hiring, interview, triathlons, and the braves w/eng mgr colin lord

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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 for 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, social media at tdsntdesseyn. 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. What's going on everybody? Good morning. When I say everybody, it just mean Colin. I don't want to hear yet. But good morning, happy, happy hump day. Wednesday, we made it. I'm going to the beach on Friday. And I could not be more proud. I've not been to the beach in a few years, and even more so I'm going to 30A.

Yes, very. The best beach, the best beach. You know, so funny. Who are we hanging out with? Oh, we had some friends. We went a few years back. And we had some friends and I was like, yeah, it's like, my tagline is like, we're Nashville goes to the beach. And they're like, what are you talking about? I was like, literally, I was like, just go around and start asking people on the beach where they're from. So literally this guy is like a social butterfly. Like he makes me extremely anxious with how comfortable he is going up to strangers to talk to people. And so he started to go around everybody like in the beach chairs around us.

And he was like, where are you from? And everybody around us was from Nashville. He goes, damn, you're right. So anyway, so excited to do that. But for those who do two things, good morning, welcome. Say hey, we'd love to hear from you. This is the last guidance cuts for two points. I'd say for about two weeks or so, like I said, going vacation next week and then probably gonna take the following great rising instead of good morning, great rising. I love that. Nick, very clever. You're a very clever gentleman. LinkedIn user is pumped that Colin is here. Christina, it's great to see you. So y'all keep commenting.

But so yeah, the next week off for a break and then the week following that to wrap up my job search, it keeps extending how these things work. So I thought I was going to have it wrapped up this week, but we're kind of moving into vacation. So taking two weeks off. So last live for the day, so I'd love to hear from you, say, hey, let us know what you're tuning in from. Also to ask questions. So the reason why really, so again, this is like a two-sided thing here. It is a networking platform. So if you say, hey, people see you, people can connect with you, yada, yada, yada, yada.

And then the second thing is, you can ask really cool people like calling some questions. Like how to train for a triathlon or why are the Atlanta Braves really good right now, which we're going to get into. So again, ask questions, be engaged, say hey, and this is, I'll be off for two weeks after this. Also shout out that conference. I know Colin's a fan of that conference for the official coffee sponsor of the show. There it is right there. I am drinking it right now. Actually, I'm not, all right, I'm going to be honest with you. I'm not drinking it at the moment. I changed it up, Clark, don't get mad at me.

But I'm going to, I have to get some variations here, right? So I'm trying. My second favorite bag of coffee is Canyon Coffee. I would check in, I would check on that. But also that conference, go to it, July would be great. Might have gotten a chance, a few people tuning in, again Nick, LinkedIn user Christina, Paul, Mean Team, what's going on, Steven, Deb, Ricardo, John, Joe from Knoxville, I love it. 19 out of 22, I'm assuming that's a Braves reference. That is a Braves reference. So you guys, the Braves, well I'm just going to stuff the music. So the Braves have won 19 on last 22.

Yeah, we've had a pretty good June. That's pretty crazy. And then chop on. I love it. We got some Braves fan this morning. So we're going to start out a little fun here, a little icebreaker type thing. So Colin, so Josh Seiffer, my guy. What's up, buddy? It's been a minute. RJ, it's good to see you. So all right, so let's talk triathlon. So Colin, you're kind of not a guy who brags, I feel like. But I want to brag on Colin for a second. So I was talking to Colin backstage and I was like, you know what, you and one of my buddies where I play ice hockey with are like all over my Instagram feed, documenting your triathlon training.

And Colin, what did you do recently and where are you going because of what you did? So about five weeks ago, down in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Ironman 70.3 Chattanooga, me and another person on my triathlon team, we both qualified for the 70.3 Oh, championship. Come on. Finland. So in about two months, uh, packing up my bike and heading to Finland to really believe how you travel with a bike. Do you just like check it or sort of? Yeah. That's something I still need to figure out. Google chat GPT. How do you travel with a bike? Thanks. Put an air tag in there. Make sure there's a loss.

Hey, for real low key big hack. Jackie and I did it. do air tags with all your luggage, especially do international. We did that for one of our trips when we were going to Norway last year for a wedding. Our bags got, did not come with us, but we knew exactly where they were the entire time. So. Yeah, I've got one in my bag. I got one for Katie, so we can track our bags whenever we travel. Big hats, big travel. It's definitely worth doing. Yeah, love that. Talk, so congratulations Colin, that's awesome. Let's talk about first thing, because I think you and I chatted briefly about this.

You know, you've been a lot better. I'm going to give you props here about documenting your training. I've enjoyed fun along with it. How does that helped you build connections? If not, you can tell me that's fine, but I have a sneaky suspicion. People probably resonated with you doing what you're doing. Yes. And I think the key is if you're, if you're sharing it online, you don't have to worry about the smell because you can see this hard work out that I did, but you don't have to deal with the hamper. But when you're done, yeah, like yesterday, Katie was, is horrified by how bad the hamper smelled and I just apologize to her.

It's like, this is the burden that you have to be married to me. So there's a, if you look, you follow me on any social media platform, you'll see those photos, but there's no smell. So it's like the best way to share. And I had to put my clothes out on the deck because they were, they were. That's awful. Oh, so Nashville heat. So, so yeah. So, so you've been able to, to build some relationships. Because again, right, you know, I'm big about documenting and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like the people that I raced in Chattanooga with, I met online. Like we never would have had a means of meeting otherwise.

And now they're part of, I'm on their triathlon team. We talk all the time and that was because they were documenting their journey and I commented on theirs. And now I'm trying to do the same thing, at least I'm on some level. That's awesome. I love that. And it's so important. I mean, I was talking to them. So Jim Young, for those of you who do not follow, Colin, do you shave your legs? I did for the race in Chattanooga. It was my first time doing it. That was also documented on social media. And there you can watch the video of that out there for better or for worse.

I love that. I love that. Well, that got on the LinkedIn. Talk about a thing. That's amazing. That's amazing. So talk about, so it's going to the Braves, right? Talk Braves a little quickly. I don't know much about baseball. So I do follow South. The only baseball team I follow is South Carolina Baseball. Shout to the Game Cocks. We lost in the Super Regionals to Florida, who ended up going to the College World Series finals. I can tell us you. That's the only baseball I really follow. And I can talk Game Cocks baseball. But I don't really follow the MLB. So Braves are good right now.

And talk about your infatuation of Braves. Obviously your Coke bottles. I saw somebody talk about the Coke bottles. So explain kind of the Atlanta Coke bottle Braves connection and talk about the Braves for a second before he can dive into actual practical advice. Actual practical advice. So I grew up in Atlanta. I used to be a brave season ticket holder when I lived there. Coke is from Atlanta. So I live in Nashville now, but my Atlanta ties run deep. And I collected Coke bottles and you get bobbleheads at some Braves games. Until COVID, they, this all sat in boxes. And now that I work from home, everyone has these virtual backgrounds and they try to look professional.

I went the opposite route. I sit in front of soda, bobbleheads, and a little matrix screen that I can do. I love that, but I kind of want to get one. I've seen those on my Instagram or something like that. So I thought you could do it. I saw the other Instagram too. I bought it and I'm still tinkering with it. So it just shows random stuff. Anything with a public API you can hook into. So I need to. I'll just invite you over to do that. I'll just invite you over to do that. We got fewer people tuning in, Gabe. It's good to see you.

The party has started. Let's go. I love it from smokey Wisconsin. Yeah. But Clark was texting me yesterday, and he was like, dude, I got a major headache from all this smoke. His air quality is not good today. Not good, not ideal. All right, man, let's dive into the important stuff. Not that I'm saying you actually qualifying for a world championship in Finland is an important. But so tell the people what you do, again, just super high level. So I worked for a Smile Direct Club. I started there at the end of 2018. My job title is Engineering Manager, and my teams oversee the front end of the website.

So anything. So anything small, directclub.com, basically? Anything, Smile Direct Club related to the front end goes through my team. We had a production deployment yesterday. So we run those. Did it go well? Did it burn in? No, if it was burning, I wouldn't be here with you. That's fair. But yeah, so it's anything front end. If somebody needs something, generally, I'm the guy they're reaching out to. Gotcha. Gotcha, guys, that's awesome. So I know last time we talked about kind of a similar thing, but I always say, if I was a job seeker, I'd be fascinated to hear from a hiring manager, no matter how many times, to see what they look for and how they interview.

And you sent me some notes. And one of the things you said is that you really look for somebody that you want to go into battle with, right? Or you said, what are the words you said again, like production goes down or if you want to go into battle, I'm gonna read it real quick, hold on, what was it? It says, maybe it sounds dramatic, but I'm basically trying to answer one question. Would I go into battle with you when production is down and we don't know why? And I love that so much. Cause can you talk about why that's your mindset and how do you screen for that in some way, shape or form?

So like when we have an interviewing process and we're talking to a candidate, like obviously we want to evaluate, can you write JavaScript? do you have the skills that you need to be able to do day-to-day tasks? The thing that I try to look into more is, I guess you could more say it's like a culture thing, but it kind of goes a little bit deeper than that. It's easy to see how somebody codes on a good day when everything is smooth versus when production's down, everybody's blowing us up because they're saying, why, what's happening here? we're losing money, conversions being affected, we need you to fix this right now.

And I've seen people who are really, really smart, who frees up in that situation. And- Interesting. They're not sure what to do. The worst thing you can do in that spot is start saying, it's not my fault. I'm gonna blame somebody else. Like what I wanna see from people in that spot when production is down, which thankfully doesn't happen very much, but any company you're gonna eventually have some sort of fire that you have to put out, is like, am I like contributing to help this? Am I looking at this rationally? Am I, am I approaching this like from a calm mindset? Those are harder things to try to pull out of an interview.

And when we go through our process and they talk to different people, that's basically the one thing I'm trying to figure out. And that's what I said in the email that I sent to you. And the phrase that I kind of asked myself is, when I go into battle with you, when production goes down, because no matter how good your process is, eventually something's gonna break, even if it's like an external service, and then that brings down your site somehow. When you know what the problem is, it's easy to fix. Usually the hardest thing is identifying what the problem is, and how do you communicate that out in a calm way that's problem solving?

That is a skill that is hard to develop. When I first started at my career writing code, I sucked at that, I will completely own that. I think most junior engineers do, And that's a hard thing to evaluate in an interview. And that's also a hard thing to find. I got distracted by your shirt for a second. What's on your shirt? Square boys, round boys, what is this? What is this? It's the different kind of brackets. Oh my gosh. I'm so much. I got it at that conference. I love that. I love that. So, you know, it's interesting. I wanted to kind of sit on this for a second about like the battle going into battle because that's the way I view things too.

And I don't know if that's a competitive mindset, because for me playing hockey, me and the guys went to Pittsburgh in April, took a bunch of Southern boys to go on the road up in Ice Hockey Central to try to compete with those guys. And we ended up placing top five out of 38 teams. Nice. The guys we bring, these are the guys I want to go in a battle with. I know they're going to have my back. I'm going to have their back. Where do you kind of get that from? And I don't know, I guess I'm trying to figure out how to say this, but where do we think the going into battle mindset comes from?

Because I love it and it's so good. The cop-out answer is to say that you just sort of have to develop it organically. You can't just, I can't put on a job listing. Here are the skills that you need. And also, I want to go into battle. Just be like, wait a minute. People are going to be like, wait, what's going on? What's going on? What about are we fighting? I think you build it organically and you need to have a good relationship where I trust my engineers, they trust me. And then on those days when something's going wrong or we've got a work late or something, that's when the fruits of that come out.

Some people have said that this is a very unorthodox way to manage. I personally like that my team is comfortable giving me shit. If I say or do something that is dumb, they're all gonna blow up my team's saying, Colin, you're dumb. In the last year or two, this beard has started to get really great. It has been called out many times. The hair on top of my head is starting to thin. That's been called out. And if you're an uptight manager, you might be like, oh no, I need to be respected. And I'm the opposite where I would rather you be comfortable giving me shit, because when something's going wrong or you've made a mistake or something's up, you're gonna fall back on that more trustworthy, friendly relationship, and hopefully that's the other side.

But you don't want people giving you shit to interview, right? Because that can be weird. Right? An interview, no. Like that's cool. I beat you on the interview. Right, yeah, don't, if you're in an interview with me, they'll be like, oh, hey, look at that beard. I'm talking about more like day to day once you're working with me. And if you're comfortable giving me shit, hopefully you're also comfortable saying, Hey, I screwed up. Here's what we need to do to fix it. And that's kind of the approach behind it. There's, we got a few questions coming in right now. So Paul, I like the idea of that mindset when interviewing people, but how much of that is also enabled or disabled by the culture?

It's all enabled by culture, I think. I don't know how you can have that mindset without like actively working on that being part of your culture. Yeah, absolutely. The onus is going to be on the leadership team, but each individual person needs to bring a piece of that too. So I can preach that all day, but if everyone else on the team doesn't buy in, then it's wasted breath. Yeah, 100%. Let's see here, RJ, we all sucked at it and tell him I'll figure it out. Code Inhumor is the best humor. Can you teach somebody how to work through production being down? This is a good question, Emmet.

So production can be down for a multitude of reasons. Like it really sneezed. Yeah, depends on what you're using. Like you can't teach what to do with production being down but you can teach how to react to a stressful situation. And that applies not just to production being down but to throw it back to like triathlon. I have a flat tire. That's a stressful situation. Production's down. That's a stressful situation. And it will get noticed if you respond to a stressful situation, calmly approach it analytically and don't let the, oh my gosh, this is a huge crisis. Even if it is, like you need to take a minute and approach it and just start trying to problem solve.

Because most of the time when something like production is down, whether it's a service or something on our own hosting side, the problem isn't obvious because if you identify the problem, you know how to fix it. So 95% of it is what screwed up, and then the last 5% is reverting or restarting something or switching to something else. Like usually the fix is the easy part. Identifying the problem is the hard part. So you can't really teach how to identify it other than just getting familiar with everything, but what you could teach is, okay, yes, like everybody is freaking out and blowing up our Microsoft Teams accounts, but we need to hunker down and problem solve this without freezing up and being intimidated by the moment.

What are some nuances? So I wanna share my nuance, but I want you to go first because I don't want you to go same and then we're done with the conversation. So what are some nuances that you look for? Cause you said in the email to me that you're kind of responsible for like the overall culture of the team in the interview process, which when I was leading a team, I was kind of the same way. I let my team members kind of get in the weeds about more tactical things. Do you have like a mental checklist of what you look for in a candidate to join the team?

And this may help one, hiring managers watching the show now in the future, or also job seekers too. So obviously on some level, you've got to have at least some of our coding skills and our tech sector. Yeah, for sure. I would say that if you're looking at a job posting you don't have everything, you should still certainly apply. If somebody comes in and says, hey, I know everything on this list, I'm going to be suspicious like I'm being catfish. They're all sort of nauseous. Yeah, that too. But if somebody's like, hey, I can do everything on you. Everybody with the job specs, then no wonder why you have turnover.

If somebody comes in with knowing everything, I'm going to be like, am I being catfished on like engineering manager, hiring show or something? Because nobody's perfect. Right. If you don't know something or a couple of those, that's okay. We can certainly teach you. I didn't know everything about SDC's tech stack and I still applied. They still hired me. So that'd be one thing I would call out is, you know, you don't have to know everything, but also be honest about what you do and don't know and yeah, express a willingness, a willingness to learn it just so that it's out there and said. The other thing that I look for in this may sound overly simplistic is just being a good communicator, especially on the front-end side.

Like I work with our marketing folks probably more than I work with other parts of our tech Group here at SDC. That's crazy. And we talked to senior leadership all the time and How we communicate what we're working on is just as important as what we're actually working on you might even make a case It's more important because they're making decisions about how to run the business based on the updates that we're giving Yeah And if we can't communicate the status of where things are then that's gonna impact them and I need to be able to communicate with my team to figure out well they're asking for a date what should I tell them and It I mean I don't want to cop out and just say be a good communicator But that that's really like one of the main things I'm looking for is you can be an awesome engineer But if you can't communicate where your code is it's it's not gonna work Well, so we got some people There's so much to unpack here so communications huge we got that Brett is good to see you Finding devs that know the sense of urgency in those snares is big too.

Yeah. Have you seen that as well? Just that gear that people need to have? Yeah, and usually the younger you are, the more you kind of are not used to it where it like, okay, production's down. This is literally costing us money. Or not even the whole site being down. There's a part of the site that's down. Yeah, like the checkout. Right. Check out it's important. But even not even something like that, if part of the site's not working and that's affecting conversion rates and they're down by 20% because some map is broken or something like that. Production may be up, but that's still affecting conversion, which is literally costing us money.

Yeah. So having just a basic understanding of the business and what you're working on to understand the urgency is really important. Just saying, well, it looks okay to me why the urgency is kind of the wrong reaction in that kind of situation. So you've commented a few times on vulnerability, communication, being open. If a developer comes to you and has those qualities, how much do they set themselves apart? Is it, they're like already in the 95th percentile? Like, because, because, because I don't know man, like I've obviously done the show for three years, I've been doing a lot of engineering layers, they all say the same thing.

And I'm like, what, excuse my friends, why the fuck doesn't anybody understand? Like, if you're a developer, just say, I don't know, Just say, just communicate. Like I just don't understand why people can't get it. And so in your experience, what would you tell people, developers, if they can communicate and be vulnerable in transparent interview, what presents how do you think they're already in? You're certainly up there. There's a lot more people that know react than know how to communicate and have humility. That was good. That's a sound buy, get my team to chop that up. That was great. But honestly, I think it's also a harder skill.

I think it's easier to learn React than it is to learn humility and to say, I don't know this or even worse to say, oh wow, you know what? I totally broke this last week. Please don't be mad, like that kind of thing. Like, no, I'm never gonna be mad, but I do need to know if something's wrong so we can fix it. And that is a scary freaking bridge to cross. Like if you're one or two years into your career going to your manager and saying, oh wow, I fucked up. That is scary and I completely get it. And that's part of why I try to be so disarming as a manager is I want people to be comfortable bringing good news to me just the same as bad news.

I love that. Communicating that something's wrong and you made a mistake, like I always try to share like how many times that I've made mistakes in my career. It's not like this cause I have a manager in front of my title doesn't mean I don't have 10 years of GitHub history, actually more than 10. The gray beard, I'm getting old. I've made plenty of bugs in my career. And the longer I've done this, the more comfortable I've gotten it owning it, the sooner that you can accept that you are not a perfect engineer, because nobody is, the better that you will do in your career.

So Josh has been on the show twice. Josh, I need to probably get you on again soon, man. This is so good. If only our interview processes were scoped for communication and vulnerability instead of technical accuracy. Now, obviously Josh is a very knowledgeable engineering leader, obviously, Colin is too. I understand like you can't go all soft skills. They got to have the ballpark. But technical accuracy is easier to screen for than communication and vulnerability. I can give you a coding assessment and tell if you can write view or if you understand how to pull in data from an API. It is a lot harder for me to tell if you were a good communicator and if you are comfortable and humble enough to say, I made a mistake.

Yeah. Yeah. So I'm gonna throw a curveball at you. No pun intended. I feel like this is where references could come in to play. Yeah. But also I hate references, but this just popped into my mind because I'm like, I think the only way you can really see it is if like you go through the process with somebody and you get a good vibe, but to have like another check marker too. What are your thoughts on references? Do you use them as an engineering leader? I think they're dumb, but also talking to you now, I'm kind of like, well, I think it would make sense to maybe at least talk to somebody else who can vouch this person's communications goes.

Yeah, so for me, I generally don't use references unless it's something, unless I can't answer a question on my own. Sure. And I need more information. Yeah, that makes sense. The last few folks that we hired, I didn't even ask for references. And I've asked for it in the past. For me, rather than asking for references, I would more ask questions directly in the interview about like tell me about a project that you worked on and not get into the nitty gritty of what version of node did you use? And more about what was like the process like? What was your interaction with the client?

Who was this for? Was it late? How'd you work with your product manager? what you do in Jira, like that kind of stuff. And that's my way of, you can kind of figure out if they're a good communicator. Because A, they're telling you a story of what they worked on and communicating a project. Right. And I would really only go to references if I felt like I needed more or wanted to check something. But to me, like you're gonna obviously give references that are gonna say good stuff. Sure. So I kind of know what I'm gonna hear there. And it's usually not something that I would go to unless I was a fan.

That makes sense. That makes sense. It just popped in my brain. So I wanted to bring it up. How's Colin is blowing my mind good? That's why I wanted him back on the show. RJ said the best. If you can bring the bad news, it's easy to bring the good news. Yeah. And I think it's huge. Like I would rather you communicate more bad news to me. And I know that seems kind of weird. But if I know you're comfortable in the bad, you're going to be way comfortable in the good. And I think it gets a sign of culture. If anybody on my team's watching this now or in the future, I hope they would say that they feel comfortable saying, hey, I have a bug and I'm not going to get mad at them.

Yeah. I'm not going to yell. I don't think I've ever yelled. Maybe I have about the Braves, but certainly not about work. But I'm going to want to know how to fix it and what we need to do to prevent it from happening in the future. But I mean, it sounds silly, but I hope nobody's scared to bring bad news to me. Yeah. And I think that's like the baseline. A hundred percent. should be a lot more than that, but hopefully nobody's intimidated or scared to bring bad news, because it's going to happen. And you want to make sure that relationship is good on both sides for when that day comes.

Let's see here. Somebody asked the question. How do you find if someone honestly has a soft skills during an interview? I mean, it's kind of like continuing to come and see, we just have to just want to get to this. You can't fully evaluate it much in the same way you can't fully vet somebody's technical skills. So I personally am not a fan of like the live coding and the Google sheet or whiteboard coding or anything like that, much in the same way that, I got, it's hard to evaluate how you have soft skills in an interview. Really, it's one of those things from a manager perspective that it's a skill you develop the more folks you interview.

I'm not perfect. like there's people that I thought knocked it out of the park and then I was like, oh, actually it's the next time. Oh, same. I've heard people that just thought we're great and then just didn't work out and that's okay. Yeah. It's a guess. And you don't want to drag the interview out and make like eight or nine steps because that's a bad thing. On some level, you have to take a leap and figure it out. So to answer your question, you kind of can't, you could just get a really good hunch and the more folks you interview and the more you kind of learn how you work with folks and interview, it's a skill like anything else.

Yep, without a doubt, without a doubt. Man, we're definitely on something here. A lot of comments. Let's see here. References, Stephen comes in, they can be done, but I call them the warm fuzzy blanket. Yeah, we've kind of called them that too in recruiting, Stephen's a recruiter as well. I like this, they're great. He talks about lately, I have had references tell me awkwardly honest truth. It's been super weird, but it's been amazingly helpful. Yeah, I mean again, right? Like listen, I understand you don't want to screw over somebody, but they're asking about something. If I've ever talked to somebody for a reference, generally I always try to throw in a question that's like something to the effect of like, tell me a reason why I shouldn't hire somebody, maybe not that direct, but it's just like, can you give me some sort of like critical feedback or something they need to work on?

because everybody has things that they're good at and things that they're bad at. And I certainly have plenty of things that I'm bad at. But I would at least hope that I could identify what your strengths and weaknesses are. Not that it's a bad thing, it's just who you are. 100%. Richie, Richie's a fellow recruiter. Can you repeat, you don't wanna have eight or nine interviews and you have to take a leap. I just wanna hear it again. Yeah, I don't wanna do eight or nine interviews because if we're interviewing three candidates, It's 27 interviews. Yeah. Like at some point, you've got to take a leap.

So I'll say it again. Like you're never going to get to 100% statistical significance that this candidate is going to work out. You need to get to a point where you're comfortable. And at that point, make a decision one way or the other. RJ, if you really want to test their skills, just torch your production environments and you can fix it on the spot. That shit would be wild if that was an interview. I'd rather not. I mean, I agree. I'll start to the top. It all starts at the top. And that's why I wanted to call on the show. Collins is a good one.

All right. So as you wrap up here, Colin, I do want to talk, I know we've been kind of hovering, kind of job seeker vulnerability side of things. Is there anything else a job seeker can do right now to really stand out, especially kind of what you're seeing on the market as a manager, and then we'll wrap it up here. Yeah. So I would kind of go back to everything that we've seen in the past. Yeah, so I would kind of go back to everything that we've just talked about. Anybody who's interviewing for an engineering role, and that's what I am, I'm an engineering manager, so those are the folks that I talk to.

Pretty much any process you're going to have some sort of coding evaluation. They may or may not have a soft skills evaluation. I would hope they do, but what I would hope people would try to do to stand out is try to find a way to bring that into the interview. if you're the one bringing it up in some way, shape or form, even if it's during your coding evaluation, like, oh, I remember doing this in X Project and sort of talk about how that happened. If they aren't asking about it, I think it's kind of a mistake on their part, but if you're on the other side, job-seeking, obviously, you can't control what their process is.

Right. But I've met plenty of engineers over the course of my career. Most are good to excellent coders. the ones with good communication and soft skills. If you have that, you can set yourself apart. And like I said earlier, to the point where I would hire somebody with weaker coding skills, but stronger soft skills, because I think what I said earlier was I can teach you react much easier than I can teach you how to be a good communicator. So if you want to set yourself apart, everybody can learn React. It's a lot harder to learn how to communicate and have soft skills and particularly humility, especially with working at home, it's easy to get angry at the screen and just say, I'm right and this person is wrong.

Yep. Don't do that. Like if you can have some level of humbleness and realize that my way may not be the right way, even though from my seat it appears to be, that'll stand out a lot being a good team player and hearing other people out rather than just bulldozing the conversation and saying, no, we are going to use this tech stack. Those are the things that will set you apart. Anybody can learn React. That's the stuff that's harder to teach. I love that. I love that. All right, man. I think I'm going to pivot this question a little bit. I've been asking people, what tech stuff have you been messing with that you're interested in?

I'd say probably 70% of the answer has been AI. I'm going to flip it a little bit. What is a lot of podcasts, do you like favorite piece of content? Is there anything that you've watched, read, done recently that you're fascinated with that you want to share? And it can be technical, or it could be non-technical. Favorite TV show or favorite book you've read, or maybe you found a new triathlon bike. I don't know. I am getting some new wheels from my bike and about a week, so I'm excited about that. So I'll answer your question in a minute. I'm not deflecting. One thing I would say is whatever you do day to day for your job, so for me, we're primarily, JavaScript, we write VU even though I've been talking about React, get into something in terms of another tech stack that is wildly different from your job.

Interesting, okay. Just give your brain a chance to do something else. Even if it's not coding, I think being a triathlete is awesome for being a software engineer because it gives my brain a chance to do something different. I've solved bugs in the back of my head while swimming laps. I have no idea. I've done my best idea of being like not in front of the computer by any means. So what I would advise people to do to keep their brands fresh and also just to learn new stuff is to find something that's completely disconnected from what you do day to day and get into that.

For me, the two things that I've been playing with lately is this little board back here. I can write little apps for it and pull in stuff from an API. And I have a weather station on my back deck. That also has an API. Yes, you're a big weather nerd. I forgot about that. And I just have played with that. I mounted a camera on my roof. Katie told me, please don't fall off. I didn't. And I've just played with stuff like that. None of that is really the same stack that we use at work. But it keeps my brain fresh. And I get to use different brackets, depending on the language, too.

I love that. So I'm not going to say AI because that's everybody's easy answer. I would say. You're putting pivoting a little thing. Try to be like, let's. Like for me, those two answers are very unique to me. I think each person probably has their own unique answer, but I think you need something fun. It can't be, I went to work and then I have a side project that's like really cool. That was our last conversation, I think, about just having a hobby and doing something different. Don't code all day and then go home or, in my case, go downstairs and then code some more.

You need to do something else. your brain, you're gonna burn yourself out otherwise. Yeah, I do wanna get to Alice's question, and then we'll wrap it up with one more question. Kind of unrelated, but how does Colin feel about take-home assessments? How can someone demonstrate their humility, soft skills that they, if the take-home is their first interview contact, well first off, fuck off to that company who's doing that. That's a shitty strategy, I've seen it the 12 years of my career, that's an awful strategy. But Colin, what are your thoughts on that? I would, that's rough if the first thing you do is have to have to write code.

I guess that they're approaching it from the standpoint of, well, we need to make sure your skills are good before we waste our time type thing, whatever. I am a fan of take home type stuff in the, because I think it's less pressure than on this live coding. For us, that is what we do. And it's generally more open ended. And I try to say to people, like, please don't spend more than like an hour on this. I don't want you to have to do whatever. I appreciate that you're going to spend this hour on it. Like I know that that's a hot take on some level that people don't like the idea of here's essentially homework to go interview for the job.

That's sort of what we've settled on. Maybe I'll change my opinion in six months. So for me, I like take home interviews to evaluate your tech stack because I'm going to be way more nervous on camera than I am writing code. And is it OK to Google? What are the rules of an in-person coding type thing? And then to answer your question, humility, soft skills, and a take-home interview, yes, you can demonstrate that even if it's not the first contact point. And the way that you do that is by writing comments. Like, explain what you're doing and explain your thought process. Like, whenever I've interviewed, thankfully it's been a while, I write comments in my code if it's a take-home tech interview, SDC, when I interviewed, that's what we did.

And I tried to help them learn who I am, both through my code, but also through my comments. There's a way you can demonstrate it in a take-home assessment if you kind of think outside the box a little bit. Yeah, I love that. I love that. Last question, the career advice question, right? Guidance counselors in middle school, high school college, but now as adults, not so much. I forgot what you said the last time we spoke. So it'll be new to me too. What would be your biggest career advice to your younger? a young Colin, less gray Colin. Colin Brown. Yeah, I don't remember what I said last time.

So this might be a repeat answer. I know I did. But this is what's popping into my mind. It was the same exact thing. What I would, the advice that I would give to myself with far less gray hair would be to be kinder to myself. You know, I broke the bill so many times. It's, you know, it's, it can be a, You can have a cruel day where you spend two hours trying to figure out how to do something and all you do is notice, mad at you, your package managers, mad at you, lenders, mad at you. It's there are there are really good days.

There are really bad days. There are days where you crush it and somehow knock out like four story points. There are other days where you spend six hours figuring out that you have a semicolon in the wrong spot. You are better than those worst days. And it's really easy to feel like you're a shitty engineer. I still have days now where I feel like I'm a shitty engineer or a shitty engineering manager. Don't let your worst day be how you evaluate yourself because you're probably your worst critic and don't be afraid to stand up and get away from the computer. Like just hammering through is not always the best way because the longer you go, the more frustrated you're going to get and that's not a happy place to be.

Yeah, man, Colin, you preach it today. Well, y'all, thank you again for hanging out with us today. Last guidance counselor 2.0 of probably next two weeks. Go, Ken, with Colin, miss working with you, man. Brian, since I'm not, I'm showing up as anonymous. Hi, Brian. I love it. I love it. But Colin, thanks again. Stay backstage real quick so I can say bye to you. But y'all have a great one. We'll see you in about two weeks. If you still want to be a part of my ecosystem, I'll still be sent out an email newsletter and Discord and all that. So if you need that information, drop in the comments and I'll get back to you.

Otherwise, we'll see you in about two weeks. I appreciate y'all. Bye. 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.

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