tips from a former apple hiring manager

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auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

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.com is how to get in touch with me old fashioned email social media at t 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. being said that's enough with me that's enough about me. Tiago let's give the people what they want introduce yourself real fast. Alright thanks Tyler. Great to be here thanks for inviting me and so a little bit about myself so I more regionally from Brazil but I had been in New York for the past nine years almost I started my career a little bit over 15 years ago I went from being a Java a programmer from going to be a project manager, then going to QA, then going to a full stack developer, then doing sales engineering, then transitioning to back to engineering, then engineering manager.

And now, over the last five years, mostly around engineering management and as a director over the past four years now, hiring and trying to give my best everyday building chains, adjusting processes and for the last year or so, I'll be pretty heavily trying to share as much as I can online, Twitter, LinkedIn. Yes, and I definitely want to talk about that too. I want to give people shout out this more and Steve, Randall, Chris, Josh, thanks buddy. Erica, Victoria, Victor, Janee, Joey, Trey, JC abdas bill. We got the crew today. It's great to see all this morning. I love your church that look so I then everybody in Twitter spaces Eddie Ryan Sagan Dre Dragon it's it's Alan again it's it's great to see you all this morning so all right so Tia I want to dive in first thing let's talk about you as a job seeker right I think a lot of times I think people view hiring managers as they never have issues on the job search.

I do want to talk a little bit about just what to look for in a job, right? You talked about going to Apple, you talked about your challenges at Apple, and why you left. Not necessarily we have to get into that, but just your mental state. Can you talk about just maybe some job search tips and tricks for people right now to kick off? Yeah, I love this subject actually and I have been helping a lot of people around that and so to myself I I actually wrote Archmogon this a couple of years back and that is a Principle that I try to follow that's called continuous interviewing is like no matter what right?

You should be interviewing every year and but I think more than that right. I think it is like like, yeah, it's easy to say that, but I mean, only a few people actually walk the talk there. It's like, and I think the other thing I would say, okay, interview even if you're happy at your current job or especially if you're happy at your current job because that's when you can get this super, super exciting opportunities. I think that's, that's an easy one, but I would say the thing that has helped me the most is spending money, to accelerate that interview process or that. There are two things actually.

Okay, the one thing I would say is if you wanna maximize your chances of actually being interviewed, write your own recommendation and ask someone that's inside that company to drop as a person, as a referral, right? think is like, but you need to write and you need to kind of like put a lot of energy, because that person is going to refer to you. Okay, okay, he's gonna drop, let's say your resume, and he's gonna ping the hiring manager or whatever. But he's not gonna have the time and the knowledge most of the time to actually write something that's impressive that actually is like almost like your personal letter of recommendation hard in English but coming from like a third person.

So I think yes that has helped me a lot and I now I'm curious though where do you put it on your LinkedIn I'm assuming and like you sent to someone so let's say you have a friend or you have a former co-worker that is at Google or at Apple or whatever and you want to you want to apply for a position there. Sometimes you know like our opening. Most of the time that is not a clear opening and is like they just need to do, like to put your resume on the internal referral, like employee referral program, right? And a lot of times it's not appealing enough to only put your resume and say, oh, this is my form of work is really good at this.

It's like what I recommend folks do is actually right. like three four-part rafts with following the same principle that you should following behavior introduced, like data, like putting together why, like you are above the bar, I would say, in what areas do you would see? What are your superpowers and why that could be appealing to a hiring manager? Always putting the hiring manager perspective into that. Then I think that has a much, like almost like a recommendation, right? as a much higher chance of giving your visibility and getting you to the interview, then either applying to the website that we all know is bad or working with the recruiter.

That, I mean, helps. But I think if you wanna really like, shortcut that. I think it's like, talk to your network for people that are already in. Most companies have an employee referral program and not only send them like a great resume, send exactly what they should write about you. Like, so. OK, so first and also, by the way, Twitter spaces, you dropped out of Twitter spaces, by the way. So you should probably go log back on Twitter space. I was getting double feedback. Let me see. Oh, you're getting double feedback. You should put yourself on mute, I think, on Twitter spaces. OK. Thank you.

So as you're doing that, I want to ask you a question. So all right, so the referral game is great. I talk about that all the time. I think that's something that people don't use enough. I talk to people, when you network, so say, Tiago, say I hit you up, right? Let's say somebody hits you up, right? Let's say Randall hit, uh, hit you up, right? And then Randall talks to you for like seven minutes. And then, and then they're like, Hey, Tiago, thanks again for this. Who else should I be connected to in your network, right? The referral is such a powerful tool, right?

Always try to get warm leads. And then I, and then I would also say as well is that you really, really need, I love the thought of like, you know, Tiago doesn't know me, right? But let's say there's like a VP level of recruiting at New Bank, right? I'm probably going to say, Hey, Tiago, can this listen, this is my background, because I'll go. I'm sure Tiago will go to bat for me now that he's had me on the show that I've had him on the show. But he doesn't know me like super well, but he knows I'm a chill guy, right? And so I love that.

And I want to go into the next thing too. You said spending money to help to help accelerate your job search, talk about what you spent money on, but then talk about some of the things that if people don't have the money to spend on, how can they still get that experience? So two part questions, so answer the first part. What did you spend your money on, and why do you think it was worth it? Okay, so just to give some context, last time I was interviewing actively was end of 2020. And I found out a video on YouTube of someone, like giving some salary range for the big techs and I would say senior leadership positions.

And I was shocked when I saw the numbers. And I was a director at American Express at the time and I was making good money. What I thought it was like pretty good already. But then when I saw that, I was like, okay, this is it. I have to do it. Like if there was any other reason besides money, that was it, that was like the right moment. And I decided to, so the one thing I did was like to, I had a couple of recruiters that were always talking to me and I kind of went emailed and back and said, okay, like schedule interviewing a month or something.

I put, I put a like a, a deadline on that. And then I had, let's say a month to prepare as much as I could to get there and do all the interviews. The one thing that I knew would be a waste of time and I had done that in the past was interviewing by myself and read books or just do the cracking and coding interviews. Interview book that is great but is not the book that you should follow after you are in fact for 10 years and say after you are in a leadership position that book is great for coding interviews, great for people that will start but it's not enough.

And I knew that the same principles that we applied to let's say public speaking or to many of the areas that more let's say soft skills related can be applied to interviews. So I found out this bootcamp called Interview Kickstart and I mean not only I did that but their their bootcamp was like six months I I was able to negotiate to have access to all the recordings and I get access to the most important thing that was the mock interviews and instead of like spending let's say a month watching all the classes and preparing I decided to put like three three mock interviews a week for the next four weeks.

And I had mock interviews in the early morning before work. I had mock interviews at 10 PM East with folks in the Pacific, right? Yeah. And that helped me a lot more to see my gaps and to see the areas that I should double now and the areas that I was already doing great. Where was, I'm curious, where was your biggest gap, right? again, right? I think people view people in leadership like, oh my gosh, they're perfect, but like let's let's be vulnerable here. What's what what would you say your biggest weakness wasn't interviewing? I would say true. I mean, I had this illusion that I was great at behavior interviews because I was doing a lot of them as a hiring manager, right?

And I I had this idea that that, okay, I had enough stories, I had enough data, enough, and I never forget the first walking interview I did with someone that was at Google at the time. I think this person moved to Netflix or something like that. He was a mentor, a front-to-date program, and I was trying to get my point across. The way that the mock interviews work, at least the ways that the mock interviews that I did work is like you have like maybe 40 minutes of you being interviewed as if the person was interviewing you for their company, replicating as much as the interview.

But then the last 20 minutes they're going to share exactly what you did wrong. And when this person started to share what I did wrong, it was like so many things. And I had the idea, I don't even need to prepare for behavior interviews. And that's when I kind of like, I flip, I mean, completely flip my approach on behavior interviews. And I have been writing a lot about this. And I think the biggest insight is, you not only need to know, let's say, the cases, and you need to write down almost a script of like your best story. So whenever they tell, they ask you the question, tell me about the time you had a conflict with a peer of yours.

with a peer of yours. You don't need to think about it. You need to have a table with stories that you can pick for almost any kind of like permutation behavior interview. Oh, tell me about a challenge project that you help to rescue or to revive, right? You need to have that prepared. And you write down not because you want to read this quickly right now because that will help you to be a lot more chick-weight during the interview. That was a big gap. So I had this illusion that I was really good at answering behavior interviews, but when that person showed me that all the things that I did wrong and all the stories that I went sideways, right?

It was like shocking. So, and I wanna, and I've actually talked about this too, so I'm glad Tiago brought it up. I truly think like you need to have before an interview, before you walk into an interview, let's say you are interviewing for a.net angular role, right? Let's go individual contributor to.net angular role. They're basically, they have old versions of angular. They're trying to migrate to new versions of angular. And let's just say it's an entire conversion project from old.net to.net core, old angular to angular. If I were you, I would write down any time in your career that you have done either. Because what happens is, is when you go into an interview and you are not comfortable like 99.9% of the people are, you're gonna, your brain's gonna like just freeze.

And so then you won't have anything, you won't have anything in front of you. And so that, so again, I love what Tiago said here. make sure that you write a script, come prepared. Come prepared, it's incredibly important. I think the star method, right? I think a lot of people know about it, but not enough people actually take it like seriously, right? And I, that was the biggest lesson learning, something that I haven't done with probably like 20, 30 people this year. Like I asked them, okay, are you really taking this interview seriously? If you are, here's a Google Doc with the top 10 questions that I ask.

All these staff engineers, all the engineering managers that I interview, right now your answer is, and I would comment and say, this is not good in scope. Where's the data on this? Why didn't you do this? This is bad because you had to escalate to your manager. That's not a good story to tell on an interview. And I would comment out, and you should do that with some peers of yours, some mentors of yours. Right now, your ideal answers for the top 10 most common behavior questions that you can easily find and ask peers or mentors or former mentors of yours to tell what you got wrong on that story and then polish them.

And then during the interview, you don't even look, you already know by heart, right? And I think you're going to do much better than 99.9% of the people. So behavior interview was the area that I was completely blind to. I thought it was doing great, but when I got to the review interviews with senior engineering managers and directors and he had their expectations and the gaps that I had was mind-blowing. The second thing was on the system design interviews. And I think that was something that the bootcamp helped a lot because I found the instructor that was able to articulate on a four-hour class, all the concepts, how everything connected.

And I learned that system design interviews are about structure and are about time-boxing, how much time you should stay in each one of the parts of the system design interview. Like the biggest mistake that I made was like spend maybe 10 minutes like doing data, like how the database would look, all the tables, all the relationships, and that was completely waste because I would run out of time and not have a functional solution for the system design. And I remember staying like two hours on a marketing interview with someone like actually redesigning my initial solution in the idea way and telling, okay, for management positions, you don't need to go as deep as like senior engineer positions, your focus is different.

And realize that was like a big mind blowing moment. What? So, so for the people who can't afford to pay for mock interviews, what would you be your biggest advice? I obviously have thoughts on how to get mock interviews for free, but what, what's your advice to those people? So the first thing is right now, the top 10 behavior questions and ask peers or mentors or people that you trust to review and really agree with you on that. And the second thing would be if you cannot afford mocking to you, so you can still do that with friends or like co-workers of yours and you need to put yourself up like a high pressure situation.

Make it as real as the real thing, right? Like make a Zoom meeting, put on record, bring someone, need to act as almost like you need to pretend that it was a real interview and if you ask someone to interview you, you need to ask them to almost do the role playing there and to put you in your position. You almost forget that that is a fake interview, right? Yeah, and I want to give Barrett a shout out Barrett's a former guest on the show. For those of you who are watching, I would highly take Barrett up on this. Barrett Barrett's great. You can go watch our episode together on YouTube.

But Barrett, thank you for that, man. I appreciate it. So, all right, so we're half we're more than halfway through and I knew this would happen. So let's jump on the other side of things real quick. And obviously, I just need to have you on again. So we'll make sure we book you again. Because I love to catch up with you a little more. Because this, all this stuff just takes so much time to uncover. Let's talk about putting yourself out on the internet real fast. Because that's kind of my thing right now. You have, for those of you who want to check out Tiago, It's typefully.com backslash.

Tia go. Tia go. How do you pronounce your last name? Gizzy. G-H-I-S-I. Yeah. So go, go, go check it out. Tia go talk to me about the importance of putting yourself out there and what it's done for your career so far. Okay. So I would say. After a lot of years in tech, the most important thing, and is one of my arguments that is influence, right? And is influence by sharing your ideas, by increasing your impact beyond your current company, beyond where you are at, right? And maintaining your network across all the companies that you work with in the past, and all the companies that you can work next, right?

And so that was a big realization I had beginning of this year. It's like, I don't wanna be the VPs or the SVPs or the CTOs for the company, for the companies that I worked for, and I have seen everybody really love their ideas and appreciate their wisdom inside the company, but nobody knows them outside. and a lot of their influence is being restricted. A lot of their impact is being restricted and he's like, he's dying inside the corporation. And I think he's a big waste. So I decided to share like what I learned publicly. I think that was the one thing. The other thing is in fact, we have a lot more people coming in than people that are staying after, let's say 15 years.

Like, so if you are in tech and you are in the leadership position for a while, it's almost your, your, your study like to post like shared. Yeah. Yeah. To share and to, and to give back, right? Like because I got a lot, um, early in my career learning from people that like share with me that reason and I mean, especially after the pandemic, you don't go to the ops. You don't have the role models around and it's much harder. And especially if you start your career remotely, right? I think it's like, and the new generation also see things differently than my generation. So I felt that it has two effects.

One, it helps me to polish my ideas, right? And to test them, think that's one. And two, it helps me to increase my network, make friends, and also build a network outside my current employer, my current core, right? And I think that's the main reason why I have invested so heavily on LinkedIn and Twitter. It's here. Well, and then, and again, the reason why, and I'm so passionate about this, I found Tiago because of Twitter. So Tiago did, I forgot what the thread was, but you did a thread. And I think one of my contacts, again, the power of liking and commenting people's posts. So for the most part, for those of you who are watching, everybody who I have on my show, I only have on my show if they have a social media footprint.

Because that's the only way I can find you. So for example, tomorrow, Emmet, I have a guy coming on named Emmet, he's a junior dev. I have followed his entire career, working from crazy hours in the ER to like a night nurse type thing to, to be coming to software dev. And I've watched his whole journey play out and I was like, I have to interview you. If Emmet did not post about it, I would not know about it. Right. And so again, it's just the power of it. Tiago and I got connected because of Twitter thread. So again, I want to reiterate you, you just got to do it.

I mean, you don't have to do it. I keep saying that my brother, he's a senior product owner, a ticket master, a ticket master that was his last job event, right? He doesn't put out any content. He's done just fine. But what my brother does really well though is make friends and network, right? So again, it's part of it. And you can do wonders just by doing that inside the companies you work with and maintaining the life. But I think like it's really powerful what you can do today with Twitter and LinkedIn and the kind of people you can connect across geographies, right? And across roles and I think it's super powerful.

I mean, the amount of people I have connected this year and the amount of opportunities that I have being receiving because of that is just it's just, it's formation, it's like, it's hard to be. It's hard to be. Yeah. Steve comes in, despite being a junior, putting myself out there on YouTube and Twitch helps me connect with people interested or involved in my industry. Thrilled to even have met some amazing folks on Taylor's show, so thank you so much for that. Jordan, it's great to see you. And Marie brings up a great point. You can just apply to everything and use the interview with the company you do not, as mock interviews, absolutely.

That's honestly another way to get better. Tiago, as we wrap up here, last five minutes. Quick advice for hiring managers right now. What are some things that you live by on your team, both from actual hiring and then building good leadership or building good culture? So let's answer both of those in five minutes, which can usually take about six hours. Yes, yes, yes. So for hiring, I'm a big fan of two things. I would say the first thing is to try to make the interview process, to be a reflection of the skills and the challenge that that person is gonna actually have on the day today.

And I know this is actually hard. Actually, keyword not made up. Yes, so I think especially in big that is really hard to replicate that, but if you are on a startup or a small company or you have that power to change at least a few of the interviews to be kind of like, okay, that's actually one of our biggest challenges is what you're going to be doing most of the time for the next six months. I'm not gonna have this view of what that person is gonna be doing after that. But I think you can replicate that. Like that is really powerful because we will show you how that person is gonna perform all the day today.

And it's different than the traditional code interviews, it's inside. That I understand why the company is used. And I think those are powerful tools. And I mean, you can go back to history, why Google and the other big techs decided to use that. But, I mean, if you actually have the relationship with the candidate during the interview process, during that, it's great. The other thing that I try to do is to be as honest as possible and share as much as I can about the current state of the change that the person is about to join, the challenge you're gonna face, both architecture-wise, like knowledge-wise, like process-wise, right?

And what's the site? What is the vision? Why I feel that that particular role is really great. They could potentially be great for someone new joining. So I would say do that first, right? Like give back first as a hiring manager and then ask the candidate about their background, about what they're inside about and what not. Instead of hiding that or almost trying to avoid talking about this. And I would say about health, like how to maintain a health culture on engineering. I would say, it's all about leading by example. And when I say that, it's so cheesy, right? Like, but it's about cultivating the behaviors that you wanna see.

And it's about like stopping the behaviors that you don't wanna see, right? So if you see that someone in your team did something that was amazing, share that, appreciate that. Like, it's fought like that. If you see something that was really bad or someone did that was really offensive or do the same, but of course in private and it is, if you do those two things, appreciate the behaviors you want to see more that you think are healthy for your team, for your company. and share feedback on the impact of the behaviors that folks did was not really good, would say. And at the same time, try to be the one that don't tell what you mean, do what you wish others could do.

That goes in many ways, like making decisions, like putting yourself in a really vulnerable position, like as the leader, right? As the manager of that group. Because if folks see you doing that, they tend to replicate bios, right? So I think that's the thing I would say. I love it. All right, Tia, the last questions we wrapping up here. And again, thank you for hanging out with me. I knew 30 minutes would fly by. So this show is obviously called Guidance Councilor 2.0 because we had Guidance Councilors in middle school, we had Guidance Councilors in high school. What is one piece of advice that you could tell your younger self and basically like, basically what's one piece of advice you would tell your younger self knowing what you know today?

Man, there are so many things. I would. I love the thoughtfulness. us. No, I would probably say to not pay as much attention to a particular technology and focus on the fundamentals and to not attach your personal brand to a particular company, not be restricted by that and not fear that mind is like your career is yours independently to where you are and what technology you're using at the moment or what part of the extent. He's like that whole thing about that I spend maybe five years being kind of what I'm a Java guy. I'm like okay not Java, not Linux, not for me. I hate Windows.

I hate old project managers. Never do that. Like oh you're using like looking down people because they were like not using the technology that I would appreciate and not on the community that I was a humanitarian at the moment. I would say that is probably the thing, like full of mentors on one side, like look at your career for the really long term. Like you're gonna be in your career for probably 40, if not 50 years. You can talk about like retiring early and all that, but I mean, if you really enjoy your career, you're going to be on that for a long time. And you don't want to be your last name being your company, right?

You don't want to be the like Taylor, the one from let's say, Apple or whatever you want. They to remember you as your personal brand, like almost agnostically of what company you are at at the moment or what company you you work in the past. Yeah. I love that. I love that. All right. Well, Tiago, thank you again. That was great. Twitter spaces, thank you again. I saw some people with some questions. Sorry we didn't get to them today. It was so much talk about, we'll have Tiago on again. But again, Tiago, thank you. Stay on real quick as we log off here. But y'all, thank you for tuning in tomorrow.

Very excited again, Emmet. I have Emmet on the show. His story is fantastic. He built a Slack community called Coder Dads. And then, you know, he worked in the ER and just got his first job as a junior dev. So tomorrow's great. Thursday with Unicorn Finders, my other podcast because the man can't have too many podcasts. We have Tejas. He is a director of Developer Advocacy at Zacta, X-A-T-A. I met him at React Miami, so we're gonna interview him about his company. And then Friday, it's just me. So y'all have a great one today. Tiago, thank you. And you all have a great rest of your Tuesday.

Peace. 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 finish 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 Tdeston on all social media handles and I hope you have a fantastic day.