance but your delivery for those people. I imagine earlier in your years, you guys were some of the quiet members of audiences and whatnot, and you just did whatever was put in front of you, and that elevated you over time. Some people use words and conniving efforts, and they can elevate themselves if you're very intelligent, but you're also got a hell of an ego on you, and you know, you can do well in life. But both of you guys made it through your sense of service. You delivered on everything that was put in front of you. You probably both had very nice humility about you, and then you—it contributed to just very good quality conversations with those people, and then you were damn both of you before age 30, you were up and with that crowd you were with them. Yeah, yeah. 0:55:26.800 --> 0:57:04.559 Totally. So, let's think. Let's imagine you have several offers and, as we said, the number one reason people leave their jobs or a hiring manager—a hiring manager is obviously very important. What are things that a candidate can do in that reverse interview like to find red flags? I'll throw one out there. Yeah. Um, okay, I want to make sure I anonymize, I get rid of the PII, the personal information out of this story, but I did a reverse interview and, um, and the hiring manager spent a lot of time talking about how they had a much higher position at their last company and how you know they took a lower position at this company, and they were trying to spin it as kind of a like, 'I'm going to be fast-tracked because I was super high up at the last company,' but they were also like really bemoaning it. And I could tell that there was real insecurity there, and I could tell that this is somebody who's going to climb to the top and probably step on my face on the way there and use my face to get, you know, to the next rung of the ladder.' Yeah. And so I think insecurity is actually the number one red flag. If your manager is insecure and if they spend a lot of time talking about their own personal growth, you know, in the future, that is—that is, you know, if you have the choice, you should run away from that. 0:57:06.651 --> 0:59:03.480 Agreed. One hundred. Patrick, feel free to run with that. Yeah. What are other red flags? Patrick? Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure about red flags, but I guess for me and we kind of pivoted weirdly, but it kind of doesn't—it's like thinking about career growth, right? Like you know, you mentioned like 'hey, you can what do you call, like fail upward.' There are people who for some reason seem really bad at their job but just got promoted. They always leave right before everything goes, you know, flames. And you know this is bad. But and you've got to be careful when you're kind of picking a manager, but I think if I think back through my career and this is what I try to like when people ask me, you know, for this kind of advice, is think through like what kind of mentorship are you looking for? And are you getting that mentorship like from your manager or from the team or from your position, or are you not looking—'I'm just looking to practice my craft and I'm looking to drive in a more leadership role.' And I think there's being real about what it is that you are looking for. It sounds kind of bad like out of the job, well, of course, a paycheck. Like that's true. Yeah, but then also there's a big difference working for a deeply technical manager versus a person who's expecting you to be independent and autonomous. And we talked about how you represent your resume, but you also need to understand what they're looking for. Mark kind of mentioned that like, 'How do I like what is the next step here? What are you looking for me to do? How are you looking for me to ramp up?' Is a key indication of making sure you understand the thing because getting the job is great, but in practice what matters more is like the area under the curve. Well, unless maybe you're getting a hundred million dollar signing bonus, then maybe that impulse is all that matters. But like in general, like getting a good momentum can cover up for a lot of other issues, and you can really accelerate if the manager is saying, 'Look, I'm looking for people to come in and like churn and work with me,' and they have a history of execution. Then, you know, you can learn that if they're coming in and saying, 'Look, I'm looking for you to come.' 0:59:03.480 --> 0:59:31.760 In and start delivering for sort of technically leading the work a team, whatever. You need to say like, 'Am I going to be able to do that?' Or is there going to be a missed expectation there? And I think those initial things are really, really important—and understanding what your and your manager's relationship expectation is going to look like. And so having a wrong one there, I guess that's a really long-winded way of saying like a red flag is a misalignment there. If you are really junior in 0:59:33.531 --> 0:59:53.292 Something and—and there's overlap, right? You can realize that it always is going to feel really hard or too much burden. And so it's not saying that you have to feel like I can come in and crush it. Like that's not always true. Like you can grow into it. But if there's too big of a delta there, yeah, then you could run into trouble. 0:59:57.882 --> 1:01:35.740 Excellent point. Yeah, totally agree. Okay, you faded out for a bit. So one other thing I noticed and I really dislike how this has become almost like a political thing. So take this word literally, not figuratively. Yeah, really look for diversity on the team. Like you want, you know, a group of people who have a variety of different skill sets and interests, and people who are dynamic. And you know, you want something that is, you know, like people who are ultimately culture builders, you know. And you want if the team are all kind of people who have known each other since high school and you don't know them—like if you're in the group that's fine, but the team is all people who knew each other since high school except you—that I think is going to be very difficult. So, you know, and it's also a sign like how did that team end up that way? I mean, it's not very organic, right? So one thing I look for is—I do look for people who come from a variety of different backgrounds and we're still kind of able to come together. That there is kind of like a process for growing this team that really attracts, you know, people who have, you know, who have a certain passion, and regardless of how they got there. So that's one thing I kind of look for. 1:01:35.740 --> 1:02:05.524 And there is diversity in that dynamic, Jason, as you can imagine. We all want to support diverse cultural and, you know, backgrounds and everything like that. But that whole movement got a little off track a couple of years ago and whatnot, right? It's—yeah, you find the diversity in the way an individual thinks and the way they break down problems, and you can feel that through three or four interviews that this person would contribute to the company's 1:02:05.912 --> 1:03:40.463 Culture. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Okay. So we've done the reverse interview. We have one, maybe more companies that where there's mutual, you know, we both like each other, you know, you like the job, the job likes you. Um so now we get to the offer phase. I'll throw out a few things just to kick off this discussion. Then maybe we'll go Mark and then Patrick, and we'll go around the table. A few things, you know, I—I think that you know you should try not to make the first offer unless you're looking for exactly what you already have. That's kind of the exception. So if you have a compensation of X and you're looking for exactly X, you could throw that out there. Um if you get kind of pressured to reveal your compensation, what I usually say is something like, 'You know, I think that compensation data is pretty confidential,' and, 'Um, you know, I don't really feel it's fair to my current employer to tell you all of the details that they have taken so much time and energy preparing for me.' Right? And so try to not give out the first offer. With that said, you also want to be super in tune to what your expectation is, and there's Levels.fyi. There's a bunch of resources for this, but I think the way to do this is beforehand. 1:03:42.100 --> 1:04:56.660 You know, before you really take the job or start even negotiating, think about like what is the bare minimum that you would take for this job. And you know, it might even be zero. Maybe you're working for FEMA doing some disaster relief for the flooding we're having here in Texas and you would do it for free, right? Now should you do it for free? Maybe not, but at least like you set that lower bound. Maybe the lower bound is I need to make more than I'm making right now, otherwise it's just not going to happen because I'm paycheck to paycheck, right? Like maybe that's your lower bound, right? But set that lower bound in advance because the more you talk to the company, the more invested you are, you know, emotionally and literally in your time, and the more you're likely to compromise. And so setting something in advance, right? And then on the other side, Mark, you kind of alluded to this—set your upper bound. Set the number that if they reach that number, you're gone. You're gone. I mean, take two weeks notice, but like you're you're effectively gone today. Like you sign the offer today that you'll start a month from now or whatever it is, but you're gone. So set those two limits in advance. That I think is so important. 1:04:56.660 --> 1:06:15.932 This day and age job descriptions, the vast majority of them have the salary range on there. So in that introductory conversation that comes up and 'Hey, that salary range works perfectly for me!' And everything. And again, it's just all about creating that very positive experience in that first round, then doing well technically. That's the beautiful thing with software engineering professions—a lot like athletics. You've got to deliver on that technical assessment. You've got to show that technical horsepower. And then if you do the in-person, the final on-site and everything, again to your point, Jason, you almost start interviewing the company. The pivot changes from you pursuing the company; the company is now starting to pursue you. And you can have that private conversation now. If the job tops at 170, you can't throw 205 out there—that's out. But um you could say, 'Hey, I am currently at 163k base. I've got about an eight percent bonus, and they do match my 401k that takes me up to about 181.' I just wanted to ask, Jason, if a buck 80 is on the table on the base again? I'll open up that document and I'll sign. I'm ready.' Right? And then the beautiful thing is if you decline that offer but y'all come back with 176, I still won. I got your company's best offer. I got the best offer. 1:06:16.506 --> 1:07:53.250 Yep. Yep. I think that you know having that weight behind it of, you know, 'You give me this offer,' yeah? And in exchange, I'm giving you a guarantee signature.' That is really how you negotiate. Um and then if they come back with something less than that, then what that means is you have to decide whether you should lower your upper bound or not. And that takes time. This—this is another thing that is actually in hot debate. So, you know, do you what do you do with an exploding offer? My view historically has been to basically ask for more time. But I think that the way you really counter the proper way to counter an exploding offer is with your upper bound like because you've set that upper bound advance, you're totally prepared to handle exploding offers. If someone says, 'Oh, I didn't explain it—exploding offers where someone says we're offering you this but you have to sign in the next 24 hours.' If they come back with that, you just come back with your upper bound. You said, 'Hey, you know, I've already thought this through and actually I need this, and if you give me this, then I'll sign it in the next hour, in the next five minutes,' because like you've already kind of dealt internalized the exploding offer, and so you can say, 'Well, you know, the fact that you're not offering me this is why I can't sign it in the next 24 hours.' So you're kind of putting, you know, the responsibility and the agency back on them. 1:07:53.959 --> 1:08:22.140 And and you can do that when earlier in the process. You have let them know that the problem space the company is in makes you very curious. You find it very interesting, and you really like your hiring manager. It's not talked about enough in tech, but one of the greatest luxuries is just having a great boss, right? That you love working for, and they drop stuff on your table, and you knock it out. Those two dynamics—interesting work, you really like the boss that you're going to have. So yeah, if you guys can do these numbers, I'm ready to sign. Yeah. 1:08:23.642 --> 1:09:43.309 Yeah, Patrick, what are your thoughts negotiating the offer? Yeah, I guess there so taking it back a step, most people aren't aware for tech offers that it isn't just a salary. So you know, people outside of Tech won't realize it. If you're a new hire—maybe maybe it's with Levels.fyi—I feel like well first of all, it's a little weird sometimes; it can be non-reflective, so be careful. And same thing for, you know, Glassdoor or anything like that. Just be careful because there is a bias in people either up or down on who report, but the offers that tech companies are typically composed of many pieces: assigning signing bonus, which is what we were joking about hearing for the AI people with Meta, but then also there can be relocation money that can be part of the package. There can be a base salary, there can be options or RSUs if it's a public company, there can be—or a private company—sorry, a startup, you know, an equivalent thing. But then also Mark was mentioning a bonus that's a target that can adjust. So it's really like the total package can be complicated, and there may be certain things like you'll hear advice on the internet like, 'Oh, negotiate for more vacation.' It's like, well, that's an option you can ask about, but just realize some companies may not have that as a lever. They may not be able to do that. Oh, that's. 1:09:43.309 --> 1:09:47.849 An informational thing. Great point, Patrick. That would simply be, hey, do you have your vacation? 1:09:48.507 --> 1:11:47.037 Yeah, and so I think getting those things on the table too because a 401k match is money at the end of the day, and taking a job with either like yes, hey, you're at a really high PTO relative to this company, and you're going to be a new hire. And even if you're pretty senior, a new hire may have very limited days off. That's like... and there's a cash equivalence there, like, you know, you would pay money to get time off, right? And so you got to kind of like roll those things up into it a bit. But I agree mostly with what everyone is saying. I will also just say like things not written down in the actual offer letter aren't worth anything. Oh, I'm going to get you this, but you're going to be up for a promotion. I am going to get your promotion within a year or two, or I'm going to like no, that's not like that. That doesn't cut it. Like, it's go for the offer, you know, sort of as written. That being said, again, there can be games played with a vesting schedule. So, I'm going to give you X amount of stock over four years, but it's vesting backloaded. You're only going to get 10 in the first year. So if you don't stick around and you got to be really weary like that might be policy, but there might be a really bad churn. So famously one of the big tech companies had a really bad churn problem, and so they would backload RSUs because people would leave after year one or year two, and so they could lure people in, burn through them, and then and they would leave of their own accord. And so just I guess informationally be aware online of what people are saying. Think through your own story about what you are wanting. If there's relocation involved, you got to be honest with yourself and your family about that. Like, are you really going to move to this place for that amount of money? What is what is really the cost of living going to be for you? So like, you know, talk about like Texas versus Bay Area people. I owe Bay real estate's really, really expensive. But the question is, what about for you? Are you can you make it work for you? Can you like make the opportunity balance out? And so I think that comes in a bit too, and it's really 1:11:47.037 --> 1:12:07.780 complicated. Can be discovered, believe it or not, Patrick, even after the second or third interview, that's something that would make the company feel pretty well that in terms of relocating you've already talked it over with the family. Yeah, the cost of living you've already measured that. You've already looked at some real estate. A lot of those that would make the company feel good at least that you've already researched all that potentially. 1:12:07.780 --> 1:14:04.040 Yeah, yeah, that's true. And and just as like a side note, often by the time you get to them making you an offer, it is so hard to get candidates through at most good companies to that point. Yes, don't abuse it, but you don't have to like have low confidence either. So getting them to a specific number may or may not be slow or difficult, but in general they don't want to walk away at that point exactly. And there are companies, Jason, probably is the same thing. If you make it through the interview process, you go into a database, and they will pest you for the rest of your life because like they know that you're you can pass the interview, and so they will keep sending you like, 'Would you be interested again? Would you be interested again?' So don't feel like it's as much pressure as they want to kind of make you feel to hurry up and make a decision. And so, hey, I need my family to check out the area. Is there a possibility to give me time or, you know, whatever they may offer to fly you and your family out to the place to check it out? These are all things that like become on the table that aren't strictly just like a dollar and cents, you know, kind of kind of what happens. But yeah, absolutely knowing how much, but it's really hard because it can be literally all over the table. You could be vastly underpaid. You could be being vastly like overpaid, so it's really hard to say. People say don't leave for anything less than 20%. Yeah, but those absolutes are such a struggle they are. And then because most of us end up with so much stock-based compensation, the underlying company makes up a huge portion. The difference between, you know, Google stock, Apple stock, Facebook stock and a startup or, you know, something else like Cisco or something. Yeah, or yeah, or Cisco, like those relative momentum velocity value future stock expectations, like it becomes it can dominate over, you know, a five percent difference. And I think Mark was pointing out like, or and Jason too, like you're picking your boss right? If you can find a boss that you really like and that you think you could 1:14:04.040 --> 1:14:16.971 deliver for and would stick up for you. You got to think about the iterative amount of that too. Like what about five years down the road? Ten years? Like are they going to help you grow your network? Like those all things have intrinsic value too. It could you 1:14:16.971 --> 1:14:45.400 can make an argument almost amounts to anything. I mean, Patrick, look at freaking Jason. And if we found a 23-year-old graduate with machine learning background and they're a little hustler from Texas A&M, and they got an opportunity to work for Jason, I would take that even if you know Goldman Sachs is offering 45k more a year in annual compensation, but your boss is up in New York City and you look disconnected. No way you take the offer with Jason. 1:14:46.131 --> 1:16:41.240 That's yeah. I think I think that done deal. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Patrick, I mean just to double-click on something you said. Um, you'll never ever ever accept future rewards like it is. It is not a good idea, you know. These things like, 'Oh, you'll get promoted in the future,' or 'I'm gonna put you on some fast track.' I've seen people get burned by that so many times. So here's what's going to happen: You will you will end up maybe on let's say the best case scenario, you'll end up on some kind of fast track, but you know because you didn't get the offer you really wanted, you just got the promise in the future of the offer you wanted. That's going to make you insecure, and because you're insecure, you're going to be the worst hiring manager as because we've what we talked about in the past. So like you can't you can't do that. It's a trap I've seen people fall into it. And so now now there's a flip side. I think on one side, you know um you should you should look yourself in the mirror after the interview and tell you you love yourself that you deserve love. You're great. On the flip side, on the flip side, um you know you everybody dies, right? Everybody dies, and nobody's gonna care a hundred years from now that your last job was VP of Engineering or just Software Engineering, like nobody at the end of the day. Like you can't get hung up on the past. I see people who especially in management, you know manage your jobs are getting decimated, and you might have had some really lofty title, and and you might say, 'Well, I want to hold on to this title and the respect and the the the the um uh you know org chart power that it comes with.' All of that. But you know things change so fast. Like when Patrick and I were starting our careers, just being able to code was huge leverage. 1:16:41.240 --> 1:17:22.140 You know um and now you know it's less of leverage. Like there's a lot more people who can code. It's becoming even more prevalent. Like friends of mine who who have never coded in their life now with AI tools are starting to code. And the reality is the leverage of just being a pure coder unless you're a good architect, that leverage is going down. And you know the leverage of being a good manager frankly is going down. And and so you might have to take a title cut, you might have to take a pay cut to make you happy if you're not happy in your current job. That's just a reality. And 1:17:22.140 --> 1:17:54.203 Jason, you'll love this dynamic. To these poor souls I have worked with some Senior Director and VPs of Engineering, and immediately upon the search they say, 'Mark, I don't want to take a cut in title. I don't want to take a cut in pay.' Nine months goes by. I'm not hired. They haven't found a job, but here's very disappointing. Then they're ready to make the concession. They're even ready to go down to a manager, but that mindset holding that for nine months, they've kind of deteriorated and they don't even qualify to be a Manager anymore. Yeah. 1:17:56.177 --> 1:18:04.800 You know I mean when we hold on to a status that we can't achieve anymore, we hollow out. We're no longer at that, you know. 1:18:06.522 --> 1:18:21.574 There's these Senior Partners at law firms that are in their 60s. They still pound their chest and everything they know all the principles, but they haven't done the nitty-gritty details in years. So you dig into them a little bit, and they fall down. That's what's happening with some VPs out there. Ouch. I feel for them. Yeah, yeah. 1:18:22.502 --> 1:19:34.960 I mean, I think in general there's this thing, and maybe this hits you know when you get to a certain point in your career, but this like monotonic ever-increasing pay title. Like there's a bit of a very very few people industries that also change jobs like we do in Tech would would have that, and a lot of times if you were, you know, take a nurse or whatever, there's like very standardized pay, and you may move up, you may negotiate, but there isn't this like oh every year you're moving up and up and up and up and up and up sort of almost without bound. It's a it's a very unique unique thing. But then to Mark's point too, I'll say sometimes you have to realize the thing that you're doing is gaining expertise in a very very particular managing team whatever, and that the chance of having the next opportunity be a straight up or, you know, up and diagonal move is is goes really down. So as an individual contributor it may be pretty straightforward. If you're a Manager or a Manager of Manager or above, it's very difficult to find a new role where you can just plug into an existing team at that level versus rise to that level. And so being realistic about that is is very important. 1:19:38.710 --> 1:19:40.515 Yeah, yeah, totally beautiful, beautiful. And again, 1:19:40.515 --> 1:20:08.629 That's a nice luxury that both you have. I gotta toss it a little bit. You guys are at not saying you guys can even go higher, right? Celebrity status might be like the next step or, you know, but no, y'all we have a podcast, man. Come on. I need more Twitter followers for that. Yeah, you're at the top end. I'll start following you on Twitter, Jason. We'll have a lot of fun. But both of you are at the upper, upper ends of your ladder and you had the luxury of just being able to stay there. 1:20:10.755 --> 1:20:13.200 Yeah, yeah. I think that uh um. 1:20:14.755 --> 1:22:10.320 I think that over time, you know, in the same way as like the job changes and leverage for jobs change over time, you also change over time as a person. And so sometimes you might outgrow a job, or sometimes it might just your priorities change. And so when you're negotiating one thing that they're going to ask you, especially when you—oh, let me explain a little bit. So the way you negotiate an offer, or what actually happens on the other side of the table, is there's a Finance flash, you know, Talent development kind of department that figures out the bands, which means the lowest and the highest compensation a person can make at a certain level. They figure out those bands, and then they also look at your resume, and they have a bunch of ways of deciding what your offer should be. And so then when you ask for more, what's going to happen is the recruiter you're talking to, they want you to make infinite money because they want to close the deal, and it's not their money, right? Yeah. So you're not really negotiating with the recruiter, although they represent the people you are negotiating with, but you're not talking directly to them. So trying to be persuasive and stuff like that is not—is not really that useful. What's going to happen is they are going to take your request to the next level up. And so if you're within band, then a Director or maybe even a Manager or a Senior Manager could just approve it. Once you go outside of the band, it can actually still get approved, but it has to require higher and higher levels, right? So, you know, if you have 1:22:10.320 --> 1:23:54.501 Mark Zuckerberg approval, you could get a hundred million dollar offer. It's clearly out of the band. So at some point you can get infinite offer, but think of it as rings of an oak tree, right? Like you have to go more and more into the inner circle of the oak tree, you know, more to the like most senior people, most trusted people at the company to get that kind of an offer. And so, and so like that's where a lot of the sort of intangible things really matter. So for example, you know, we talked about being committed to that offer, but another thing is, you know, let the recruiter know like what are the intangibles. You know, it's like, look, I really like that your company. Um has a lot of data, you know, your company collects a lot of data, and you know so much. And knowledge is power, and just the ability to kind of work with that data is kind of really uniquely interesting to me, like find out. And this is something you should really do at the beginning. But if you already have a job, why are you changing jobs? And if the answer is just for more money, then that's kind of a little bit difficult. Yeah, you know. Yeah, yeah. I mean it's because you're taking on so much risk of maybe your boss isn't that great or maybe you don't have the kind of upward mobility. So the reality is like you really need to have good reasons for taking that job. And so and so when you're negotiating your compensation, you know, bringing in all those other things is really going to strengthen your case. 1:23:54.940 --> 1:24:40.148 And a nice one would be the stagnation and the problems at your current company. Just don't leave you as challenged and as curious as you used to be. I've had a great time here. I've really enjoyed my time here, but I'm waking up just not nearly as excited about what we're working on. We have a number of products that are now on hold. We're not doing any new releases, and just my experience with your company—wow, you guys have three products that you're going to be delivering inside the next nine months. I just love what you guys are doing. I find the challenges from a work standpoint, waking up day to day excited about our job is one of the greatest luxuries we can earn in our career. And you can let that company know you feel that you realize that through the interview process. Yeah, yeah. 1:24:40.755 --> 1:25:15.332 Totally. So I have a few rapid-fire things here. One is what's your take on moving to the coast? There's sort of three areas on this spectrum. So one area is you know sort of not to move and stay where you are. Another one is you know, move for the job if it presents itself. And then the third one is move to the coast now and then look for a job. So what's your kind of take on those three options all? 1:25:16.277 --> 1:25:17.290 Patrick, I'll follow up. 1:25:18.340 --> 1:26:21.803 Oh, I mean this is such a personal question. I mean my take is like in general if you know having an opportunity in like the Bay Area, New York—there maybe are a few other areas where there's lots of tech companies, especially early. Like it's always really hard to move, but it only ever gets harder. And so if you're open to doing it, I mean it's I see it as it's sort of an investment, and that's something you have to make with your family, spouse, kids, parents, if there's situations. And so those things do change over time. And so it sounds cheesy, but no amount of money is going to make like how many people have the story of—yeah, I know, I know the divorced VP, right? It's like, oh, the VP did great. They climbed the ladder, but they got divorced twice, three times. Like we just—we know a brand new, we know a brand new divorce CEO if you've been following. Don't go to Coldplay concerts. That's right. Yeah, Coldplay just made—Coldplay just made two singles. Oh gosh, good call. 1:26:21.803 --> 1:26:23.035 Okay, but but but. 1:26:23.237 --> 1:28:10.697 But we really do know this, right? Like people who get like I don't know. I do—I know this story directors and they, you know, anyways. So you got to be real about that. And I think to me that is something you have to figure out sort of first. But in terms of like career potential, I mean there's just something to be said for the fact that like there's so much opportunity next to each other. It removes so much of a hassle. It's more companies are willing to say, 'Well, you're already here,' therefore like we are more willing to take a swing on interviewing you because you know we don't have to deal with a lot of stuff.' I mean, I think earlier in the career if it's something that you and your loved ones can kind of get behind. Yeah, it really does make a big difference. I mean, I think this is same as for you, Jason, as for me working in a non-tech hub and then going to a tech hub made an enormous difference, you know, in just like career opportunity and potential. Yeah, just I'll double down. Then we'll talk to Mark. I think moving before you have a job is terrible idea. I think that you know I've had several people ask me that recently even after we did the show kind of like, you know, pressing on that it's true there's a ton of meetups there. There's not that many meetups in—I won't say the name of the city, but the city of the person was from—not as many meetups, but honestly, like especially if you're junior companies kind of expect that you're going to be able to move or they're going to give you the benefit of the doubt. And so I don't think a Bay Area company is going to ignore you if you don't live there right now. On the flip side, you're saving a ton of money by not living in San Francisco without a job. So with that said, I think you know if you if you are um you 1:28:12.317 --> 1:28:36.880 know if you're like relatively junior and you don't have, you know, a lot of commitments in your current city—you don't have to take care of an elderly family member or or have children who who you have an anchor where you're at. Yeah, moving to the coast is just like phenomenal for your career, and I think that you know Patrick and I definitely wouldn't be where we are without having done that. 1:28:36.880 --> 1:29:14.755 Yeah, good point. And you know, for some people too, art networks mean a lot. When you do move, take inventory of the fact that you are leaving a community of people that know a great deal about you, that speak very highly of you. You might be going to a new landscape. Granted, your experience at companies, whatnot, might override that, but again, for both of you, just imagine the incredible value of the networks you've built and the places where you've worked. And if either one of you left, like Jason, if you left Austin now and went to rest in Virginia, you might know a couple of folks or some stuff, but wow, damn dude. Yeah, yeah, I think it 1:29:15.244 --> 1:30:22.390 Makes sense. I think, you know, this is a sunk cost fallacy because, you know, we had COVID, and during COVID time, um, you know, you couldn't even shake anyone's hand. And so it really leveled the playing field. And so, uh, you know, Patrick and I both moved in the middle of COVID. There are other people who are who are living in in West Virginia who could get the same tech job and have exactly the same experience as someone in downtown SF, in fact, probably just completely better because a lot of the things in West Virginia didn't shut down. So like you have childcare and these other things. So you're actually like strictly better off in West Virginia in mid-2020 than downtown SF. Good point. But but that's—that's the past, and kind of like we talked about with job titles. You know, you can't you can't hold yourself, you can't compare yourself to a version of you that existed in 2020. You know, you're not being fair to yourself. Like this is the era we're in now—the COVID era is. 1:30:22.390 --> 1:30:24.020 Overworld totally different world. 1:30:24.020 --> 1:30:32.616 Yeah, and and we just you just have to have to adapt or either adapt or adapt your expectations. Either one love. 1:30:35.586 --> 1:30:38.387 It um all right. So oh Mark. 1:30:38.387 --> 1:30:39.366 I'm nice man. 1:30:39.366 --> 1:31:00.460 Yes. What's up? What interview horror stories? Oh, for people who don't know Mark has a blog—I'll put it in the show notes. It's amazing. I've literally read every post in your blog. Phenomenal. But just share like you know a few interview horror stories that that you've heard of that are kind of a little bit funny or informational. 1:31:00.460 --> 1:32:05.429 Well, again one was a very talented software engineer on the initial interview with the hiring manager wanted confirmation on the salary, what their title would be, and how many times they'd have to come into the office. So immediate negotiation, and that candidate wound up getting declined. They really didn't talk too much about their technical background at all or anything like that. So the first interview is always you're just a sense of service that hiring manager. Whatever is asked of you, you deliver on it. You let them drive the conversation. So our horror stories to your point: 'Jason, or well, how many times do I have to come into the office? What's going to be my title, and I am looking for 195k base salary?' First interview dropping that hard requirement. Hey, you know what? I'd say see you later.' Yeah, yeah, yeah. We we had a candidate recently after two rounds in he goes, 'Oh, I changed my mind. I want to be fully remote.' That's kind of a horror story, and the company just kind of froze so the whole process is frozen, and we were walking into the final. 1:32:07.352 --> 1:32:08.331 On site. Yeah. 1:32:08.888 --> 1:32:46.452 So that's interesting. That first call, you're a sense of service to that company because you applied to that company. You're interested in working there. You'd consider it. You're at their mercy. You're at their service. Whatever they ask of you, you deliver and you let them run the show all the way up to the offer stage. And then you could kind of start interviewing them. You could turn the tables a tad, secure their best offer, find out PTO, the benefits, and do that itemized if. Then in our personal professional lives when you say you're going to do three things at that other party will just do this one thing. It's quite often pretty successful. Yeah, yeah. 1:32:46.688 --> 1:34:32.120 I have an interview kind of slash post-interview horror story where we interviewed somebody and they were just extremely particular about all these details. You know, 401k, all these like 'Can I do a Roth IRA backdoor conversion?' And I'm just like, 'I really don't know. I can find out for you.' And then we hired them because they had great credentials. They passed the technical part of the interview. But honestly, in the back of my mind, I was thinking this was a mistake. I just couldn't articulate it well enough even to myself because they did have such great credentials. So we hired them. And I remember the first week they were upset because the employee handbook was a Wiki, and so because it was a Wiki, HR could edit it at any time. And they—they were like, 'Well, what if you edit the handbook to make a rule that I don't agree with?' And you know, and they gave a ridiculous example. They said, 'Well, what if you—I'm just gonna pretend their name is Mark. What if what if what if HR changes the handbook so Marks aren't allowed at the company?' Right? And I was like, 'Okay, here's the deal. Like, I get it. You know, I hear you.' I said, 'But that's just not gonna happen. Like, HR is going to act in the best interest of the company.' I'm trying to explain it, and it just—they were really upset. We went to HR; they wanted HR to like give them a physical copy of the handbook and sign it. And they just end up letting this person go. And so you know that's exactly it. It's a horror story where this person was difficult, you know, because of their brilliance we hired them anyways, and then because they were just so difficult, we had to let them go. 1:34:32.120 --> 1:35:35.160 And like we all know, we've all three of us have experienced it before. Things can start out really well with another party, another human, but as you settle in with them, you start to realize, 'Wow, we don't have a match here.' And that happens a lot in the tech industry. Someone can pass either one of your interviews and they settled in, and then six weeks later like, 'Oh my gosh, what has happened?' You know, we sometimes do discover real individuals later on. So I another thing just try to be as real as possible in the interview process, and the consistency—consistency of your human actions and whatnot. I mean, Jason, with your incredible brilliance and insights, you probably smelled a couple things on this person, but just like an athlete that runs a 4:240, you almost got seduced by that technical brilliance. Like, 'Whoa, wow.' Yeah, this person could deliver on anything,' and it overrode—yeah, you know, yeah, exactly other concerns. I mean, yeah, look at some of the athletes in the NFL and the NBA. They just go and raise hell, but they blew it out in the tryouts, so the team brought them on. Yeah, yeah. 1:35:35.160 --> 1:37:20.120 Patrick, what's a horror story from your side? Either you interviewing or someone you interviewing being... Oh dude, yeah. Me interviewing. I've had a lot, but I interviewed someone one time and horror stories may be a bit of a stretch. We've had them just go really bad, and then the debate—I'm a proponent of like from conducting interviews even if a person bombs the first couple, even if you have to send in sort of like new hires to practice interviewing or whatever, you still complete the interview panel. But other people were pushing like, 'No, just send them home. Like they're done. They're done after one or two. This is a waste of everyone's time. Don't waste any more.' I think there's like a respect you gotta have there. But but I do hear it. But the only one I had is I had a person one time we were interviewing who just like insisted my qu—like they didn't want to answer my question, but I asked a question like and I always am very upfront, 'Hey, this is contrived. It's just to make sure you understand how to program.' You know? So you feel free to ask any question whatever. And they're like, 'You wouldn't do it this way.' And I'm like, 'Yeah, you know, I agree. That's fine, but let's just do it this way, like this constraint for the purpose of this.' Well, this is why we invented, you know, GPUs. And I'm like, 'Okay. Well, you know, I—but I'm trying to see like do you understand, you know, like how that how that works?' Like, 'I agree with you. No, I'm just going to talk about how GPUs work.' I'm like, 'Okay. Uh, that's not really they just like really get like, you know, I tried again another question, you know, like hey, what about this? Just really trying to engage them. And just like every turn it was like, 'No. Well, of course I would only like use the STL hash map because it's—you know that's that's the thing.' And I, you know, that's how it works. And I'm like, 'Yeah, but do you know like if you were to write your own hash map? How would—That's a horrible idea. You should never write your own.' They 1:37:20.120 --> 1:37:21.396 said that to you, Patrick, and I'm 1:37:22.746 --> 1:37:39.320 like well, I generally agree. You should write your own cryptography. Don't write your own hash maps. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree, but for the sake of like exploration and curiosity, can you sort of tell me how how you would make this part of it work? Yeah. I would—I would go to, you know, the source code for STL and I would copy the algorithm. 1:37:40.360 --> 1:37:52.986 Thank you, Patrick, for anyone that does that, I mean, yeah, you can put in the Applicant Tracking System: Never engage with this candidate. And you can't win in the long run, and then your network will never engage with that person. No, yeah. 1:37:53.205 --> 1:38:44.860 My thing is what Mark kind of pointed out, and I try to tell this when I talk to other people about how I want interviews done, you know, on my team. Like this is really look for a person who's curious, like a person who's curious, a person who has energy and drive. And these are really vague, and they can get into issues. And then, you know, I'm kind of hand-waving those, but like looking to say does this person want to engage with the team? Do they have a passion for it? And it comes across by them asking questions: 'I really like the work you do. What about this part? How do you guys think about this? Where do you think the future is going?' You know, those kinds of questions really says this person is going to bring an energy, and if they bring an energy, it's going to overcome whatever other minor perturbations that happen because on day one, you know, we couldn't get the credentials for their login sorted. Right? If they're already like, 'I only took this because it was three percent more than my current job.' Oh yeah, this is not going to work. 1:38:46.919 --> 1:38:47.847 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 1:38:47.847 --> 1:38:50.969 I agree 100%, Patrick. Yeah, I'm sorry about that, but no, you don't apologize. 1:38:51.357 --> 1:38:55.322 It wasn't you. It turns out there's really weird bad people in the world. It's okay. 1:38:55.322 --> 1:39:07.236 No, no, there is, and it's—it's getting a little bit worse. Our social dynamics and social connections are struggling, bro, and now they're starting to invent AI tools to be friends with people? Oh my god, no, no, no, no, no. 1:39:07.236 --> 1:39:55.532 We'll run way too long. Well, that's actually a good segue to my last question that I have on here, which is how do you deal with fake candidates? Because uh I've heard this from—oh, like the person has like a hundred jobs. Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, that's right. So like I'm currently we're not hiring at Circuit. You know, we're still trying to build out the product at PMF and all Product Market Fit and all this. But um but there's another team inside Circuit that is hiring, and um and they're just getting flooded with fake people. And the resumes look good, and it says oh, this person went to Georgia Tech, and they didn't actually go to Georgia Tech. And uh and even the interview—the Zoom call is like deep-faked, and it's just out of control. So so Mark, you might have more breadth on this. Like you could kick us off like how do you deal with fake interviewers that? 1:39:55.836 --> 1:40:49.785 is something that is somewhat sadly beyond our control when a company posts jobs. The fake AI applicants are submitting resumes in large volume. We're getting a number of fake ones too, but then we just shut them right down. So that is one benefit perhaps when your company is interviewing maybe some internal recruiters that can be part of their responsibility to go in there and vet out all of these fake applicants. Hey, that's a lot of work, but that saves you a ton of time, and that's something in my agency when I work with firms, we make it clear: 'Hey, we don't send over any robotic fake candidates or anything like that.' We qualify on all of them—their willingness to come into the office, a whole nine yards. But direct applications... Jason, damn it, bro. I'm sorry. You're gonna get a ton of fake applicants in there, but maybe make sure that internal recruiter cuts through all those so you don't have to mess with it because that would be a massive waste of 1:40:49.904 --> 1:40:58.280 your time. Yeah. So you know without revealing any secrets here, how do you do that? Is it is it through like following their LinkedIn and all of that? 1:40:58.898 --> 1:41:16.971 Or how do we have? I've spoken with candidates. Their names Kevin Thompson, and then it's a deep, deep, deep Ukrainian accent. So it is—it's offshore, and it's yeah, it's yeah, it's something else. I'd be like, 'Whoa, this is Kevin? You're from Louisville, Kentucky?' But what's what's the 1:41:17.190 --> 1:41:23.468 economic incentive? Like what are they—what is their end goal? Like to try to get a virtual position and not work it? 1:41:23.468 --> 1:41:38.605 It could be contributing to cybercrime. It could be individuals over in Europe hoping that individual does get hired in a fully remote role and actually—and then you've got a team over there doing the coding and whatnot. It's a fake human they try to get away with that, and you're paying that person a hundred. That's 1:41:38.605 --> 1:41:47.025 a deeper question. If you can't tell if that's happening, maybe it's okay, but not in a crime way. That's bad, but like yeah, okay. 1:41:47.025 --> 1:42:08.204 It's failing terribly though. Fake AI candidates and whatnot, fake bots. They're not getting jobs, but they are—you know, people are hell. We all get hit up constantly by cybercriminals. It's a lot of the cybercrime fails terribly, and so trying to get fake AI bots into Software Engineering positions orchestrated from foreign countries is not working. Yeah, yeah. 1:42:08.760 --> 1:43:09.544 I think that the—they're for tax and other reasons. Like a lot of companies, even though they're hiring remote, will only hire in North America or Western Hemisphere or what have you. And so they're just trying to circumvent that by masquerading. I think that the bigger problem isn't necessarily that they're from Ukraine; it's that they've lied on their resume. That they—they said, 'Oh, I went to, um, you know, Georgia Tech,' and they didn't actually go to Georgia Tech. Um, you know, one thing that is surprising to me is how few companies do background checks. You know, it's only like, I think 50 or something to do a background check. So we actually—you know, my wife and I own a small kind of event space, and we do background checks on the employees. But you hear so many stories of people being bamboozled by, you know, AI workers in Ukraine or something like that, and I feel like a background check should catch that every time. 1:43:10.675 --> 1:43:37.067 Another neat thing about certain areas here in Austin, as both of you will know, if someone worked at RetailMe not from 2010 to '14 and then Koros and then CS Disco till 2025, and I've met that person in person, then we'd be good. So there are the small exceptions, and that's something we can appreciate in terms of the strength of our networks. But you're right, Jason. There's a lot of background checks are not being done when they should be. Yeah. 1:43:38.316 --> 1:43:43.142 Yeah, that makes sense, Patrick. Have you ever had to interview a fake person? Not has— 1:43:44.796 --> 1:44:33.734 That ever made? No, that I know of is that the correct answer. Like is that like asking me, 'Am I an Android?' And not that I know of what about a resume? Did you ever see a resume and later on you found out it was fake or anything like that? I mean, we've seen resumes before that. Yeah, I but you kind of can tell. I don't know. Like there's certain giveaways that are something that's like nonsensical, or, 'Oh wait, hang on.' This—so I've seen resumes that were clearly and I hesitate to attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity, but right? Um, you know, yes, but I think to Mark's point. I mean, in general, I work at a big company, and so I don't do a lot of first-line screening. I only normally get resumes from people I know or from other humans, which generally tend to be better quality. And then the recruiters screen out most of the others. That makes sense. Nice. Well, 1:44:35.978 --> 1:44:37.851 This was awesome, guys. I loved it, Jason. 1:44:37.851 --> 1:44:45.647 Yeah, thank you so much, Mark. A really quick—do you have something you want to plug? A website or a Twitter handle or anything like that? 1:44:46.154 --> 1:45:08.209 No. We're nothing. It's kind of neat. We've just got a good brand. This is going to crack you guys up. You know, you do it through the years. Our one—our client, we've got to keep them confidential, but they're bringing us on. They've got an engineering organization over in China, and it was a couple of engineers were just talking in China about finding a recruiting firm in the US. They thought of our firm. Oh. 1:45:08.699 --> 1:45:09.525 That's awesome. Yeah. 1:45:09.930 --> 1:45:22.064 So we love it, and again either one of you guys hit me up anytime if you just need some market data. But this was just incredible, Jason. I cannot thank you enough, bro. Greatly appreciate it. Thank you so much, brother. All right, we'll 1:45:22.064 --> 1:45:24.713 Do it? What's the name of your firm? 1:45:24.848 --> 1:45:41.000 More time. Oh, The Bidding Network. B-I-D-D-I-N-G Network, The Bidding Network. Again, we're just a team of three close engineers. We're doing really well, and we love what we do. We've got a good fortune. We provide a very genuine sense of service to our audience here in Austin. Yeah, cool. Well, 1:45:41.000 --> 1:46:23.880 Hopefully this whole episode is a testament to how much you, the collective, you out there, your feedback matters. People gave us a lot of feedback. As I said, the audience is double we usually get, which is already like a very humbling number. And so that we turned around and tried to give you all more content that you're looking for. So I really hope that this answered a lot of questions. If you have follow-up questions, feel free to send them to me. I can pass them on to Mark or Patrick, and everyone out there, good luck on your interviewing, and have a great day. 1:46:30.205 --> 1:46:32.230 Music by Eric Barndoller. 1:46:33.833 --> 1:46:52.200 Programming Throwdown is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license. You're free to share, copy, distribute, transmit the work, to remix, adapt the work, but you must provide attribution to Patrick and I, and ShareAlike in kind.