scaling an engineering organization of 300+ developers

full transcript

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, VACO.com is how to get in touch with me, old-fashioned email, social media at tdesntdesseyn. 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. Alrighty. I'm like, oh, good morning everybody. When I say good morning everybody, I mean nobody, because it usually takes a second to go live. But very excited for this morning, because I have two amazing gentlemen from across the pond, as they say, and actually low-key probably in my favorite country.

And I'm not just saying that because I visited, I'm not saying that because they're on the podcast. I'm saying, because I've actually visited Sweden, It's a beautiful country. Highly recommend it. A lot of tech out there. A lot of tech. And so I'm excited to have two amazing gentlemen from Sweden on the show today. Yule and Ryan. It's good to see you guys. Thank you. Thank you. Nice to be here. So for those of you tuning in, welcome. I know we're a little early. So say, hey, when you get a chance, the reason why I tell people to say, hey, to engage is to bring visibility to yourself, right?

We're not in the metaverse yet. We're not chilling with our goggles. We don't have avatars except guidance counts 2.0 live like in the metaverse would be pretty sick. But we're not there yet. So for those of you who are tuning in, please comment. Please engage. Say, Hey, you know, one of the reasons that so this that this entire show started as just a way to hang out with with guests. But to be honest with you, it's really morphed into a networking platform. So what I realized is that there's a lot of, especially in the engineering space, like listen, let's face it, networking pre-COVID was like showing up at Was like showing up at a networking event sitting with your friends not talking to anybody and leaving right?

So like nobody really actually networked at a networking event And so what I want this is is this is a networking event So the only way the only thing you have to do is to say hey, that's it So say hey again, I know Ryan and you all love to hear from you second thing second thing is is ask questions, right? So we're gonna dive in. We started a few minutes early, cause I know it's gonna be a great conversation. These two gentlemen were partly responsible for scaling to over 300 plus engineers over last year, right last year? Last year, just wanna confirm. So it was last year, not last month, last year.

So we're gonna talk about, so ask questions, right? This show is the one time where you get really, really senior professionals IT space and you can ask them questions and they don't bill you for it. So ask questions. That'll be great. And then also want to give a shout out to my coffee sponsor of the show, which is that conference. So that conference is not international yet, guys. So I'm sorry. But that conference, I'm actually really, really blessed. I'm keynoting that conference in July in Wisconsin. So please check it out. But they do have coffee beans and I'm drinking it right now. So check out that.us conference and Wisconsin in July.

And then they have some really good coffee beans. And I'm picking about my coffee, and I know these two gentlemen are too, because coffee culture and Sweden is a thing. So it's my favorite part of the day. But Devin, it's good to see you, Scott's good to see you, Serena's great to see you as well. But let's go ahead and get started guys, because again, a lot to cover. Let's do quick intros real fast. Ryan, if you want to kick it off, who are you? Yes, LinkedIn user, I'm early. We got a lot to talk about today. So Ryan, give it into your back self.

Yeah, so my name is Ryan. I'm the Staff Software Engineer at Volvo Cars. So my area of focus is around pressing. So I work with three teams, mainly doing like press calculations, taxes, and discounts. So we're pretty much involved in any price that you see at Volvo. So if you're going into dealership or you're browsing online, that's kind of coming from the systems that we look after. I love that. I love that. Yule? Yeah, nice. Yeah, my name is Yewell. I'm the director of engineering for the same area that Ryan talked about and also expanding a bit sideways from that. Been here a couple of years now, but for that, I have history in various tech startups on the west coast of Sweden in Gothenburg.

That's awesome. That's awesome. All right, guys. So, you know, and as I messaged Ryan, Ryan reminded me, because I forgot. And Ryan, that's not on you, I just have a bad memory. But Ryan was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he was like, yeah, like, you know, we talked about how, you know, hiring and remember that, you know, we hired over 300 developers last year. I was like, holy cow, yeah, we gotta talk about that. So, so first off, so let's set the framework of why did you have to hire that many people? Going out. Yeah, so essentially we're responsible for, We're trying to scale out and build a direct business.

So always at like 100 year old company, we're selling cars to wholesale. And right now we're pivoting into direct sales model, which means that we will be doing essentially what Tesla is doing by the car of the website or any other digital medium. So that's the transition that we're trying to do. We realize that we just don't have the organization to take to meet that because we have a fairly ambitious time plan of being 100% directing 2030 and that's just we need to rebuild every partner relation across the world and build out all the technical capabilities to meet that. So that is kind of why we wanted to do that.

And today we're an organization of about just 1000 people that includes both engineering and product and a lot. And last year as we said we grew about 20 to 25% within the organization. That's a lot. That is a lot. So we had to invent a bunch of things as we went, but because before that it was much more about like we have a need, we need to find one individual to work in this team. That just didn't scale. We didn't have the time to spend on the resources to do that kind of put that much investment into recruiting. We needed to do it faster. So we need to figure out what we can tune in a tweet throughout the year.

we managed to meet the targets and grow by, again, 20% to 25% last year. That's amazing. Ryan, do you have anything else to add? No, I think it's just a really good indication of a volvus change in approach right now. So we're trying to move to being more software-first and software-focused. That basically shows a massive investment from volvus, trying to scale this part of the organization. That was really quite a key target for us, was to try and grow, bring in new talents. I guess with a lot of companies laying off and sort of Stockholm as well. That's been a really good opportunity for us to bring in really amazing talent from that side of things from a likes of Spotify and Planner and other companies.

I bet. I bet. So yeah, it's been an exciting time. So let's, there's, there's so many questions I want to ask. There's so many ways to go about this, but I'm kind of curious because again, I kind of have other engineering leaders in mind when I'm asking these questions and kind of frame this stuff up. So first off, like, You guys sat in the meeting together. I was like, are we going to hire this many people? Like, what's the framework? How do we interview people? Like, what was the process? Like, you always get in a room, like, all right, now what? Like, who's going to ask the questions?

And who's going to offer? I mean, can you talk about building the framework and trying to building the framework of the interview process? Yeah, I think it was fairly organic. It was not like we sat in a meeting room and said that this is what we're going to do. we have essentially figured out that we need to hire a bunch of people and then quite early on we realized that like the recruitment side of this will be or the recruiters will be key in this process and unfortunately I wasn't that involved in setting that the kind of basis of the recruiting organization up but that was one of the initial thing and then so then we had to start with growing the recruitment organization and setting kind of the basis in place.

But then as soon as we started hiring developers, of course, it trickled over to us and we needed to figure out how to manage that. And then like very quickly we realized where the first bottleneck was. And which was where. So for us initially, it was just the sheer amount of applicants that we needed to screen. So then we We needed to educate recruiters and help out in trying to figure out where do we set the bar, how do they screen effectively, and then the second thing was because we were working with a code assignment or we are working with a take-home assignment. So that's kind of what Ryan and I were rushing about.

Yeah, exactly. So the first thing you do is you meet with a recruiter for a screening call and then if that goes well, you would typically get a take-home assignment. Interesting. interesting. So you guys went take home assignment that early in the process. Yeah, it's that was another week. We did have a hiring manager interview in between before, but that was also like that became a bottleneck quite quickly. Interesting. Okay. So then we were like, yeah, we need to switch this up. Yeah. I guess the goal for us was always just about trying to reduce the amount of meetings and sessions we wanted to have with the applicant as well.

So it was all about trying to get a fast turnaround time that actually took as little of our time as possible. So we were trying to optimize that wherever we could. And I mean, the take-home assessment was a good opportunity to try and filter out as many applicants as early as possible. I love that. So this is a good question. I think this is for my guy Jonathan. So I have to ask top down or bottom up focus, pick your leaders or build your army, then find your generals. How did you guys approach this? Because I didn't even think about this too. Very differently. So I personally went about the bottom up, Okay.

Which meant that I ended up in a situation where we had a team of 50 people and zero engineering managers beside myself. But I have colleagues who did it the other way around where they just had a leadership team and no developers. So there were no kind of organization wide decision on this. Oh, really? So it was kind of like each, each director could kind of pick. That's awesome. Okay. Is there a reason why you went bottom up? Yeah, we already had most of the teams in place in my area. So it was more about staffing within those teams to meet requirements. And I was super keen not to lose speed.

Yeah, I love that. Which is why I was kind of hindsight that you probably should have done a bit of both at the same time. Sure. But it took quite a while for me to become the bottleneck. But when that finally hit and I had 50 people reporting to me, then it was now it took too far. Yeah, it's time to fix that. Ryan, any thoughts from you, man? I mean, I'm curious, what responsibility did you play in the interview process? I mean, the interview process, basically, I'm involved in the technical screenings. So we do the initial take-home assessment, which we will then send back and I'll review them.

And we work in a row time. So that's part of one of the improvements that we made is we have a rotating roster of people who do the assessments. So we have a pool of engineers who are on there. And I think there was one of the biggest changes we made recently that made a huge difference was that we used to just have this pool of engineers in a single Slack channel. And the recruiters would say, who's free to do this assessment? And then no one would put up their hand. Yeah, everyone's like, not again. I'm so tired, please don't pick me. And yeah, I mean, that became a massive bottleneck for us.

And it was really slowing things down to the point that we had like a two week turnaround time for doing assessments, which is just not acceptable. And we were losing really good applicants at the early stage, because we were just so slow to get back to them. And what we've recently done, and this came directly from the recruiters, they need all credit for it. But they quickly identified that this was a problem. And they just started to put everyone in a roster. And they just told people, like, you have to do this. And it's like I give you 48 hours to get back to you.

And I mean, obviously, if there's some situation where you can't look at if you're on the eve or you're traveling or something. But you can say no, and you can move on to the next person in the roster. that assignments of you should do this assessment now has really improved the turnaround time. And I think today we get most of our assignments back within 48 hours, I guess, up to getting the submission, which we're quite happy with. So I'm kind of curious about the assessment, right? Thank you. I know you and I were tweeting about it just, you know, my thought is, so again, I'm a recruiter, so I have no dog in the fight whatsoever.

I understand that. But my thought is, it's like to be very flexible and to meet the candidate where they're at. So like some cans like a take home, some don't have time, they have kids and they don't have time to take home. So they want to do it real time. Like did y'all offered the option to do stuff live coding if they didn't have the time or did you have to do this take home test? I mean, some not just always just being a take home test. That's good. And I mean, the cons that are really way in my mind, that's something we've already thought about was that doing a take home assessment really is biased for the people who have like a stable home life and and you have spare time.

And the more time you can put into it, the better your submission will be. And that's something that really sort of plays in us. So what we've tried to do to address that is we've tried to look at the work that they've left undone and make that part of the submission. So what we've tried to do is sort of give them, and it's a lot of time to ask. We asked them for four hours. So we say, here's your assessment, you have four hours to try and solve this problem. But we also asking them to prioritize what they want to solve. So there's a couple of things that they can work on.

And what they prioritize is part of the submission. And I think that's quite an important thing because it means that the person who does everything and solves all the problems isn't necessarily getting a bit of mark because they've kind of cheated on the results. So you can't finish the whole thing. We want to see what you're leaving undone. We want to see the areas that you focus on. And that's something that prioritization is something that we expect. And the way you do that obviously depends on your level and where you are in your career, but that's something we try and weigh up and talk to the candidates about.

without giving away too much information. Was the test like a business problem? And it was like, hey, did you guys kind of like give almost a real life problem that they had to solve? But what was the outline of the test just at a high level if you can say that? Yeah, I mean, it's not too much for a secret, I guess, but we try to make it as real to the work that we do as possible. And it's basically a tax calculation that you have to do. So we've been calculating tolls in Texas as you move the car through the city. So it's not directed to what Volvo would do, but it's a very similar situation that you would encounter in our space.

Sure. I love that. Like this has happened to a car and this is the fees you should try and calculate. Okay. And that's what we asked them. And then so, so, so y'all did obviously call with the recruiters. And again, I mean, shout out to your recruiters because that puts a lot of emphasis on them to sell the opportunity. I mean, like a lot. So shout out, shout out to, now I have to ask, did y'all use agency recruiters like myself? Or did you only stay in the house at Volvo? We're using in-house. Wow. We do have like four key positions. We do work with agencies.

Yeah. Almost in-house. Call me next time. Anyways, so. But now that's great. Shout to your recruiting team. So recruiting team did the test. After the test, then what was next? We go for a culture assessment, which is the next thing. So I guess that's the one that you all would leave. So I will help me lead up one of the technical assessments. So we get that out the way first. So we take your technical assessment in, we look through it, and then we do a bit of a pair programming, kind of talk us through the assessment. Let's do some system design questions. We talk about solving that.

Once that technical assessment is done, I'll write up my feedback. There'll be a person shadowing as well who will write their feedback up. We submit those completely separately, so we don't get to see each other, so we obviously don't try and give each other bias. We've passed it on to the hiring managers, and then you will, or other engineering managers, pick it up behind us. I think the candidate moves over to the second interview, which is the culture one. You're old, you want to talk about how do you screen, because again, right? It's so frustrating or not frustrating. It's difficult. You're trying to hire fast, but you're trying to hire really good talent for a pretty important mission for Volvo.

So it's definitely really difficult. Talk about how you were able to maybe hack this in a way, but or just figure it out, especially from the culture side. I think there are a few key things that we've done that I'm quite happy with. One of them is that we're always two people. There's always one lead and one shadow. Again, there is a road for this as well. I don't necessarily interview the people I'm hiring to my team at that stage. We're spreading that out so we again, try to stay unbiased and fair so that I'm interviewing my colleagues candidates. And then we have a script to make it as standardized as possible, but we also of course want to keep it flexible.

Like if there are certain things we want to dive into, then we're not that strict. Right. So we're following that script. We're always two people. And again, it's the same thing here that we submit candidates or feedback separately for the hiring manager. But yeah, it is really difficult because we have one hour for that interview. So we spend very little time with the candidates overall. But we do spend at least five minutes in the beginning of that interview to set the stage to make sure that the candidate knows what they're doing, what they're getting themselves into. And what we will be doing, we always try to leave time at the end for them to ask questions.

But there's fairly structured thing because we have to be efficient in that. Me too. And that setting expectations part, I think is really important. So you get the right questions from the candidate. That's it, man. I saw my all the time saying expectations is so, so big. And so let me ask you this, you know, when, you know, me and my team and, you know, we've tried to hire and we kind of sit down and talk about our core values, you know, what we want to see in somebody, we kind of put it on a little bit of a rubric, just a sense of like, you know, We want to address these things in an interview.

And then we do have a rating scale, one to fours, what I chose. I kind of, honestly, I kind of have this podcast to cheat off of y'all's papers. So I can apply it within my organization. But like, did y'all do anything like that? Like, did y'all mean like, hey, listen, we really care about these four attributes in a person? I mean, or is that not something you yelled at? It gets done as dictated by the script. kind of the these are the areas that we will cover and then we have like at Volvo cars we have four core competencies that we value for all of our employees but we're a big company so we're like 40 to 50,000 employees with everything from software engineers to mostly then of course people working in factories so there's four core competencies are quite broad.

That's a fair. But in our value-sinterview, we then have a script. And from the top of my head, I can't remember the rubrics that we go through. But we actually choose not to do the scoring part. So we don't assign one to four or one to five. So we do this qualitatively instead. We have colleagues in product. They are using the scoring. OK. So then what we typically do is that at the end of it, we write a feedback summary with a very clear suggestion on, do we recommend proceeding or not? And it took me a bunch of feedback to the hiring managers. Like I would recommend proceeding, but I would encourage you to dig deep into this area.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. And then at the end of it, I go ahead, Ryan. No, I'm saying I think that's a big thing with the technical interview, because we happened in quite early in the process, is we try and give as much detailed information to the hiring managers behind us so they can make good decisions. And we're not sort of rejecting candidates on what they do or don't know, because we also hiring for a very diverse set of positions. So we try and give them enough information and they can try and dig into areas later and try and make a good decision about where they would fit in.

So there's no sort of marks to say what they know, what they don't know. We're just trying to get a good benchmark on where they are and how rounded the candidates are, or like how deep they can go into certain areas. So that the hiring managers behind us have more information to try and make good decisions. So. It's very rare that I reject someone at that level. But we often sort of grade you to sort of say where you would fit between senior or junior, how you would fit in and which teams might work with. So I'm weird. I get goosebumps when people say things good and you just said that and I got goosebumps with it.

I think, so I want to dig in on this for a second. I feel like a lot of organizations only interview for like the role in front of them. It's like if Sally Smith is not a fit for the staff engineer, we don't want her. And it's like, I'm pretty sure there's probably other positions in the organization that maybe Sally Smith could be a great fit for. It sounds like y'all interview like that. Like you guys try to evaluate the whole business and not just the individual position. Is that, is that kind of accurate? But we have to, right? Because we're trying to fool so many roles.

Like, yeah, we can't sort of interview each person for each one of these roles. So that's what we're trying to do is just try and fund as many good candidates as we can and try and find good positions for them. Um, and that kind of breaks down a little bit because when you are interviewing it's very difficult to tell them where they're going to end up or like which part of the org. I mean, you all can probably talk more about this than I can, but that's quite a disjointed progress process because like they often ask me like what tick will I work with and which part of the business will end up in and it's very difficult for me to answer in the technical interview.

So that's quite a tricky like way to like a tricky process to navigate the candidate through it in a nice way. Yeah, you want to expand on that and how you all address that? is I've been there to try to pitch it and they're like, am I going to work on this team? I was like, listen, I'm going to be honest with you. I don't know. Just go through the interview process and we'll see. Now, again, I think it all comes back to that setting expectations. And then I think it's. So in every part of the interview process, we try to be very transparent about this is the steps that you will be going through.

We can't tell you about a specific role. So in some cases, we might have for it, things is it a specialized expert that we're hiring, we might have a position in mind from the beginning, but in most cases, we don't. And we're very clear about that from the beginning. You will go through these. But on the positive side, you will get to meet a bunch of people because your rotors are not just for one team or for one cluster of teams. It's for the entire organization. So hopefully you will get a feel for like a cross section of the company. This is how we work.

This is who we are. And then And at the end, we will match you to a specific position and then you will get to meet the hiring manager and then you can have that discussion and if it's not a good fit for you, then we're very happy to continue looking for a position that fits you. I love that. I love that so much. And again, right, it's one thing you guys are doing is expectation setting, right? I mean, if you tell the candidate on the initial call, you're not going to be interviewing for for a set position, here are the steps of the interview process.

Here's how the take home is going to be. Then you kind of like take away all of the gotchas that could happen in the interview process that can derail it, right? Which is huge. So recruiter, call, tech eval, culture screen, offer? Hiring manager interview. So the hiring manager gets all the feedback. And this is something that we're struggling with a little bit because on one end, we of course value their candidacy privacy as much as possible. So we don't share the feedback publicly, we only share it with the exact people who need it. But on the other hand, that lack of transparency means that it's somewhat demotivating for the people in the interview wrote us, that they just spent a bunch of time interviewing people they have no idea what happens next.

They know that I interviewed 15 people this month. I don't know who got hired. I don't know what happened after. But we do that to protect the privacy of the candidate that we're recruiting. So that's a slightly difficult balance. But after the culture fits evaluation, we give all the feedback to a hiring manager. We make some matching and think that this is a position. and then the hiring manager proceeds to an interview and that's where they sell a specific offer. I love that. I love that. So that's a much more casual interview where you as a hiring manager talk about the offer, the position, this is what we will expect from you and also of course trying to assess how well they would do in that particular position.

After which point, if everything is well after that, we do extend the offer. Jonathan comes in again and Jonathan's a former VP of engineering. So I love these questions, man. That begs a new question. How do you manage setting expectations with hiring managers when the process is so open for role-fit? I guess I guess in a way is that like if like how do you communicate that this candidate and Jonathan please comment if I'm wrong with interpreting this? How does the hiring manager know that that can't is a fit for his job? Like where's the communication going from culture to hiring and how do you guys slot those candidates in for the appropriate role?

So initially we had a committee with hiring managers. We looked at the entire pipeline of candidates coming in but there's very little information on them. And we saw that this is kind of where they are this process and then there were discussions on like, yeah, we have a really urgent need right now in our team, is there someone with these competencies and then the recruiter would help us identify who we should talk to. Okay. But then everyone could access that. But and over time, I think the recruiter became really, really good at that. So we didn't really need that panel anymore. That's awesome. I mean, that's what we've seen from the recruiters as well.

just they know the hiring managers, they know the teams, they know the tech space. I mean, they come to me like really excited like these messages saying, I found this amazing candidate, you need to like do this assessment now. And they seem to be really invested in the process and we rely on them heavily, I think. That's awesome. And yeah, okay, all right, Jonathan just affirmed. Okay, so, and I love that. And again, I want to stress that with what Ryan just said, right? This is an organization that scaled hundreds of people in the year and you have Ryan and Joel both saying, we rely on the recruiting team.

Right? Any organization that I've been a part of to help scale them, they've heavily leaned on us. And again, like Ryan and Joel here are just a prime example of how if you do leverage, and it sounds like, and by the way, I'm gonna ask for an intro to one of your recruiters, the recruiting leads because I definitely wanna talk to them because they sound amazing, but like this is how it's done. Like that is how it's done. We're engineering and recruiting work hand in hand. And it's just a really good relationship. I wanna talk about some, the last like 10 minutes here and again guys, time flies when you're having fun with new friends across the world.

But talk about some major, major mistakes or maybe just some things you pivoted because you know, one of the things that, one of the constant feedbacks I get from the show is Taylor, you always talk about people about their success stories. We don't hear enough about their failures. So I want to see, has there been anything in the process that you guys have to scrap or change or pivot? I think a big one for me is this around interview structure. There's something that we're trying to standardize right now because we have this rota system, especially in the technical interview side where it's less scripted than the culture and to use it to come later.

Because it's very hard to sort of have a script for a technical assessment. It's very much focused on the candidate. So we have this roster of people who rotate and they come through, every one of them approaches it very differently. So I tend to lead the interviews who always have a leader and a shadower. And it means that we meet for the half an hour before the interview starts. And I'll talk them through how I want to do it, which we don't think is very fair, because you're not getting a very consistent experience from that, and you're not getting filtered out in the same way.

And that's something we really need to figure out. It's like, how do we standardize this process that is so focused on the candidate, and so specific to the candidate, but we still do it in a very generic and fair way across all of them. So like, can we standardize the types of questions, the types of problems and can we assess the answers in a more standardized fashion? And that's something I think we're struggling with. So other parts of the organization have gone the re-brick approach where they sort of allow you sort of grade candidates in a very set way and they have very specific types of questions and questions to ask.

But that's not something we've really solved. I mean, if you look at the staff engineering process, like the technical assessment there is much more structured because we know we're looking for a candidate, the expectations are much higher. Sure. much easier to box them. But when you're working with sort of Junior or mid-level candidates, the skills are kind of all over the place. And it's very difficult to sort of set up a rubric like that. At least we find. So that's something we need to figure out. And I think it's definitely a hole in the process right now. I love that. You all, anything on your end where you've had to pivot or do things a little differently?

Yeah. I can't recall anything in the specific pivots, but one of the things I find quite difficult as a hiring manager is managing the team's expectations. Because to some extent they are left in the dark in this process. So they might have a few people on the rotation doing screenings, but otherwise they only get the news that there is a new person joining your team in X months. And you might have met them, you might not have met them. And that kind of expectation management is really difficult. So we do get a lot of binds from the teams now that they know about the process.

Everyone is welcome to join the rotation and they know how it works. But in the beginning that was quite difficult when we set this up because then just somebody essentially just showed up to work one day. Hey, Kevin just joined. Who's Kevin? You didn't meet him, but he's on our team now. But it's exactly what happens. I mean, if you look at the old approach that we used to have, we were hiring for a role in the team. And the team would meet the candidate and spin time with them. And unfortunately, we've lost that in the process. And now we've kind of lost all the personal interaction.

And we would like the team to maybe have the final say, but that's just another interview and another step that we're trying to remove. So it's difficult to balance that one. Yeah, I helped a company, a health care health tech company here in the States last year and the year before. They got their series be scaled a tremendous amount. We placed like, I think 20 engineers with them. And they interviewed that like y'all do in a sense of, it was recruiter screen, a techie val, a panel, and then like a leadership final call. But the thing is though, they struggle with the same thing, right, is where, you know, how do we, you know, they heavily relied on us and we pitched the vision of this company and we tried to do the best we can, but at the end of the day, like, you may not even interview with your hiring manager to the very end and then you haven't met anybody, they didn't gotta go work with them.

So I think that's the one, and that's why I really wanted to bring you guys on the show because it's so difficult to try to nail the interview in general, let alone at this scale. And so I appreciate you guys being honest and open about it. How has retention been, let's talk about retention briefly real fast. What do y'all do to like, because again, that problem of like a developer showing up first day and he may not even met the team. What do y'all do from a retention and maybe team bonding perspective? I think team bonding is so one of the things we abandon during COVID is the co-located teams.

So I don't think there is a single team in not in our cluster that is co-located. So team bombing is obviously a challenge because now we have to do that remotely. That is difficult. But retention for us hasn't been a problem, thus far I should say. We have some very good numbers there. But all I think... No cool problems to solve, I think that already helps. Yes. We're pivoting so fast and we're trying to change the company so radically. And that's a huge sort of frustration as well, because people come in from all mature organizations. And I think they have already easy time, but there's some big problems to solve.

It's lots of green ground. I think it's quite a cool space for developers to come into. So I think that already helps with attention as well. For sure. And again, I think the transparency during the interview process that we're hiring you for, we are a growing organization. We're changing a lot. So even if we want that we probably couldn't have you meet the team, because if If we're growing about 20%, the team will be very different from the time that you sign the paper to your first day. They didn't even think about that either. So, just setting those expectations for everyone, saying that we want you to join because you think that this is an interesting challenge to work on.

And that, I think, attracts a certain type of people, and then retention hasn't really been a problem for us. That's awesome. The last question here is we wrap it up. Scott comes in. How have you resisted the urge to transition to hiring only mid-senior level engineers? As you mentioned, you're still hiring juniors. Have you maintained that institutional culture of wanting to foster new talents? That is a great question. That's a difficult one. That has been, I would say, one of the biggest challenges for last year. How do we into this false-changing landscape, how do we onboard more junior people? That is definitely something that I can't speak for my colleagues, but that's something I've been struggling with in our area.

So how do we do that? Because we don't even know exactly what we would onboard you into because we're changing a lot. We're building new systems, we're forming new teams. But all in all, I think it's a cultural thing where we have to, we're trying to create that culture where everyone working in the company right now understands that this is the only way that we can scale. We need to be able to hire junior people because we need people who can grow with the company and grow with us. But yeah, that is a really difficult challenge for us. Sure. But it's also a mindset in the teams about trying to foster new talents and try to take those people with you and show them good practices because I I think it's an amazing way to bring really good talent into the company, is to like, to bring people and expose them to good practices rough in the beginning.

And they take that with them. But it definitely is a developer mindset. And we have really struggled. Like we have teams that only really have senior people in them. Like one of the teams I first joined, I think like the most junior developers been doing us for 12 years. And that's the kind of team that we ran with for a long time. So it's definitely been a head shift to sort of go back to saying, we have junior people with us, you need to work with them. and the way that we code review and the expectations we give them and the way that we pass them like business requirements and the way we work with objectives and goals is very different how you would work with a senior.

That is something that we need to sort of keep working on and keep in mind. But I think, I mean, you all specifically has been really good about bringing in new talent and bringing in young talent. And I think the teams are still struggling to adapt to that, but that's something we really need to focus on. I love that. I love the honesty. Well, guys, Thank you again for hanging out with me today. I appreciate it. It means a lot. We probably need to part two eventually because this was so good. This was so good. So for those of you who are watching, please go connect with both of these fine, amazing gentlemen on LinkedIn.

You'll all right and stay on as I end at Second State Body, y'all. But again, thank you all for hanging out tomorrow. I have an engineering major from LinkedIn who's going to be on tomorrow. So excited to catch up with her. And then Wednesday is a staff engineer out of Texas who I met at that conference in Austin speaking in January. And then we have an AI company coming on Thursday for my other podcast unicorn finders because a guy can't have too many podcast. So again, busy week this week. Hope you guys have a good one. Ryan, you all thank you so much for joining me today.

And you'll have a great one and I'll see you all tomorrow. Peace. Thanks. I think it's 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 at taylor at vaco.com or at t-destin on all social media handles and I hope you have a fantastic day.