how to crush the application and interview process w/ brad garropy

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All righty. We are here. We made it. You can't hear me. Great. Yeah, I can't. Yeah, I can hear you. Okay, good, good, good. Whew. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't touch anything else. No. Don't move. What's going on, everybody? Good morning. A little late this morning. Brad's camera just decided to not work. I was in the DMs going, hey, man, where'd you go? Where'd you go? What brand is that? What brand is that? Do we need to at them? It's old. It's a Sony A-Sixthousand, so it's a little old. All right, Sony. Sony, count your days. Get together. Lock it in. Uh, I'm pumped for this conversation.

Um, I know Brad, this is Brad's second time on the show. Um, Brad, were you, where were you at when we talked the last, were you at Stripe or were you at, you were at Atlassian still? I was at Atlassian. Then I moved to Stripe and then I had to go on a job search again. So yeah, a lot of, a lot of practice, uh, in the last year. Yeah, yeah. So we're going to talk about practice, what you're talking about practice. For those of you tuning in, welcome. Please say hey, we'd love to hear from you. Again, like I tell folks, this is really a meetup.

This is a virtual meetup. It's kind of like what I call it. To be frank with you, I feel like you really can't get these caliber guests in a meetup. but you can get them on the show. So, um, excited. So please, please say, Hey, we'd love to hear from you. It's like, I tell everybody, um, say, Hey, you know, I know there's a lot of people who network, um, on this show. Um, no, we have a lot of people that network on the show. Um, and it's like, I tell folks, you know, I, you know, kind of my vision and kind of what we want to do at torque is, is, is we really want to really want to open up our network, our, our, our, our catalog or Rolodex, um, People don't use Rolodexes anymore, but essentially open up our Rolodex for you.

And so, you know, it's like I tell folks, connect with every guest that I have on the show. Shoot Brad a message. Say, hey, it was good to see you on Guidance Counselor two point zero today. It's like I tell folks, if you do this like time and time and time again, I've been doing this for five years now. Your network would be pretty expansive at this point. So again, message Brad. Tell him you saw him this morning. A few housekeeping things as always. First off, I want to give a shout out to AppRite. I'm part of the Heroes program. I don't know what they do.

I'm just kidding. I kind of know what they do. But love the team out there. Check them out. Great tool. Great piece of software. If you want to be kept up to date with what we're doing in the Torque community, Torque.community. We'd love to have you. Got a lot going on out there. And listen, if you want To know when I go live, text me. This is actually my number. This is like my other number, my work number. So text live, two, six, one, five, two, three, five, five, six, five, zero. It is actually me on the other end. It's not some AI bot that I programmed.

It's actually me. And a few people tuned in this morning. Jordan, it's good to see you. Ricardo, Roxy, I almost wore that curly boy shirt today. Sebastian, it's good to see you. Jason, it's good to see you. I got the Cloudflare socks right now. There you go. I love it. I love it. And just good to see you, Michael. It's good to see you. Mark's great to see you as well. All right, enough with me yapping. Chris, good to see you this morning. Enough with me yapping. Again, please say hey if you are tuning in. But Brad, let's give the people what they want, man.

Just who are you? What do you do now? And then we'll dive in. Yeah, so my name is Brad Garropy. I've been doing software for like, you know, I've been doing software for like, I've been doing software for like, I've been doing software for like, I've been doing software for like, I've been doing software for like, um it hasn't wore me down too much honestly I'm in a really fun spot right now um I've had probably five different companies I've worked for over the years all have been fairly big companies and every step I've taken has has gone to a smaller and smaller company yeah uh front end dev you know trying to stay up with the times and um yeah still loving what I do I think that's what's most important I love it I love it so yeah for those who tune in so I had brad on really before the last year of his career where he's uh you know bounced around a little bit and found some jobs and so you know brad I just want to go ahead and dive in man I mean you know listen I mean I feel like you're thanos right now collecting some some stones and some big companies right atlassian stripe cloudflare there's a lot to unpack here but I guess I want to ask you How's it been the last year, right?

I mean, obviously bouncing around, it can be stressful. Just kind of give some overall arching thoughts of really just navigating your career the last year. You know, I've learned a lot about culture at different companies over the past year. I bet, I bet. When you jump around, you find out what you like, you find out what you don't like, you find out how a company operates. And I'm starting to get that sense now of like, as soon as you land, you're like, okay, what's going on? And you go, oh shit, this is not for me. Or you go, oh, this feels really good. And you know, every now and then you don't have a fit.

Every now and then things don't work out and you gotta go back on the job hunt, right? Yeah. Um, but I, another thing I found that like, there's two kinds of job hunts. There's one where you're casually looking, maybe feeling things out. And then there's another one where you are going hard, you're focused, you're practicing, you're driving towards an end result. Yes. And I've had both of those types of job hunts. And, um, I don't know, like something about my resume. I like the focused ones, to be honest. There's pressure. But at the same time, when your head is so in the game, every interview is just another interview.

You're ready for it. You've prepped for it. You've studied for it. I was the kind of guy who like didn't want to practice leak code and stuff. And this time around, I was like, I'm going to do it. And I just, my brain just started going into that mode. And as soon as you can think that way, they're not that hard. Use a set, use a map, use a for loop. You're good to go. Like, so when you're, when you're in it, it feels really good. And I feel like it's a two part thing. Like your resume has to hit so that you're getting these interviews and then you need to do well enough on the tech screens to just keep the process flowing.

Yeah. So much impact there. Uh, Brad, that's a cool shirt. Where can I get that? bradgarapy.com slash store. There you go. Roxy said she's going to try to try to find a Lincoln job. I love it. This is a shameless self promo here. I love it. All right. So I want to I want to ask you how there's there's kind of a few things unpacked. First off, how how fast do you feel like you kind of get a read on companies when you start around the culture? And do you have you? So there's that question. And then the kind of the second question that is like, have you gotten better at ferreting that stuff out during the job during the interview process?

The second question is the hard one. The first question, I feel like within three weeks, you get out of your initial phase, whatever, you're getting mentored or you're getting run through training programs. You actually start working with a team. How people interact with you when you're asking questions early on will set the tone for the entire relationship of how that goes. If they say, no, you're a senior, you should know everything. Red flag. Have you been told that? inadvertently kind of yeah that's crazy there's some companies who are like we want to hire amazing engineers sit you down and whip you to produce features top to bottom and yeah And I got to say, I feel like I'm also learning the difference of like where companies are headquartered kind of makes a difference.

Like San Francisco companies tend to be a little bit more like everybody's an A plus engineer and we fully expect that. Asking for help is like, you know, it's like, bro, you should know that kind of stuff. But these companies have huge code bases at the end of the day and it's complicated. Yeah. Let me ask you this because, you know, I've been on job search twice in the last year. or so on yeah well two well really two years now but at the time it was twice in in about a year I feel like it's really hard during the interview process to figure out the culture and the vibe of the company and I feel like I'm gonna my hot take is I don't think I don't know if you can really ever ferret that out in the in the interview process because I feel like I wasn't even getting the information I needed until third fourth fifth round in because the first little just tell me about yourself blah blah blah I mean do you have do you have any tips that you've picked up along the way with with with interviewing on more on how to really dig in more to that even though you're probably never going to get the full picture Yeah, it's really hard to get the full picture.

I think number one, if you can get your interviews with people on the team that you're going to work with, you get a much better understanding of just the personalities you'll be dealing with. But typically, like typically people are always nice. It's more like company culture. That is what's standing in the way. But the more you can talk to your teammates, the more you'll get a general sense of how they work together. Is that something you ask or have you asked like, hey, can I speak to somebody on the team? Like, is that something that you've like worked into your like questions? I've kind of tried, but a lot of companies are like, this is just the process.

And it's like, yeah, but how am I supposed to know who I'm working with? It seems so flawed. I know, I know. um I have like a list of questions that I try to ask very specifically around collaboration so you look at your computer yeah I got them right here yeah dude yeah yeah let's let's let's pull them up let's let's get a little practical tactical this morning I love asking about team rituals. How do you plan? How do you track your work? How do you divvy up your work? How do you determine success? Is it success on an individual or on a team delivering a feature?

How do you do stack ranking? What do performance reviews look like? That's going to give you a good sense of is this an every man for himself type of company? Or is this a we win as a team type of company? To me, that's very important. Yep. I love that. I love that. So let me ask you this. Do you think you got... So like I said, obviously, you're not interviewing at mom and pop places. You're interviewing at companies that are relatively large, have a pretty good presence. What are some mistakes you've learned over the last year or so? Through the interview process? Yeah. Through the interview process, things you maybe could have done differently, maybe some mistakes you've made.

You know, I think it is practice with the LeetCode stuff that truly made me feel way more comfortable in those interviews. Okay, so I'll start there. Yes, like once you get your brain moving in what they want to see, they want you to talk out the solution. They want you to use kind of basic data structures that are meant for the job. Sets and maps are the most common ones where it's like faster lookups or whatever, you know? Sure. And so you can impress people early on where they're like, oh, you just hit the data structures that we wanted you to. You said the things that tick the boxes.

We're very impressed. And it's not that hard. You just have to tune your brain to think that way sure and reviewing fundamentals of things like react you know sometimes developers get into the weeds on cicd stuff or things that aren't like programming on the web uh and it's important to like remember your vanilla javascript remember the fundamentals of react yeah you can nail those then again they're just like wow you really know your stuff and it's like well yeah this I almost had to study this because like this is not generally day-to-day you deal with different problems sure day-to-day yep I had a second half to this, and now I'm forgetting it.

It's okay. I'll keep asking questions. We can come back to it. When it comes to – I'm always fascinated with people's processes, right? I feel like interviewing and the whole interview process is almost like training for a marathon, right? Not only do you have to interview, you also have to – Do the work your own. How did you structure your days, your weeks? I had Lawrence Lockhart on a few weeks ago. We talked about how he structured his day, block and tackling. Mornings were spent for this. Afternoons were spent for this. Obviously, you've been on the job search a few times over the last year, year and a half.

What did your days or week look like? Yeah. You know, job search is really interesting. At the beginning, you're front loading like a ton of applications. You need to you need to get this ball rolling because it takes companies a while to get through the process. So, you know, have your spreadsheet, have your job application tracker track the day you applied, who you talk to, what company it is, what position it is like all that there. From there, I link out to a notion that literally tracks every single interview. And I write down who the interview was with. I link to their GitHub. I link to their LinkedIn.

I try to find something in common with them so that if you're there, you're like, oh, shit, you went to UT, you know, hook and horns, whatever, like anything, anything to break the ice. Because as soon as you break the ice, it's a complete, complete different conversation. Yeah. complete different conversation so the beginning is like front loading applications and preparing yourself for each of those like initial interviews as soon as that's all done and typically it takes me like thirty ish applications maybe forty over the course of like three months to knock out a job search I've had faster ones I've had slower ones sure sure that's kind of typical um After that, it's study mode.

Normally, you're planning for a week out for these things. Go practice your lead code. Go build some React apps. Go listen to Scott and Wes's podcast, the stumped ones, and try to answer those questions yourself. Just get your brain in that mode too. And then you'll do really well in these initial tech screens. You actually know what you're talking about. What about, I mean, listen, you've kind of threaded the needle three times now with these companies, right? These are not easy companies to get into. What would you say your secret sauce is? You know, I would have always loved to have said my GitHub profile and my Twitter and my podcast and my YouTube channel.

Nobody gives a crap. It's great. Interesting. It builds your network for people to reach out to for positions. Yes. And, you know, I got to talk to people who worked at Cloudflare that knew what happened on the inside. And I could be like, is this a good place to work? And they can tell you yes. Yes. So it's less of a black box. Sure. But it doesn't help you like build street cred unless unless you build like some open source library that some company wants and they want to hire you for that you know sure so do that kind of stuff but just know it's not going to get you a job offer straight up you still have to perform in the interview process And I think my biggest thing is just being able to talk and code at the same time.

Oh, really? So literally, you don't have to stream, but turn on your camera and record on your computer and then delete it when it's done or watch yourself and then delete it when it's done. I would probably recommend watching yourself because you pick up a lot. You realize a lot of ticks you have. Yeah. Why do I open my mouth like that when I code? It's like, why does my eye droop? get comfortable uh get comfortable thinking out loud get comfortable like thinking through something and not feeling so much pressure like knowing that you can get to the end that also comes with practice and rehearsal almost you know what what did you do what did you do with because I I love this you've said so many good things um uh how do you like when you practice coding I'm not a coder, right?

Like, do you just like Google, give me a coding problem and then you just like try to code it or like, what does that look like? Yeah. So I would, I would go to Twitch, I would go live and I would either go to a leet code or hacker rank. And that's just kind of what I would do to practice. Those are mostly like generic programming problems. They do have some react problems. Sure. Which are like, okay, but, you know even through the process people will give you take-home tests or you'll encounter a new interview question and every single time I take those questions and I like finalize that solution and post it up to my github privately to not break any ndas or whatever so that so you finish that exercise okay and really drive towards the right solution and I'm talking with tests with accessibility with all the all the stuff that needs to go and then you're just yapping the whole time while you're doing it too Yeah, yeah, and that's what you got to do.

Yeah, and you just have to practice going through those things, getting to the end. I love that. Polishing them up. And now, if you ever want to review, just go re-implement one of those, right? Now you got a GitHub full of question banks. Sure. You just go look at the prompt and try to re-engineer it. Let me go back. I want to go back to the... I feel like I quickly glanced over it because, again, I want to really try to give people as much good information as possible. I want to go back to your prepping. When you got laid off, what was your first go-to?

I'm always fascinated. What is somebody's go-to? You get the word you're laid off or you just left on your own. What's first? What do you do first? immediately offload all the data that I can if you know if I if I need it like any feedback I got any like performance review type stuff like get the things that matter long term about yourself your performance like you don't want to lose any of that stuff okay obviously lots of that stuff belongs to the company there you know But take with you what you can as far as like things that are transferable between jobs. And I'm not talking code.

I'm talking, yeah, feedback. I'm talking. So what? So you're downloading like reviews just so you can potentially give to somebody during the interview or something? Because that's kind of an interesting take. Yeah. No, what I like to do is kind of summarize my performance at a job. Did I do well? Did I do poorly? What can I take into the next job that is going to be helpful? What did I learn about this company or the way that other people work that I can transfer and use in the next company if I ever hit these situations again, or whatever it is? Okay. Try to always like gain transferable knowledge and skills anytime you make a transition.

Okay. But after that, it's straight up just like, yeah, connect with everybody, LinkedIn, whoever you need to from that company, and then just start the application process and tracking process. So how did you get the job? I want to hit all three. How did you get the job at Atlassian? Was that a referral? Was that just a cold apply? What was that? Do you remember? Ooh, that was a while ago. That one, I don't remember. Okay, what about Stripe? Stripe reached out. Stripe reached out. Where did they reach out at? email a recruiter reached out over email and I just followed up um but I was looking at the time anyway I think I was like open to work or whatever and so like you know I was getting emails and that one hit and I was like okay so the open to work banner does work yeah yeah true I mean it does people got some weird takes on that don't be it's just it's just a signal it just helps like us recruiters need to know that you're looking like we need we need all the help we can get people like don't put it up it looks desperate like I don't I don't You obviously have never been a recruiter before.

It helps us. We need to know. How did you get the job at Cloudflare? I applied at Cloudflare. Really? Okay. Yeah, it was one of those ones where the description looked really good. Sure. And I followed up. All right, let me ask you this. When you submitted your resume, when you applied, did you customize your resume? Did you look at the job description? Did you cross-reference? Or did you just yeet your resume into the ether? I feel like this is the biggest... Look, I feel like my job... searching process works obviously yeah yeah yeah there's no wrong thing I never do I never customize my resume and I never write a cover letter this is good um but obviously your resume is good enough because you're getting these looks it must be right like the magic sauce must be there I do have a section of my resume where it's kind of like a word dump but it's like tools and technologies that I know and it's this whole section of just like stuff yeah you know that that I've worked with and so people ever need to filter on keywords it's kind of there and then after that I got work experience and then after that I got side projects okay do you um let me ask you this I I I liked your question about your kind of I mean you're obviously a prolific content creator your podcast and your youtube a lot of I know it doesn't get you the job has that helped at least with conversations in the interview like I mean, I mean, you know, I'm just curious, because you're very out there.

So it's got to have some sort of impact, right? Or no, you know, you know, the thing that has the impact, people go, Oh, your setup looks good. Like, do you pod? Do you podcast? And then you go? Yeah. And then they go, Whoa. And then like, that's it. Really? Okay. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. I mean, maybe it is just like a like a switch flips in their brain or it's like this guy's a professional, you know, instead of just like being on your laptop camera or something, you know, it's a step up. Sure. No. I mean, listen, I do think, you know, I've said this.

People have come at me with some different thoughts. I think having in today's world, if you don't have a good setup and you look good and you don't use fake backgrounds, virtual backgrounds, and your room is clean, it gives a different vibe to the interview. It does. I'm also the guy whose camera died this morning. I was like, do we need to reschedule? It happens. It happens. There's always a technology problem. That's right. That's right, Kelly. Yeah. Let me ask you this. I honestly don't know what companies want with a cover letter. Have you dealt with any cover letters at all? Have you had to write any cover letters in your job search?

Never. What I do have, though, is like one sentence at the top of my resume that kind of says like what I'm looking for. Like I want a remoter hybrid. I want primarily front end development. I want to be able to lead teams and projects. I like that. You know, just the generic stuff. Yeah. Like a specific. I mean, I usually hate objectives, but at least you say like what you want. right okay right okay uh bring bring on brad in his next resume review yeah yeah I'll put it out there brad here dot com slash resume okay I love it I love it um let's see here what else we have another question too so let me I know a lot of people, yeah, if you want to drop it in the private chat, drop that in the private chat and I'll throw it up in the banner.

People can check it out. When it comes to, so you talked about leak code, right? And I know, again, I'm not a coder, but I also know that's kind of a dreaded word for a lot of people. Do you think everybody should do it? Do you think some people should do it? Should it be a nice to have? If they're a junior developer, do they need to be doing live streams with leak code questions? What's your general thought on all of that? And again, there's no wrong answers here. I think the general thought is you're going to get asked some style of generic programming question that will probably use the skills that LeetCode will teach you.

I don't think you need to know data structures and algorithms. It ain't that complicated. Companies nowadays are just seeing if you can get through a thinking exercise. It doesn't have to be... Well, recursion can be helpful, but... You don't have to know depth first and breadth first search on a tree and how to implement that and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Sure. You might get a rogue company that asks something like that, but then my take is like, meh, then they're only going to get a certain type of engineering. Maybe I didn't want to work there in the first place. Sure. Um, Yeah, go ahead.

I don't know if I could say it. I think I signed an NDA. One company asked that question and that company wasn't necessarily the most tech-forward company. It was a different line of business that was hiring engineers and they're asking these questions that are like, do data structures and algorithms and it's like, Y'all must not like you're not connecting the dots well enough. Yeah, you're not filtering in the right way. So that makes sense. Just be prepared with the generic stuff at the end of the day. Okay, let me I again, I still huge shout out what Brad said, I think practicing talking while coding, the more I talk to folks and engineering space the more that is a skill right if you remember anna mcdougall I had her on we talked about ai she still said even with these ai tools I still want to know how somebody thinks and talks and solves a problem so again I just I want to call that out again I think that's I think that's a wonderful suggestion let me ask you this you you you could say I think in in the traditional mindset If I'm Cloudflare, hey, you've bounced around twice in the last year or so.

Did you get any pushback with that? Um... In most cases, nobody ever even said anything. Yeah. Isn't that wild? Isn't that wild? And it's a really awkward thing to say. I also can't talk about it given the circumstances. Sure. Nobody's making you sign things. Sure. But it is one of those things where people go, yeah, people move in tech. There was a lot of layoffs lately. They just kind of assume and then they go, it's fine. This guy's had a history of pretty good jobs for three to seven years. There's a blip. Who cares? Yeah. So so so you feel like that stigma kind of bouncing around just is not quite there anymore because it used to.

I mean, like, listen, back when I started recruiting in twenty eleven, dude, if I saw you on in front of me, I'd be like, oh, this guy's a red flag. But now. Oh, yeah, dude. Yeah. Back in two thousand eleven. Back when I was recruiting dot net web forms and NBC. Yeah, dude. Like literally we were told my we were we were told by hiring managers. I don't want to see anybody that's had more than like two jobs in the last five years. wow like I would actually be specifically said that but I feel like now it's just not the case anymore I feel like everybody understands that the market's very um not hostile but just fragile I guess you could say um and and people move around Well, I just read this thing on LinkedIn this morning that DoorDash changed their pay structure, their stock structure, to grant faster in the first two years.

I think that's smart. And it's like, what do you think that's going to attract at the end of the day? Google has the same model. It's going to attract people who want to stay for two to three years and not the full four to five. Correct. Because at the end, you're only getting like ten percent. So it's like... Get your, get your fifty and then do something else. Well, engineers are smart people. We're going to maximize. Yeah. I mean, listen, I, you know, when I, when I spoke in, in, in Barcelona, you know, cause I have my whole talk around like the job search, but I have a whole nother talk that I don't really give a ton because usually code conferences are usually more like ic's but like I had a few engineering managers go like well do you have this same talk for hiring managers like what can we do to like interview better and retain talent I'm like I have a whole slew of options or slew uh thoughts but I think what you said I think companies need to understand and most of them don't that listen your folks you best you'll probably get three years out of them best And we're probably looking at two years right now, which is, again, just the nature of it.

It depends how big the company is. It depends on how exciting it is to work there. I think that's one of my favorite things about Cloudflare is that it's four thousand people. And I feel like every day we're shipping some stuff that's like a big deal. This whole AI pay per crawl thing. Cloudflare like kind of invented a new internet economy where like now, oh my God, my camera's like falling right now. It's going to just be staring at my coffee. We're having a great, great time. It's awesome. Yeah, it's great. So like now, like anytime an AI bot goes to crawl a website, Cloudflare is going to respond with an HTTP code that says payment required.

And like maybe one day the browser builds something in to like handle that. And so like really cool big things, the company shipping. And I feel like Cloudflare has been doing that for like a couple of years now. And so, you know, you might have a longer tail at a company like that. That's fun to work for. That's innovating. Sure. The bigger and slower they go, you go, yeah, let me grab my stocks and like find something else. yep yep absolutely um somebody asked is that cold brew that is cold brew that is cold brew um I'm I'm always drinking cold brew um uh as we kind of wrap up here brad I I want to um you know again just just just ask you around anything else that maybe you've thought of that we didn't touch just for advice for folks right now who may be on the job search here soon Here's one.

Do not ever apply on LinkedIn. Apply directly on the job website. Yes. Yes. I literally have talked about this recently. I have a group text about fifteen engineering leaders, mainly here in Nashville. And I've texted them. I said, hey, when you post jobs as an org, where do you go first? Almost all of them said we just mainly post to the career page. We don't really try because of all the AI slop and fake resumes and all this stuff. They're like, we all. So I love it. You said that. love that you said that you have to it's just you're gonna have a much higher chance of getting called in linkedin it's it's everybody can press one button one button easy apply everybody does it everybody yeah yeah most companies stay away from that um two two more things as we wrap up here first off we didn't talk a ton about your network and networking I'm assuming that does play a part thoughts on that general thoughts Um, I think it plays a part in getting more information, like inside information about a company, if it's a good place to work.

I had one-on-ones with a couple of friends who were working at companies that I was considering sitting down, just asking them, is it what I think it is? Does it feel like this? And, and they could, you know, confirm or deny that. So you'd have those conversations and they'll, Hmm. you know, it's giving you the information of the interviewers won't tell you. That's it. And I think that's huge. And again, again, give a shout to you. That's another thing that most people don't do. Like, listen, if you're interviewing somewhere and you know, folks there, like, you know, again, Brad and I were talking about how do you, how do you get a good picture of what you're about to step into talk to other people?

Honestly, looking back on it there, there's some place I haven't interviewed many places. You can probably figure out where, um, but I wish I did some more digging. on the side hey what's this place like like what's really going on right so again shout out to you for doing that you gotta be careful too though I actually had an offer pulled one time when I like you know like They were telling me, like, oh, yeah, feel free to reach out, like, whatever. And so I, like, DM'd an employee, and I was like, yo, like, tell me about what it's like. And they're like, yeah, we're pulling the offer.

You, like, side, you know, backdoored the process. No! Freaking told me. What? It was a very, very, very, very small startup, like, you know, whatever, like, one year, thirty people. And I think it was, like, they're very protective, you know? We need people to... But even after giving you the ability to do it, they still pull it? That's weird. That's really weird. You dodged a bullet. Let's just be honest. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You dodged a bullet. That's the culture. Next and final question before I do a little rapid fire here. I use chat GPT for rapid fire, and I really like the questions. We'll get there in a second.

AI, I got to talk about it. We got to talk about it. It's kind of elephant in the room. Are you using it? Was it talked about in the interview process? I'm talking to a lot of folks in the interview. It's not really brought up a ton. What are your thoughts, just general thoughts on AI right now in interviewing and coding? So generally, I use GitHub Copilot for my AI stuff. I'm about to start experimenting a lot with Claude Code. Interesting. I'll say Windsurf, Boo, like VS Code. I've seen that a lot on Twitter. Can someone educate me on Windsurf? What is that? It's an editor, right?

It's an editor like VS Code, but it's like... AI is built in. They forked VS Code and put AI in there. It's going to lose. Anything that's not coming from Microsoft is going to lose. You really think so? Yeah. Microsoft has everything. And they've got the power to back it all. Yes. Will they deliver a little bit slower? Yes. But all these companies, they're trying to get acquired. Look what just happened to the Windsurf deal like two days ago. They're trying to get acquired. They're trying to make money. They're not trying to be the AI play for the absolute future. So... I also think these terminal-based editors, Cloud Code, I think one just came out called Klein or something from Amazon.

I don't know who just released it. They're going to be very useful as well, so experiment there. But how I use it in interviews, I'll leave GitHub Copilot autocompletions turned on, and I won't use the chat. And I'll just kind of say, I'm coding along, and I'll go, oh, hey, thanks, GitHub Copilot. And I'll go, oh, by the way, is it cool if I... like leave my tools on or you, what do you want me to do? But I kind of like acknowledge that, like I am skilled in using these tools, but also I respect the process. Yeah, I get that. I love that. All right.

Last rapid fire here. And again, please connect with Brad. He's a wealth of wealth of information, obviously, as you can tell. All right. So based off the tooling conversation, first question, what's one tech tool or app you can't live without right now? It doesn't have to be code, by the way. It can be something completely different. I still love Raycast. I operate my entire computer off of Raycast. It's the best. First job you ever had that you were paid for? I mowed lawns out of the back of my Ford Ranger pickup truck. Nice. That's hard work, dude. I got a job at CVS after that.

Nice. I love it. If... I've been talking to my wife about this. There's a lot of cool offices spinning up in Nashville, a lot of cool swanky places, obviously, to get people back in the office. And then we were driving past something. I was like, man, I would like to go into the office sometimes. Let me ask you this. If you could have your ideal setup, what would it be? One day on site, one day a month? Or is it just fully remote? You like fully remote? But your ideal situation. I was looking for a hybrid role this time and Cloudflare was perfect because they want two days in the office.

I wanted to have more conversations with people. I wanted to network and do that. Back at Adobe, we would run front-end guild meetings where all the people who did front-end would get together and hang out and Cloudflare's been great about that. Two days a week, I think it's good. The drive is a little long, like, forty minutes away. I wish I could, like, ten to fifteen away would be my ideal. And I want my desk set up in both places. You know, minus this camera. Yeah, minus that camera. Definitely not that camera. In the office, they just don't have as good of stuff as you have at your house.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, I'm not going to the office to have fucking Zoom meetings. Like... yeah that still happens I know I know that that was like like I wish all of the company was in that office or all of your team but I go to the office with two or three teammates and then we still have people in london lisbon different places yeah yeah yeah uh sebastian goes brad are you a gamer I'm gonna guess the next question is what do you play uh yes I am uh currently like looking for a switch to really want to find one of those okay um What else?

Oh, I've been playing World of Warcraft lately again. I love it. Yeah, I love that. I love that. Yeah, I think the last company I worked at, I like what they did. They brought in divisions for a week, once a quarter. Yeah, we marketing would come in for a week. Sales would come in for a week. And I actually like that. I like that. Yeah, we do. It's like once a year, like a team get together and it typically happens in Austin. Yeah. Let me ask you this. Do you have a career mistake that you're oddly grateful for? Anything off top of your brain? Maybe a wrong step that in hindsight worked out or you took a job that in hindsight was a fail, but you learned a lot or something.

I'll say this. I don't think Stripe was for me. And I think under all the circumstances, I am so happy to be where I'm at right now. I love it. I love it. Love that. Love that. We'll just leave it at that. Next question. If you weren't in tech, what totally different career would you try? Honestly, let's just say money's the same. Let's just for conversational purposes, let's just say money's the same. I think I would do something, uh, like physical, like, like, like, like construction or like, just like, just do something. That's not me at all. That's my wife. My wife knows how to use a hammer.

I don't, I love that. Um, last question as we wrap up here. And again, thanks for all tuning in this morning, Brad. Again, appreciate you, man. Um, uh, the show's called guidance counselor, two point O cause you had guidance counselors in middle school, high school and college, but now as adults, you don't really have them. What would be your biggest piece of career advice to young Brad? If you can go back in time, I think it would be don't stay at your first job too long. Yes. Yep. Yep. Like it's easy to get comfortable when you're like, let's say you're, you know, finding your partner, getting married, going through all stages of life.

Like a lot of things happen right after college and throughout that time. And I stayed at that first job for probably too long, but I didn't push. Like I didn't push until like five, six years in. I was like, I need to learn something different. I need to do something more. There's more out there. Yep. Like get involved in the tech community. There's a lot of stuff going on. A lot of stuff. And it'll excite you and you'll want to go explore different companies and touch different technologies. Yep. I love that. Awesome. All right, y'all. Well, thanks again for tuning in this morning. Appreciate it.

Tomorrow, I'm going live with the founder of Mail... let's see here, mail.zero, mail.com, mail.zero.com, Nizzy on Twitter, founder out in the Bay Area. He tweeted the other day about, as a founder, how he likes people to stand out. So I just slid into his DMs and I go, yo, would love to chat. So we're chatting tomorrow, nine thirty a.m. Central. So y'all have a good one. Go connect with Brad. Brad, thank you, my friend. Stay on so I can say bye to you backstage. We'll see you all tomorrow morning, nine thirty a.m. Central. Peace.