ai & the job search w/ engineering leader anna mcdougall

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that. Oh, I gotta do one more thing. Go. What's going on everybody? Good morning. When I say good morning, no, no one's here yet, but say hey. Uh, if you are, um, I'll say hey. Hey. Yeah. Um, Sweet. Good morning everybody. Good morning. Good morning. Forgot to do one thing. I'm posting it in our Torque Discord. Alrighty. Sweet. Cool. Good morning everybody. Uh this is the only live for the week. This is all we got. We got Anna this week. It's It's kind of crazy. I've been traveling a ton. Um obviously been documenting the whole thing um like like one does. And uh this week is like all leadership meetings in the mornings during my live stream.

So like tomorrow we have the torque uh all hands meeting and then Thursday I have uh Ron's dad's leadership meeting. So I got to present. So and then I don't do Monday stream. So Anna's it this week. This is this the only stream for guidance counselor 2.0. So Anna, thank you. Yeah. You know it's it's quality over quantity this week. That's what we're going for here. It's funny you Yes. 100%. Yeah. I only bring on quality like but you know it is interesting. You know I I've done this thing for five years now. Yeah. Right. I mean I mean you and I met three years ago, four years ago.

I mean I think I think actually it was five years ago. That's crazy. That's crazy. And that's why I love that was back in back in Twitter days. Back in the Twitter days. Yeah. Yeah. So um so I've known Anna for a long time and this is our second time on the show. And um you know, one thing I've kind of talked about internally with my team is like pulling back because I've done it for so long and that my job now is ton of meetings, you know, VP blah blah, whatever. But and as you're aware of this and we kind of talk about backstage, the higher up you go, the more meetings you're in, yada yada yada.

Um so, uh so I am I am pulling back a little bit. I you know, my goal is to do two streams a week. Um but, uh but again, super pumped to have Anna here. Um there's people already trickling in. Please say hey. Would love to hear from you. Anna knows the drill. This is a networking. Yes. Virtual thing. Um you know the guests are incredibly important. The tops are incredibly important. But what I've realized and probably speak this like meetups have changed. People don't go out of their houses as much anymore. Um you know and I really truly think like these virtual stream that's why I'm so passionate about Torque.

We have all these streams going off all week every week. Um is that like this is the new meetup, right? You connect with the person, you send them a DM. Hey, it was good to see you. You go back and forth on LinkedIn and all of a sudden become you become bffs, right? So it's like I tell people, please network on the off the back of me. Connect with Anna. Tell her hey. She's Anna's wonderful. She's a wonderful resources, wonderful resource. So please go follow advertising. This is false advertising. Yeah. So uh so yeah, please say hey. We don't know if you're watching unless you say hey.

Um and uh few housekeeping things real quick. Um first off, want to give a shout out to AppRight. So um I'm on their uh Heroes program. Um, I'm the only probably non-technical person on a technical heroes program. My pitch is apprite has good people. I think they have a really good product because a lot of people use it. You should try it. That's my pitch. There you go. So, go go go try it. Um, if you talk to anybody at AppRight. Um, Jason Torres, my colleague, he's an app right hero as well. We've done a lot of meetups with Apprite. We love the Appite team.

So, go check them out. If you want to get involved in the Torque community, right, we do a lot of things, right? We have a mentor program. We're about to launch our first cohort of our mentee mentor program. If you want to check out everything we have going on, go to torque.com community, check that out. Please jump in the Discord, which is a link there. If you want to know when I go live with guests, text me. This is actually my number. It's not a bot. It's not AI, which we'll talk about AI, but this is not AI. This is actually me. So, please text me.

Text live and it just lumps you in. Um, so I send out a text every day before I go live with a guest. Um, all right. Let's see here. Who we got here? Mark, Chris, good to see you. Oscar, my guy, got my cold brew. I got it right here. This is more iced coffee. I need to be more specific in my terminology. Um, but cold brew is my jam, but it's good to see you, Oscar. Elliot, it's good to see you, Chris. Yes, meetings. Yuck. Absolutely. Jaylen, um, Jaylen, my guy. I love it. Uh, it's too hot to It's very hot. It's very hot.

I think it's like 30 degrees Celsius right now. Thank you for the Celsius. Yeah. I'm trying to get better going to Mexico and going to Europe. Like I'm trying to get better with Celsius. Um Seth, it's good to see you. Another great engineering leader. If you don't follow Seth, please follow him. He's been posting about his job search. Um he's been posting about uh places he's submitted to, interviewed with. We we drop his post in our Torque Discord to help others uh find opportunities. So he's a wonderful engineering leader here in Nashville. And Ricardo, it's good to see you. If you are in Nashville, this is my last thing.

I'll let Anna introduce herself. Uh I'm speaking tomorrow at NashvilleJS meetup on how to leverage uh social media to find a job. So uh tomorrow I'm gonna be back at my own stopping grounds Veco, which is hilarious. Um so I will be uh I will be there speaking at uh six o'clock um tomorrow after tomorrow evening. So all right, Anna, let's get to people what they want. Who are you? What do you do? And we'll go from there. Oh, you know, I'm just a stranger who wandered in today. Taylor and I I have no idea why I'm here. I don't know why I'm here. I'm just I'm sitting at my desk.

This thing pops up. No. Um I've known Taylor for a long time now. Back in the day. I think it was 2019 or 2020 I think when when we were on Twitter together at the same time. We kind of our worlds collided I think through Danny Thompson. Yeah. Who was our mutual friend and kind of from there the rest is history. So, uh, Taylor's known me since I was pre-junior engineer looking for my first job and, uh, it's it's been a wild ride. I'm currently engineering manager at a mental health startup called Hello Better. We are basically like mental health courses on prescription in Germany and soon in France as well.

There you go. So, we cover like panic, panic, depression, um, vaginismas, um, sleep problems, all kinds of different things. Um yeah, so you can go to your doctor, say, "I have a sleep problem. You can't get a place with a psychologist, it's okay. You get a prescription, you get our app, and you get um chat support with a psychologist." So, but it's a really cool program. Kind of fills this gap that we have here in Germany where people are waiting sometimes a year to get a therapy spot. Um so, we're like hoping to kind of fill that gap and help people um before they can see someone one-on-one.

I love the idea. Yeah, we do something with that. It's called like blueberry here or something like that. My my wife uses it for the kids. It's kind of like a chat on call for the kids if you can't get in touch with the doctor. It's I I really like that stuff. I feel like I don't know. I feel like you don't always have to go into the doctor or if you do to have that more support. I love that. I love that. Exactly. All right. and and yeah and why and why I'm here, sorry, just to finish up the whole thing, is um I wrote this Medium article and people liked it and uh Taylor posted, "Is anyone here like talking about AI in the interview process or AI in hiring?" Look who it is.

Oh, Danny. Look who it is. Yeah. The legend himself, Danny. Congrats on a great meet up. There you are. Yeah. Yeah. Danny threw a banger meet up last night in New York. So, shout out Danny. Nice. Of course. He's the meetup king. Um, and yeah, so so I wrote this article about what I call the McDougall method. A little bit egotistical, but hey. And um, got to own it, right? You got to own what you do. Uh, where we basically embrace AI as one of the tools that engineers can use in the interview process rather than trying to fight against it and like and have this battle that I just don't see any way you can win that battle.

So if you can't if you can't beat them, join them. And yeah, I came up with a new kind of structure for how we can do that as engineering managers to appropriately and fairly assess candidates. So that's why I'm here. I love that. Um, all right. So, lot to cover today. Um, uh, also if you want to send me I don't know if you can quickly find a link uh to that. I would love to link to that. Oh, yeah. Sure. Of course. I So, as as you are finding that, let me kind of tee up the first question. So, again, I've kind of been a little bit on this uh kind of um uh kind of this thread of AI and the job search and and uh No, I I I think uh Anna, what are you Australian?

Yeah, I'm Yeah, I love how we said New Jersey. Jason, come on. New Jersey. We get Boston a lot because apparently, here's a fun fact. Apparently Bostononians and Australians say car park in exactly the same way. Yeah. Uh we our boss me and Jason's boss is heavy Boston and like trying to talk to him is like is is is crazy is crazy. Um so uh all right so kind of this theme around AI I've had a bunch of guests on and I'm really glad to bring Ann on because she brings kind of a little bit of a different kind of tenor and Vue being an engineering leader.

I feel like right now where we're at with AI is where we were with JavaScript when React kind of came on the scene. view Angular um in that like there were some people resisting to it like I don't jQuery is great right like vanilla JavaScript's great and I feel like there there was a huge shift that people who got it got it and the people who didn't didn't right and then those people kind of fell behind and they were they they had problems finding a job I this is just me validate me or don't is that where we're at with AI right now a little bit yeah I think it's a it's a little bit different in that it's not a whole new language or a whole new framework.

Um, but in terms of being a skill that developers have to learn, I I really do see it that way. Um, you know, we've always said, you know, since since you saw me on Twitter in 2019, we said, you know, the whole thing about being a developer is you have to keep learning new skills. And um I don't think many people when they talk about that they're often thinking about frameworks, they're thinking about packages, they're thinking libraries, but they're not necessarily thinking like your tooling. And I think that's one of the things that developers who have been in the industry for decades, they understand it almost better than the younger or the less experienced developers that tooling also changes.

Idees were not always a thing, you know. um dev tools were not always a thing. You know, these are actually part of the developer experience or part of the developer tooling that you have to learn and you have to update and upgrade with. Um so how much or how little use you use it or how much you take on, how much you decide to leave to the side is fine. That's up to the individual, but in the end it's a good tool to have in your metaphorical tool belt. I would say what do you a as an engineering leader and again the comments are going off.

Dan Danny's comment here. I have to I have to laugh. I knew you mentioned me. I have an AI bot that stocks Taylor. Listen, I I'm not going to lie, Danny, I would not based on how aware Danny is everywhere. I would not put it past him for this, but uh Danny, I appreciate you, brother. And then yeah, again, um definitely please please connect with Seth as well. Um he's also in the Torque Discord. But so what are some tools and again like I'm all over the place. welcome to interviewing with me, but like and we'll kind of go all over the place here, but what are just some tools?

So, if someone watches this or listens now in the future and they're like, "All right, great. I got to learn AI." There's a lot within AI, right? There's like, "Yeah, you kind of have your prompts and your your cursors and all that stuff." I saw somebody did a breakdown of video the other day. I should have shared it in the torque discord, but I forgot to. But, and then there's like your hardcore engineering, NLP, ML stuff, which I don't think we're necessarily talking about that in this moment. What are just some basic tools that people should get comfort with? And again, this is just coming from you, right?

I could ask the same engineering leader, the the 10,000 the 10,000 engineering leaders, and they're all going to have different answers, but but you're on the show, so So, so no pressure, but give me a perfect answer. Uh, yeah. So, I would say the the one that you should really get to know is some sort of AI agent. So, my developers used um GitHub Copilot agent. Okay. Um, that's real relatively new. Um, I mean everything is relatively new, but I would say choose one, right? Like with a programming language, you know, this goes back to the the the content from my book, which I don't recommend to anyone anymore because it's quite outdated.

But isn't that crazy? Isn't that crazy how tech works? I wrote a book. It's not bad anymore. Tech is Yeah. So, one of the things I say in that is like just pick just pick one, right? So, I would say if you can pick one and get good at using one and kind of get comfortable with it, then that's more important than like, oh, okay, I've tried this one, I've tried this one, I've tried this one, because I think um I think getting just a bit of experience, getting used to it being part of your normal workflow is the most important thing. So, I'd say that's that's kind of the starting point that I would recommend to developers at this point in time if they haven't already.

Is that something I mean, is this something you ask in the interview? I mean, is that I mean, when when you're when you're hiring and evaluating talent, if somebody has the co-pilot experience, if somebody doesn't, are you going to gravitate towards a person who has the co-pilot experience? I would say not at this point. Okay. Not at this point. Um, purely because it's so new that I wouldn't want to like have it be anything that sways me one way or the other. If someone's an excellent developer and they've never touched an AI tool, probably they'll be good with AI tools when they start using them.

So, I'm not really concerned. Um, in a about two years, I would say like in a year to two years, I would start expecting most developers to be having that. People don't need to freak out right now. Like, they don't need to freak out that they're behind right now. Okay. No, we're still in the stage where it's it's easy enough to catch up. And truth be told, people are going to be learning these skills for for years or decades to come. So like, you know, like with everything, the best time to start was yesterday. The second best time is today. Um so you might as well just start now.

Uh and yeah, slowly stay calm, but just slowly kind of chip away at it. In terms of um the interview, so when we do um this McDougall method for the technical interview, one of the things we say to them is you are able to use any tool you want. So we encourage developers to do the technical round. It's more like a pair programming session with part of our code base that we kind of pull out and we make it we anonymize a lot of stuff and we um you know we get rid of any keys and this kind of stuff. So we create like a little mini fake code base based on our actual codebase.

We give that to them one hour beforehand and then we give them a task as if it's their first week on the job. So what it's your first week on the job? You're going to be using your normal tooling, right? you're going to be coding in the way you code. And so that's what we encourage people to do. We encourage them to just solve the problem like you would if you were actually at work and you were on a call with one of our existing senior engineers. You're new. You don't know where certain files are located or how certain things work. You can ask whatever questions you want.

You can use Google to look up docs. You can use an agent if you want to. However you want to do it, whatever your normal workflow is, that's what we want to see. So that's that's kind of how we integrate it into our process. I I I love that. Yeah, Danny here, I agree with this take. I've said in the past right now I believe we are in what we call the AI forgiveness bubble, but this will change the things they let s become expectations grade you 100%. So how I I am curious with this, right? And I've had I mean in full transparency, I'm going to kind of ask you this question so I can answer questions better when I get asked if we're being honest here.

Yeah. How has the interview process changed with AI? Right? Because there used to be take-home tests and I mean here's the deal like which which is hilarious. I always say this when I first started recruiting in 2011 I was told that I'll never forget this that developers who Google are bad developers. That was the information I was taught which is way wrong. You you you you can still Google you do all this stuff now with use of AI. How have you changed your interviewing process? What does that look like? you doing and take home like is it co like what does it look like? Yeah.

So we have several different rounds. So I'm not when I'm talking about this McDougall method, I'm talking about the technical round. I'm only talking about one of those rounds. Okay. We've got we're already by this point you've already spoken to me or another engineering manager and we already think you're cool. So like you've got that already kind of ticked off. Um but in this stage what we do is essentially we yeah give them a code base. We spend about 15 minutes kind of catching them up on it's just two engineers and the the candidate by the way. We get spend about 15 minutes catching up on their experience where they're at.

Then they have about 40 minutes to do one maybe two maybe more if they get through it. Um kind of little exercises, bug fixes or whatever in this fake code base that I mentioned before. Um so for us it's it is as I said that idea of replicating that first week on the job to give us an insight into how they work. This is rapidly different from how things were. Um, you know, I say in my blog post and I'll I'll say it again here. I think a lot of engineering managers, uh, VPs, CTO's, they're stuck in this thinking from the '9s or the early 2000s when you were physically in the office standing in a room with people sitting at a desk and you had a whiteboard and they said, "How many golf balls fit in an airplane?" And you had to show them you're working out.

um you know to to kind of solve this problem and display your logical prowess or whatever. Um we can't do that anymore. For one thing, when we're remote, as most technical rounds are now, um I would say 99.9% of our technical rounds are no one's going to the office and doing no one's going to the office to do a technical round. Um so you can't control the candidates's environment, right? They're not in a controlled environment. You don't know what screens they've got there. They could have five laptops all around them, right? You can't tell. You don't know. So this this idea that they are operating purely off their own brain.

This this desire to see purely what their brain can do. It's quite old school now and it doesn't really work. And the reason it doesn't work increasingly is because of AI. I would argue it didn't work before that either, but let's not go there. Let's just stick to the AI stuff. Now we have things like deep fakes. Now we have things like chat GBT that can be actually listening to the conversation and giving. Then you have that startup out in the Bay Area. Is it Clue? Cluey who like raised 15 million um and and their whole thing is like cheating. Yeah. Like like their entire platform is how to cheat real time.

Correct. But but yeah, this is the thing. The interesting thing I always say is this when I when I hear about AI cheating and we're saying is it cheating if you know that it's happening? Like if we say to the candidates, we want you to use AI. We want to see how you do this. Get the help. Like, okay, I have currently a team of six engineers. Am I sitting next to them watching them code all day? No. Like, I'm trusting them to use whatever tools they use to deliver good stuff. And in the end, we check that stuff and we talk about that stuff and we have conversations about what it requires and all that all that jazz.

But I'm not sitting there watching them. I'm not like policing the tools that they use. I'm giving them suggestions. Um, and so in the end, I don't know why we're doing that for candidates. We want to see if they can deliver and if they can communicate about their ideas and what they're doing and if they understand it. And I think that's that bit there is the tricky bit. So, how do you Yeah. Yeah. This is this is fascinating. How do you figure out to get in their brains on how they understand it, right? Because I feel like that seems to be like with all the tools and all the frameworks and all the AI at the end of the day, it sounds like it's getting in their brains or getting out of them how they understand.

So, how do you facilitate that type of environment during an interview? Well, for one thing, you have to establish trust. Um, I mean, this is this is the thing, okay? One thing that I'm gonna just kind of do a little bit of a segue to answer your question. Just just stay with me. I promise. Yeah, I love it. Um that this is what psychological safety is all about, right? If you go into a a a interview, your body I mean you you know candidates I mean they're like your body it doesn't know if you're in a technical interview or if you're being chased by a bear.

It it's it's it's reacting the same way, right? it's reacting the exact same way. So our job as the interviewing team, right? So I, as I said, by the time they get to the technical round, they've already spoken to me. I reassure them this is not a pass fail thing because it's not in our case. We we use this as one criteria, right? The technical round is not a pass fail. It's like a we're weighing up the pros and cons and the benefits and strengths and weaknesses of a candidate across a whole range of stuff, not just technical skills. Absolutely. And so that's one thing we say kind of like it's okay if you flunk it.

you flunk it. Let's just talk about it, right? Um secondly, the engineers, I actually train them on how to how to be approachable, how to be friendly, how to seem open. You know, it doesn't come so naturally to everyone. That's fine. But in an interviewing environment, you have to be aware that um how you come across will influence candidates and their sense of safety. 100%. You can bring that stress level down just a little bit. That's what these first 15 minutes are for in the in the McDougall method. If you can bring this level of stress down in the early stage, then the hope is that they can focus up a little bit more when it comes to the actual task itself.

Yeah. Then you're asking how do you assess how they think? Okay. Um, someone actually said it in the comments, they got ahead of me there that you're looking at if they're using AI for example, what prompts are they using? What are they accepting? What are they not accepting? What bits of the code are they taking? What are they not taking? And then at the end once this 40minut kind of coding part pair programming part is complete the idea is that the rest of the interview is just talking about it. So it's saying okay I saw there you know the AI suggested you go with um I don't know that you store things as objects and you went with an array instead.

Why is that? Like can you talk me through why you decided not to take that suggestion? You know you use the AI as a tool for conversation and you see how they think. Um because you might disagree with what they chose. That's fine. I I I'm a believer in culture ad, not culture fit. I don't think everyone should think the same way. What I'm interested in is seeing like why did you choose that method? Can you explain it in a terms that in terms that other engineers can understand and say, "Okay, yeah, I see where you went with like why you went with that or okay, yeah, we can talk about that.

Maybe that's a better way." You know, these conversations can start. Um so for me, it's more about that. It's trying to see not only can they implement but can they understand what they implemented and why they implemented it that way. And that's through this conversation. And I just want to say before we go on the reason we do it this way, the reason we do it this way is because if we're in the moment, right, and they're accepting it in that moment and you say, "Oh, why did you choose that?" People will go on the defensive again. Always, right? So we we don't want to ask those questions during the coding.

During the coding, we just let them code. We help them, we answer their questions, they use their tools, you know, we just let them do their thing and then afterwards we start asking the questions to get their sense of understanding. Um, because we don't want to break that potential flow that they could get into if we get lucky, you know, in the technical round. Man, there's there's so much gold. I mean, literally, if every engineer leader hired like you, that would be ideal. It would make the recruiter's job so much easier, too. What? Oh, man. Uh, just I have so many thoughts. First off, shout out to you for like that safe space.

I think that's huge. Um I I I I think more engineering leaders need to create, you know, a an environment that allows the person to be um kind of their true self, right? Um so so huge on there. Huge on that. I want to affirm that. I think the next thing that I I wanted to so so what does it look like with with you and uh and you may have answered this already, but I've been too busy. I mean the comments I'm trying to there's so much comments that we need to get to but like are are you on a Zoom call? Is it you do you give them a problem?

Are you do you just watch them? They share their screen. Are you and you're just taking notes so you don't interrupt them? Is that so I'm not there because I'm the hiring manager and I freak people out whether I want to or not. Okay. Right. I could be you can be the friendliest person in the world, but if they know you're the one who makes the call, they're going to get freaked out. So I'm not there. I let the engineers do it. I train the engineers on the method. Um we actually developed it with the engineers. Um so the full list of people who were involved in is in the blog post.

Um and then we yeah I trained up the engineers who weren't there on how to do it. Um and there's two engineers and the candidate. So I've actually had a round already with the candidate at this point. So I already think okay I think that they'll be um a good addition to the team. I think they'll bring something new or interesting to the team. Um so that's fine from my side. They've got my kind of like tick. Maybe there are some strengths and weaknesses, but I want to see how their technical skills are again. So, we can kind of weigh all of those things together and um and go from there.

So, yeah, two two engineers and they share their screen. The candidate shares their screen and um we send them the repository one hour beforehand. They have a bit of a chance to look through it. If they've used AI tools to look through it beforehand, that's also fine. We don't we don't mind. They can do whatever research they want. As said, we're pretending that it's their first ticket in their first week on the job. So, that's our approach. And then is it a is it like a actual business problem that you guys are trying to solve or is it just like a random problem like how do you guys frame that up?

Yeah. Yeah. So as said the codebase is based on one part of our app. So we again the developers create it. I I trust them with this. It's a ticket like any other to create this codebase. They choose one part that they think is interesting or particularly complex or particularly not complex as the case may be. Um and then I get them to create five different levels of difficulty. So for a front-end position, for example, level one might be change the color of a button. Um, and level five might be completely refactor this function that's got a endless loop occurring or something or it's just super verbose and we want to see like how you would make it look better.

Um, so there's everything in between and then based on the level that we're hiring for, we start people at different positions along that scale. Um, so if we're hiring a mid-level, we might start at the junior. If we're hiring a senior, we'd start at the mid level. to kind of give them a chance to kind of easy win only. Yeah, I like that. I like that. All right, let's let me get to I can't believe we're technically at time. Can you go a little longer? Is that okay? Yeah, I can go a little longer than All right, hold on. Let me This is This is nuts.

Y'all are blowing up the chat. Uh this is crazy. Uh All right, we got this. Uh so Chris, uh Chris, I believe that's it. Companies want engineers who are more efficient with the AI. Does that most cases? Let me Okay, let me ask you this. Have you seen increased output like like like have you seen like do you have enough data points in your brain where it's like yes a developer with AI is moving faster and pushing more releases or whatever terms we use in the developer space than a developer without AI. I would say that right now I have individual examples, but I wouldn't say my data set is particularly huge.

Like I'm going off of self-reporting and this kind of stuff. I'm also quite wary of trying to measure this stuff too early. I, you know, I'm a big believer in um experimentation and I believe that when especially when a tool is new that it's kind of like a what you want to see is an kind of kind of exponential curve, right? that at the beginning it should be very slow because it's hard to learn something new. Sure. Right. Sure. Sure. And um and then at some point it picks up. I I have some engineers on my team who use it for everything and work really fast.

But maybe they would have worked fast without it. I don't know. Like it's not it's not a randomized control trial. So it's hard for me to to know. But um I would say that that I think there's a lot of potential there for it to speed things up especially in getting ideas like if you first encountering a problem. Um I saw Danny mentioned MCPs you know if if they are getting a handle on that if we as an organization are getting to the point where um we have the ability to have our um code base be a bit more accessible by the AI agent. Then that also enables a lot of things like how how are some ways I could do X and then kind of get some ideas and kind of use it for ideiation or of course for for creating quick prototypes for product.

That's another thing that we've um heard a bit about. Um so yeah, I wouldn't say that I have enough data points for it to be like set in stone, but I do see a lot of potential there. And I think at this point, you know, it's worth it's worth investigating for yourself. And again, another good reason to choose one and run with one for a while rather than trying to flip-flop around um because then you'll be stuck in this learning curve state for quite a while. So that makes sense. So this is interesting Danny writing a paragraph. It's taking up our faces. We had a can we were like initially and realized what they they were using an interview where where Danny go interview tool on their phone for the replies.

The responses were noticeably different from the technical interview. That stuff red flags and that was a big thing. But the big thing was was because the quality replies were so bad. Thank you. I always thought was a social media post. Yeah. So again, I mean like like there are going to be Yeah. Have you had any kind of horror stories? No. No. No, I haven't. I mean I've I've read I've read some horror stories, but um the thing is I I feel like I feel like I've read enough AI slop now that I would recognize if someone were uh trying to answer non-technical questions with it.

Um cuz that to me is kind of wild. Like if you ask, "Oh, what are some of your hobbies?" And someone's like, "In the modern era, we experience many different things that can give us joy." Yeah. Like no. Okay, that's AI. This is a good question. I don't know if you've answered this, but what recent techniques or practices whether technical culture have truly changed the game in terms of how your team is delivering better code with AI tools? What's something that you're surprised surprised you or shifted your approach? It's a good question. Yeah. Yeah. No, I I don't think I have anything personally that I can vouch to as yet.

Um I'm trying to think. I do think like for for us and for a lot of companies, I do think that the connection of agents and MCPs will be the thing that really brings it to the next level. I think like once once enterprise level and I think Danny mentioned this as one once enterprise level code bases can be kind of like well traversed by an agent or well assessed by an agent in a way that enables options. Yeah. Because I don't think I don't think there's ever like one correct way of doing most things. So what I would expect developers to be able to do in that scenario is to be able to assess different options that can be provided by the AI and to um to know and understand the trade-offs there and be able to appropriately implement those and then communicate those further to whoever the stakeholders are.

So that would be how I see it culturally. Culturally, I think there's still a lot of people I and it's unfortunate but it's true. You know, we live in this LinkedIn bubble where we're hearing about new stuff happening all the time. We're engaging with it. We're around other people who are engaged in it. It feels like everyone knows about it and everyone's doing it. But the reality is there are so many developers who are not even on LinkedIn. Yeah. In an average month, year, whatever. They're only there to update their CV every time they change a job and that's it. You know, they are not reading all the news.

A lot of them are not subscribed to newsletters or listening to podcasts or any of that stuff. There are a lot of developers out there who do not actually have exposure to these topics and it's only through sharing through knowledge sharing that those people will be brought along. So culturally in our company I can say we've put a lot of effort into sharing knowledge with each other. So people actually showing how did I use an AI agent to solve this problem. Um people doing demos on how they've used it for example our QA engineers how they're using it to help them with testing. um you know all these kinds of things like actually sharing with each other um and being proactive about that.

So engineering managers as like part of our job is finding ways to enable our developers to do that with each other um and also externally wherever possible and to encourage that. Um but yeah there's still actually a lot of people out there who are not on boarded into this stuff at all. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think like Emory comment how do you scale onboarding? You kind of just shared it just then. Um I don't know if this question is directly related to increase output or increase good output. I mean I would imagine increase good output is the important part. Yes. Yes. And Emry that's that is exactly why the technical round the McDougall method is all about um assessing like not just implementing but then assessing what you implemented because someone could implement every task.

Oh I just pressed a button. That was not what I wanted to do. Someone could implement every task no problems using AI. Dun, dun, dunk, it's done. But they have no idea what they just did, right? And if that's the case, we don't want them on our team either, right? So, it's also a situation where um you have to know that this person is critically evaluating what the AI is giving them, not just blindly accepting it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's like Danny said, company internal evangelists are crucial. I think Yeah, I think. Great. I mean, even from the non-technical side, even on our neck of the woods with what we're doing at Torque, I mean, I think the more internal I think internal evangelists are highly slept on in terms of impact within the organization.

So, yeah, totally. Yeah. I think I think one of one of the struggles we have is that sometimes the people who are best at this stuff are the ones who aren't so interested in talking, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, nah, I don't want No, no, I just want to do it. I don't want to talk to anybody. I'm good. I'll show you. You can show other people. I'm like, oh, no. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. That's cool. I love it. I love it. Uh, all right. We're wrap up here. This is great. The the chat has been, uh, you know, through the roof. Uh, I love this.

Do you have any AI Do you have any, uh, any content you consume that you want to give a shout? And this kind of goes, Elliot, this is a great question because this is kind of my wrap-up questions. Do you have anything you're consuming that you want to give a shout out to? No, honestly, I don't have anything specific. I just stay on top of everything that comes my way. You know, check check on Medium. I have a bunch of different podcasts that randomly talk about these topics. I don't have any one in particular. Um I'm not an AI expert. Like I know we've been talking about AI this whole time.

I know. Everyone's like what? Yeah. Yeah. I'm not an AI expert in terms of it's like you know in terms of the technical details of it. I'll say that I'm good at like implementing stuff and knowledge sharing and cultural change and structural things. You know that's my jam. Um, but yeah, I will say that there is a podcast that I absolutely love that actually doesn't really have much to do with AI. Um, but it's called Soft Skills Engineering. It is excellent. You must listen to it. Really, really, really great um podcast. Can recommend. Awesome. I love it. I love it. All right, last few questions.

We wrap up here. And again, thanks everybody involved in the chat. I appreciate you. That that that was awesome. Um I always feel like days like today where like the chat's going nuts and it's great conversation. And it's it's it's like we're going down the highway at like 200 miles an hour. Um uh first off, I always ask folks, coffee or tea? Coffee. Hot or hot or cold? Iced? Hot. Sorry. I'm I'm Jane Way. I'm Captain Jane Way. Coffee. Black. Hot. I love it. I love it. Uh next next question. Um do you have anybody just in your network you want to give a shout out to?

Anybody who's doing really cool stuff? Anybody you want to give uh God? You can't do this to me, Taylor. I've got so many people hate this question. No, you had to warn me. Um, oh gosh. Okay. Okay. Um, Galy Orush writes the pragmatic engineer newsletter. He's amazing. I've always wondered how to say his name. Say it. Say it again. Well, I don't know if I'm saying it right. Oh, it sounded way better than Oros. I'm pretty sure it's Or it's pronounced. Um but yeah, he's he's excellent. Um who else? Um Kave Bulambo. She's the CEO and founder of Black & Tech Berlin. She does really excellent work around the Berlin tech scene.

If you're in Germany or are interested in coming to Germany, Americans, just saying. Um and yeah, who else? I mean, Danny Thompson obviously have to give him so you know, no pressure. Um yeah, and um Chiang Kai Fang, if you're interested in data, he's the guy to follow. Um he's amazing. He's he's one of these people you were talking about, Taylor, where we started talking on uh LinkedIn and then like randomly had decided, oh, let's have a virtual coffee and now we talk like every month, sometimes twice a month, just catching up. Like great friend now and just really good at what he does. He's really into data governance.

So if that's an area that interests you, go for it. I love it. I love it. Last question. I asked you this four or five years ago when you came on the pod, but we'll ask it again because it's been a minute. Uh, so it's called the show's called Guidance Counselor 2.0 because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school, and college, but now as adults, we don't really have them to turn to. If you go back in time and tell young Anna something early in her That's a really good question. Honestly, my my mom gave me the best advice and I followed it and it seems to have worked for me.

So, I'm just going to stick to what she always told me. Whenever I was confused about what to do, she always said, "Pick something you like and that you're good at." Because if you have those two criteria fulfilled, you'll be fine. And that's what I've always done. I've done it in multiple fields now. And I have to say it's led to a really great, interesting, cool, successful life. So, I am I promise that is a good way to go. I love it. I love it. All right, y'all. Well, thanks again, Anna. Stay on. I say bye to you backstage. Y'all have a good one. only stream of the week.

We'll see. We have We have a lot of events though in the Torque Discord, so go check that out. torque.com community. Um, so I will see you in the Torque Discord tomorrow. Resume, LinkedIn reviews, but y'all have a good one. We'll see y'all next week.