the power of community at torc and career guidance w/ david messinger, cto of torc

full transcript

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

I forgot to do one thing. So, uh, I, so, so we're live. Um, but I have to, so I asked this question at the end of every chat, but I w I want to start at the beginning because the, the, there's obviously a delay to get started. I always ask people this and I've never asked you this. Are you a coffee or tea guy? Coffee. And are you, are you hot or iced? Hot. I'm hot all year round. For real? All year? All year round, and I'm a black coffee guy. There you go. There you go. I don't know if you've seen the coffee chat we have on the Torque Discord.

We literally have just a coffee chat talking about the ways to drink coffee. I will say, though, it's a little too early for me yet, but it's starting to get into it. I do like Dunkin' Donuts pumpkin coffee. Dunkin' Donuts. I have to say this. You are the epitome of Boston because you and I do our one-on-ones and you are drinking Dunkin' Donuts. I do like Dunkin' Donuts. You're literally like a walking commercial. I'm not a big Starbucks or fancy coffee guy, but just some good old-fashioned Dunkin' Donuts is good by me. I love it. Well, good morning, y'all. Welcome. It's been a minute since we've been live.

I've been on a little bit of tour. I have to say, I want to give shout out to Dave and I've worked it in my newsletter. I'm playing off of Taylor Swift errors to tour. So it's the Taylor error E R R O R tour. So this is the originator behind that. So shout out, Dave, for that. But, yes, I've been on the Taylor's Air Tour the last three weeks, so there's been no lives. But excited to go live today with the boss. Actually, not to be confused with Springsteen, but this is the boss of Torque. So excited to go live here. And then I have to reschedule tomorrow.

We have our all hands. tomorrow, so I need to reschedule my live to Friday, but I have Jeff Blankenberg coming on, a fantastic guy. He's up in Columbus, just took a job as really a staff principal engineer, so super stoked to talk to him. this week but as always say hey we'd love to hear from you again it's what I tell folks you know I I've done this live show now for five years um I was very aggressive it's kind of my personality is is Dave is very well aware of now after working together for a year I'm kind of balls to the wall And so I did this live show every day for about four and a half years.

And so one thing I've realized over the last six to nine months is this is really just, this is a meetup, right? I tell folks, if you don't comment, no one knows you're watching or tuning in. And there's a lot of people in the Torque community. I actually just got a DM from Abby. Abby actually worked at Ronstadt years ago. um she actually worked with angie uh dave and uh she actually messed me she's a developer now and she messaged me she goes she goes I can tell you have your torque community trained right because I've never had more intentional dms about how we met um so again for those of you watching please say hey slide into people's dms message mess he'll get back to you eventually I don't know when but he'll eventually get back to you um so tell him you saw him on guidance counselor but again like I tell folks like if you have networked off the back of me for like five years you would have an expansive network.

And so please say, hey, let us know where you're tuning in from. We have folks tuning in from all around the world, which is pretty cool. We do have some folks tuning in now. Taran, it's good to see you. Ang, it's great to see you, brother. Ricardo, it's good to see you. Chris, great to see you. Kelly, Roxy, it's great to see you all this morning. Want to give kind of some housekeeping things. I haven't done this in a minute, so I'm trying to refresh how I do things. But shout out to AppRite. Me and Jason Torres are AppRite heroes. I'm probably the only non-technical person on a technical heroes program.

Listen, I don't code, but I know AppRite is a pretty cool tool. So you should check them out, apprite.io. Um, uh, if you do get in contact with anybody at upright, tell them to torque boys sent you over and listen, we have a lot going on with the torque community as we'll talk about today and kind of messes vision when he hired me and kind of where we're going, but check out torque dot community. We have a lot going on. Um, uh, you know, I'm, I, I grew up, uh, in the age of, of non, uh, cable television and you would have the, the, the TV guides on what's going on.

We have a TV guide on Torque.community of all the events we're doing. Also, too, we're doing resume LinkedIn reviews this afternoon at one thirty central. So I'd love to have you. Also, if you do want to be updated on when I go live, shoot me a text. I text the folks in my community when we go live so you can check this out. And I think that's it. We got a few more people tuning in. Erica, it's good to see you, Seth. It's good to see you. jesse my guy uh uh calls boss mess boss smiles yeah exactly exactly richie it's good to see you uh thanks for the dm this morning brother um I will get back to you jeff it's good to see you we got a few torque ambassadors in here sebastian and jeff and roxy all right so Enough with me yapping mess.

So, so, so for the record, I, everybody calls Dave mess. So when you hear me on the recording in the future, and now when I say mess, that refers to Dave who I'm interviewing, not a third person. That's not the room with us. So mess, let's give the people what they want, man. Who are you? What do you do? And we'll go from there. Yeah. Yeah. And first of all, I saw Richie said he's in Atlanta. I'm heading to Atlanta tonight. So yeah. Send me any tips before I get down there. But hopefully you're going to meet Brianna from the Torque community there for dinner.

So I'll hold her responsible finding the right restaurant. But yeah, Dave Messenger. So I was the co-founder and CTO at Torque. My background, I was actually a comp sci major and then went straight into consulting back in the day. I'm old enough right before kind of the dot-com boom. Yeah, you're like the mainframe days, right? I never did mainframe. I'm not that old, but, uh, I don't, I don't know my cobalt too well, but I started actually my first project, believe it or not. My first really big project was priceline.com. And it was like, I can tell you a lot of, uh, crazy, uh, stories and issues and, um, different things that, uh, we survived and not in, went on to help with the Priceline founder, do a couple of different startups and different name your own price from everything from starting on hotels and airlines, to mortgages, to cars, to gasolines, to groceries, do a little bit of everything there.

And then I was at a couple other, I was at Kinko's.com, I just did a Best Buy.com, PG&E Energy, a bunch of different clients left. left that. So that was at this company called Talon back in the day. It was originally called BDS and actually Mike Morris, the CEO and co-founder of Torque and I both started, we're both there. That's awesome. I met Mike. And then I went to another startup, which was called Amentra. which ended up getting bought by Red Hat, but I left after a year, maybe, maybe the wrong decision, but they, they did kind of mentoring. So the idea there was open source software development for companies.

Like my big client was Merck pharmaceuticals, but not only did we build an app for Merck, but we also trained Merck employees on like how to use back in the day. Like it was web logic. Oh yeah. I remember recruiting web logic. Yep. Yeah, so it was like Ant and JBoss. And well, yeah. And we had a whole curriculum, we would teach people that weren't on the project. So it helped us sell deals, because we did kind of both mentoring and building the project with talent company. And then Red Hat bought them for basically become because they did all the mentoring stuff as their consulting arms when they need a consulting partner.

Okay. And let's see, then I went to top coder, which was Very early on, that actually sort of spun out of Talon. At Talon, we built this app we called the CodeOff, which was a platform to let everybody kind of compete against each other in a fun coding way. And Topcoder took that and said, we're going to go worldwide with that. And they actually started that about eight months or about a year before I got there. And when I joined, Mike and I were there when they started a separate business called Topcoder Software, which was how do you use a community model to develop software?

Imagine that. I mean, I kind of call you in my circles like the grandfather of community because I don't like was community really a thing like like like what year was that? It was two thousand one. Two thousand one. I mean, I'm like community wasn't like no one was talking about community like they're talking now. No, I mean, the funny thing was we started mostly in the US and it just grew virally all around the country. all around the world. And it's funny. Like if you look at like famous people, like you can still pull up Zuckerberg's top coder. I was before Facebook. He was a top quarter member competing.

No way. Yeah. D'Angelo was the CTO there. Drew Houston founded, uh, Founded Dropbox. You had D'Angelo, CTO of Facebook. They were all on Topcoder. Yep. Steve Newman was the guy that founded Rightly, which became Google Docs. He was a finalist at Topcoder. Even now, he looks like Scott Wu, who is the founder of Cognition that just bought Windsurf. He's got five hundred million in funding from this week from Peter Thiel. He was a Topcoder champion. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. The guy that runs the data science group now for OpenAI, two of them were Topcoder members. Like Topcoder, we used to place people at huge head funds at Facebook, Google.

We actually ran the Google Code Jam for nine years. We ran the Facebook Hacker Cup for a few years. So that was fun. I actually flew all around the world, like helping Google open offices in like China, Brazil, Ireland, all using that kind of platform to help assess people. I love that. I love that. And for folks joining, also Kelly, a fellow Atlanta native, tune in. She's a dear friend of the Torque community. It's good to see you, Kelly. But it's funny. I'm actually asking Dave these questions because I don't know because our entire one-on-ones are just spent just with a bunch of follow-up and strategy.

So I'm just asking a lot of these questions to Dave just because I don't even know. So you left – so you were at Topcoder for a bit, right? Yeah. Like seven years? Yeah. I left and went to a company called the period, which was kind of the first, um, SI for Salesforce. Cause I wanted to go focus on cloud and mobile. Um, and we started another community platform there called cloud spokes that grew to about eighty-five thousand people. Okay. And then we actually bought top coder. Okay. And we reverse merged Cloud Spokes into Topcoder. Stayed there for a few years and then Wipro bought Topcoder and Appirio.

I kind of split them and then I did a stint of four years at Wipro and then Mike and I were always wanting to go back and kind of take a slightly different twist. Topcoder was a high level like kind of really open innovation platform was one part of it the other part was a different model for software development which is component based and competition based okay which I think still is one of the best ways to develop software but um as you know in any kind of company it's what you can sell it really probably matters the most so if you have the best thing like I'm going to date myself here, but like beta was better than VHS, but no one bought beta.

So VHS wins out. So when we started Torque, we said, hey, we're going to do more staff augmentation, but we really wanted to be talent focused. And I still think that's what's unique about Torque is we want to have the best profiles. We want to be able to give developers more and more opportunities and have the best developers shine versus, I think, not to throw shade at our competitors, but I think a lot are like, you know, more like moving widgets of humans to two different jobs. And that's never been kind of our intention. So, yeah. So, so, so what you and Mike and I'm kind of, I kind of want to get nitty gritty.

We have some time again. I've made these a little longer because of this, but like what you and Mike just like grab lunch one day and we're like, Hey, we want to go back into this. I mean, cause essentially it's, I mean, it's not staffing, but at the end of the day, it's placing talent. Right. So like, like, like what, what made you guys get so enchanted with your career where you guys wanted to start this again? It's not easy. It's not easy. Yeah. I think, you know, if you go back to the days, my first job, which was the BDS Talon is we were really good.

I think, I think we were like, great. Like we were a great company. But when you're two hundred and fifty people, when you get to five hundred people, it was kind of like back in those days, like, hey, can you spell Java? And unlike Taylor, you know, Java is not a cup of coffee. It's a programing language. There you go. There you go. And then like then it's like, hey, here's a book sticking on your desk and let anyone see it. And we're going to bill you out and put you over here. Sure. Sure. Like the big consulting companies are just like back up the bus with the juniors or those sort of things.

I always thought that was kind of a uh, again, a model that worked really well, but not the right model to get software development done. So like, how do you find great people, give great opportunities and have it where like, um, you know, we always say kind of like managing your fantasy football team where you could swap in the right resource at the right time to get the right job done. Yep. And you know, and ideally like you don't want that person to be, cut and sit on the waiver wire whatever in fantasy football but you're able to get that person another job where they're they can work on what they want to work on and show their their privileges so that was sort of what our intention was was like um and when we started talk we were looking at you know um Like Web three verified credentials, like how do we give more of the talent ownership of their own profile, which is something we still want to do.

We actually had a deploy. We turn it off because people at the time didn't really care. So we probably not the best decision that we made things that people weren't really ready for. But I still think that's the right way to go is you don't want to be a. we don't want to be a walled garden, right? Again, my processing accent probably hurts me here, but you don't want the profile to stay inside its own four walls. It should be able to go, if Torque can't help you, you should be able to go someplace else and get that job and not lose all your standing and credibility and things like that.

So that sort of was the background of the Torque profile. So talk, you know, I've asked this question. I've had amazing community builders on the show recently. I kind of go through these little stints where it's like heavy community, then job search and heavy community job search. Why do you think like community is the secret sauce, right? I think it's a secret sauce. You and I are very aligned. Why do you think this community first model especially in the age of call it what it is staffing is really the true indicator or the differentiator words yeah yeah I mean I think let me try a different way so if if I think now um I think you actually someone recently I think it was the uh chesky at airbnb just recently talked about it is like hiring is hard not only is it Yeah, not only is it hard, it's possibly the biggest mistake you'll make, right?

Because it costs a lot of money. There's a lot of hidden costs. It's really, it can be a very painful experience on both sides. If you get hired into the wrong job and you kind of feel locked, if you hire the wrong person, it's super, super expensive. So to me, community where you are starting to understand people, you start to understand their wants, desires, you're kind of lifting, you know, the lift, all tides lift all boats or I've been trying to say that in our one-on-ones and I always mess up the same, but yeah, that, yeah, I messed it up as well. So, but you know, being able to get people, you know, kind of collectively be able to improve everybody and move everything up.

Yeah. It just reduces risk because now, you know, like you're not, you're no longer a number being run through an AI machine to figure out if the skill and that thing, it's like, Hey, we know that, you know, Jason Torres can kind of tie his own shoes and maybe can go down this route, but we've got other people that can go down this other path that are, you know, can contribute immediately. Right. Sure. Sure. And that, that just helps de-risk it for everybody. Not only is it de-risking it for the talent because the talent and, you know, hopefully we have, their best intentions and understand where they want to go and what they want to do with their career.

You know, that's some of the things we're trying to do that you'll see in the near future in the profile is like, hey, I'm really good in Java, but I want to learn Python. So maybe we'll try to get you Python. Maybe that'll get you a little lower rate or something or different opportunities to get Python, or maybe it's kind of small one-offs. But we'll be able to help kind of help manage your career in the right direction. And then from the talent, from the company standpoint, they're not getting an unknown as much as I think you might. Even in the big consultant firms, as you meet a great partner, and next thing you know, you got twenty guys from know a university coming out and coming out and you know hiding that book under their desk and coding for it right right yeah what um kelly comes in here she goes a rising tie lifts all boats let I need to write that down so I we we can save that also uh fun fact about me I can tie both shoes at the same time okay all right jason so where So, you know, obviously it's actually my one year mark here.

I hired last August with you. Let's do a little bit of review, kind of one year kind of in review. You know, I know, you know, let's just kind of chat like a one on one like. Yeah. Where have we gone? Like, where have we been? What have you liked? Where do we want to go? Obviously, we can talk about some TORC stuff as well. But, you know, just kind of give an overview of the last year and your thoughts. Yeah. So last year, like I said, I think over my entire career, there's been ups and downs. I think last year, Silicon Valley Bank, that was probably a little over a year ago.

That was kind of a rough start. Then hiring Taylor might have caused a lot of other anxiety. Those were probably the two big issues we've had. We survived both those and we got Taylor on board and get them going. I think what excites me is stuff like this. I think I think we have barely scratched the surface. You know, it's like, it's like the iceberg, right? Like we get the little, little thing going up, but what's all, what's underneath the water and coming is like, if I could wave my magic wand. I'd like, you know, one of the things we talked about now is like Taylor's KPIs.

Right. And what are we what are we doing for the community? I mean, one of the things I think it's not a KPI for next year, but maybe the year after. So is I would love to see like. total spend with the community. So that'd be like how much we pay and all the people pay place out of the community. But also, um, we have this concept of tasks, right? Like maybe there's something small that needs to be done. Like, you know, like, um, Jesse's been doing discord bots. So like maybe we say, Hey, here's a, here's an enhancement for that. We're going to pay X amount of money or like we got small things that I know we want to get built and that we don't necessarily, we may have the cash to pay, but we don't have the engineering talent or stuff.

So how do we, how do we add like crowdsource gigs into things? But I think that's one thing I'm going to interrupt you real quick. I think that's one thing that, and I want to give you props here publicly. I mean, even since the day I started, you've always wanted to flow back money to, to the dev community? I mean, that's something that you have talked about time and time again. Where does that come from? Where's that motivation? Why are you so big on paying the community for things? Obviously it makes sense, but I wanna know where that motivation comes from. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's probably, I wouldn't say it's a knock, like I think open source is very valuable.

also I feel like you also don't want to um you don't want to build on the backs of people without them getting compensated I agree so it's and I think in those models where you're getting free work and free labor it's it's just not a not a conducive outcome so like one of the things we did at topcoder when we first started was we always said we're going to pay people for the work they do. Now, in some cases, that was a slightly different model. The way talk could work is we put out a unit of work and we'd say like, hey, go build this thing.

First place is going to get two thousand dollars, second place is going to get twelve hundred dollars, and then we'd pay three reviewers five hundred dollars a piece or something like that. We might get three or four people that submit code, the best person we could pay what they said they're going to get paid, the second person would get paid, and then third and fourth wouldn't get paid. But you just got the experience, you got the code review, you got other things for it, and no one used that code. So that maybe was not the best efficient use of talent. And we couldn't pay everyone just because financially you can't pay them.

But at least everybody knew kind of going into it. This is what you're going to get paid. This is what's going to happen. This is the risks you're involved in. But at least you get this get these things and you end up building a profile. Right. So I think to me, that's it. I think the other part is we've always been developer first. And we want to be a spot where developers feel they're not being taken advantage of and that we want to want to kind of push the envelope there. We're getting them there in it. And from a selfish standpoint, it benefits us too, right?

Because yeah, of course. Yeah, we can legally use that work as IP. You've traded goods, you paid them money, you can use it. It gets them gets them the opportunity to put something on their profile to show that they're good. And it shows that they can maybe do other work for other people. Sure. so I I think like over the next year that's going to become a big piece yeah and that's also like I mean other things I think are interesting is like even like the mentorship like right now it's it's as we kind of figure out it's volunteer but is there a way we can pay the mentors yeah yeah I mean that's I mean that's something that jason and I have actively been talking about too because again for those of you watching and listening in the future like we appreciate everybody being patient with us because we are building this thing from the ground up.

I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, definitely. Sorry, I lost my train of thought, though. No, no, you're good. The amount of DMs you've probably already gotten in our conversation is probably a ton. No, we're just talking about just giving back to developers, but then also just telling folks like, hey, thanks for the mentor mentees. Thanks for the ambassadors who are just taking a chance on us. But I'm glad Mess said it. when it comes to compensation, I mean, listen, like we have, I mean, we do want to give back monetarily to our community. I mean, that is a goal of ours, but it's just, I mean, we are, we are building this thing real time.

Yeah. Yeah. The plane is flying as we put the, the wings on or the cars drive as you're putting the wheels on Kelly, you can correct us in the sands. I mean, it's the blind leading the blind here. Let me ask you this. Talk, talk about, talk about the platform. Right. I know a lot of the ambassadors have asked us in ambassador meetings, what's coming out. There's a lot of excitement for the new drop of the platform. Can you talk a little bit about where the tort platform is going to go? Obviously at a super high level. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, we got a new profile coming.

Part of that profile is we want to make sure that we're showing people in the best light. The other thing I would say too, is like, we got thick skin and we want to make this a community for the developers. So if we're missing things, you don't like things, send all complaints to Taylor and send me all the praise. That's how it usually should work. But seriously, in all seriousness, just make sure that, you know, be honest, be open. Don't, don't hold back. But we want the profile to be something that you can own, that you can use no matter where it is. And that's extremely valuable to you.

And that's where we're trying to, have it where it integrates with like, we're pulling GitHub now, we'll pull in other feeds, other data. we want to make it very valuable for for you people um new people sounds like a bad thing to say but uh you know you know what I mean and so we'll end up one of the things next is career hub so career hub is yeah talk about that yeah it's like where what are you looking at now what jobs do you want to get how do you get there and we have a couple different sources of data for that We have some career and other data we're pulling in.

We also have, you know, behind the scenes. I don't know if people realize this. Yeah, yeah. Talk. Yeah, I was about to get into that. I don't think people still realize what we're a part of and how it all works together. Yeah. So. And one thing I probably have not done enough good job of speaking about is so Torque is part of Ronstadt. We're going to be a big part of Ronstadt, especially in the next month. We're rolling out the Torque platform to all the U.S. recruiting team. and you know one of the things I think just a simple slogan that ronstadt has is partner for talent is that they want to be a talent first platform so it aligns extremely well with with our vision and so can't be happier to be part of ronstadt now the the in ronstadt right now they're it's slow for us it's slow for ronstadt they get about five hundred jobs a week I just ran a report for Taylor.

I think we had a hundred and thirty eight public jobs. So eventually those will all show up on the platform as well. But behind the scenes, everyone's profile is going through and we're trying to match people. We're trying to align people to the right jobs. When we launched this career hub, now we'll be able to show more of, Hey, here's all the jobs we think you're the match for. So we're going to proactively match you to jobs. And that's pretty even, even if the recruiter hasn't matched you, we'll say like, here are three or four jobs we think we've matched you to. And then you could say like, like this one, don't like this one.

You know, the other pieces will be like, Hey, here's, perfect match he has like the next next level matches and maybe the next level matches um you know jason has to tie his shoes better so we so then the skills like prove that you can tie your shoes so like then maybe and he like you said he knows how to tie both shoes at once so we can actually he could actually prove that and that moves him from like good to best right and that'll help him show up better for that next job or even for that job And so being able to pull in, you know, hey, here's how you've been looking across these five hundred searches and you say you want to be here.

We can start coaching you to say you've come up on all these matches, but here's a constant miss that we're not seeing your profile. Either we don't know about it or you've had it. So we can start coaching you to add that to your profile and add that to your to your online, you know, prove it through an assessment or an interview. But that'll help you be able to get matched to more jobs or see more jobs and ideally in the entire ecosystem. Yeah. So so essentially, you know, because right now, kind of in state V one that we're at, it's it's really just a place for you to create your profile and event and eventually get matched with all the recruiters in Ronstadt Digital, which is a tech practice.

But what it's eventually going to become is a place where we can almost be your career coach in a way where it's like, hey, you're not getting matched. You're not showing up in results. here's how you can better your chances. Is that correct? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I love that. So talk about, let me ask you this. Let's kind of go back backwards a little bit. And if anybody has any questions about the platform, definitely ask them because you, I mean, you have the boss on the line. So definitely ask them, but I want to go back to kind of some career stuff.

And cause a lot of folks are struggling right now in their job search. Job search has taken an incredible amount of time. Based off your career, what would just be some suggestions for you from you to job seekers right now to really just help level up their careers as somebody who's been in the game for so long? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I guess listening to you, I think networking is the best thing you can do. Um, and something I still try to do, um, you know, is go to meetups, local meetups, virtual things, get involved. Um, you know, something else that I think people, I think reading books is huge.

I, I, you're old, but go ahead. Well, I'm an audio book guy now, but I do think like listening to audio books, like when you go for a walk or doing the dishes or something like I pick up a ton of things and That's just interesting. And you can go chat with someone, ask someone about that. Or I would say like now it's so many things on AI or pieces on AI or podcasts. I'm a podcast addict. I listen to probably too much podcasts, but being able to, I think, get engaged with content and then be able to follow that up with like discussions or talk to people.

So, and I think the other thing that's interesting to me I think I actually heard, well, who said it? I think it was a guy from Oxide Computers. And he said the thing that he likes the best is when someone says, hey, I got a dumb question, which I think is interesting. It almost shows, and maybe they don't use those terms in actuality, but people like where you are intentionally trying to learn or expand your knowledge or very interested in the topic so that idea of having a dumb question I think is is great I think where where you have people that are kind of almost trying to ask you questions where it's like hey taylor I'm just going to ask about community but what I'm really trying to do is is step on your toes and show you like how much I know about community because I'm trying to kind of turn one over on you Sure.

I think those questions on is acceptable. So like if I'm learning the job search now is like having those kind of humble like, hey, I'm really interested in this space. I'm trying to learn. I'm trying to get into it, connecting with people. I think those would be kind of the spots I would go after is is try to. try to do that I think the other pieces is use the resources you have like the resume reviews we have here uh talking to the team at torque other mentors other people I think is really important uh just to kind of kind of get yeah mike yeah mike mike morris brought up the mentors like he was like that that was his big thing is like finding a mentor um I guess he's had a mentor for his entire career he it was obviously a few months ago he said it, but there's been one guy who's been consistent throughout his career.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's awesome. It's like, yeah. Finding the right people, being able to chat with different people. Like, um, I still have, we don't do it all the time, but like guys I worked with in previous jobs, like, hey, I'd like to stay in contact. Can we just put something on the calendar every six weeks? Yeah. Yeah. May get canceled and we may only meet once every eighteen weeks or something like that. But at least it's like an excuse to stay together. Yeah. So I think that mentoring connections and, you know, then if they hear something just that they know that you're looking is helpful as well.

Yeah, absolutely. I don't want to glance over. Sebastian brought up a good question. He's one of our ambassadors. So Tork is in the process of making a more interactive profile with badges and activity. Do you think this would be a good portfolio to present? I'm assuming to maybe other clients he's interviewing with. That is our goal. I know our downloadable version of it is pretty junky right now, to be frank. Okay. But we'll make that better. But yes, I think being able to go through and look at it Um, and be able to share it to people that that's our goal is we want it to be yours.

Yeah. And if you think the stuff on there that should look better or have different pieces, happy to do that. Uh, in fact, Taylor, I don't, can I, I'm happy to even walk through the prototype now. Let's do it. Um, if you want to, so actually I'm really glad you're doing this, Sebastian, thank you for this. Um, If you want to go to the – no, that's not it. Go to the plus, like the screen with the plus on it. Do you have that? Hold on. At the bottom, the screen with the plus, and then – oh, wait. There we go. Boom. Is that working?

Let's go. Look at this. I say I'm not playing on two monitors, so this is a little bit different for me. I love it. You guys are getting a sneak peek. Some of the folks have seen this. you are in the torque discord um but we have not shared this publicly like this so this is huge so yeah go ahead so this is this is basically our community page so this will be like where articles and things come up who's contributing them who's writing them um you know and this is something we want you guys to contribute and add your own content your own yeah which is coming And that'll be huge, right?

And the idea is I eventually personalize this too. So if you are, you know, a Java developer, you might see something else. If you're a creative designer, you might see different articles. So have some personalization around this. This is just a Figma prototype. We'll go through this. So this is the internal view. Hey, look at that ugly mug. Look at that ugly mug. Yeah. Yeah. So the idea here is when you're looking at this, now this is, I think, sort of an innovative view. Yeah, I mean, I think this looks great. Yeah, so this is like, and this is the internal view. There's a public view of this too.

It looks similar, but one of the things we heard from the recruiters is they want to see like what companies were you working at? What skills did you show when you're working? Now this looks, there'll be gaps and other things in here. This is kind of a prototype. But being able to see very quickly, like, hey, you recently at Google, you worked on these things, being able to show those skills. And we'll have the ability to click into them so you can see different milestones or certifications or stats you've done with those technologies. That's kind of what we're trying to do from an excitement standpoint is being able to do these pieces.

The other thing we're looking at here is this concept of boosting. This may or may not be live by the end of the year, but this will be Hey, I'm looking for a job right now. And if you have done certain things, you'll get extra ability to kind of push yourself to the top. Cause you've done more things in the talk community. You've been participating. So it's the reward people that are participating in the community with the ability to say like, Hey, boost me now. And that'll be for like a period of time. Oh, I like that. I like that. Yeah. So it's like, you get points, but maybe it's like logging into the discord for so many times, um, which you, and this would give you kind of different ideas on how your profile is.

You can look at, so boost it here. You can see if you're boosted, it'll be for a time period and you'll be able to see more pieces. Um, this is your career chapters, which is sort of a different view, but the idea here is a show and call out like, Hey, I've done TypeScript and see the different, this will kind of automatically happen for you. And then the ability to add milestones like events or awards or things that you've had. So kind of stand out. So the idea here is like, how do we make the resume look a lot nicer? I mean, if you gave me my, our salespeople and people talking to clients might not like this, but I would love to kill the resume at the end of the day.

Yeah. Well, I think that's one of the things we do, right? I mean, like, you know, I'm helping clients hire all over the world right now with some of my connections. Like, we don't send resumes. Like, we send profiles. Yep. And so we want to eventually show soft skills. The scorecard will be more fun. Like, here's assessments and certifications. Have different achievements you can earn and badges. And this is, I think you were saying from a portfolio, is we want to have the ability to have projects, right? So these are things that you may have done on your own, but the ability to kind of give a way to show like, what have you done on your own?

What are you doing outside of work? Could be anything, could even just be like, you know, if you're, you know, my karaoke skills, cause just maybe you want to show something like that. I don't know what you want to do, but. Well, I think, I think the projects are huge. I'll never forget. And I've told the story countless times, but I was recruiting back at Vaco. a client needed a handful of.NET engineers with solid Azure experience, specifically Azure Functions. I interviewed a guy, I still remember his name, his name was Adam. I was like, hey, Adam, your resume is great from a.NET perspective, but do you have any Azure experience?

He was like, well, I'm actually not professionally, but he goes, I am working with a company to redo blah, blah, blah, and it's all in Azure. So I think being able to showcase projects is is a huge way to get your name in the door, even if you don't have professional experience. Yeah, and this, yeah, as you enter in data, we also have the ability to pull your LinkedIn data, assuming your LinkedIn profile is public. We can't do anything with that, but we can pull in your public LinkedIn data. So we have that today. and and uh and I think too like I think being able to pull in you know I want to give a shout out to kelly you know um on on the stream right now like we've gone live quite a few times um and we have another one on the books here soon but you know she's she's a senior engineering manager at zapier right now she was a director of engineering at a startup we've talked about the power of like hey like maybe you have an email newsletter where you talk about API development.

And if I'm hiring for an API engineer, I want to be able to see any of that documentation. So it'd be cool, you know, again, to pull in different, different places on the internet to, to, to, to make more of a holistic view about your profile. Yup. Yeah. And we're actually Zapier clients. We use Zapier a lot in the platform. So there you go. There you go. I now know where to send all my complaints to as well. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Anything else you wanna highlight, man? And this is like your perfect job fits we talked about. So this is like showing like, hey, you get five or six, here's the rates, here's the salaries.

So you can kind of see, these would be jobs that we call it a reverse match. so where the talent has an official you have an official even match to it yet but we think you're a good fit for it if you're a good fit for it you could still apply indicate interest and kind of push yourself to that recruiter I love that um let me just skip ahead to so this is the career path okay this is great I haven't seen this actually so this is I don't know if we could have put maybe should have put a little bit more than junior for for Jason here.

But if he wants to become a regular front end developer, creative or UX or designer, you know, it kind of shows here right now for UX engineer, there are eight new jobs in that category, he doesn't really fit that too well. So we would then be able to kind of show where he, what, what is good for him or what, what he could do to get through UX engineer. So you can kind of see different paths and data. This here is trying to show you like where he, you know, where you are now in the gaps of your skills and then have scorecards and pieces where you could come in and add more data or take a test or show your other pieces.

So this is also where this upskill here is. So again, kind of giving the ability of people to look at that and, try to find spots where they could improve. I love it. And again, this is cross-referencing all of the jobs and data for Ronstadt Digital, which is, you know, arguably a two hundred fifty million dollar practice. So we'll be able to, you know, cross-reference all that data. So we're pulling in all this jobs data. We're pulling in your data. And our best and our goal is to be able to guide you the best we can throughout your career based off the data we're seeing.

correct it's um it's basically will be like what we've seen from searching and across jobs in addition to uh we do have some career pathing data service as well so it's kind of a our own secret sauce on top of that across a variety of different spots um and the goal is to have this live by the end of the year I love that I love that that's awesome that's awesome cool all right Any last wise words of wisdom before I wrap up here? I got some rapid fire questions for you, but I know if you had any, any last words of wisdom, encouragement, thoughts.

Yeah. I mean, I think be active, be proactive, you know, whatever we can do to make, the experience toward community. I think one of the things I always say is community is what the community is, right? Like it's, we can try to set the norms of like what's acceptable, what we want the community to be, what we need the community to be, but it really comes down to the people in the community that are Are they having fun? Are they enjoying it? Are they driving where the community should go? And so we are happy to listen. And in fact, if we're not listening and not reacting to what the community needs, then I think it's a loss for everybody involved for both sides.

So we definitely don't want to be up here and dictating what should and shouldn't happen. Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. All right. Rapid fire. You ready? Yep. What's one tech tool or app you can't live without right now, just in your own personal day to day. Oh, geez. Um, probably my least favorite app is the calendar. I hate calendaring and getting anything with calendaring done, but between having four kids trying to manage Taylor and everybody else, it's, it's impossible to like without my calendar constantly looking at it and figuring that whole thing out. But also at the same time, I know people have, tried to reinvent the calendar a thousand times, but I feel like it's still like next to impossible to have like a family calendar, a work commit calendar, this kind of calendar.

It's like, yeah. So I think it's like the best and worst thing that I have going on right now. I love it. I love it. Let me ask you this. What is the very first job you ever had that you got paid for? I was a janitor. No way. an off Broadway playhouse and like a North shore music theater and outside of Boston. And that's awesome. Are you a theater kid at heart, man? I enjoyed it. I swept floors, picked up popcorn, drew, did parking lot attendant, even did some security. I went to security for bill Cosby and Joan rivers and a few other people.

Yeah. I mean, security was like, just sit outside of the door. Yeah. It wasn't, it wasn't a rough and tumble. Um, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, once a month like like like what's your as a leader of the organization if you could have it your way what type of cadence would you want on site versus remote I would say quarterly on site court like for a week yeah yeah or the other option would be maybe once or twice a year as a company yeah then give groups the ability to meet more frequently like on like if you said hey I want to get the community team here yeah get the community team together for a quarter or something or but I think I pay once or twice as a company and I think like if you're saving money by not having physical space that that gives you the opportunity to do that stuff.

Yeah, I the last company I worked at, I did like their cadence, a business unit would come on site once a quarter for a week. So like one week, we'd have market one month, one quarter, we had marketing, the next quarter, we had sales, the next quarter, we had engineering. And I thought that was a pretty good cadence. So I like that. Let me ask you this. Oh, go ahead. The other thing I would do is instead of going on site to one spot, I'd rather do like a, Oh, same. Do a tour. Oh, same. Right. And we could have a content. We'll go crazy.

Yeah. We could have a community meet up at whatever location we end up at. We should. We should do a Vail meetup. Sebastian, on-site with these folks would be wild. Yeah, we have a good team. We have a good team. Let me ask you this. When you were a kid, what did you originally want to grow up to be? I'm sure it was not CTO of a community first. No, I did. I always wanted to be in tech. Oh, really? Yeah, I liked, you know, playing. Well, I mean, first and foremost was probably the NBA. But considering I stopped growing, it really wasn't in the cards for me.

I probably peaked my junior year. But Yeah. I was like, like I have, I know my dad brought home a kind of PC clone. It was a Xerox PC and I was able to, I was in high school. I was able to write basic on it. I had the twenty four hundred baud modem that made that awful screeching noise. Yeah. And I wrote some basic, played some kind of old BBS online games and it was all text based, used pine for my email. Um, but we didn't even have, we just had dial up back, back in like the early nineties, late eighties. Um, but so yeah, I was a nerd.

You're always a nerd at heart. Yeah. I love it. I love it. Um, what's one career mistake you're oddly grateful for? I mean, I guess I, I probably made as many, made a lot of mistakes. One, I think is two are probably one is I left the job. You know, maybe I should have, I maybe should have stayed without a mentor company because it did really well and went forward. But if I didn't do that, I wouldn't have gotten a talk code. I wouldn't got into remote work. And it's funny how it all works. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Um, final, uh, final old two, two more questions.

Let me ask you this. If you weren't in tech. So if I tell you tomorrow morning, Dave, you can't, you can't do anything in tech anymore. Money's the same. What career path would you chase? What would you do if you couldn't do this anymore? Um, It's easy. I think two things. I would love to own a bed and breakfast. I could see you doing that. I bet it would be lit, too. I'd have a little bar and be able to do a little cooking on a beach somewhere. Okay. There you go. The thing I would say is I would love to be a sports coach.

So like, I mean, obviously like at like the NBA or NFL level would be awesome. Although I don't know if the life is, but I think even better than that would be like unified sports, like doing stuff with people with disabilities and like having the two together would be like really rewarding. And it'd be like just an awesome, you know, it's just an awesome experience. I have a couple of kids with some disabilities, so it's a lot of fun. I love that. Your restaurant could be called the mess hall. There you go. I like it. I like it. Um, all right. Last question. And we'll wrap up here.

Um, the show is called guidance counselor, two point O because we had guidance counselors, the middle school, high school and college. But now as adults, we don't really have a guidance counselor to turn to and ask for general career advice. What would be your biggest piece of career advice? If you could go back until young Dave, you know, and after hearing this podcast several times, I should have been prepared for this, but I'm not prepared off the top of my head. Um, I mean, I guess, I guess, you know, have you ever hear the joke that there's two types of, you know, how you tell the difference between an introverted and extroverted engineer?

What? The introverted engineer looks at your shoes and the, I looks at his shoes when he talks to you and the extroverted engineer looks at your shoes when he talks to you is don't be afraid. Just go out and talk to people. Just go mingle, chat with people, get yourself out there, ask those dumb questions. I think, and explore what you think's interesting. So like just kind of take the bull by the horns. Like I think probably at the beginning I was maybe a little bit more passive, like want to be a pleaser. What do you want me to do? I'll go do it. I'll run this down, chase this down.

And it worked really well for me. But I think at the same time, I probably didn't like, and at the same time, I will also say, I think the people that say like, Hey, you should just go explore your passion. Well, it's tough to explore your passion when you get to get a paycheck to pay the bills. Yeah, I know. But you got to, I think, being able to, I think the advice would be just get yourself out there and don't be afraid, right? And I think people overall are probably more supportive and more willing to help than you realize. Yeah, I agree. I agree, which is what we're trying to build here, right?

I mean, everybody's helping everybody in the Discord right now. It's really awesome. So Teron, I guess, tuned in late, but we got to answer it again because it's become such a staple. Talk about coffee or tea. Talk about your setup. Coffee, black tea. If I go out to buy it, definitely Dunkin' Donuts is my preferred vendor of coffee. Obviously. I will occasionally... I do like... pumpkin coffee, the pumpy flavor. And that's the only thing I'll get if it's not black and only if it's Dunkin' Donuts. But that said, I really dislike, and I'm very anti right now, all the Halloween decorations and pumpkin. It's still the summer right now.

I like to hold on for another week or two and get rid of all that. As we were live, I got an email for fall scented candles. I'm not kidding you. yeah yeah I'm I'm not it's ninety eight degrees yesterday in nashville like we got tom we got tom yeah I I met a friend as you said networking uh for a beer recently and he ordered a pumpkin beer and I said dude it's august you can't have a pumpkin beer right now like are you are you kidding me yeah I love it I love it and mess does hot coffee all year round which is absolutely yeah that's absolutely terrifying um awesome well mess thank you my friend I appreciate you a lot Yep.

For those of you, go connect with Mess after this. This is the first hour. This is the first full hour session I've done. So we're going to do more of these, much, much more nitty gritty, much more conversational, be able to kind of dive in a little bit more. So if you have not joined, obviously, we'd love to have you in the Discord. Love for you to create your profile. And we'll see you probably Friday, as long as Jeff confirms with me. But, Mess, stay on so I can say bye to you offstage. But you all have a good one, and we'll tentatively see you guys on Friday.

Peace. Thanks, everybody.