networking, becoming an independent, and paypal w/ kent c. dodds

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Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco, VACO.com is how to get in touch with me old fashioned email social media at T D S and T D E S S E Y N. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. And give the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do? What do you are part of? And then we'll go from there. Yeah. So my name is Kent C.

Dodds. I live in Utah with my wife and four kids and one dog. And I have been doing the software thing a full time since I graduated from BYU in 2014. I had a couple of software related internships before then. But yeah, so around like seven-ish years that I've been doing this, and I'm pretty much 100% JavaScript and HTML, CSS stuff. So web is my thing. I do web. And I worked at a number of companies. I think we'll talk about that in detail later. Right now I'm working at Remix, and that's what the CD next to my name is. There it is. I was going to ask you about that.

Very clever, Ken. Very clever. Yeah. So yeah, Remix is a web framework that enables you to build really awesome user experiences without feeling bad about the code it took to get you there. And developers feel bad about code to get them there sometimes? Oh, yeah, man. Like, yeah. Before Remix, there were always the parts of the code that I had written that I was like, I don't feel really great about that. like in a full application, like there maybe sometimes for features like I just nailed that, but right. In the whole application, there were definitely areas that I was like, oh, I kind of would rather do that differently.

But with remakes, I've got a code base of 30,000 lines of code and I feel great about it all. And that's what remakes allowed me to do. That's why I liked it so much I joined the company. There you go, there you go, I love it. So let's go ahead and dive in and we'll talk about that. So let's talk about that right now, right? So talk to me about your journey. You were freelance for a long time or happened freelancing rather. Yeah, so I wouldn't call it freelancing because I never really like, what a lot of people think of when they think freelance, they think, oh, okay, so people would come to you with a project, you would sign a contract for two or three months and build the project and then move on and you'd be constantly chasing clients and stuff.

That was not what I did. So from the time I graduated college, I'd, well, so let's step back further. I was in school for information systems and I was not convinced I wanted to be a software developer. Before information systems, I started in electrical engineering. I took two programming classes. They were the worst. I did okay in them, but I couldn't see myself sitting at a computer programming all day. just, those classes did not give me a good idea of what developing software could be. And so I wasn't convinced I wanted to be a software developer, but when I was in that program, I got this job where they had me doing a bunch of monkey work.

And in information systems, I actually also had a programming class there, but it was like a lot more use case business focused sort of thing. And so all this work that I was doing for this job was just like, this is really boring. I wonder if I could automate this with the software program. So when I started solving real problems with software, that's when it really like the... It's interesting. Yeah, things got exciting for me. So anyway, when I started... Or yeah, around the time I was getting ready to graduate, I started getting interested in and speaking at conferences and meetups and stuff. And so I went to a meetup, well, actually I saw the meetup page online and they said they were looking for speakers.

I didn't realize that meetups are literally always looking for speakers. Always. Always. And so I was like, oh, sweet, they're looking for a speaker. That's awesome. I'm gonna, I'll just volunteer to speak on this library that I wrote. And so I started speaking at meetups and one of my meetup talks was recorded and put online. And John Lindquist, who also lives here in Utah, but he started Egghead. Here's actually, boom, Egghead. He saw that and he's like, hey Kent, why don't you turn that into a course? So I just, by that time, I just barely graduated from college. And I made it a course. And that course paid for my mortgage every month for months until the next course that I made.

So I was blown away. I didn't realize I could make that much money on this side thing. So that's what I've always, what I've been doing since I graduated, just the side hustle. And then eventually like that side hustle turned into something big enough that I could quit. So instead of freelancing, I was doing like content creation courses and that sort of thing. Well, great. So that is a great segue to my next thing. So content creation, right? So I had Ted Neward on the show yesterday and some call him the kind of like the Godfather of what Devruh or is now. So talk about the importance of content, not only for maybe a company right now, but maybe a job seeker, and really just the power of putting yourself out on the internet.

Yeah, so I never really planned on being really a popular figure in the tech world. What I did want was I wanted to be the best. I wanted to be the best at whatever it was that I did. And I worked really hard to get really good at what I do. But when I started developing a following on Twitter and just in general, I realized that it was really great job security. Because when people, actually, one interesting thing about my early career was when I was still in school, I actually taught a workshop about AngularJS to my co-students. So I got Firebase to sponsor this little, like, some pizza.

And I invited my other students to come and I just gave them this workshop. And the interesting thing that came out of that, of course, like it wasn't paid or anything like that. It was just my classmates. But what came out of that was a few months later, after we had all graduated, one of my classmates needed an Angular developer for just this, like a short contract job. And guess who we thought of? It was obvious like, oh, I know it was somebody who does Angular because I created that workshop and taught him that. So I got that opportunity and made a little bit of money on the side.

And so I've always been like a natural content creator. But developing a following and a reputation for being somebody who is really good at what they do, is a really great job security. Because if, like right now the tech market is outrageous, and well, all that, but it can, and anytime it could go sideways. And you want to be one of the people that, like it's unlikely that nobody is going to need a software developer, like even if it goes sideways, there will probably still be jobs for software developers, just maybe not as many. And so you wanna be the cream of the crop at the top where people are thinking, oh, well, we don't have a budget for as many software engineers as we used to have, so we've gotta choose the best.

You wanna be in people's minds as the best. And so I realized early on that getting a following and building a reputation for myself as the best was really important for me being able to take care of my wife and four kids. 100% and so look, because you made a comment off air. You were like, you know, I've really only applied to one job and that was my first job and then everything else has come through networks. So can you talk about the power of networking? Obviously there's going to be some overlap with content creation, but maybe give some nuggets to the people watching today just on why you should be networking always.

Yeah, yeah. So I'll just give the practical examples and then we'll pull out the takeaways there. So the only job that I applied for was my first one at Domo. And I was still in school at the time. I went through the regular interview process and I got hired. And while I was at Domo, I started speaking at events and whatnot. Actually, I got my first international conference like four months after graduating, which was, I didn't realize it was international when I applied to speak. They were like, all right, we'll fly you out to Sweden. We're like, what? That's awesome. That's pretty crazy. But yeah, so I was really active and one of the places that I spoke out was the Angular JS meetup and that was hosted at a company called AtTask, which is now called Workfront.

they found out that I wasn't super happy with my or that I was at least entertaining opportunities at other places. And so they were like, hey, we totally want you because we know that you know your stuff because you're speaking at our meetup on a regular basis. So that was they asked me to interview and I got that job two months later, another company came to me and said, hey, this is actually kind of funny. So somebody who worked at AtTask had a friend at another company and found out that that friend needed a developer. And so I don't know who it was, but one of my coworkers told them to hire me.

Oh, what from AtTask? How it works, man. That's how it works. Yeah, so I don't even know who it was. I don't think they were even a developer, but they knew that I'd just been hired on and I was doing a lot of good work already. And so I got hired over there. So that one was a little bit less like they knew who I was just organically and more like I was recommended and when they interviewed me they were like yeah we want this guy. So actually that was really cool because like I said that was two months later. So in a period and I just barely converted from intern to full time at Domo and I'd been there for four months as a full time then two months at at task.

So within a period of six months, I more than doubled my salary, which was pretty sweet. So like moving around a lot, I don't necessarily recommend it, but it sure is a good way to bump your salary really fast. Yeah. And especially if you are really good. And I spent like a silly amount of time getting really good at this. And not only getting really good, but also demonstrating that I was really good. because you can be a really good engineer, but. I think that's incredibly important. Yes, yeah. You could be a brilliant engineer, but nobody knows about it. Correct. And so, yeah, demonstrating that you're really good by speaking at meetups and writing blog posts and creating content that made a big difference.

So I was at this company called Alianza for a year when I decided I wanted to make a shift in the tech that I was using. And I interviewed at Facebook. They reached out to me. I got an offer there, but I'm so glad I didn't accept that. No, nobody wants to work at Facebook. No, I'm just kidding. I'm sure some people do, but I sure don't. What a company, my goodness. I'm not going to get into that. But I also- Hey, man, how much time you got? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you couldn't pay me enough to work at Facebook. We'll just leave it at that.

But then at the same time, so this is an interesting story. Like I was really excited about using React. I tweeted something to, at the time, it probably had something like 30,000 followers. And I tweeted about this new JavaScript feature that spread syntax that was coming. And I was like, man, this is so cool. If I used React, then I had to have a lot more use cases for this because you could spread props. And that's what I was referencing. And somebody replied, who works at PayPal, James, and Charles, and he replied and said, hey, come work at PayPal and you can use React. And I was like, sweet.

And I said, I just said no to Facebook. The reason back then that I said no is because I didn't want to move to California. And they didn't do remote. I, wait, I forgot. You had to move places before COVID. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I replied to him, and this is like public on Twitter, and I replied and said, yeah, not if I have to move to California. And so then he DM'd me on Twitter and said, hey, we actually could maybe make remote work for you. And so like that happened because of Twitter, like literally I tweeted something. And so developing a following on Twitter was how I got my job at PayPal.

And I was there for three years and did a lot of really awesome work for them. They're still using work that I developed there. And yeah, I provided a crazy amount of value for PayPal, save them millions of dollars because of the stuff that I did there. So let's talk about, which by the way, that's cool. So let's talk about the interview, right? So again, we talked about this offer. I get a lot of questions like, how do you break into big tech? What are some tips and tricks? Like again, you got there because of Twitter, because of the power networking, but if someone's trying to go in cold, Like what's maybe some of, maybe some advice for interview prep for those people?

Who? Well, so it really depends on how good at interviewing the company is. Um, because some companies are still doing the LEAT programming challenges and the stupid stuff like that. Um, there's not a lot of- I'm gonna, I'm gonna chop that piece content up right there. Yeah, do it. Leat code stupid stuff like that. Yeah, seriously, it's, it's so stupid. It is does not tell you anything about how skilled this person will be and how good they will be at helping you accomplish your goals as a company helping you push the mission forward so yeah so stupid. Luckily Facebook and PayPal both of those interviews are very similar and they were very practical.

Good. So it was totally the sort of thing that you run into when you're on the job. And so they were basically the same style of interviews. So I'll just explain what happened there. Well, and actually, first of all, I'll just put this to bed. Like if the company you're going to speak at or interview at is the leak code sort of thing, like data structures, there are books about that and things like if you wanna work at Google or whatever, then. Sure. And you can always ask the recruiter and say, Hey, like, what is the interview like? Yep. Because they want you to do your best.

It's not like they're hoping that you fail. Trust me, we do. Yeah. We do. Yeah. Because it would be a big waste if you failed, right? Big waste of everybody's time. So they want you to succeed. And so they're not going to give you all the questions that they're going to ask, but they can tell you what it's like. And so ask. And you find out that it's a leak code interview. You can't really do too much about it. I mean, you could say, well, that's stupid. I'm not gonna interview, I guess, if you wanted to do that. But if you want the job, then you just go get some books and study and good luck.

And then complain on Twitter if you don't get the job or something, I don't know. But yeah, so for better interviews, like Facebook and PayPal, this is what happened. So you had four interviews throughout the day and one lunch that was sort of an interview. And so one interview is like, what's, and I'm UI. And so I'm doing like front end stuff. And so it was, how do you build something with HTML and CSS, so like implement some design? Another was infrastructure related. So at Facebook it was kind of an Instagram UI. And how do you get these pictures in and have a nice loading experience when you don't know what the resolution, or the size of all the photos are, and make sure that you have three columns, but they're laid out in an order that makes sense so that as you scroll, you don't end up with things like way out of chronological order.

It's kind of interesting there, because you could have a bunch of photos that are really short, and so you gotta just lay it out properly. So that one was actually pretty interesting. Lots of infrastructure related sort of problems or architecture problems. And then another one was like, okay, we've got this function that you need to write for, you know, crunching some data. How do we do that fast? And so, yeah, like understanding big O notation going into an interview can be pretty helpful, even for the practical stuff. And then, yeah, the other one was just like, okay, so you say you're good at React. Let's see how good you are at React.

PayPal was also interested in in my node chops as well. So the last one was kind of like, okay, here's the tech that we use, how good are you at the tech we use already? And then the lunch interview was just like, let's get to know you from a like on a personal level. And also like, let's sell ourselves to you because we really want you. What is your biggest advice? Because you seem like you have thoughts and opinions, which I love. I'm not afraid of my thoughts and opinions. I love it. What's your biggest advice right now? And everybody keep calm. And if you have questions for Kent, we'll get there in a second.

But what's your biggest advice for companies on how to interview better? So what I did when I was at PayPal is I would say, all right, hey, I'm so excited to have you here. You're awesome. Let's make you feel comfortable. Now, I want you to show off to me. I want you to like whatever you're really good at, tell me what you're the best at. Like what are you super good at? Every time they would say react. It was probably because we're PayPal, we do react. They were hiring or we were hiring for a UI, but they would always say react and it'd be like, sweet.

Let's talk about react. Like show me the coolest things you can do with react. And you say you're really good at react. Okay, let's build this like simple component. Let me see how good you are at react. I was really surprised. How many people said, oh yeah. I'm amazing at React, but they couldn't build like a simple counter-compound. Oh, I see it all the time, and I'm not even telling you it's crazy. It's like, okay, so you've got like different levels on how good you are at different things, and you're setting your highest levels React. So let's see how good that is, and then that tells me a lot about the rest of this stuff that you're at.

So mine was more about like, we have like our needs, but I wanna see how good, like where your best at, like what does your puzzle piece look like? and we'll see if that fits with what we need. Rather than like, do you happen to just know what this certain thing looks like? It's kind of like you've got like an empty space in your puzzle and you're trying to say, hey, like let me ask about every piece of this empty space in this puzzle, rather than what I tried to focus on, it was like, let me see the shape of your piece and then see if that can fit.

So that ended up working out pretty well. I can say that there were people that I said, hey, let's hire them because I think they'll be great. And we did and they were. And then there was one person in particular that I said, I don't think we should hire them. And we did and they were no good. So I feel pre-validated that I did a pretty good job with that. And it was all about like, okay, tell me what you're really good at and show me how good you are. How fast did y'all move through the interview process? I pay pal. And really what's kind of a good clip for you?

Because I mean, I have my thoughts and I'm pretty vocal about them on Twitter, but which by the way, if you're watching this, one of the key things I would get on Twitter if I were you, especially the Deaf community, but what's kind of your cadence or clip in interviews to still vet, but also try? Yeah, you're talking about like how long? Just general interviewing, general interviewing. Yeah, how long the interview process is? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you don't need that much time to think about it, right? Like you're not going to spend that much time, you know, over the, even if you say, yeah, we're going to take a month, like how much of that month is you actually thinking about hiring this person, right?

So why don't you just compress that to not waste anybody's time? And so like my optimal would be, you know, you're doing the, like you do have to wait for them to respond to things and stuff. So like you're not gonna be able to do this in just like a day. But at PayPal, we would like, first we'd have like an on phone interview, I didn't mention that, but that was part of both Facebook and PayPal. You'd have this on phone interview. At Facebook, it was just a recruiter, asked some questions and they had like the answer key of like the right words they need to say.

At PayPal, I talked to an engineer. But yeah, so we did have that. And then if you get through that, then they fly you in. So like there's the logistical things, but that's the only reason that it should be longer than like a day really, is just the logistics of making things happen. And so yeah, it's super, super frustrating to have to have things drag out. Now at PayPal, it actually took me a month to get hired, but that's because at the time, PayPal wasn't doing remote very often at all. And so I had to get like the CTO had to approve my hire. And also like they had this weird pay structure and they really wanted me.

So they couldn't pay me enough like salary wise. And so they had to give me a lot more options, stock options and stuff. And so yeah, I had to get the CTO to approve my hire and he did. Ha ha. So I think that like barring that when it's just like a decision of yes or no. After the interview, after the day of the interview, you just block off an hour for everybody who interviewed that day and you talk about it and you make the decision right then. Just decide yes or no. And you don't have to, like, you're not in charge of deciding how much and negotiating whatever as the engineers.

You just say we want them or we don't want them and then the hiring manager can figure out like the negotiations of the offer and stuff. Yep. But yeah, like the person who interviewed should know that day whether this is gonna happen. And that's what I think. I love that. Here's one question that came in. And I think it's important any tips or tricks for tracking measurements at your current role. I'm really big on having quantitative data in your resume, right? Like, Kent was talking about, I wrote this, it saved millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Like, I like to see that in resumes.

actually helped a developer this week write his resume. And that he, we put in a ton of data that he helped with. So Kent, do you have thoughts on that? Yeah. That 100%. It's way better to see numbers for folks. Um, I, when I looked at resumes, I actually didn't look very carefully. Um, but I know, uh, there, there is a filter process that, uh, that happens. It's gotta be one, like you gotta have the buzzwords, you gotta have the functional speak and then you got to have the data. Like there's kind of like three levels of like a good, a well, a good written, a well written resume.

Yeah, yeah. You also should use good grammar. Yes, good grammar. Hey, so obviously time has flown. I hate that sometimes, I hate sometimes that happens to 30 minutes. Okay. Just really quick. One thing. Well, I was about to ask you last words of wisdom from Kent Dodds, Kent C. Dodds from Remix. Go ahead. Okay, I've got two. I love it. I didn't talk about open source, but that made an enormous impact on people's perception of me as a skilled engineer. So if you're not involved in open source, talk about that real quick because we can run over as you can run over. Talk about why is open source so important.

Yeah. So when you're the one who built the library, you're suddenly the subject matter expert on the thing. Or if you're like a major contributor to this library, or you can say, I contributed to AngularJS and React. And so open source has just been an enormous benefit. The other thing is you get free code reviews from experienced developers, especially when you're early on. You're making pull requests, and they say, hey, don't do this or do that. And on top of that, you also get exposed to a lot of different ways of writing code. So it gives you a lot of experience, And it gives you like, yeah, some like people perceive you as a much more skilled developer.

Sure. So open source has been huge. That lunch that I had at PayPal with the director, we just talked about the open source stuff that I was doing. And he just thought it was the coolest thing that I'd built this open source project and was maintaining it and people were using it. Like, so many people were using it. And so that's another thing you can stick on your resume. I get millions of downloads in my libraries a week. That's just another number you can put on there. I just said. So yeah, so the one piece of advice from me, it's all about kindness. So you can be the best engineer in the world and everybody can know that you're the best and that's awesome and not a single person will want to work with you if you're a jerk.

And so I think it's more important to be a nice person person than to anything else. In fact, my father-in-law would always ask his kids, is it more important to be a hard worker or to be smart? And they say it's more important to be smart. Is it more important to be a hard worker or to be nice? It's more important to be nice. So like all of those things are cool and nice and great, but the most important thing is to be nice. And honestly, I think most people in this world are trying to do the right thing, they're trying to be good. And so let's treat them like that and be nice as deep and by default And I think we can make the world better if we do that so be nice.

I love that. That's awesome. Well y'all Thank you again for hanging out with us today on this beautiful Friday. Can't there's snow out here Well, I have with their six inches snow and national. It's almost like I'm living in Utah Can't stay on real quick after we end it, but y'all thank you again for hanging out with us. Say guys couch 2.0 I'm off Monday Tuesday. I'm actually be up in Cincinnati. I'm helping them develop a content creation plan So I'm off for Monday Tuesday But we're back Wednesday with the VP of engineering. I've already interviewed Ben Henderson We're actually gonna talk about actually how to partner with recruiters when it comes to hiring and doing it more effectively So you won't want to miss that.

I'll be back with y'all next Wednesday. Can't thank you again my friend. I appreciate it See everybody Hey, you did it you listened to an entire episode And I am very grateful because you know why there's a lot of podcasts out there There's a lot of episodes and I myself rarely finished an entire episode So I appreciate you so so much for listening quick reminder Please rate and review this podcast in the app store I want this to be discoverable to others and the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and Review it please like right now Unless you're driving then don't do it.

So thank you again If you need to reach out to me, Taylor at Vaco.com or at Tdaston on all social media handles and I hope you have a fantastic day.