**Finding Your Unfair Advantage: How to Get Noticed by Hiring Managers**

When it comes to job hunting, having an unfair advantage can make all the difference. This concept was discussed by R.P., a developer who has found success despite not having a traditional degree from a prestigious university like Harvard. According to R.P., his goal should be to appeal to only one or two companies and their hiring managers, rather than trying to appeal to everyone.

This approach reduces the problem scope into something much more tractable. By focusing on a smaller number of potential employers, you can tailor your strategy to each individual company and make it easier to build trust with them. This is because building trust with 100,000 people is impossible, unless you have a certain level of legitimacy or credibility that comes from having attended a top university.

However, R.P. argues that trust is the most important asset when it comes to hiring. The benefit of now having a smaller problem space is that you're not trying to build trust with 100,000 people, which can be overwhelming and impossible unless you have a certain level of legitimacy. Instead, your focus should be on how can I quickly build trust with two or three people at these key companies?

To do this, R.P. suggests leveraging your unfair advantage. For example, if you're an English major who worked as a historical reenactor, you may have had the opportunity to meet someone working in Tech who was impressed by your skills and experience. Leverage that connection by asking them for advice or guidance on their job, and offer to provide feedback on their work or share your own expertise.

Another way to build trust is to engage with people online or through public speaking engagements. For example, R.P. won a bunch of hackathons, which proved out his skills as a software engineer and made it easier for hiring managers to take a chance on him. If you're interested in learning more about how to get hired as a developer, R.P. suggests checking out his book, "How to Learn to Code and Get a Developer Job," which offers additional insights and advice.

R.P. also recommends following him on LinkedIn and YouTube, where he regularly shares valuable insights and advice for developers. Additionally, there are many other resources available online that can help you learn how to get hired as a developer, including free coding resources like Free Code Camp.

**The Power of Unfair Advantage**

R.P.'s approach to job hunting is centered on finding his unfair advantage – the unique combination of skills and experiences that sets him apart from others. By leveraging this advantage, he's able to connect with hiring managers at key companies and build trust with them.

This concept is not new, but it's often overlooked in favor of more traditional approaches to job hunting. However, R.P.'s experience suggests that having an unfair advantage can be a powerful way to get noticed by hiring managers and land your dream job.

**Leveraging Your Unfair Advantage**

So how can you leverage your own unfair advantage? Here are some tips:

* Identify your unique combination of skills and experiences.

* Think about how these strengths can be applied to different industries or roles.

* Reach out to people in your network who work in those industries and offer to provide feedback or guidance on their work.

* Use social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter to connect with hiring managers at key companies and build trust with them.

By leveraging your unfair advantage, you can increase your chances of getting noticed by hiring managers and landing your dream job. Remember, it's not about trying to appeal to everyone – it's about finding a smaller number of people who will make a decision on you.

**Conclusion**

Finding your unfair advantage is key to getting hired as a developer. By leveraging this advantage and building trust with key hiring managers at top companies, you can increase your chances of landing your dream job. R.P.'s approach may not be for everyone, but it's certainly worth considering if you're struggling to get noticed in the job market.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enit's just incredibly hard to write a ton of code and not be a good programmer welcome back to the free Cod Camp podcast I'm Quincy Larson teacher and founder of freecodecamp.org each week we're bringing you Insight from developers Founders and abitious people getting into Tech this week we're talking with Rahul Pond he's a software engineer who left his $800,000 a year Fang job to build his own startup we're going to talk about the post layoff developer job landscape developer interviews salary negotiation and Landing Venture Capital as a startup founder and more Rahul pleasure to have you here man Quincy thank you for having me it's been really fun to collaborate with you and free code Camp over the past few years I'm excited to chat absolutely and uh I am going to put a link to uh one of rahul's courses he has a comprehensive Android app tutorial it's about four hours long if anybody wants to see his teaching in action uh but I just want to start by acknowledging Rahul that you are one of the winners of the tech boom in that you've been able to build your network your skills your reputation over the past few years but there are a lot of people who've been laid off recently who may not feel like they have a lot to show for the time that they spent working in Tech what would you say to someone who approached you who thought that they might have made a mistake learning the code and getting into Tech I would say it's not too late it's never too late to get into Tech it's never too late to learn these what I would consider fundamental skills of working with computers and working with software I've been coding or thinking about tech in some capacity since I was 18 and I'm 32 now right so I've been doing it for a long long time and I think when people come to me and say hey I've been doing it for three months or six months it's not making sense to me I say hey you still have another 15 20 years until you can say that you've been doing it for enough time or a long enough time um so that's one thing it's like you know the key is put the time in be persistent have a system so you don't get discouraged the other thing I would say is that we are very very early in software I fundamentally believe that the amount of time and energy and money going into Computing into working with computers that will only go up in the coming years and so you know I I I came into college and I thought there are people around me who have been coding since they were 5 years old it's too late for me but it was not too late for me it's not too late for you the amount of Stu stuff that will get done with software in the coming years is going to be huge and I think anyone who wants to be part of it can be part of it as long as they work smart and they work hard awesome well we're going to talk a little bit about working smart and working hard which is how you got to where you are today and uh we're going to tease as many insights as we can out of your developer Journey let's go way back to when you were a kid uh Hindi speaking son of immigrants the second generation American in Detroit Michigan and maybe you can tell us a little bit about your early years and what life is like for you for sure I think my childhood was very similar to the you know second generation immigrant experience so my parents came here for higher education in the 1980s and then the majority of my dad's career ended up at General Motors which is how we ended up in Michigan in the Detroit area and so I always had you know my parents value education and it was always a huge part of what I spent every day doing say this school and then you come back and study a bit more beyond the homework that you already had to do so I think that was a big part of uh my own childhood and then of course you know you always have okay there's a small Indian Community when I was growing up in the Detroit area and then in school it was majority non-indian majority white and so you always had that kind dichotomy which I think is super common for the second generation on how did they balance okay you speak Hindi actually we spoke a dialect of Hindi called butur at home and then in school it's a very different culture very different uh language and how much indianness do you want to show right that was a very common thing for me and you know that community that I grew up with um I think school and academics were definitely a huge part of what I did my life growing up but I actually never thought too much about the future like I I can't recall ever saying to my dad I really really want to be a mechanical engineer like you I really want to work with cars that know it's never somehow uh a big part of my life and even for computers which is what I spend every day you know coding and programming and and software engineering is what I think about every day now never really came up growing up somehow it was only in college when I really started to think about okay what do I have have some agency of what do I want to do I think growing up for me A lot of it was put my head down do the work my brother was very into math competitions so we do a lot of math competitions but I never really thought about how will the work I'm doing now translate into a career or a job in the future yeah well at what point like did you I mean you said you went to college and that's when your discovery of I guess your what you wanted to do with your life started to be I mean for most people that's an ongoing Discovery process and they uh go down one road and then they switch and maybe the road that they went down has a nice kind of intersection with the other Road and there's a natural transition or maybe it's a very dramatic uh like I've talked to a lot of people that uh work at like I talked to someone who's working as a sign language interpreter with American Sign Language who's learning the code and I mean those two things on the face of it would seem very different but they're trying to figure out kind of a natural bridge between the two or uh people I know who are working as like truck drivers or working as mechanics and other things like that that want to transition into software development so your maybe you can set the stage you're in University you've worked very hard to get there you followed the teaching of your first generation immigrant parents of course like I I hope I don't seem like presumptive or anything like that but like I have lots of friends from Vietnam from China uh from India especially uh who have these parents who like basically drill it into them you have to do well academically like that like it doesn't even matter what you do other than that like academics have to come first was that how it was in your household like like did your parents really hold you a high standard as far as grades and things like that yeah I I think it's interesting I think they definitely had high standards but it wasn't so much in the form of like you need to study or else you'll get punished it didn't feel like that I think a lot of it was my brother actually so I have an older brother two years older and he was academically just I think naturally uh incredibly talented especially when it came to math and so I think a lot of it I actually remember feeling like it wasn't my parents who were pressuring me it was most of the time my brother is say hey you better you know stay up late to train for this math competition and that was like a huge thing for me and I I never actually did as well in like there was something called AMC and am aim which were two big math competitions growing up and I never did as well as him but that was a huge point of anxiety for me it's like I really need to do well um and that took over like I never I think you know going back to what we talked about I never really thought about a career or a job because I was so myopically focused on how do I do well right now and you know show my brother or my parents or whoever that I can actually succeed Beyond School in this math competition or in this you know there were other things going on at the same time and so um that was what took over and then it was only until College when I could you know remove the the local pressure of a math competition and I that was when I feel like I had the freedom to think a little bit broader about what I actually wanted to do in my career and that was I think really powerful for me I wish I could have done that a little bit earlier but you know I think it was you know age 17 18 is when I finally started to think about that yeah so potential parenting advice there uh for me as like someone who has young kids like instead of pushing your kids academically just try to get your kids surrounded by high achieving motivated kids and let that peer pressure compel them rather than trying yeah and that's actually way more powerful because they are your peer like they you can't make a claim that oh you know my dad he doesn't understand my mom doesn't understand because they came from a different generation or different geography no like this is my brother he literally went to the same exact school that's two years ahead of me or if I have other friends um who went through the same system and actually that was one of the I would say the biggest benefit of Stanford way more powerful than the academics or the campus or anything else the most the biggest benefit was you would appear group at Stanford who opened your eyes to what would be possible if you had the a little bit of luck a lot of hard work you put yourself in the right position to succeed you could do anything which I didn't even think was possible in Michigan and that was a huge benefit of Stanford was that peer group that you enter into yeah well maybe you can talk about your early days at Sanford getting into Sanford of course is very difficult uh I'm not sure if it's more even more difficult now than it used to be it's way more difficult now yeah well like so you get this uh I understand you got into a lot of prestigious schools but uh how did you prepare how did you pull that off yeah I mean I think maybe there is like a benefit to how I how I grew up too and I was so focused on high school I didn't think about um other thing I just like okay math competitions I did some science stuff and then I you know did well like doing well in classes with the Baseline like of course you would do well in classes on top of that it was a discussion with my brother or my parents about okay what else to do um so I think I part of it is certainly like I got lucky going to Stanford like what I tell people or parents or um you know high school students is that there are a lot of good schools in the country and so rather than getting your heart said oh I really want to go to Harvard I really want to go to Stanford that I think is a recipe for disappointment the top 10 or top 20 schools all of them have that same amazing peer group of people who will go on and do startups they'll go go on and um become executive somewhere they'll go on and do something really Innovative and so as long as you get into one of those top 20 I think you're going to be set up for a really amazing future and so if you think about the probability of getting into any one college as like let's say 20% so the likelihood that you get rejected by all the top 20 is actually quite low it's like what what is that 08 uh to the power of 20 so it's like I don't know what the math is but you know I would just cons what my advice to people is that instead of just focusing on one University just do the run the gamut and figure out how you'll get into one of them probably if you're a high academic achiever and go into to the best school you can yeah and and for anybody curious uh point8 to the uh uh to the 20th power is 1% so like you're 99% likely to get into a top 20 School assuming you meet like the basic criteria for applying and stuff like that yeah that's that's really good uh um man this just brings me to one of the things that you have talked about a lot in like your videos and like podcasts I've listened to you talked uh you talked about the the role of quantity and there's that that quote that quantity has a quality all its own and uh for you like you have approached a lot of things as as kind of a numbers game like I'm not just going to apply to my dream University I'm going to apply to a bunch of univers I'm not just going to apply to you know uh Google I'm going to apply to a bunch of Google tier employers right uh maybe you can talk just for a second as a Segway because this is a very natural time to talk about this about the role of quantity in your decision- making and your approach to life yeah that there such a uh huge part of how I think about success and how I think about my own journey is just really focus on quantity don't think of yourself as an artist where you're like an artisan crafting every pixel on the screen or every video you put out or every college application hey we're going to do our best but we're also going to maintain a really high velocity so we can hit the quantity bar and I think there two benefits one is what you said is that uh I truly believe that the more quantity you put out the higher your quality will become just naturally it's just very hard for you know the thing that I think about a lot is is programming it's just incredibly hard to write a ton of code and not be a good programmer so that's that's part of it the other part of it too which I think is equally powerful is psychological element of quantity over quality which is that it relieves you of the pressure to make every single attempt at whatever you're doing to be amazing and when you reduce that pressure you want to do it more and that is a huge unlock so other than saying hey this code I write right now is going to have to be perfect bug free and efficient and work on the first try I'll never write code because I'm going to be so afraid of screwing it up and same thing with colleges if if I tell myself or if I tell the world that the only College I really care about is Stanford that is make or break if I don't get into Stanford I don't care about anything else I'm going to be so stressed out and I'll probably do worse in the application because I'm going to be over editing it and thinking about it too much and it just be counterproductive so if you instead have leverage by saying hey Stanford is one good option but so is Harvard or Caltech or MIT or Carnegie melon or whatever else then I can almost guarantee that you're going to come in in a much healthier mindset and that healthier mindset will lead to uh better performance yeah well let's talk about your time with Stanford and did you know from the time that you enrolled there that you were going to study engineering and following the steps of your father now I know that you said he studied mechanical engineering working in the car industry that's kind of like almost like the tech industry of your in my opinion I mean you could argue that like there's a lot of innovation going on in the car space too but like I consider Transportation somewhat solved compared to like all the new novel systems were coming up with like you know llms and search engines and all the more recent tools but uh did you know that you wanted to study engineering right from the get-go or at what point did you start to go down that path yeah I mean I I definitely knew that I wanted to do something analytical so I think if I think back to when I was 17 coming into University I think the majors I had thought about were electrical engineering or physics um I may be mechanical too but I was not at all considering like Med medicine or English or history I knew I want to do something with numbers and something which was a bit more analytical yeah and uh what did you do with those I guess around four years that you were were you were you at Stanford yeah I was actually I ended up being at Stanford for five years so the way the reason is that they have a program called co-term like a co-term program and the idea is that you can concurrently for a portion of your undergrad you can start to work on a master's degree and so I think in my third year I applied for that program and I was able to do a master's degree in computer science as well I did Bachelor and Masters in computer science I did both of them in five years so that was why I stuck around for an additional year and also frankly I think my my job prospects at the end of four years was not that strong and so having one more year in the Stanford bubble the academic bubble really helped me strengthen my profile and give me confidence that I could actually go out and get whatever job I wanted so that was another huge benefit of it um I think in terms of the uh like what I did I I came in with that mindset of something analytical something in the engineering realm or maybe science physics realm very quickly I would say by the end of freshman year it became very obvious to me that the best thing I could do is go study software and coding because there was so much energy this is 09 2010 and um there was so much energy around software like the iPhone had come out I had people down the hall for me who were making iPhone apps and doing really well and these were people who I didn't think that like you know my growing up I didn't really know any software Engineers who were just like doing like I knew engineers in the context of like they were at Accenture and they worked as part of 20,000 Engineers doing a small thing but this is the first time where I felt like hey as a 18 or 20-year-old you can actually go out and create something valuable and make money from it so very quickly I okay this is the thing I'm going to do and after sopt like second year sophomore year I very quick quickly decided okay this is going to be what I want to end up working on at least initially when I graduate so you hit the ground running I understand you had a number of internships while you were going through your degree program can you talk about those yeah um I had an internship every single summer so that's four different internships and I think that was again one of the benefits of going to the top university like Stanford is that people assume some level of credibility which honestly I don't think I deserved I remember my first year I had literally taken I I didn't really program at all coming into college unlike a lot of my peers and so I did feel some amount of imposter syndrome or I felt behind to some extent I had taken a grand total of two programming classes and I somehow landed an internship and the reason is because I I believe it's in March or April the near the end of the Academic Year Stanford has a startup career fair and these startups they just want to hire and especially if you say hey I went to Stanford for them it's kind of like oh I got I was able to hire a Stanford kid to come intern and so I was super lucky that I honestly didn't have the skills to contribute and that whole summer I really was struggling I like I there was not like a formal discussion about if I got a return offer or not but I can almost for sure tell you that I would not have received one if I had had that conversation um and so yeah I think like I just kind of fell into that internship because they wanted someone from Stanford and I had like I it seemed like I was interested and then every single summer I felt like I made dramatic improvements into my productivity as an engineer and feeling competent like the first summer I really didn't know what I was doing but the last summer I interned at Facebook in 2013 I felt very comfortable actually to figure out how to manage a software project and figure out what change I needed to make in order to make progress yeah and I want to talk a little bit more about Facebook and we will get to that because I understand you worked there for a number of years uh doing Android development but what was your like after that internship did did that convert into a job or did you go work other places what what did you do upon completing your five years at school so at the end of my last internship 2013 um I I was actually kind of borderline but I was very lucky to get the return offer at Facebook and that was a huge confidence boost and then Stanford has this really nice policy where if you get an offer from an internship then Stanford will uh allow you to get two or 3 months to just go out and recruit other places too the idea being that they don't want the company to force the student to immediately accept or reject without having data points from other companies and so from September up until mid October I went on a Sprint and I collected I interviewed and talked to a bunch of companies I ended up collecting four other offers so I ended up with five offers um and I made a video about that actually where I talked about the actual numbers and what felt like it's a great video and I will link to that video in the description but if you can just kind of verbally summarize uh some of these offers this is like really like the I say like the Pinnacle of when I felt confident because I it was like every single summer I did an internship I got so many rejections from all the companies I really wanted to work at but finally this September through October period in 2013 I felt like okay now I actually come into interviews with confidence rather than feeling like I'm just super scared of what question I GNA ask and so I ended up if I recall correctly Google Twitter uh block or at that time it was called Square um Facebook of course and then Microsoft so five five companies I got offers from and um I felt like okay I I made it it was like some element of these are the companies I literally heard about growing up and I am getting offers from them it felt like this really cool full circle moment from someone who hadn't really programmed at all coming into college and now at the end of it had gotten all these offers um what's interesting is that I after ID gone through that whole process a professor of mine when I was doing research during the Academic Year in my fifth year he came to me and said hey rul like I know you have these offers at the big tech companies but I am thinking about starting a company and that was like very hard to turn down and so we can talk about that if you're interested then I ended up not doing the big tech company and I ended up doing the startup wow so so you had five offers on the table from some of the biggest brand name is tech companies and you walked away from those to work for your professor yeah it's so funny because I feel like you know I honestly did feel so grateful and so um happy at least initially that wow okay these are the companies I really dreamed about even at the beginning of college if you got if you landed an internship at Google or Facebook that was a big deal I wow you you must be competent you must be legit if you were able to but the human psychology is such a weird thing because as soon as I got the offers somehow it became less valuable to me and so I think part of it was just like I got it and I felt I did it I don't need to now go work there and part of it also I think there was some element of ego of you know Google and and Facebook they're going to hire a thousand college graduates in the next year I don't want to be one of a thousand I want to go be special and when a professor like someone in a position of power frankly comes to you and says hey I've been seeing your work I think you'd be a really great fit for this brand new Endeavor that I'm starting out it's a classic Silicon Valley story Professor does a company it's a ton of smart people you graduate from Stanford and you join it like how could you say no to that and so I did end up that was a kind of the thought process in my head I mean that's how Google started right like Google was a bunch of Stanford phds or two Stanford phds who just grabbed a bunch of their classmates and went and created you know multi-trillion dollar market cap Corporation right so uh I I can definitely understand the appeal of that uh on the note of you having those offers in hand and them just not feeling as appealing uh I'm a huge Star Trek fan and Spock rest in peace lard Neo has this quote where he says uh having and uh he says having is not so pleasing a thing as wanting it is not logical but it is often true so I think once you had those it's just like the novelty of the shininess wore off and you're like what else is shiny you start look you look up from the the treasure in your hand and you start to see all the other treasure out there right the the world becomes your oyster yeah that's so true and I mean it's a classic quote of like the journey is more valuable than the destination like focus on the journey not the Des destination and that was so true and there's also one more element too um of hey big Tech it will be big tech for a long time like I don't anticipate Google or Facebook to go anywhere in fact they've only grown in power and market cap since 2013 when I graduated and so there was also an element of hey if this is an opportunity that I don't think I will easily be able to replicate which is with the startup with the professor then I would rather do that uh action or do that opportunity now whereas I can hopefully if I have gained the skills now to get a job at Google hopefully I can repeat that in two or three years if I wanted to there was that element of scarcity I think or like the the the worry that it might disappear that also I think triggered ending up to join the startup yeah the fear of missing out the fomo yes exactly fomo so we're going to talk about what you learned working for your Prof and we're also going to talk a little bit about software engineering uh Concepts and skills you picked up but I do want to draw an immediate parallel to you taking a chance on your professor's company to later you having this uh this faithful meeting with uh WhatsApp yeah or yeah it was WhatsApp right yeah yeah yeah later on well the WhatsApp conversation happened like roughly the same time actually like I had um i' gotten this return offer from Facebook and then at that point they're independent companies yeah um and so I interview at whatsapp but at that point I mean as you probably recall like whatap wasn't that big in the US I had rough I had like kind of heard of it because I think some relatives of mine in India were using it yeah it's still not big in the US but it's huge overseas like it's like it's huge India that's how they communicate yeah yeah as everyone knows what eventually got acquired by by Facebook or meta and I remember while when I worked at meta for four and a half years there were people they had these user researchers who go to India and there were people in India who thought that the internet meant WhatsApp like their whole world their whole uh conception of the internet was communicating via WhatsApp and getting the weather and getting updates and talking to their friends and family through WhatsApp that's how dominant yeah WhatsApp has become in India so I didn't know that at the time but I did you know get an interview or an offer for um for WhatsApp and I talked to the founder which is super cool and then I ended up turning them down in order to go to Facebook so you know missed opportunity but so you would have ended up the same place but you probably would have ended up with you know Millions ended up with one or two extra zeros in my net worth if I had done the WhatsApp offer yeah uh but uh it does like it's not like the story had like a sad ending or anything you've had in a remarkable career so far over the past few years let's talk a little bit about that so you work with your professor uh and like what are some and I want to focus not just on like life lessons you've learned but also software engineering Concepts and things you've kind of Learned From The Trenches uh of doing software engineering in both the context of this small Tech startup this these giant corporations that you work for at least one of them uh and then of course your startup life now we're going to talk about that a little bit later so again I apologize for providing so much Exposition but I just want to like kind of structure the conversation for people following along at home that is kind of the arc we're going to go from small to big to small Lessons Learned along the way so maybe you can talk about those first few months working for your Prof yeah and so the I'll start with the conclusion and then I'll work backward into like how it felt so very quickly after I joined the startup got acquired or Aqua hired by Pinterest so I joined in summer of 2014 in early 2015 so maybe six or seven months later it was acquired and so I remember feeling at the time not super happy about it honestly I felt like it was a rug pull it's like okay I joined the startup and I wanted to build something meaningful for the world and I expected it to take a year 2 years probably longer to build something substantial and really make a connection with my co-workers and like learn from them and I felt like this ended so much more prematurely than what I had bargained for when I initially joined and so um you know I mean certainly you can't complain like it was a there was a tech article about it I showed my mom that was in in Tech with a picture of me it's like kind of a cool outcome but not what I had expected did but at the same time I actually feel like it ended up working out for the better because I actually really struggled during that six-month period I told you in my last year at Stanford I felt very confident I had gotten all these offers and um I was able to pass all the interviews and within a big company I felt like I could surgically make changes like minor changes to to do what I wanted and it was a huge ego hit CU I went to the startup there's no infrastructure right like literally I was a founding engineer there was like four people working we were all working together in a conference room and they just gave me a ton of responsibility like hey here's this very vague ambiguous thing go figure it out it was like deal we were dealing with like uh data infra so I was dealing with something called Hive as a way to um you know store and query data and I couldn't do it like I just didn't have the maturity at that point to be able to decompose a problem read a GitHub repository and figure out how to put the pieces together and I just needed a lot more handholding than I think it's a good fit for most early stage startups and so even though I was had mixed feelings about the acquisition I think looking back I think being able to go to Pinterest which is a much bigger company was like I think 400 or 500 people at the time which felt big uh it actually ended up working out really well uh when we joined in 2015 yeah so it's interesting that you say that uh you had trouble kind of like breaking problems down from like abstract specs in the form of like maybe GitHub issues and things like that or uh instructions handed down from High by like non-technical managers perhaps or other people like that and you have to figure out how to do this and that's something like we at free C Camp are like a very small team we often have to Grapple with such ambiguity I often tell people that it's really good to go straight from college into working at like a small organization like a small business small startup uh small charity something where there's only going to be a few developers you're going to be able to put your fingers in all the pies you know but it sounds like this is the the flip side of that where you didn't really have as many people that you could look to to learn from and there wasn't as much structure to guide your initial fora into software engineering uh so in I mean in light of all that like what would your advice be to people that are just graduating uh let's say they are getting a computer science degree and they have options they have the option of potentially going and working at a larger company or like not a company size is not a big deal but like the team size I guess um yeah like like what would be the the goldilock zone for team size for you if you were doing everything over again yeah I mean I think in a vacuum my general advice to uh new graduate would be go work in a structured environment and structured environment could take many different shapes and forms but generally that means in my mind like a midsize or larger company which has some amount of product Market fit so I think part of the issue here and I like I I don't think that your advice is necessarily bad like if you go work at a nonprofit or if you go work at a smaller company but it's been do it has some amount of structure like they have a product they have customers there's some amount of like repeatability in the work I think it could actually be a really good fit to learn ownership and learn how how to get things done with the startup that I joined in 2014 it felt very much like we had done some research academically in the lab that was part of and my professor was working very hard to figure out how can we monetize this academic idea and so there was no real and also we had taken in I think two million in funding we had gone through some incubator or like seed program yeah and so there was a lot of pressure that you have to grow like we have this vague interesting research how do we make that commercially viable and so the combination of a lack of a we had no product there was no talk of product Market fit because there was no product yet and then there's also this uh element of like how do we even talk to customers or how do we do how do we make this commercially viable which I don't think anyone in the company really was that good at and that's what led to um you know this kind of not so great experience as a new grad for me okay so um you get Aqua hired and you transition from kind of like not necessarily knowing what you're doing uh to kind of being the dog proverbial dog at the keyboard uh to uh I don't know if you remember that old meme the dog I have no idea what I'm doing uh to uh to being in a much more structured environment Pinterest you know you said like 400 500 people working there of course it's name brand product like you're you know your aunts and uncles have probably used it in the past so you when you go to Family reunions and stuff and you're talking about it like they they have some grasp on oh yeah that's like the photo pinboard app or something like right so um what did you learn during the first few months once you hit the ground in a larger more structured environment yeah so I think one big career transition that happened at Pinterest is that after the startup experience where I was doing a lot of data infra and machine learning stuff I actively chose to walk away from that which you know maybe in retrospect was a bad decision because right now as you know it's like ml AI is so hot and recommendation systems like all that stuff is has only grown in importance but I think for me I felt like I wanted to do something more tangible I wanted to be able to build something and have it show up in the production app which I didn't have any of that at Co with the startup that I was at just because we didn't have a product and it was also much more like academic like I wanted a product so I think being able to shift into Mobile development which I ended up doing Android development at Pinterest that was um a big change that I made within the first six months of me joining and the other reason I did that change also is because I I cared a lot about going back to 09 when I first entered Stanford I saw these people make mobile apps and they were just on their own shipping a product to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people I wanted that same thing and so I thought Android would be the easiest way for me to actually start hacking on things on my on my own like an indie hacker and just like be able to publish things and so I over the next few years I was able to publish several different Android apps and that was super fun and um also like helped me learn a lot yeah so uh so you've transitioned to something that is more tangible like the actual app that you know consumers like the end users of the tool not some recommendation engine that is completely abstracted away that most people wouldn't even understand it unless you took time to like get out of whiteboard and explain what it's doing and stuff like it's just invisible to most people and you're going to the most tangible layer the most front end of front end right uh so that's cool that you made that transition how did you pivot your career uh or pivot your skills like did you ask for an internal transfer did you start working on this like like how do you go from being somebody working on kind of a like a recommendation or AI system in the background to uh a different department within a relatively large company like Pinterest yeah I mean actually it worked out pretty easily I think one of the things I tell people is that ideally you should go work at a company where you have by default a lot of trust and autonomy and so at Pinterest there was not any formal process where I have to go apply for a brand new role I have to like fill out application form and talk to 20 people it was literally within the first few months of me joining I just told the skip level manager like hey here is what I think could be a really good fit for me and also the company here's why it makes sense for both parties and within a couple weeks I okay let's let's make it happen here are some opportunities here are some projects that could be a good fit same thing at at Facebook like Facebook I think is well known for just uh tons of responsibility and Trust given to the engineer and there are many many stories of people way more senior than me who like you know 10 15 years of experience and they did like backend development they were building up the continuous integration system or whatever and they transition into iOS development they're examples of that and I think that's a very powerful thing not only for to work at a company like that but also as the engineer you should have the confidence that you can easily pivot into a brand new domain and a lot of your knowledge will carry over and if you work hard you can become productive very quickly in a brand new domain okay awesome and just to be clear like uh just little uh uh vocab you said skip level engineer that's like the engine or skip level manager that's the manager above your current manager so you probably had a manager that was over that particular product that you were working on and you need to go a level above to get approval to move okay I just want to make sure I have that uh definition correct okay that's cool so uh yes like Facebook famously like everybody has access to production I'm not sure if it's still like that uh but like anybody can push to production like uh they've had some outages and stuff like that due to the dark side of being too I guess empowering and trusting but who knows all the invisible improvements that they've been able to rapidly ramp out that would have been mired in bureaucratic procedure had they not had the high level of trust that they have and like I would say like uh this is not an interview of me but like if I can opine on this very quickly yeah personally The Way We Run free code Camp is with a high degree of trust where a completely remote team everybody has different responsibilities I am everybody's direct charge right like I'm like kind of an in individual contributor working alongside everybody else we don't want to have this big bulky hierarchy expensive hierarchy of like manager and all this stuff we just want people to be able to work on what they think is the most important and if they want to shift from one thing to another and they can make kind of like a business case argument like hey this is a good use of scarce Stoner funds for us to develop this for example for like the English curriculum for example or uh making some improvements to some system that some people use but not everybody uses then like we can green light that and they can move over and they can start working on that and I I love that culture of trust and I'm thrilled to hear that you know Pinterest had that uh and that you know Facebook I guess famously has has that or had that uh the move fast and break things ER we'll get into some of that uh but uh it sounds like you had a pretty good time and you learned quite a bit uh so maybe you can talk about other things that you learned maybe you can just rattle off some rapid fire lessons from working at kind of the height of tech with alongside really good Silicon Valley San Francisco Bay Area uh software Engineers building with contemporary tools yeah I mean I think Pinterest overall was a great experience I think that uh one thing that might get overlooked occasionally is a peer group of who you work with matters a lot and so if you join this old you know I'm trying to think of com like Oracle not to pick on them but you know join some like sap Oracle like this compy has been around for 50 years frankly a lot of your um or maybe I'll give you a more concrete example General Motors so I had friends who ended up sticking around in Michigan they went to like the University of Michigan did mechanical engineering and they took a job at Ford or General Motors and the median age of one of the workers there is like 50 or 45 and that's not a bad thing but if you're a 22-year-old and you're looking for that level of cohesion and learning and opportunity and there's a lot of people above you who are at a different life stage that can cause some amount of conflict or maybe not conflict but it can cause uh some tension of like you wanted to move faster and you can't so at Pinterest it was a relatively young company at the time I think it was founded in 2010 or 20 uh 2009 and so you know still relatively young most of the engineers were actually quite young they were all you know these mid 20 early 30s folks and there was a cultural cohesion that I think was super valuable so that was one thing it's like in a job don't just think about the work of the project think about who are the people you're going to be working with um another thing that comes to mind is growth growth effectively solves all problems like it doesn't matter if masks masks problems certainly it Mas all problems so like it doesn't matter if you're like oh you know my manager is like they said something weird to me or like um you know like this project didn't go as well but Pinterest at the time it just felt like this no like I worked on a project which actually ended up not working out at all and they killed it it was called shopping or buyable pins where you could actually buy a product directly in Pinterest totally failed but the core of Pinterest which was about discovering images and saving them to different pin boards that was such a strong product and it was growing internationally at the time it was growing domestically at the time every month you would see this dramatic growth and users which that was you knew that the company would succeed and that led to rather than a mindset of scarcity where people were always arguing about what project to take on there was actually an opposite mindset where it's like hey if you want to help we'll give you we'll load you up with tons of responsibility will give you feedback you can do whatever you want and I think that's another huge lesson is that that's why Silicon Valley I think works the way it does is that there's an addiction to growth because that addiction to growth is what allows you to mess up a lot and still succeed at the end and so you want to ideally work in an environment where which is growing rapidly and you can take on as much as you're able to yeah absolutely um and uh that's one of the things that I want to talk to you about is the fact that to some extent like growth has slowed a little bit like Venture Capital funding has slowed uh and a lot of people like I saw an excellent um talk that I'm going to link to in the description by pragmatic engineer uh where he did like a conference talk and he talked about the correlation between the Federal Reserves uh risk-free rate uh the Fed rate uh I I can't remember all the words that you used to describe this rate but basically we had like near zero interest rates for a very long time during the big startup boom uh the app uh Revolution where you know companies like Pinterest like Facebook uh like Instagram like what app were gaining you know hundreds of millions of users and were able to just grow so quickly that they could do whatever they wanted because they had this abundance mindset and they didn't feel risk aversion like they would feel if the coffers were suddenly tightened uh and uh I think for a long time there were very few layoffs and things like that to some extent uh that has been reversed uh with the rise in interest rates which disincentivizes like you know speculative investment from venture capitalist my understanding the way it works is if you are you know the Saudi Arabian government or if you're you know the California pension uh cpers or whatever or if you're just like a high net worth individual who would normally like just be able to put all their money into you know index funds or something like that and and expect like a certain level of growth uh when you can make 5% just by throwing your money into a savings account at a bank then more speculative Investments like uh investing in small companies that may or may not work out and Venture Capital my understanding is you get like an entire basket of companies and you know a majority of them are going to fail but one of them might be a stripe one of them might be an Airbnb right and uh as a result you can kind of like spread a whole lot of bets and and know that you're going to like like statistically make that money back but there's a lot of disincentive to that when you can just much more safely make the money uh thanks to the high interest rates so my understanding is that this change that happened you know over the past few years like the interest rate has gradually gone up and it may eventually go back down but it's back at around historic levels and in fact like near zero interest rates were uh a historic aberration that was not that's not common for interest rates to be that low in any country other than maybe like Japan which has had like extended low interest rates and even deflation and stuff right so um the reason I say all this is just to give people some quick context in case they don't have time to watch that pragmatic engineer talk uh but I do encourage you to watch it and watch this QA afterward but um I'm not sure if you've seen that talk but can you talk a little bit about um now that growth is not uh I mean obviously investors still want growth that's why you invest in a company is you want the stock to go up so you can you know sell the stock at a higher price than you bought it you know in the future right um and all that um that stock price is is discounted cash flow values of the expected earnings of that company in perpetuity right so um if uh I guess my question sorry this is like a really rambling question but how has that changed things in the valley and like uh your experience as both an engineer as a startup founder who's gone out and raised VC who's gone through why combinator a very prestigious uh accelerator program in the Bay Area uh like like how do you see things having changed for businesses in Tech yeah the way I think about it is that the interest rates will dictate what is the priority at the moment is it growth or profit with a lower interest rate then there will be more focus on growth and with a higher interest rate there will be more focus on profit so I do think that businesses are very short-term focused which is you know good or bad but that's the fact of how a lot of companies operate so I think the meta point I want to make first is is that for people watching who are thinking about going into Tech or they're already in Tech I want you to realize that your career is long so just because the interest rate in right now in 2024 2025 is is higher than it's been historically I want you to succeed and I want you to have a huge like a a fulfilling long very uh highly paid career for 20 years that's the time Horizon on which I want you to think about 10 or 20 years and so if you zoom out like that I do think that there's a broader Tailwind of the importance of software and you can benefit from that yeah so coming back to the conversation here though I do think that I feel lucky for that that it was like a three four five maybe 10 year period even where interest rates were quite low and it was a huge emphasis on growth and that emphasis on growth coincided with when I was growing my career and I was able to kind of supercharge my growth or even perhaps earn more money I got lucky to be part of these IPOs that really did well um and I think now there is a lot more focus on we need to not hire as much maybe even lay people off in order to control our costs and show shareholders that uh we are diligent with with our spending and we're actually working toward a profit or we maybe we are profitable so a couple things I'll say is the one is that tech industry now is huge it's like literally 10x bigger than what it was 20 years I mean I made that up but it was it's dramatically bigger than it was what what the tech industry was 5 10 20 years ago and so I think that you know we'll talk about job searching tactics in a little bit but I think but the number one advice I have for folks is that don't view the tech industry as this huge blob of like uh a single blob of like just a tech job or not they're pockets of the tech industry which will be growing faster than the average and they'll be hiring a lot right the tech industry is big enough now where you're going to have these discrepancies so just focus on those figure out where you can have a unique value to the world or to that company um and the other thing I would add is that startups and big Tech is very different big Tech if you if you work at Google or meta or any of these big companies then there's a quarterly earnings report and there's going to be a lot of focus on how do we make sure that we show high EPS earnings per share how do we show growth how do we show all these different things on a three-month time Horizon so you're on that clock whereas a startup usually there's perhaps a bit more leeway if they're like just seed round or the yesterday's a series a they might not be as focused on profit because their whole they sold a promise they sold a narrative of rapid growth yeah so those companies might still be hiring and I would just encourage people to think about the just like the difference between early stage startups which have a different mindset compared to later stage tech companies awesome so one question I have just a quick follow-up question before we move on is do you think that a lot of those jobs like where you know Facebook's XYZ Department laid off end people or um Google's XYZ product line uh like they laid off and people who are working on that product like do you think that those particular products within those companies are going to hire more people in the future or do you think that they're going to just have smaller teams going forward and they're going to open new products and hire to fill those teams or how do you I guess how do you see those companies going about you know rebuilding their um their engineer base if you will like like the the people and do you think it's going to be just like uniform across the entire company they're just bringing more people on or do you think that like there's going to be more settled solved problems that are being maintained and there are going to be new areas they bring people on I definitely think that it'll be lumpy in that there are always going to be a couple projects which have the L share of time and attention and money in big tech company and then a lot of a lot of products that are just going to be in maintenance mode and then a lot that are also just you know not that important or just like the bare minimum to get Buy in terms of like I don't know like a support function so um I would say that one one thing which is really interesting with big Tech in particular is that money is not the scarce resource they have bil like Google and apple and you know all these you know Fortune 100 companies they actually have more cash than they know what to do with like they have literally tens of billions of dollars in the bank or maybe hundreds of billions and so for them I think the way they make decisions about resourcing is not so much about can we afford it because they can definitely afford it it's much more a conversation of what do we actually want to prioritize in terms of a bet and what do we think what projects do we think could turn into a multi-billion dollar opportunity because if you're Google you're not going to waste your time with something which can only quote unquote only make 10 million a year that's way too small for you to even think about you need to figure out what are the projects that could potentially add a billion or 10 billion or 100 billion to your market cap and so that is I think the if I had to guess like what the Google leadership or apple leadership or whatever that's how they're thinking about it in terms of Staffing is okay in this new environment the time Horizons might have shrunk so instead of a 10-year time Horizon we want something to be showing uh profit or Revenue in 2 years instead of 5 years and what do we think is the top priority and then we staff those accordingly and a lot of things that are much more experimental they might get cut and then never come back in in this environment awesome given that uh what kind of developer roles are still being filled uh what kind of devs are still getting jobs in at like the higher like I think a lot of devs can go and get a job uh that pays them less than they were making it at like a Fan Company because they could they could go to work at a bank or a hospital chain or something like that and apply the skills they learned working at at Google or Facebook but uh what kind of devs are still getting jobs at you know big tech companies where you know I guess I guess again I don't want to stereotype like those jobs as being the most competitive but I I would argue in many way I mean working for NASA might be way harder than working at uh at Google for example but yeah but like for the for the I guess high paying Developer jobs what kind of uh skills do you think people like those employers are looking for and what kind of backgrounds do you think they're hiring for yeah so I I have a bit of a hard time answering that question because I think the way I think about it is that for people I work with people who are like I had this company called Taro which is about helping Developers for people who join Taro for you know the developer that I I think about I want you to be in the top 10% of whatever it is that you're doing and so if you're a mobile if you let's say you come to me and say hey um I'm an Android developer do you think that's a good fit for me like will I have a job that way and I will say like broadly speaking I do think that mobile is not as hot as what it was when I was you know picking it up in 2015 2016 now the hot area might be like data or ml or AI but if you're in the top 10% of Android I can guarantee you will get a job right so I think that a lot of the dialogue or conversation ends up being okay for the median developer will the median Android developer get a good job versus a median you know like SQL database engineer and you know I'm not actually that sure maybe data or AI will do better I think it probably does do better than mobile but in terms of compensation or in terms of being able to get jobs I would say both yeah like those are correlated in the sense that the more job opportunities there are for like a machine learning engineer that will often skew toward higher compensation but I think for people who are watching I want you to have the belief that you are in the top 10% of your field like you have worked hard enough you have the right Network you have the skills to be in the top 10% of Android developers or machine learning developers and if you're in the top 10% then I can guarantee that you will find a way to get a really compelling job opportunity so it's kind of a non-answer to your question but I do think that um as long as you focus on the Network and just being one of the better people in your field then no matter what part of software you're in I think you'll end up having a good job and we can talk about tactics and how to do that yeah but that's how I think about that job search um rather than thinking about the technology of like oh I want to learn you know JavaScript I Want To Learn Python I want to learn you know um this particular framework I don't think about it from that perspective I think about it more in terms of who are the people I know or the knowledge I have which will more easily allow me to become a top 10% developer in that field and if I do that then everything else will take care of itself so it sounds like you're advocating for really going deep and specializing uh as a developer uh right now and and historically like generalists as you said like University degrees often produce generalist developers and and through a series of internships through a series of jobs they come to be Specialists like you specialized in Android app development and worked as an Android developer for many years and you're probably in the top percent of Android developers on earth right uh but that that that came with a whole lot of dedication and time and energy uh what would you say to somebody who is just coming out of a computer science program or is just finishing like a series of free C Camp certifications or is just finishing like doing a whole bunch of self-study at the library and answering a bunch of questions on leak code or something like that like what would you say to them in terms of uh how they should approach specializing and do you think they should try to specialize now or do you think they should try to specialize through employment I I do think that broadly speaking going deep in one area is very valuable early in career depth I think is super valuable more than breath early in career because I don't want to hire someone who have to spoon feed and handhold on every domain it like what's much more attractive as an employer is you tell me hey I built five Android apps you can see how good they are in the Play Store clearly I'm competent I'm one of the better endroid developers out there I can come in and I can lead this function or at least I can be independent most Junior developers most entry level developers are not independent they like in fact like uh at Facebook E3 Engineers which is entry level Engineers were often considered more of a neutral or negative to the team rather than a positive right the idea is that hey they're going to come in and there actually going to be a tax on the team on the other developers because they're going to have to um ask a bunch of questions take up time with other developers they actually will end up hurting the productivity of the team later on it will help but if you can instead flip that narrative and say hey I'm going to come in as a fresh graduate from a boot camp or a computer science program and here are things that I know how to do really well as evidenced by all these published projects I think that it really does help getting you a job and the other element of it too which I think is super important is that I think it's helpful to be polarizing and what I mean by that is don't try and be everything to everyone but if you say something really generic like I'm a full stack developer and I do Java and I do Python and I do you know list all 20 languages my immediate reaction to that is that you probably don't know any of those languages really well whereas instead if you pick a lane and say hey I am a very deep Android developer I know cotlin I know Java I know jetpack compos I know all these different um tools and Technologies related to Android now I feel much better about actually hiring you for that role yeah you're not going to be a good fit for like a machine learning role now so you've kind of elate that you you've become polarizing and you're eliminating a lot of jobs for yourself but for the jobs where you do declare yourself to be a good fit you have a much much higher chance so that's another benefit I think of specializing yeah absolutely that's super helpful be polarizing as rul says okay yeah awesome so that is like super actionable advice for folks out there uh and yeah it's like what would you consider to be enough of a general Baseline if you just had to Rattle off some skills that you think like everybody has just off the top of your head like every developer should probably know these key things and then once you know those key things start specializing like just off the top of your head what what are what are some things that you think are super valuable I mean I think that just in a normal curriculum just having a very basic familiarity with I would say like three or four languages is important just so I have faith that you could pick up something else quickly like the common ones might be Java C++ python JavaScript like just familiarity with a handful of those so it's not like you only know one language that's not a good indicator for a strong software engineer if you only know one like you you should be able to learn and pick up different things that's one terminal familiarity like are you able to run commands and understand how they work is an is kind of obvious one that most developers will have to deal with um and then I think one thing which is also for me I bias heavily toward people who have something published like put your name on something that you have majority built out so not part of a team of five or 10 or 100 people that's the beauty of Android I think is that you can or mobile is that you can literally publish end to end an entire app with just you that's pretty amazing even it's not like back end maybe it's harder to show showcase what you're doing but show me a GitHub repository where you've done something novel something Beyond a tutorial I think that is a really core skill of every developer and then once you have that then you can kind of specialize a bit more just like show me that you have the competency to do do something without the training wheels of a tutorial awesome and I want to go to something you've said in some of your videos and your interviews you've said that Developer jobs are high leverage what do you mean by that yeah the idea of Leverage is how much output do you get for a certain amount of input so like the classic way of contrasting it is it with taxi drivers and so you know if you're a average Taxi Driver you might go from point A to point B like 20 minutes and then a really really amazing Taxi Driver can get you from point A to point B in like 15 minutes because they like take turns in a more effective way they don't fully stop at stop signs you know all these things they can do to cut the time down on the other hand the gap between an average developer who can like build a project or like add a feature from A to B um it might take them a month a much much better developer can probably get the same feature done in one tenen the time yeah right like literally it might take a day or two that's where you get the term of 10x developers so do you believe just for the record because a lot of people this is somewhat polarizing discussion do you believe 10x Engineers are a thing yes they're 100% a thing and in fact 100x developers and 1,000x developers are also a thing so who is a famous 100x or THX like like a Steve wnc type character or somebody like that I mean like there are these legendary programmers that you keep hearing about like Jeff Dean Steve wasak sunj Gat um but I think a lot of it is also contextual of like a 10x engineer is not just in a vacuum a 10x engineer a lot of how they have such a huge amount of impact is that they know the business context so for example going back to this idea of like this arbitrary like feature a to feature B like you're building out something so a 10x engineer is not someone who writes 10x more code they could maybe say hey actually 90% of the project spec to build pro feature a whatever we call it Feature Feature B 90% of it is actually stupid we're not going to do any of that no one cares about that I'm not even going to think about it all I really care about is the 10% of the project which actually matters I'm going to spend my time coding that there there you go now you've become a 10x engineer because um you're focusing on the work that actually matters and so yeah that's not about how much technical prowess you have or technical depth you have it's more about understanding what does a customer want and how do you back into that um so I think it's obvious to me that those kind of Engineers do exist and they'll become more and more prominent actually with AI tools which will magnify The Leverage of a developer awesome yeah so it sounds like uh a 10x developer or 100x or a THX is a developer who knows what not to do what is not going to bear fruit what doesn't matter for the I guess business case or whatever they're trying to solve for and is able to see like the through line to where they need to be and not squander a lot of time doing other things and uh yes like if you're just trying to Output code and get a bunch of commits in and and have something to talk about during the standup meeting that may not be the path to becoming a 10x or 100x developer whereas you know um just like thinking really hard and then developing the solution to the fun Al underlying problem after asking why a whole bunch and getting to the the root of the problem so you believe that's the path to becoming a tenx developer yeah 100% so I think one very common template to become a 10x developer just working on the right thing like don't waste your time like the reality in software because the beauty of software and also the hard part about software is that it's so easy to write and rewrite and delete that you know you have these developers or companies that have millions and millions of lines of code and the majority of it is like not doing very much so part of it is like figure out what to actually work on um there's another element too the second very common template to become a 10x developer is make the people around you better like there's a good example when I was working at Facebook which is a developer and we had this kind of messy module or code base uh and what he did which is very simple is like just break it down into different components so now each developer when they write code they don't have merge conflix they don't have to step on the toes of other developers who are you know adding their own logic so that's actually kind of a simple change it's refactoring this component to make it independent but he made it so that every other developer on the team could move a lot faster so that's a very easy way to now all of a sudden become a 10x engineer because you've made five people around you you know twice as efficient right so that's another very common uh yeah common practice as a hiring manager which I know you are uh you can look at potential hires as is this person going to potenti like use critical thinking and reasoning to identify the most important work that needs to be done and the best way to do that at any point and that is going to be a huge value unlock or is this person going to figure out ways of refining processes to just make the overall engine hum more efficiently uh within my team yeah that's great Insight I think one of the criteria in fact for the more senior people that we hire in big Tech and even with Taro like the people who I work with is Will will they make me better will they make the people around me better and if I don't actually have faith that there's something that you can teach something that you can uh talk about that makes my like me or the teammates around me better I probably won't hire you like that's almost like baked into the criteria of do you have something to offer to uplevel the team awesome I have some rapid fire questions for you I want to be mindful of your time but I have so many things to ask you because you have expertise as you mentioned you know ter uh Taro I think I think it's joint taro.com yeah joint taro.com yep exactly yeah uh your startup uh which has gone through YC combinator and uh you know uh I I'm a part of your slack group and like uh you've got a lot of momentum around just helping people with developer careers so you are precisely the kind of person I should be peppering with developer career question so I'm not going to uh squander this opportunity if you were working at a big tech company right now how would you approach changing jobs the number one advice I have for people who want to change jobs is figure out your unfair advantage and leverage that so what that means is um like let me tell you what not to do if there's an open opportunity on LinkedIn or indeed.com and you apply for it I just think that the amount of effort you put into that is going to yield so few results because a job posting on LinkedIn Within 24 hours I've heard of stories where they get literally hundreds or thousands of applicants so you are competing against perhaps a thousand or 10,000 people applying for that job so instead what I want you to do is I want you to figure out what is your unfair Advantage where do you have a referral a strong referral for someone who works at a company who can advocate for you and so now instead of competing with 10,000 people applying for a job online you might be one of three or four people who have a strong referral to that company or maybe when you look at your resume or LinkedIn something will stand out like okay clearly the thing that stands out to me is that you are very spiky like you're po polarizing in terms of being an exceptional um I don't know like a iOS Developer so okay now that should be how you frame your job search like figure out companies that really are desperate for an iOS engineer and now you have a way bigger Advantage there compared to like Google yeah Google I'm sure there's probably some job opening for iOS Vel at Google I'm sure there is but you don't have an unfair advantage to get into that whereas a startup that is really focused their whole strategy product strategy is focused on mobile and iOS in particular you have a unique ability to go to them and say hey I can fulfill your need and so that would be like the number one advice I have if you're in big Tech figure out where do you have a huge Advantage compared to the general population and Orient your whole job search around that what are uh some of the important aspects of soft skills you've talked a lot about the importance of soft skills can you define soft skills and uh what are some specific soft skills that Dev developers should focus on that will yield big returns to effort yeah I mean soft skills is basically anything which is not directly related to the technology to the coding and that that was the Gap that I observed especially among engineers in myself with soft skills is a huge part of why I even felt comfortable or I had this desire to start join taro.com is I felt like that was very underserved for technical folks um so like a very common one that I talk about is how do you ask a good question that is such a fundamental soft skill is I don't care how smart you are I don't care your background you are going to have questions about the code base or about the company or about the team whenever you join a new environment inevitably so how do you frame your question in a way which not only gets you the information you you want but also critically is valuable to build a relationship with the people around you and you know there's like a I was just going to say like like relays that you do have some it's not a a quotequote dumb question it's a well-informed kind of surgical question yes that is going to make them respect you oh good question yes that and also like you can also view the question as an asset that will help build up your social capital so for example if you ask a question in in a DM that's one of the things I tell people not to do because now You've Lost That knowledge that that interaction is now lost in The Ether between me and Quincy whereas if I put it in a public forum and I tell Quincy Hey over here in slack or in this like email thread I left a question I think you you have a ton of great Insight I would love for you to answer it now the next person who onboards after me they can go through that history and benefit from it too it's like kind of having the awareness or thought process to figure figure out how can I ask a question in a way which gets me the answer builds a relationship and also helps everyone else around me like the next person who on boards I think that's the kind of thing that really does differentiate a 10x developer and average developer and I think a lot of people Get Lucky by having a mentor or having someone in their career who can help them with that a lot of people don't they just get stuck doing things in the same old way and that's what I'm hoping that we can try and um make some of that knowledge free for everyone 100% that's one of the reasons it's an honor to be able to uh grab you and ask questions and and hopefully improve at asking questions as I've got like 50 hours of experience this year doing podcast interviews right so uh what are some other soft skills because I'm sure there are more like there are a lot of them are there any other ones that immediately come to mind that you think people neglect I mean I think the another huge one that comes up again and again is uh career growth right so how can I advocate for myself how can I do skillful uh self-promotion in a way which is not oh here's how great I am I want to promotion now help me instead talk about okay here's the work I've done here's why I think it could benefit you and oh in the process of benefiting you and benefiting the team and helping the company I would love to continue to grow my career and take it even further how can we work together to make sure that happens like framing the conversation in a way where your career growth is not on the back burner and yet it's also not the like be all end all of what your manager is thinking about and recognizing that that is thing that comes up again and again where people get frustrated like I'm not growing in my career and then I ask about what are they doing are they asking questions are they proactive about getting feedback are they trying to figure out what the career Matrix even looks like at their company and I think a lot of people just haven't done that much thinking about it and so being able to have some sort of framework or uh uh structured approach to thinking about performance RW promotion is another fundamental soft skill that most Engineers don't think about and uh I want to point out that you have I think twice as many followers on LinkedIn as I do you've got like more than 100 thousand followers on Linkin which is not like a platform that a lot of people think of in terms of uh I guess self-promotion and establishing credibility uh can you talk a little bit about the use of LinkedIn for yourself uh as a developer as an entrepreneur and as uh you know whether LinkedIn is a helpful tool for uh developers trying to gradually build up their reputation and their Network and things like that yeah I mean so LinkedIn and YouTube are hugely important to me as a way for me to share a lot of the opinions or advice they have or just share the opinions of other people who I might be able to interview and and share their platform and so the way I think about it is what I care about is I have this thing called Taro it's a membership product that I genuinely believe can help people in their career and so YouTube and Linkedin I you asked about LinkedIn LinkedIn is a really powerful way for me to tell people about that I don't do it in like a marketing way I try not to the way I think about LinkedIn or really any social media is that the way you win the way you grow the way you add value is you need to show up every day every week and you need to provide a ton of value for free over a long period of time and if you do that consistently not just for a week or a month but if you do that for two or three years like I've been doing I've been on YouTube since 2019 I've been posting almost every day on LinkedIn for two and a half years or more than two years if you do that then inevitably you will start to have people who recognize your name recognize your brand and then trust you enough you've earned their trust that then you can direct them toward um a video or Taro or whatever else it is that you think that will help them but you have to earn that by showing up every day day for a long period of time yeah cuz I mean a lot of people just kind of show up and they think that like they don't need to spend years potentially building out uh not just the skills but also the reputation and this also where quantity over quality comes back too right it's like if you come and say I'm going to spend you know a week writing out this amazing LinkedIn post talking about my whole life story I want to put it out there it might do well but don't get me wrong like I'm sure if someone comes out on LinkedIn and like talks about something really compelling it'll do well but the way you actually do well the way you win over the long term is you need to have enough quantity not not not like quantity for the sake of quantity but like you need to continue trying to get better at your craft over a long period um and only then do you earn the right to be able to you know capture capture people's attention yeah absolutely now I will say that if you like having written I think more than 500 programming tutorials over the past 10 years myself uh there have been a few like outlier hits and I didn't necessarily know in some cases that those would be outlier hits but there were some where I'm like wow I've got something really special here and uh I'll point to like a post I discovered recently my my friend sent it to me and it was this guy's story of how his father died and he went back to India and he ran his father's Chemical Company I don't know if youve read this amazing story but it's it's basically like it's a single article but it represents like an entire two years of his life like learning how to run a chemical company and learning how like all the Cal differences and everything he had to to take in having grown up in the US and having to go back and and communicate with his uh his staff and uh like basically figure out a way to gracefully exit with the company and find find uh an acquirer and uh I mean that is like you know a 30 minute read 40-minute read there's like I can only imagine how many hundreds of hours went into that but I'm sure tens of thousands of people read that so there is uh something to be said for just having a single very high quality uh article but I would be willing to bet that that that that uh developer had spent a lot of time uh just writing over the years just blogging regularly and things like that so so they had build up those muscles and built up that kind of like mentality so uh even if it feels like a lot of your quantity is not hitting it's not connecting with audience and stuff you're still getting benefit in terms of you know as you said earlier like the way to become good at coding is just code a whole lot right that's probably the best single indicator of somebody who's good at coding is somebody who spends a whole lot of time coding and also content is another area where it is extremely high leverage in that the gap between an average piece of content which might get I don't know for like for my LinkedIn an average post might get 20,000 views Impressions um an amazing post might get 10 million so like it's not just like oh it's like 20% better it's like literally 100x better in terms of the amount of traffic or amount of like impact you can have on the world with that piece of content which is another reason why I think um you know content social media can be really powerful if used effectively yeah awesome well I want to ask a few quick questions about uh developers like who are applying for jobs right now uh let's presume uh I think you and I have established that you need to have General skills general knowledge you want to specialize in you want to be polarizing and you want to be in the top percent working with even if it's some relatively esoteric tool like you could go get a Cobalt job right now if if you really want to go deep on Cobalt there are Cobalt jobs and there are not a lot of people that want to work with Cobalt you could there are lots of people that are still using like cold fusion WordPress like old technology to run their uh you know e-commerce operations and if you become a known quantity in those fields you can go get a job right but let's say uh let's say that you've already done all that and you want to go out and get a job conventional wisdom is uh you try to shop around uh a whole lot of different competing offers and and like collect a lot of offers like you were able to time your acquisition of different offers from Big tech companies to where you had this window and you could like kind of play them against each other and negotiate do you think with the job uh Market the way it is for developers right now developers still have the luxury to do that I think some developers do I mean definitely there are not all developers are created equal or not all profiles I should say are created equal like if you went to a name brand school if you are working at open AI I can guarantee you there's like hundreds of companies knocking on your door to hire an open AI engineer for example right so I do think um it's possible it's certainly harder now compared to 2021 or 2020 um what I would say is that figure out what is actually important to you like if you're starting out your career and you're breaking into tech for the first time then it's not that important to get five offers like what you want really at the end of the day is you want to get one offer which is compelling and hopefully at a name brand company or institution and then you leverage that as a jumping off point for your next job like don't think about like very few developers these days will stick around at a job for like 20 years so I think a better approach is okay like let me do this uh job for the time being and then it'll open up new possibilities and then once I have those in my hand I'll then evaluate them and make the best decision for myself but right now you know just think about the next one or twoe time Horizon rather than thinking about the next 20 years awesome and do you think that uh developers still have like like would you still encourage people to negotiate salary the way they did historically or do you think that the job market has fundamentally changed where that that's not safe to do anymore no I think the answer to negotiation is always yes if done in the right way so like you don't want to obviously piss people off and like um like lie about I have this other offer like obviously that's kind of going to put you in hot water but I do think that no matter the job market Condition it's always worth trying to negotiate it might not be effective today because you whereas in 2021 you might have had like five offers where today you might only have one offer of course the amount of Leverage you have is a lot lower but I still think it's worth um making an ask and it might be rejected but at least you've made the ask awesome what would you say to a developer who's getting into the field field and has heard you know Jensen hang the CEO of Nvidia say oh you don't need to teach your kids to code anymore like coding is going to be a solved thing and we're just going to have ai magic that takes care of all the software engineering like what would you say to somebody who is feeling discouraged because they've heard some kind of like marketing talk like that and uh yeah like like what would you I don't want to like you know cat the question in too much uh but but just like okay I'm going to I'm going to pretend to this person yeah I don't know I mean I'm pretty sure my job is just going to be automated by the time I finished learning all this stuff anyway yeah I would say that first of all I disagree with this um hypothesis that coding jobs will disappear I think the way we code and the types of problems we solve with coding those might change and so if you are expecting to have the same kind of job like let's say you're liting a for Loop or like doing these more rudimentary programming tasks you should expect that to change but the actual job of being able to communicate with the computer whether we call that a programmer or a developer or engineer or something else we call it in the future that problem I am very confident will continue to be in high demand and in fact the demand will will uh increase a lot in the coming years and so um that's the first thing I would say is that I just think that it's not true that programmers will not exist in the next 20 or 30 years like they will exist the other thing I would say is that um your goal go should be to be in the top 10% like your goal is not to be at bottom of the barrel like barely scraping by developer I want you if you're going to enter this field you you should be and I want you to be in the top 10% and so if you think you have a chance of doing that then that gives you that should give you more confidence that your job in particular will be really well taken care of and in fact even more important um because like you have this skill set that not most people in the world have and you can that the your leverage will be magnified Amplified With The Changes coming to programming with AI let's say somebody okay let's take two candidates or two people right there is a software engineer or like a computer science uh senior at Stanford who has done a few internships and they are graduating and they are entering the job force and I would probably you know posit that aside from being like a proven 10x developer or something they are probably the hottest commodity for uh a lot of like entry-level jobs right uh what would somebody outside of you know the brand of Stanford outside of the I guess cultural cache of uh comp established computer science degree programs like having a bachelor's in computer science that carries a lot of weight and I tell everybody if they're going to go to university they should absolutely study computer science I think it's a great field to go into but let's say hypothetically you don't have that luxury I've got an English degree I'm a teacher I'm 30 right this actually describes where I was when I started coding back you know 15 years ago uh what would I need to do to be able to get to that level of appealing this that that uh recent Stanford or the person who's about to graduate from Stanford's computer science program yeah we get to I would say first of all I don't think the goal should be to be that appealing to everyone like the goal should be how do I you're not trying to appeal to everyone right you're trying to get one maybe two or three job offers so that means that really what you care about is there's a set of 10 people at these two or three companies that will make a decision a judgment on you your job is to impress them you don't care about the 100,000 other people or companies that are hiring you care about two companies that are going to hire you and take a bet on you that's all you care about so let's reduce the problem scope into something much more tractable um the other thing I would say is that trust is the most important asset when it comes to hiring and so the benefit of now having a much smaller problem space is that you're not trying to build trust with 100,000 people which is impossible unless you like you know if you went to Stanford then maybe inherently you have some trust like people kind of just assume that you have some level of legitimacy but you don't have that luxury and so all you really care about is how can I quickly build trust with two or three people at these key companies and the way you do that is again go and leverage your unfair Advantage so let's say you you an English major you probably have let's say that you worked as like a um a historic you know some or you work at the library and it just so happens that there was a customer or like a a visitor at the library who was working in Tech that guess what that is your unfair Advantage go and talk to that person and say hey I want to learn more about your job and your company can we hop on a call and if you do that you know with like 10 people I guarantee one or two of them will feel comfortable they they'll trust you and therefore they will feel comfortable advocating for you in a particular job so might not like it's hard to give like a template answer but like I think figure out be creative with how you can talk to people how you can find opportuni like maybe go to a uh like build an app and ask for feedback on it like figure out ways you can engage with people so they start to trust you and as soon as you have a critical mass of people who trust you that is how you're able to get a job even though you don't have this you know Harvard degree on your resume yeah yeah and just in case anybody's curious my unfair Advantage was I was pretty good at winning hackathons so I won a bunch of hackathons fa Advantage yeah that's amazing and by doing that then I kind of proved out the concept of me as a software engineer and made it like I guess less risky for an a hiring manager to take a chance on me and bring me in as you know one of those lowlevel kind of like net negative Engineers on a team who's gradually going to learn the skills and eventually be a net positive right so uh if anybody wants to learn more about that I've written a book it's free it's called how to learn to code and get a developer job it echoes a lot of what you said here rul but there's a whole lot of additional Insight that you've layered on and of course I'm going to encourage everybody to check out tarot uh is there anything else that people should check out uh from you uh I mean I think that they should follow you on LinkedIn I follow you on LinkedIn I encourage everybody you you're constantly showing up and delivering value to people there uh but but like just in imparting like anything else people should do that's great I think LinkedIn and Joint tara.com are where I am very active YouTube also I have a YouTube channel under my name r p so would love for people to check that out and share whatever feedback or questions they have I'd love to help out R it's been such a pleasure to talk to you thank you for everything you've done for the free cocing community over the past four or five years through uh creating these free learning resources and creating resources through other means that I know like a there's a huge overlap there's a big Vin diagram of people who are like making use of freeo Camp people who are like learning from you directly through your YouTube channel so thanks for everything you're doing for the developer Community keep it up man yes it is really my pleasure and I appreciate all the work that you all have been doing as well at free code Camp so it's been it's been great awesome well everybody uh who's made it this far be sure to uh subscribe to the podcast feed if you're listening like make sure you click the plus thing and and follow in apple podcast or in Spotify or wherever and uh yeah look for more insight like this until next week happy coding byeit's just incredibly hard to write a ton of code and not be a good programmer welcome back to the free Cod Camp podcast I'm Quincy Larson teacher and founder of freecodecamp.org each week we're bringing you Insight from developers Founders and abitious people getting into Tech this week we're talking with Rahul Pond he's a software engineer who left his $800,000 a year Fang job to build his own startup we're going to talk about the post layoff developer job landscape developer interviews salary negotiation and Landing Venture Capital as a startup founder and more Rahul pleasure to have you here man Quincy thank you for having me it's been really fun to collaborate with you and free code Camp over the past few years I'm excited to chat absolutely and uh I am going to put a link to uh one of rahul's courses he has a comprehensive Android app tutorial it's about four hours long if anybody wants to see his teaching in action uh but I just want to start by acknowledging Rahul that you are one of the winners of the tech boom in that you've been able to build your network your skills your reputation over the past few years but there are a lot of people who've been laid off recently who may not feel like they have a lot to show for the time that they spent working in Tech what would you say to someone who approached you who thought that they might have made a mistake learning the code and getting into Tech I would say it's not too late it's never too late to get into Tech it's never too late to learn these what I would consider fundamental skills of working with computers and working with software I've been coding or thinking about tech in some capacity since I was 18 and I'm 32 now right so I've been doing it for a long long time and I think when people come to me and say hey I've been doing it for three months or six months it's not making sense to me I say hey you still have another 15 20 years until you can say that you've been doing it for enough time or a long enough time um so that's one thing it's like you know the key is put the time in be persistent have a system so you don't get discouraged the other thing I would say is that we are very very early in software I fundamentally believe that the amount of time and energy and money going into Computing into working with computers that will only go up in the coming years and so you know I I I came into college and I thought there are people around me who have been coding since they were 5 years old it's too late for me but it was not too late for me it's not too late for you the amount of Stu stuff that will get done with software in the coming years is going to be huge and I think anyone who wants to be part of it can be part of it as long as they work smart and they work hard awesome well we're going to talk a little bit about working smart and working hard which is how you got to where you are today and uh we're going to tease as many insights as we can out of your developer Journey let's go way back to when you were a kid uh Hindi speaking son of immigrants the second generation American in Detroit Michigan and maybe you can tell us a little bit about your early years and what life is like for you for sure I think my childhood was very similar to the you know second generation immigrant experience so my parents came here for higher education in the 1980s and then the majority of my dad's career ended up at General Motors which is how we ended up in Michigan in the Detroit area and so I always had you know my parents value education and it was always a huge part of what I spent every day doing say this school and then you come back and study a bit more beyond the homework that you already had to do so I think that was a big part of uh my own childhood and then of course you know you always have okay there's a small Indian Community when I was growing up in the Detroit area and then in school it was majority non-indian majority white and so you always had that kind dichotomy which I think is super common for the second generation on how did they balance okay you speak Hindi actually we spoke a dialect of Hindi called butur at home and then in school it's a very different culture very different uh language and how much indianness do you want to show right that was a very common thing for me and you know that community that I grew up with um I think school and academics were definitely a huge part of what I did my life growing up but I actually never thought too much about the future like I I can't recall ever saying to my dad I really really want to be a mechanical engineer like you I really want to work with cars that know it's never somehow uh a big part of my life and even for computers which is what I spend every day you know coding and programming and and software engineering is what I think about every day now never really came up growing up somehow it was only in college when I really started to think about okay what do I have have some agency of what do I want to do I think growing up for me A lot of it was put my head down do the work my brother was very into math competitions so we do a lot of math competitions but I never really thought about how will the work I'm doing now translate into a career or a job in the future yeah well at what point like did you I mean you said you went to college and that's when your discovery of I guess your what you wanted to do with your life started to be I mean for most people that's an ongoing Discovery process and they uh go down one road and then they switch and maybe the road that they went down has a nice kind of intersection with the other Road and there's a natural transition or maybe it's a very dramatic uh like I've talked to a lot of people that uh work at like I talked to someone who's working as a sign language interpreter with American Sign Language who's learning the code and I mean those two things on the face of it would seem very different but they're trying to figure out kind of a natural bridge between the two or uh people I know who are working as like truck drivers or working as mechanics and other things like that that want to transition into software development so your maybe you can set the stage you're in University you've worked very hard to get there you followed the teaching of your first generation immigrant parents of course like I I hope I don't seem like presumptive or anything like that but like I have lots of friends from Vietnam from China uh from India especially uh who have these parents who like basically drill it into them you have to do well academically like that like it doesn't even matter what you do other than that like academics have to come first was that how it was in your household like like did your parents really hold you a high standard as far as grades and things like that yeah I I think it's interesting I think they definitely had high standards but it wasn't so much in the form of like you need to study or else you'll get punished it didn't feel like that I think a lot of it was my brother actually so I have an older brother two years older and he was academically just I think naturally uh incredibly talented especially when it came to math and so I think a lot of it I actually remember feeling like it wasn't my parents who were pressuring me it was most of the time my brother is say hey you better you know stay up late to train for this math competition and that was like a huge thing for me and I I never actually did as well in like there was something called AMC and am aim which were two big math competitions growing up and I never did as well as him but that was a huge point of anxiety for me it's like I really need to do well um and that took over like I never I think you know going back to what we talked about I never really thought about a career or a job because I was so myopically focused on how do I do well right now and you know show my brother or my parents or whoever that I can actually succeed Beyond School in this math competition or in this you know there were other things going on at the same time and so um that was what took over and then it was only until College when I could you know remove the the local pressure of a math competition and I that was when I feel like I had the freedom to think a little bit broader about what I actually wanted to do in my career and that was I think really powerful for me I wish I could have done that a little bit earlier but you know I think it was you know age 17 18 is when I finally started to think about that yeah so potential parenting advice there uh for me as like someone who has young kids like instead of pushing your kids academically just try to get your kids surrounded by high achieving motivated kids and let that peer pressure compel them rather than trying yeah and that's actually way more powerful because they are your peer like they you can't make a claim that oh you know my dad he doesn't understand my mom doesn't understand because they came from a different generation or different geography no like this is my brother he literally went to the same exact school that's two years ahead of me or if I have other friends um who went through the same system and actually that was one of the I would say the biggest benefit of Stanford way more powerful than the academics or the campus or anything else the most the biggest benefit was you would appear group at Stanford who opened your eyes to what would be possible if you had the a little bit of luck a lot of hard work you put yourself in the right position to succeed you could do anything which I didn't even think was possible in Michigan and that was a huge benefit of Stanford was that peer group that you enter into yeah well maybe you can talk about your early days at Sanford getting into Sanford of course is very difficult uh I'm not sure if it's more even more difficult now than it used to be it's way more difficult now yeah well like so you get this uh I understand you got into a lot of prestigious schools but uh how did you prepare how did you pull that off yeah I mean I think maybe there is like a benefit to how I how I grew up too and I was so focused on high school I didn't think about um other thing I just like okay math competitions I did some science stuff and then I you know did well like doing well in classes with the Baseline like of course you would do well in classes on top of that it was a discussion with my brother or my parents about okay what else to do um so I think I part of it is certainly like I got lucky going to Stanford like what I tell people or parents or um you know high school students is that there are a lot of good schools in the country and so rather than getting your heart said oh I really want to go to Harvard I really want to go to Stanford that I think is a recipe for disappointment the top 10 or top 20 schools all of them have that same amazing peer group of people who will go on and do startups they'll go go on and um become executive somewhere they'll go on and do something really Innovative and so as long as you get into one of those top 20 I think you're going to be set up for a really amazing future and so if you think about the probability of getting into any one college as like let's say 20% so the likelihood that you get rejected by all the top 20 is actually quite low it's like what what is that 08 uh to the power of 20 so it's like I don't know what the math is but you know I would just cons what my advice to people is that instead of just focusing on one University just do the run the gamut and figure out how you'll get into one of them probably if you're a high academic achiever and go into to the best school you can yeah and and for anybody curious uh point8 to the uh uh to the 20th power is 1% so like you're 99% likely to get into a top 20 School assuming you meet like the basic criteria for applying and stuff like that yeah that's that's really good uh um man this just brings me to one of the things that you have talked about a lot in like your videos and like podcasts I've listened to you talked uh you talked about the the role of quantity and there's that that quote that quantity has a quality all its own and uh for you like you have approached a lot of things as as kind of a numbers game like I'm not just going to apply to my dream University I'm going to apply to a bunch of univers I'm not just going to apply to you know uh Google I'm going to apply to a bunch of Google tier employers right uh maybe you can talk just for a second as a Segway because this is a very natural time to talk about this about the role of quantity in your decision- making and your approach to life yeah that there such a uh huge part of how I think about success and how I think about my own journey is just really focus on quantity don't think of yourself as an artist where you're like an artisan crafting every pixel on the screen or every video you put out or every college application hey we're going to do our best but we're also going to maintain a really high velocity so we can hit the quantity bar and I think there two benefits one is what you said is that uh I truly believe that the more quantity you put out the higher your quality will become just naturally it's just very hard for you know the thing that I think about a lot is is programming it's just incredibly hard to write a ton of code and not be a good programmer so that's that's part of it the other part of it too which I think is equally powerful is psychological element of quantity over quality which is that it relieves you of the pressure to make every single attempt at whatever you're doing to be amazing and when you reduce that pressure you want to do it more and that is a huge unlock so other than saying hey this code I write right now is going to have to be perfect bug free and efficient and work on the first try I'll never write code because I'm going to be so afraid of screwing it up and same thing with colleges if if I tell myself or if I tell the world that the only College I really care about is Stanford that is make or break if I don't get into Stanford I don't care about anything else I'm going to be so stressed out and I'll probably do worse in the application because I'm going to be over editing it and thinking about it too much and it just be counterproductive so if you instead have leverage by saying hey Stanford is one good option but so is Harvard or Caltech or MIT or Carnegie melon or whatever else then I can almost guarantee that you're going to come in in a much healthier mindset and that healthier mindset will lead to uh better performance yeah well let's talk about your time with Stanford and did you know from the time that you enrolled there that you were going to study engineering and following the steps of your father now I know that you said he studied mechanical engineering working in the car industry that's kind of like almost like the tech industry of your in my opinion I mean you could argue that like there's a lot of innovation going on in the car space too but like I consider Transportation somewhat solved compared to like all the new novel systems were coming up with like you know llms and search engines and all the more recent tools but uh did you know that you wanted to study engineering right from the get-go or at what point did you start to go down that path yeah I mean I I definitely knew that I wanted to do something analytical so I think if I think back to when I was 17 coming into University I think the majors I had thought about were electrical engineering or physics um I may be mechanical too but I was not at all considering like Med medicine or English or history I knew I want to do something with numbers and something which was a bit more analytical yeah and uh what did you do with those I guess around four years that you were were you were you at Stanford yeah I was actually I ended up being at Stanford for five years so the way the reason is that they have a program called co-term like a co-term program and the idea is that you can concurrently for a portion of your undergrad you can start to work on a master's degree and so I think in my third year I applied for that program and I was able to do a master's degree in computer science as well I did Bachelor and Masters in computer science I did both of them in five years so that was why I stuck around for an additional year and also frankly I think my my job prospects at the end of four years was not that strong and so having one more year in the Stanford bubble the academic bubble really helped me strengthen my profile and give me confidence that I could actually go out and get whatever job I wanted so that was another huge benefit of it um I think in terms of the uh like what I did I I came in with that mindset of something analytical something in the engineering realm or maybe science physics realm very quickly I would say by the end of freshman year it became very obvious to me that the best thing I could do is go study software and coding because there was so much energy this is 09 2010 and um there was so much energy around software like the iPhone had come out I had people down the hall for me who were making iPhone apps and doing really well and these were people who I didn't think that like you know my growing up I didn't really know any software Engineers who were just like doing like I knew engineers in the context of like they were at Accenture and they worked as part of 20,000 Engineers doing a small thing but this is the first time where I felt like hey as a 18 or 20-year-old you can actually go out and create something valuable and make money from it so very quickly I okay this is the thing I'm going to do and after sopt like second year sophomore year I very quick quickly decided okay this is going to be what I want to end up working on at least initially when I graduate so you hit the ground running I understand you had a number of internships while you were going through your degree program can you talk about those yeah um I had an internship every single summer so that's four different internships and I think that was again one of the benefits of going to the top university like Stanford is that people assume some level of credibility which honestly I don't think I deserved I remember my first year I had literally taken I I didn't really program at all coming into college unlike a lot of my peers and so I did feel some amount of imposter syndrome or I felt behind to some extent I had taken a grand total of two programming classes and I somehow landed an internship and the reason is because I I believe it's in March or April the near the end of the Academic Year Stanford has a startup career fair and these startups they just want to hire and especially if you say hey I went to Stanford for them it's kind of like oh I got I was able to hire a Stanford kid to come intern and so I was super lucky that I honestly didn't have the skills to contribute and that whole summer I really was struggling I like I there was not like a formal discussion about if I got a return offer or not but I can almost for sure tell you that I would not have received one if I had had that conversation um and so yeah I think like I just kind of fell into that internship because they wanted someone from Stanford and I had like I it seemed like I was interested and then every single summer I felt like I made dramatic improvements into my productivity as an engineer and feeling competent like the first summer I really didn't know what I was doing but the last summer I interned at Facebook in 2013 I felt very comfortable actually to figure out how to manage a software project and figure out what change I needed to make in order to make progress yeah and I want to talk a little bit more about Facebook and we will get to that because I understand you worked there for a number of years uh doing Android development but what was your like after that internship did did that convert into a job or did you go work other places what what did you do upon completing your five years at school so at the end of my last internship 2013 um I I was actually kind of borderline but I was very lucky to get the return offer at Facebook and that was a huge confidence boost and then Stanford has this really nice policy where if you get an offer from an internship then Stanford will uh allow you to get two or 3 months to just go out and recruit other places too the idea being that they don't want the company to force the student to immediately accept or reject without having data points from other companies and so from September up until mid October I went on a Sprint and I collected I interviewed and talked to a bunch of companies I ended up collecting four other offers so I ended up with five offers um and I made a video about that actually where I talked about the actual numbers and what felt like it's a great video and I will link to that video in the description but if you can just kind of verbally summarize uh some of these offers this is like really like the I say like the Pinnacle of when I felt confident because I it was like every single summer I did an internship I got so many rejections from all the companies I really wanted to work at but finally this September through October period in 2013 I felt like okay now I actually come into interviews with confidence rather than feeling like I'm just super scared of what question I GNA ask and so I ended up if I recall correctly Google Twitter uh block or at that time it was called Square um Facebook of course and then Microsoft so five five companies I got offers from and um I felt like okay I I made it it was like some element of these are the companies I literally heard about growing up and I am getting offers from them it felt like this really cool full circle moment from someone who hadn't really programmed at all coming into college and now at the end of it had gotten all these offers um what's interesting is that I after ID gone through that whole process a professor of mine when I was doing research during the Academic Year in my fifth year he came to me and said hey rul like I know you have these offers at the big tech companies but I am thinking about starting a company and that was like very hard to turn down and so we can talk about that if you're interested then I ended up not doing the big tech company and I ended up doing the startup wow so so you had five offers on the table from some of the biggest brand name is tech companies and you walked away from those to work for your professor yeah it's so funny because I feel like you know I honestly did feel so grateful and so um happy at least initially that wow okay these are the companies I really dreamed about even at the beginning of college if you got if you landed an internship at Google or Facebook that was a big deal I wow you you must be competent you must be legit if you were able to but the human psychology is such a weird thing because as soon as I got the offers somehow it became less valuable to me and so I think part of it was just like I got it and I felt I did it I don't need to now go work there and part of it also I think there was some element of ego of you know Google and and Facebook they're going to hire a thousand college graduates in the next year I don't want to be one of a thousand I want to go be special and when a professor like someone in a position of power frankly comes to you and says hey I've been seeing your work I think you'd be a really great fit for this brand new Endeavor that I'm starting out it's a classic Silicon Valley story Professor does a company it's a ton of smart people you graduate from Stanford and you join it like how could you say no to that and so I did end up that was a kind of the thought process in my head I mean that's how Google started right like Google was a bunch of Stanford phds or two Stanford phds who just grabbed a bunch of their classmates and went and created you know multi-trillion dollar market cap Corporation right so uh I I can definitely understand the appeal of that uh on the note of you having those offers in hand and them just not feeling as appealing uh I'm a huge Star Trek fan and Spock rest in peace lard Neo has this quote where he says uh having and uh he says having is not so pleasing a thing as wanting it is not logical but it is often true so I think once you had those it's just like the novelty of the shininess wore off and you're like what else is shiny you start look you look up from the the treasure in your hand and you start to see all the other treasure out there right the the world becomes your oyster yeah that's so true and I mean it's a classic quote of like the journey is more valuable than the destination like focus on the journey not the Des destination and that was so true and there's also one more element too um of hey big Tech it will be big tech for a long time like I don't anticipate Google or Facebook to go anywhere in fact they've only grown in power and market cap since 2013 when I graduated and so there was also an element of hey if this is an opportunity that I don't think I will easily be able to replicate which is with the startup with the professor then I would rather do that uh action or do that opportunity now whereas I can hopefully if I have gained the skills now to get a job at Google hopefully I can repeat that in two or three years if I wanted to there was that element of scarcity I think or like the the the worry that it might disappear that also I think triggered ending up to join the startup yeah the fear of missing out the fomo yes exactly fomo so we're going to talk about what you learned working for your Prof and we're also going to talk a little bit about software engineering uh Concepts and skills you picked up but I do want to draw an immediate parallel to you taking a chance on your professor's company to later you having this uh this faithful meeting with uh WhatsApp yeah or yeah it was WhatsApp right yeah yeah yeah later on well the WhatsApp conversation happened like roughly the same time actually like I had um i' gotten this return offer from Facebook and then at that point they're independent companies yeah um and so I interview at whatsapp but at that point I mean as you probably recall like whatap wasn't that big in the US I had rough I had like kind of heard of it because I think some relatives of mine in India were using it yeah it's still not big in the US but it's huge overseas like it's like it's huge India that's how they communicate yeah yeah as everyone knows what eventually got acquired by by Facebook or meta and I remember while when I worked at meta for four and a half years there were people they had these user researchers who go to India and there were people in India who thought that the internet meant WhatsApp like their whole world their whole uh conception of the internet was communicating via WhatsApp and getting the weather and getting updates and talking to their friends and family through WhatsApp that's how dominant yeah WhatsApp has become in India so I didn't know that at the time but I did you know get an interview or an offer for um for WhatsApp and I talked to the founder which is super cool and then I ended up turning them down in order to go to Facebook so you know missed opportunity but so you would have ended up the same place but you probably would have ended up with you know Millions ended up with one or two extra zeros in my net worth if I had done the WhatsApp offer yeah uh but uh it does like it's not like the story had like a sad ending or anything you've had in a remarkable career so far over the past few years let's talk a little bit about that so you work with your professor uh and like what are some and I want to focus not just on like life lessons you've learned but also software engineering Concepts and things you've kind of Learned From The Trenches uh of doing software engineering in both the context of this small Tech startup this these giant corporations that you work for at least one of them uh and then of course your startup life now we're going to talk about that a little bit later so again I apologize for providing so much Exposition but I just want to like kind of structure the conversation for people following along at home that is kind of the arc we're going to go from small to big to small Lessons Learned along the way so maybe you can talk about those first few months working for your Prof yeah and so the I'll start with the conclusion and then I'll work backward into like how it felt so very quickly after I joined the startup got acquired or Aqua hired by Pinterest so I joined in summer of 2014 in early 2015 so maybe six or seven months later it was acquired and so I remember feeling at the time not super happy about it honestly I felt like it was a rug pull it's like okay I joined the startup and I wanted to build something meaningful for the world and I expected it to take a year 2 years probably longer to build something substantial and really make a connection with my co-workers and like learn from them and I felt like this ended so much more prematurely than what I had bargained for when I initially joined and so um you know I mean certainly you can't complain like it was a there was a tech article about it I showed my mom that was in in Tech with a picture of me it's like kind of a cool outcome but not what I had expected did but at the same time I actually feel like it ended up working out for the better because I actually really struggled during that six-month period I told you in my last year at Stanford I felt very confident I had gotten all these offers and um I was able to pass all the interviews and within a big company I felt like I could surgically make changes like minor changes to to do what I wanted and it was a huge ego hit CU I went to the startup there's no infrastructure right like literally I was a founding engineer there was like four people working we were all working together in a conference room and they just gave me a ton of responsibility like hey here's this very vague ambiguous thing go figure it out it was like deal we were dealing with like uh data infra so I was dealing with something called Hive as a way to um you know store and query data and I couldn't do it like I just didn't have the maturity at that point to be able to decompose a problem read a GitHub repository and figure out how to put the pieces together and I just needed a lot more handholding than I think it's a good fit for most early stage startups and so even though I was had mixed feelings about the acquisition I think looking back I think being able to go to Pinterest which is a much bigger company was like I think 400 or 500 people at the time which felt big uh it actually ended up working out really well uh when we joined in 2015 yeah so it's interesting that you say that uh you had trouble kind of like breaking problems down from like abstract specs in the form of like maybe GitHub issues and things like that or uh instructions handed down from High by like non-technical managers perhaps or other people like that and you have to figure out how to do this and that's something like we at free C Camp are like a very small team we often have to Grapple with such ambiguity I often tell people that it's really good to go straight from college into working at like a small organization like a small business small startup uh small charity something where there's only going to be a few developers you're going to be able to put your fingers in all the pies you know but it sounds like this is the the flip side of that where you didn't really have as many people that you could look to to learn from and there wasn't as much structure to guide your initial fora into software engineering uh so in I mean in light of all that like what would your advice be to people that are just graduating uh let's say they are getting a computer science degree and they have options they have the option of potentially going and working at a larger company or like not a company size is not a big deal but like the team size I guess um yeah like like what would be the the goldilock zone for team size for you if you were doing everything over again yeah I mean I think in a vacuum my general advice to uh new graduate would be go work in a structured environment and structured environment could take many different shapes and forms but generally that means in my mind like a midsize or larger company which has some amount of product Market fit so I think part of the issue here and I like I I don't think that your advice is necessarily bad like if you go work at a nonprofit or if you go work at a smaller company but it's been do it has some amount of structure like they have a product they have customers there's some amount of like repeatability in the work I think it could actually be a really good fit to learn ownership and learn how how to get things done with the startup that I joined in 2014 it felt very much like we had done some research academically in the lab that was part of and my professor was working very hard to figure out how can we monetize this academic idea and so there was no real and also we had taken in I think two million in funding we had gone through some incubator or like seed program yeah and so there was a lot of pressure that you have to grow like we have this vague interesting research how do we make that commercially viable and so the combination of a lack of a we had no product there was no talk of product Market fit because there was no product yet and then there's also this uh element of like how do we even talk to customers or how do we do how do we make this commercially viable which I don't think anyone in the company really was that good at and that's what led to um you know this kind of not so great experience as a new grad for me okay so um you get Aqua hired and you transition from kind of like not necessarily knowing what you're doing uh to kind of being the dog proverbial dog at the keyboard uh to uh I don't know if you remember that old meme the dog I have no idea what I'm doing uh to uh to being in a much more structured environment Pinterest you know you said like 400 500 people working there of course it's name brand product like you're you know your aunts and uncles have probably used it in the past so you when you go to Family reunions and stuff and you're talking about it like they they have some grasp on oh yeah that's like the photo pinboard app or something like right so um what did you learn during the first few months once you hit the ground in a larger more structured environment yeah so I think one big career transition that happened at Pinterest is that after the startup experience where I was doing a lot of data infra and machine learning stuff I actively chose to walk away from that which you know maybe in retrospect was a bad decision because right now as you know it's like ml AI is so hot and recommendation systems like all that stuff is has only grown in importance but I think for me I felt like I wanted to do something more tangible I wanted to be able to build something and have it show up in the production app which I didn't have any of that at Co with the startup that I was at just because we didn't have a product and it was also much more like academic like I wanted a product so I think being able to shift into Mobile development which I ended up doing Android development at Pinterest that was um a big change that I made within the first six months of me joining and the other reason I did that change also is because I I cared a lot about going back to 09 when I first entered Stanford I saw these people make mobile apps and they were just on their own shipping a product to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people I wanted that same thing and so I thought Android would be the easiest way for me to actually start hacking on things on my on my own like an indie hacker and just like be able to publish things and so I over the next few years I was able to publish several different Android apps and that was super fun and um also like helped me learn a lot yeah so uh so you've transitioned to something that is more tangible like the actual app that you know consumers like the end users of the tool not some recommendation engine that is completely abstracted away that most people wouldn't even understand it unless you took time to like get out of whiteboard and explain what it's doing and stuff like it's just invisible to most people and you're going to the most tangible layer the most front end of front end right uh so that's cool that you made that transition how did you pivot your career uh or pivot your skills like did you ask for an internal transfer did you start working on this like like how do you go from being somebody working on kind of a like a recommendation or AI system in the background to uh a different department within a relatively large company like Pinterest yeah I mean actually it worked out pretty easily I think one of the things I tell people is that ideally you should go work at a company where you have by default a lot of trust and autonomy and so at Pinterest there was not any formal process where I have to go apply for a brand new role I have to like fill out application form and talk to 20 people it was literally within the first few months of me joining I just told the skip level manager like hey here is what I think could be a really good fit for me and also the company here's why it makes sense for both parties and within a couple weeks I okay let's let's make it happen here are some opportunities here are some projects that could be a good fit same thing at at Facebook like Facebook I think is well known for just uh tons of responsibility and Trust given to the engineer and there are many many stories of people way more senior than me who like you know 10 15 years of experience and they did like backend development they were building up the continuous integration system or whatever and they transition into iOS development they're examples of that and I think that's a very powerful thing not only for to work at a company like that but also as the engineer you should have the confidence that you can easily pivot into a brand new domain and a lot of your knowledge will carry over and if you work hard you can become productive very quickly in a brand new domain okay awesome and just to be clear like uh just little uh uh vocab you said skip level engineer that's like the engine or skip level manager that's the manager above your current manager so you probably had a manager that was over that particular product that you were working on and you need to go a level above to get approval to move okay I just want to make sure I have that uh definition correct okay that's cool so uh yes like Facebook famously like everybody has access to production I'm not sure if it's still like that uh but like anybody can push to production like uh they've had some outages and stuff like that due to the dark side of being too I guess empowering and trusting but who knows all the invisible improvements that they've been able to rapidly ramp out that would have been mired in bureaucratic procedure had they not had the high level of trust that they have and like I would say like uh this is not an interview of me but like if I can opine on this very quickly yeah personally The Way We Run free code Camp is with a high degree of trust where a completely remote team everybody has different responsibilities I am everybody's direct charge right like I'm like kind of an in individual contributor working alongside everybody else we don't want to have this big bulky hierarchy expensive hierarchy of like manager and all this stuff we just want people to be able to work on what they think is the most important and if they want to shift from one thing to another and they can make kind of like a business case argument like hey this is a good use of scarce Stoner funds for us to develop this for example for like the English curriculum for example or uh making some improvements to some system that some people use but not everybody uses then like we can green light that and they can move over and they can start working on that and I I love that culture of trust and I'm thrilled to hear that you know Pinterest had that uh and that you know Facebook I guess famously has has that or had that uh the move fast and break things ER we'll get into some of that uh but uh it sounds like you had a pretty good time and you learned quite a bit uh so maybe you can talk about other things that you learned maybe you can just rattle off some rapid fire lessons from working at kind of the height of tech with alongside really good Silicon Valley San Francisco Bay Area uh software Engineers building with contemporary tools yeah I mean I think Pinterest overall was a great experience I think that uh one thing that might get overlooked occasionally is a peer group of who you work with matters a lot and so if you join this old you know I'm trying to think of com like Oracle not to pick on them but you know join some like sap Oracle like this compy has been around for 50 years frankly a lot of your um or maybe I'll give you a more concrete example General Motors so I had friends who ended up sticking around in Michigan they went to like the University of Michigan did mechanical engineering and they took a job at Ford or General Motors and the median age of one of the workers there is like 50 or 45 and that's not a bad thing but if you're a 22-year-old and you're looking for that level of cohesion and learning and opportunity and there's a lot of people above you who are at a different life stage that can cause some amount of conflict or maybe not conflict but it can cause uh some tension of like you wanted to move faster and you can't so at Pinterest it was a relatively young company at the time I think it was founded in 2010 or 20 uh 2009 and so you know still relatively young most of the engineers were actually quite young they were all you know these mid 20 early 30s folks and there was a cultural cohesion that I think was super valuable so that was one thing it's like in a job don't just think about the work of the project think about who are the people you're going to be working with um another thing that comes to mind is growth growth effectively solves all problems like it doesn't matter if masks masks problems certainly it Mas all problems so like it doesn't matter if you're like oh you know my manager is like they said something weird to me or like um you know like this project didn't go as well but Pinterest at the time it just felt like this no like I worked on a project which actually ended up not working out at all and they killed it it was called shopping or buyable pins where you could actually buy a product directly in Pinterest totally failed but the core of Pinterest which was about discovering images and saving them to different pin boards that was such a strong product and it was growing internationally at the time it was growing domestically at the time every month you would see this dramatic growth and users which that was you knew that the company would succeed and that led to rather than a mindset of scarcity where people were always arguing about what project to take on there was actually an opposite mindset where it's like hey if you want to help we'll give you we'll load you up with tons of responsibility will give you feedback you can do whatever you want and I think that's another huge lesson is that that's why Silicon Valley I think works the way it does is that there's an addiction to growth because that addiction to growth is what allows you to mess up a lot and still succeed at the end and so you want to ideally work in an environment where which is growing rapidly and you can take on as much as you're able to yeah absolutely um and uh that's one of the things that I want to talk to you about is the fact that to some extent like growth has slowed a little bit like Venture Capital funding has slowed uh and a lot of people like I saw an excellent um talk that I'm going to link to in the description by pragmatic engineer uh where he did like a conference talk and he talked about the correlation between the Federal Reserves uh risk-free rate uh the Fed rate uh I I can't remember all the words that you used to describe this rate but basically we had like near zero interest rates for a very long time during the big startup boom uh the app uh Revolution where you know companies like Pinterest like Facebook uh like Instagram like what app were gaining you know hundreds of millions of users and were able to just grow so quickly that they could do whatever they wanted because they had this abundance mindset and they didn't feel risk aversion like they would feel if the coffers were suddenly tightened uh and uh I think for a long time there were very few layoffs and things like that to some extent uh that has been reversed uh with the rise in interest rates which disincentivizes like you know speculative investment from venture capitalist my understanding the way it works is if you are you know the Saudi Arabian government or if you're you know the California pension uh cpers or whatever or if you're just like a high net worth individual who would normally like just be able to put all their money into you know index funds or something like that and and expect like a certain level of growth uh when you can make 5% just by throwing your money into a savings account at a bank then more speculative Investments like uh investing in small companies that may or may not work out and Venture Capital my understanding is you get like an entire basket of companies and you know a majority of them are going to fail but one of them might be a stripe one of them might be an Airbnb right and uh as a result you can kind of like spread a whole lot of bets and and know that you're going to like like statistically make that money back but there's a lot of disincentive to that when you can just much more safely make the money uh thanks to the high interest rates so my understanding is that this change that happened you know over the past few years like the interest rate has gradually gone up and it may eventually go back down but it's back at around historic levels and in fact like near zero interest rates were uh a historic aberration that was not that's not common for interest rates to be that low in any country other than maybe like Japan which has had like extended low interest rates and even deflation and stuff right so um the reason I say all this is just to give people some quick context in case they don't have time to watch that pragmatic engineer talk uh but I do encourage you to watch it and watch this QA afterward but um I'm not sure if you've seen that talk but can you talk a little bit about um now that growth is not uh I mean obviously investors still want growth that's why you invest in a company is you want the stock to go up so you can you know sell the stock at a higher price than you bought it you know in the future right um and all that um that stock price is is discounted cash flow values of the expected earnings of that company in perpetuity right so um if uh I guess my question sorry this is like a really rambling question but how has that changed things in the valley and like uh your experience as both an engineer as a startup founder who's gone out and raised VC who's gone through why combinator a very prestigious uh accelerator program in the Bay Area uh like like how do you see things having changed for businesses in Tech yeah the way I think about it is that the interest rates will dictate what is the priority at the moment is it growth or profit with a lower interest rate then there will be more focus on growth and with a higher interest rate there will be more focus on profit so I do think that businesses are very short-term focused which is you know good or bad but that's the fact of how a lot of companies operate so I think the meta point I want to make first is is that for people watching who are thinking about going into Tech or they're already in Tech I want you to realize that your career is long so just because the interest rate in right now in 2024 2025 is is higher than it's been historically I want you to succeed and I want you to have a huge like a a fulfilling long very uh highly paid career for 20 years that's the time Horizon on which I want you to think about 10 or 20 years and so if you zoom out like that I do think that there's a broader Tailwind of the importance of software and you can benefit from that yeah so coming back to the conversation here though I do think that I feel lucky for that that it was like a three four five maybe 10 year period even where interest rates were quite low and it was a huge emphasis on growth and that emphasis on growth coincided with when I was growing my career and I was able to kind of supercharge my growth or even perhaps earn more money I got lucky to be part of these IPOs that really did well um and I think now there is a lot more focus on we need to not hire as much maybe even lay people off in order to control our costs and show shareholders that uh we are diligent with with our spending and we're actually working toward a profit or we maybe we are profitable so a couple things I'll say is the one is that tech industry now is huge it's like literally 10x bigger than what it was 20 years I mean I made that up but it was it's dramatically bigger than it was what what the tech industry was 5 10 20 years ago and so I think that you know we'll talk about job searching tactics in a little bit but I think but the number one advice I have for folks is that don't view the tech industry as this huge blob of like uh a single blob of like just a tech job or not they're pockets of the tech industry which will be growing faster than the average and they'll be hiring a lot right the tech industry is big enough now where you're going to have these discrepancies so just focus on those figure out where you can have a unique value to the world or to that company um and the other thing I would add is that startups and big Tech is very different big Tech if you if you work at Google or meta or any of these big companies then there's a quarterly earnings report and there's going to be a lot of focus on how do we make sure that we show high EPS earnings per share how do we show growth how do we show all these different things on a three-month time Horizon so you're on that clock whereas a startup usually there's perhaps a bit more leeway if they're like just seed round or the yesterday's a series a they might not be as focused on profit because their whole they sold a promise they sold a narrative of rapid growth yeah so those companies might still be hiring and I would just encourage people to think about the just like the difference between early stage startups which have a different mindset compared to later stage tech companies awesome so one question I have just a quick follow-up question before we move on is do you think that a lot of those jobs like where you know Facebook's XYZ Department laid off end people or um Google's XYZ product line uh like they laid off and people who are working on that product like do you think that those particular products within those companies are going to hire more people in the future or do you think that they're going to just have smaller teams going forward and they're going to open new products and hire to fill those teams or how do you I guess how do you see those companies going about you know rebuilding their um their engineer base if you will like like the the people and do you think it's going to be just like uniform across the entire company they're just bringing more people on or do you think that like there's going to be more settled solved problems that are being maintained and there are going to be new areas they bring people on I definitely think that it'll be lumpy in that there are always going to be a couple projects which have the L share of time and attention and money in big tech company and then a lot of a lot of products that are just going to be in maintenance mode and then a lot that are also just you know not that important or just like the bare minimum to get Buy in terms of like I don't know like a support function so um I would say that one one thing which is really interesting with big Tech in particular is that money is not the scarce resource they have bil like Google and apple and you know all these you know Fortune 100 companies they actually have more cash than they know what to do with like they have literally tens of billions of dollars in the bank or maybe hundreds of billions and so for them I think the way they make decisions about resourcing is not so much about can we afford it because they can definitely afford it it's much more a conversation of what do we actually want to prioritize in terms of a bet and what do we think what projects do we think could turn into a multi-billion dollar opportunity because if you're Google you're not going to waste your time with something which can only quote unquote only make 10 million a year that's way too small for you to even think about you need to figure out what are the projects that could potentially add a billion or 10 billion or 100 billion to your market cap and so that is I think the if I had to guess like what the Google leadership or apple leadership or whatever that's how they're thinking about it in terms of Staffing is okay in this new environment the time Horizons might have shrunk so instead of a 10-year time Horizon we want something to be showing uh profit or Revenue in 2 years instead of 5 years and what do we think is the top priority and then we staff those accordingly and a lot of things that are much more experimental they might get cut and then never come back in in this environment awesome given that uh what kind of developer roles are still being filled uh what kind of devs are still getting jobs in at like the higher like I think a lot of devs can go and get a job uh that pays them less than they were making it at like a Fan Company because they could they could go to work at a bank or a hospital chain or something like that and apply the skills they learned working at at Google or Facebook but uh what kind of devs are still getting jobs at you know big tech companies where you know I guess I guess again I don't want to stereotype like those jobs as being the most competitive but I I would argue in many way I mean working for NASA might be way harder than working at uh at Google for example but yeah but like for the for the I guess high paying Developer jobs what kind of uh skills do you think people like those employers are looking for and what kind of backgrounds do you think they're hiring for yeah so I I have a bit of a hard time answering that question because I think the way I think about it is that for people I work with people who are like I had this company called Taro which is about helping Developers for people who join Taro for you know the developer that I I think about I want you to be in the top 10% of whatever it is that you're doing and so if you're a mobile if you let's say you come to me and say hey um I'm an Android developer do you think that's a good fit for me like will I have a job that way and I will say like broadly speaking I do think that mobile is not as hot as what it was when I was you know picking it up in 2015 2016 now the hot area might be like data or ml or AI but if you're in the top 10% of Android I can guarantee you will get a job right so I think that a lot of the dialogue or conversation ends up being okay for the median developer will the median Android developer get a good job versus a median you know like SQL database engineer and you know I'm not actually that sure maybe data or AI will do better I think it probably does do better than mobile but in terms of compensation or in terms of being able to get jobs I would say both yeah like those are correlated in the sense that the more job opportunities there are for like a machine learning engineer that will often skew toward higher compensation but I think for people who are watching I want you to have the belief that you are in the top 10% of your field like you have worked hard enough you have the right Network you have the skills to be in the top 10% of Android developers or machine learning developers and if you're in the top 10% then I can guarantee that you will find a way to get a really compelling job opportunity so it's kind of a non-answer to your question but I do think that um as long as you focus on the Network and just being one of the better people in your field then no matter what part of software you're in I think you'll end up having a good job and we can talk about tactics and how to do that yeah but that's how I think about that job search um rather than thinking about the technology of like oh I want to learn you know JavaScript I Want To Learn Python I want to learn you know um this particular framework I don't think about it from that perspective I think about it more in terms of who are the people I know or the knowledge I have which will more easily allow me to become a top 10% developer in that field and if I do that then everything else will take care of itself so it sounds like you're advocating for really going deep and specializing uh as a developer uh right now and and historically like generalists as you said like University degrees often produce generalist developers and and through a series of internships through a series of jobs they come to be Specialists like you specialized in Android app development and worked as an Android developer for many years and you're probably in the top percent of Android developers on earth right uh but that that that came with a whole lot of dedication and time and energy uh what would you say to somebody who is just coming out of a computer science program or is just finishing like a series of free C Camp certifications or is just finishing like doing a whole bunch of self-study at the library and answering a bunch of questions on leak code or something like that like what would you say to them in terms of uh how they should approach specializing and do you think they should try to specialize now or do you think they should try to specialize through employment I I do think that broadly speaking going deep in one area is very valuable early in career depth I think is super valuable more than breath early in career because I don't want to hire someone who have to spoon feed and handhold on every domain it like what's much more attractive as an employer is you tell me hey I built five Android apps you can see how good they are in the Play Store clearly I'm competent I'm one of the better endroid developers out there I can come in and I can lead this function or at least I can be independent most Junior developers most entry level developers are not independent they like in fact like uh at Facebook E3 Engineers which is entry level Engineers were often considered more of a neutral or negative to the team rather than a positive right the idea is that hey they're going to come in and there actually going to be a tax on the team on the other developers because they're going to have to um ask a bunch of questions take up time with other developers they actually will end up hurting the productivity of the team later on it will help but if you can instead flip that narrative and say hey I'm going to come in as a fresh graduate from a boot camp or a computer science program and here are things that I know how to do really well as evidenced by all these published projects I think that it really does help getting you a job and the other element of it too which I think is super important is that I think it's helpful to be polarizing and what I mean by that is don't try and be everything to everyone but if you say something really generic like I'm a full stack developer and I do Java and I do Python and I do you know list all 20 languages my immediate reaction to that is that you probably don't know any of those languages really well whereas instead if you pick a lane and say hey I am a very deep Android developer I know cotlin I know Java I know jetpack compos I know all these different um tools and Technologies related to Android now I feel much better about actually hiring you for that role yeah you're not going to be a good fit for like a machine learning role now so you've kind of elate that you you've become polarizing and you're eliminating a lot of jobs for yourself but for the jobs where you do declare yourself to be a good fit you have a much much higher chance so that's another benefit I think of specializing yeah absolutely that's super helpful be polarizing as rul says okay yeah awesome so that is like super actionable advice for folks out there uh and yeah it's like what would you consider to be enough of a general Baseline if you just had to Rattle off some skills that you think like everybody has just off the top of your head like every developer should probably know these key things and then once you know those key things start specializing like just off the top of your head what what are what are some things that you think are super valuable I mean I think that just in a normal curriculum just having a very basic familiarity with I would say like three or four languages is important just so I have faith that you could pick up something else quickly like the common ones might be Java C++ python JavaScript like just familiarity with a handful of those so it's not like you only know one language that's not a good indicator for a strong software engineer if you only know one like you you should be able to learn and pick up different things that's one terminal familiarity like are you able to run commands and understand how they work is an is kind of obvious one that most developers will have to deal with um and then I think one thing which is also for me I bias heavily toward people who have something published like put your name on something that you have majority built out so not part of a team of five or 10 or 100 people that's the beauty of Android I think is that you can or mobile is that you can literally publish end to end an entire app with just you that's pretty amazing even it's not like back end maybe it's harder to show showcase what you're doing but show me a GitHub repository where you've done something novel something Beyond a tutorial I think that is a really core skill of every developer and then once you have that then you can kind of specialize a bit more just like show me that you have the competency to do do something without the training wheels of a tutorial awesome and I want to go to something you've said in some of your videos and your interviews you've said that Developer jobs are high leverage what do you mean by that yeah the idea of Leverage is how much output do you get for a certain amount of input so like the classic way of contrasting it is it with taxi drivers and so you know if you're a average Taxi Driver you might go from point A to point B like 20 minutes and then a really really amazing Taxi Driver can get you from point A to point B in like 15 minutes because they like take turns in a more effective way they don't fully stop at stop signs you know all these things they can do to cut the time down on the other hand the gap between an average developer who can like build a project or like add a feature from A to B um it might take them a month a much much better developer can probably get the same feature done in one tenen the time yeah right like literally it might take a day or two that's where you get the term of 10x developers so do you believe just for the record because a lot of people this is somewhat polarizing discussion do you believe 10x Engineers are a thing yes they're 100% a thing and in fact 100x developers and 1,000x developers are also a thing so who is a famous 100x or THX like like a Steve wnc type character or somebody like that I mean like there are these legendary programmers that you keep hearing about like Jeff Dean Steve wasak sunj Gat um but I think a lot of it is also contextual of like a 10x engineer is not just in a vacuum a 10x engineer a lot of how they have such a huge amount of impact is that they know the business context so for example going back to this idea of like this arbitrary like feature a to feature B like you're building out something so a 10x engineer is not someone who writes 10x more code they could maybe say hey actually 90% of the project spec to build pro feature a whatever we call it Feature Feature B 90% of it is actually stupid we're not going to do any of that no one cares about that I'm not even going to think about it all I really care about is the 10% of the project which actually matters I'm going to spend my time coding that there there you go now you've become a 10x engineer because um you're focusing on the work that actually matters and so yeah that's not about how much technical prowess you have or technical depth you have it's more about understanding what does a customer want and how do you back into that um so I think it's obvious to me that those kind of Engineers do exist and they'll become more and more prominent actually with AI tools which will magnify The Leverage of a developer awesome yeah so it sounds like uh a 10x developer or 100x or a THX is a developer who knows what not to do what is not going to bear fruit what doesn't matter for the I guess business case or whatever they're trying to solve for and is able to see like the through line to where they need to be and not squander a lot of time doing other things and uh yes like if you're just trying to Output code and get a bunch of commits in and and have something to talk about during the standup meeting that may not be the path to becoming a 10x or 100x developer whereas you know um just like thinking really hard and then developing the solution to the fun Al underlying problem after asking why a whole bunch and getting to the the root of the problem so you believe that's the path to becoming a tenx developer yeah 100% so I think one very common template to become a 10x developer just working on the right thing like don't waste your time like the reality in software because the beauty of software and also the hard part about software is that it's so easy to write and rewrite and delete that you know you have these developers or companies that have millions and millions of lines of code and the majority of it is like not doing very much so part of it is like figure out what to actually work on um there's another element too the second very common template to become a 10x developer is make the people around you better like there's a good example when I was working at Facebook which is a developer and we had this kind of messy module or code base uh and what he did which is very simple is like just break it down into different components so now each developer when they write code they don't have merge conflix they don't have to step on the toes of other developers who are you know adding their own logic so that's actually kind of a simple change it's refactoring this component to make it independent but he made it so that every other developer on the team could move a lot faster so that's a very easy way to now all of a sudden become a 10x engineer because you've made five people around you you know twice as efficient right so that's another very common uh yeah common practice as a hiring manager which I know you are uh you can look at potential hires as is this person going to potenti like use critical thinking and reasoning to identify the most important work that needs to be done and the best way to do that at any point and that is going to be a huge value unlock or is this person going to figure out ways of refining processes to just make the overall engine hum more efficiently uh within my team yeah that's great Insight I think one of the criteria in fact for the more senior people that we hire in big Tech and even with Taro like the people who I work with is Will will they make me better will they make the people around me better and if I don't actually have faith that there's something that you can teach something that you can uh talk about that makes my like me or the teammates around me better I probably won't hire you like that's almost like baked into the criteria of do you have something to offer to uplevel the team awesome I have some rapid fire questions for you I want to be mindful of your time but I have so many things to ask you because you have expertise as you mentioned you know ter uh Taro I think I think it's joint taro.com yeah joint taro.com yep exactly yeah uh your startup uh which has gone through YC combinator and uh you know uh I I'm a part of your slack group and like uh you've got a lot of momentum around just helping people with developer careers so you are precisely the kind of person I should be peppering with developer career question so I'm not going to uh squander this opportunity if you were working at a big tech company right now how would you approach changing jobs the number one advice I have for people who want to change jobs is figure out your unfair advantage and leverage that so what that means is um like let me tell you what not to do if there's an open opportunity on LinkedIn or indeed.com and you apply for it I just think that the amount of effort you put into that is going to yield so few results because a job posting on LinkedIn Within 24 hours I've heard of stories where they get literally hundreds or thousands of applicants so you are competing against perhaps a thousand or 10,000 people applying for that job so instead what I want you to do is I want you to figure out what is your unfair Advantage where do you have a referral a strong referral for someone who works at a company who can advocate for you and so now instead of competing with 10,000 people applying for a job online you might be one of three or four people who have a strong referral to that company or maybe when you look at your resume or LinkedIn something will stand out like okay clearly the thing that stands out to me is that you are very spiky like you're po polarizing in terms of being an exceptional um I don't know like a iOS Developer so okay now that should be how you frame your job search like figure out companies that really are desperate for an iOS engineer and now you have a way bigger Advantage there compared to like Google yeah Google I'm sure there's probably some job opening for iOS Vel at Google I'm sure there is but you don't have an unfair advantage to get into that whereas a startup that is really focused their whole strategy product strategy is focused on mobile and iOS in particular you have a unique ability to go to them and say hey I can fulfill your need and so that would be like the number one advice I have if you're in big Tech figure out where do you have a huge Advantage compared to the general population and Orient your whole job search around that what are uh some of the important aspects of soft skills you've talked a lot about the importance of soft skills can you define soft skills and uh what are some specific soft skills that Dev developers should focus on that will yield big returns to effort yeah I mean soft skills is basically anything which is not directly related to the technology to the coding and that that was the Gap that I observed especially among engineers in myself with soft skills is a huge part of why I even felt comfortable or I had this desire to start join taro.com is I felt like that was very underserved for technical folks um so like a very common one that I talk about is how do you ask a good question that is such a fundamental soft skill is I don't care how smart you are I don't care your background you are going to have questions about the code base or about the company or about the team whenever you join a new environment inevitably so how do you frame your question in a way which not only gets you the information you you want but also critically is valuable to build a relationship with the people around you and you know there's like a I was just going to say like like relays that you do have some it's not a a quotequote dumb question it's a well-informed kind of surgical question yes that is going to make them respect you oh good question yes that and also like you can also view the question as an asset that will help build up your social capital so for example if you ask a question in in a DM that's one of the things I tell people not to do because now You've Lost That knowledge that that interaction is now lost in The Ether between me and Quincy whereas if I put it in a public forum and I tell Quincy Hey over here in slack or in this like email thread I left a question I think you you have a ton of great Insight I would love for you to answer it now the next person who onboards after me they can go through that history and benefit from it too it's like kind of having the awareness or thought process to figure figure out how can I ask a question in a way which gets me the answer builds a relationship and also helps everyone else around me like the next person who on boards I think that's the kind of thing that really does differentiate a 10x developer and average developer and I think a lot of people Get Lucky by having a mentor or having someone in their career who can help them with that a lot of people don't they just get stuck doing things in the same old way and that's what I'm hoping that we can try and um make some of that knowledge free for everyone 100% that's one of the reasons it's an honor to be able to uh grab you and ask questions and and hopefully improve at asking questions as I've got like 50 hours of experience this year doing podcast interviews right so uh what are some other soft skills because I'm sure there are more like there are a lot of them are there any other ones that immediately come to mind that you think people neglect I mean I think the another huge one that comes up again and again is uh career growth right so how can I advocate for myself how can I do skillful uh self-promotion in a way which is not oh here's how great I am I want to promotion now help me instead talk about okay here's the work I've done here's why I think it could benefit you and oh in the process of benefiting you and benefiting the team and helping the company I would love to continue to grow my career and take it even further how can we work together to make sure that happens like framing the conversation in a way where your career growth is not on the back burner and yet it's also not the like be all end all of what your manager is thinking about and recognizing that that is thing that comes up again and again where people get frustrated like I'm not growing in my career and then I ask about what are they doing are they asking questions are they proactive about getting feedback are they trying to figure out what the career Matrix even looks like at their company and I think a lot of people just haven't done that much thinking about it and so being able to have some sort of framework or uh uh structured approach to thinking about performance RW promotion is another fundamental soft skill that most Engineers don't think about and uh I want to point out that you have I think twice as many followers on LinkedIn as I do you've got like more than 100 thousand followers on Linkin which is not like a platform that a lot of people think of in terms of uh I guess self-promotion and establishing credibility uh can you talk a little bit about the use of LinkedIn for yourself uh as a developer as an entrepreneur and as uh you know whether LinkedIn is a helpful tool for uh developers trying to gradually build up their reputation and their Network and things like that yeah I mean so LinkedIn and YouTube are hugely important to me as a way for me to share a lot of the opinions or advice they have or just share the opinions of other people who I might be able to interview and and share their platform and so the way I think about it is what I care about is I have this thing called Taro it's a membership product that I genuinely believe can help people in their career and so YouTube and Linkedin I you asked about LinkedIn LinkedIn is a really powerful way for me to tell people about that I don't do it in like a marketing way I try not to the way I think about LinkedIn or really any social media is that the way you win the way you grow the way you add value is you need to show up every day every week and you need to provide a ton of value for free over a long period of time and if you do that consistently not just for a week or a month but if you do that for two or three years like I've been doing I've been on YouTube since 2019 I've been posting almost every day on LinkedIn for two and a half years or more than two years if you do that then inevitably you will start to have people who recognize your name recognize your brand and then trust you enough you've earned their trust that then you can direct them toward um a video or Taro or whatever else it is that you think that will help them but you have to earn that by showing up every day day for a long period of time yeah cuz I mean a lot of people just kind of show up and they think that like they don't need to spend years potentially building out uh not just the skills but also the reputation and this also where quantity over quality comes back too right it's like if you come and say I'm going to spend you know a week writing out this amazing LinkedIn post talking about my whole life story I want to put it out there it might do well but don't get me wrong like I'm sure if someone comes out on LinkedIn and like talks about something really compelling it'll do well but the way you actually do well the way you win over the long term is you need to have enough quantity not not not like quantity for the sake of quantity but like you need to continue trying to get better at your craft over a long period um and only then do you earn the right to be able to you know capture capture people's attention yeah absolutely now I will say that if you like having written I think more than 500 programming tutorials over the past 10 years myself uh there have been a few like outlier hits and I didn't necessarily know in some cases that those would be outlier hits but there were some where I'm like wow I've got something really special here and uh I'll point to like a post I discovered recently my my friend sent it to me and it was this guy's story of how his father died and he went back to India and he ran his father's Chemical Company I don't know if youve read this amazing story but it's it's basically like it's a single article but it represents like an entire two years of his life like learning how to run a chemical company and learning how like all the Cal differences and everything he had to to take in having grown up in the US and having to go back and and communicate with his uh his staff and uh like basically figure out a way to gracefully exit with the company and find find uh an acquirer and uh I mean that is like you know a 30 minute read 40-minute read there's like I can only imagine how many hundreds of hours went into that but I'm sure tens of thousands of people read that so there is uh something to be said for just having a single very high quality uh article but I would be willing to bet that that that that uh developer had spent a lot of time uh just writing over the years just blogging regularly and things like that so so they had build up those muscles and built up that kind of like mentality so uh even if it feels like a lot of your quantity is not hitting it's not connecting with audience and stuff you're still getting benefit in terms of you know as you said earlier like the way to become good at coding is just code a whole lot right that's probably the best single indicator of somebody who's good at coding is somebody who spends a whole lot of time coding and also content is another area where it is extremely high leverage in that the gap between an average piece of content which might get I don't know for like for my LinkedIn an average post might get 20,000 views Impressions um an amazing post might get 10 million so like it's not just like oh it's like 20% better it's like literally 100x better in terms of the amount of traffic or amount of like impact you can have on the world with that piece of content which is another reason why I think um you know content social media can be really powerful if used effectively yeah awesome well I want to ask a few quick questions about uh developers like who are applying for jobs right now uh let's presume uh I think you and I have established that you need to have General skills general knowledge you want to specialize in you want to be polarizing and you want to be in the top percent working with even if it's some relatively esoteric tool like you could go get a Cobalt job right now if if you really want to go deep on Cobalt there are Cobalt jobs and there are not a lot of people that want to work with Cobalt you could there are lots of people that are still using like cold fusion WordPress like old technology to run their uh you know e-commerce operations and if you become a known quantity in those fields you can go get a job right but let's say uh let's say that you've already done all that and you want to go out and get a job conventional wisdom is uh you try to shop around uh a whole lot of different competing offers and and like collect a lot of offers like you were able to time your acquisition of different offers from Big tech companies to where you had this window and you could like kind of play them against each other and negotiate do you think with the job uh Market the way it is for developers right now developers still have the luxury to do that I think some developers do I mean definitely there are not all developers are created equal or not all profiles I should say are created equal like if you went to a name brand school if you are working at open AI I can guarantee you there's like hundreds of companies knocking on your door to hire an open AI engineer for example right so I do think um it's possible it's certainly harder now compared to 2021 or 2020 um what I would say is that figure out what is actually important to you like if you're starting out your career and you're breaking into tech for the first time then it's not that important to get five offers like what you want really at the end of the day is you want to get one offer which is compelling and hopefully at a name brand company or institution and then you leverage that as a jumping off point for your next job like don't think about like very few developers these days will stick around at a job for like 20 years so I think a better approach is okay like let me do this uh job for the time being and then it'll open up new possibilities and then once I have those in my hand I'll then evaluate them and make the best decision for myself but right now you know just think about the next one or twoe time Horizon rather than thinking about the next 20 years awesome and do you think that uh developers still have like like would you still encourage people to negotiate salary the way they did historically or do you think that the job market has fundamentally changed where that that's not safe to do anymore no I think the answer to negotiation is always yes if done in the right way so like you don't want to obviously piss people off and like um like lie about I have this other offer like obviously that's kind of going to put you in hot water but I do think that no matter the job market Condition it's always worth trying to negotiate it might not be effective today because you whereas in 2021 you might have had like five offers where today you might only have one offer of course the amount of Leverage you have is a lot lower but I still think it's worth um making an ask and it might be rejected but at least you've made the ask awesome what would you say to a developer who's getting into the field field and has heard you know Jensen hang the CEO of Nvidia say oh you don't need to teach your kids to code anymore like coding is going to be a solved thing and we're just going to have ai magic that takes care of all the software engineering like what would you say to somebody who is feeling discouraged because they've heard some kind of like marketing talk like that and uh yeah like like what would you I don't want to like you know cat the question in too much uh but but just like okay I'm going to I'm going to pretend to this person yeah I don't know I mean I'm pretty sure my job is just going to be automated by the time I finished learning all this stuff anyway yeah I would say that first of all I disagree with this um hypothesis that coding jobs will disappear I think the way we code and the types of problems we solve with coding those might change and so if you are expecting to have the same kind of job like let's say you're liting a for Loop or like doing these more rudimentary programming tasks you should expect that to change but the actual job of being able to communicate with the computer whether we call that a programmer or a developer or engineer or something else we call it in the future that problem I am very confident will continue to be in high demand and in fact the demand will will uh increase a lot in the coming years and so um that's the first thing I would say is that I just think that it's not true that programmers will not exist in the next 20 or 30 years like they will exist the other thing I would say is that um your goal go should be to be in the top 10% like your goal is not to be at bottom of the barrel like barely scraping by developer I want you if you're going to enter this field you you should be and I want you to be in the top 10% and so if you think you have a chance of doing that then that gives you that should give you more confidence that your job in particular will be really well taken care of and in fact even more important um because like you have this skill set that not most people in the world have and you can that the your leverage will be magnified Amplified With The Changes coming to programming with AI let's say somebody okay let's take two candidates or two people right there is a software engineer or like a computer science uh senior at Stanford who has done a few internships and they are graduating and they are entering the job force and I would probably you know posit that aside from being like a proven 10x developer or something they are probably the hottest commodity for uh a lot of like entry-level jobs right uh what would somebody outside of you know the brand of Stanford outside of the I guess cultural cache of uh comp established computer science degree programs like having a bachelor's in computer science that carries a lot of weight and I tell everybody if they're going to go to university they should absolutely study computer science I think it's a great field to go into but let's say hypothetically you don't have that luxury I've got an English degree I'm a teacher I'm 30 right this actually describes where I was when I started coding back you know 15 years ago uh what would I need to do to be able to get to that level of appealing this that that uh recent Stanford or the person who's about to graduate from Stanford's computer science program yeah we get to I would say first of all I don't think the goal should be to be that appealing to everyone like the goal should be how do I you're not trying to appeal to everyone right you're trying to get one maybe two or three job offers so that means that really what you care about is there's a set of 10 people at these two or three companies that will make a decision a judgment on you your job is to impress them you don't care about the 100,000 other people or companies that are hiring you care about two companies that are going to hire you and take a bet on you that's all you care about so let's reduce the problem scope into something much more tractable um the other thing I would say is that trust is the most important asset when it comes to hiring and so the benefit of now having a much smaller problem space is that you're not trying to build trust with 100,000 people which is impossible unless you like you know if you went to Stanford then maybe inherently you have some trust like people kind of just assume that you have some level of legitimacy but you don't have that luxury and so all you really care about is how can I quickly build trust with two or three people at these key companies and the way you do that is again go and leverage your unfair Advantage so let's say you you an English major you probably have let's say that you worked as like a um a historic you know some or you work at the library and it just so happens that there was a customer or like a a visitor at the library who was working in Tech that guess what that is your unfair Advantage go and talk to that person and say hey I want to learn more about your job and your company can we hop on a call and if you do that you know with like 10 people I guarantee one or two of them will feel comfortable they they'll trust you and therefore they will feel comfortable advocating for you in a particular job so might not like it's hard to give like a template answer but like I think figure out be creative with how you can talk to people how you can find opportuni like maybe go to a uh like build an app and ask for feedback on it like figure out ways you can engage with people so they start to trust you and as soon as you have a critical mass of people who trust you that is how you're able to get a job even though you don't have this you know Harvard degree on your resume yeah yeah and just in case anybody's curious my unfair Advantage was I was pretty good at winning hackathons so I won a bunch of hackathons fa Advantage yeah that's amazing and by doing that then I kind of proved out the concept of me as a software engineer and made it like I guess less risky for an a hiring manager to take a chance on me and bring me in as you know one of those lowlevel kind of like net negative Engineers on a team who's gradually going to learn the skills and eventually be a net positive right so uh if anybody wants to learn more about that I've written a book it's free it's called how to learn to code and get a developer job it echoes a lot of what you said here rul but there's a whole lot of additional Insight that you've layered on and of course I'm going to encourage everybody to check out tarot uh is there anything else that people should check out uh from you uh I mean I think that they should follow you on LinkedIn I follow you on LinkedIn I encourage everybody you you're constantly showing up and delivering value to people there uh but but like just in imparting like anything else people should do that's great I think LinkedIn and Joint tara.com are where I am very active YouTube also I have a YouTube channel under my name r p so would love for people to check that out and share whatever feedback or questions they have I'd love to help out R it's been such a pleasure to talk to you thank you for everything you've done for the free cocing community over the past four or five years through uh creating these free learning resources and creating resources through other means that I know like a there's a huge overlap there's a big Vin diagram of people who are like making use of freeo Camp people who are like learning from you directly through your YouTube channel so thanks for everything you're doing for the developer Community keep it up man yes it is really my pleasure and I appreciate all the work that you all have been doing as well at free code Camp so it's been it's been great awesome well everybody uh who's made it this far be sure to uh subscribe to the podcast feed if you're listening like make sure you click the plus thing and and follow in apple podcast or in Spotify or wherever and uh yeah look for more insight like this until next week happy coding bye\n"