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The decision to learn to code is a big one and often a life-changing one. While you could opt to get a formal education at a local college or university, obtaining your degree in computer science is likely going to take you two to four years. Do you really want to wait that long?

Another option is to sift through the numerous code schools available in your area or online and find the one that makes the most sense for you, but what do you look for in a code school, and why? What are the most important factors to consider when choosing a code school?

Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Codeschool vs College

1. Cost
   1. $0 (freecodecamp (https://www.freecodecamp.com/), appacademy (https://www.appacademy.io/) (C)) to $15K for code schools
   2. $40K to $100K for BS in Computer Science of Engineering. Some of that can be deferred and reduced by grants and loans
2. Time to graduate
   1. 4 months for code schools. Ability to jump start a professional career within 6 months.
   2. 4 years for BS. More time to absorb more knowledge and work with different professors and students
3. Technical grounding
   1. Solid practical grounding for code schools
   2. Solid theoretical grounding for BS.
4. How fast can you get a job after you graduate
   1. 6 months for code schools
   2. 3 months for BS
5. Salary
   1. $40 to $60K for code schools
   2. $50 to $75K for BS
6. Industry connections
   1. Possible to get real industry introductions via mentors and teachers for code schools
   2. Some schools have industry connections and adjunct professors from the industry but overwhelmingly, BS does not give any connections
7. Theoretical foundation
   1. Most foundational knowledge is iffy for code schools
   2. Solid foundation for deeper understanding of computing systems in BS. Some CS departments are far better at it than others.
8. Advanced study options
   1. No real options for advanced studies for code schools
   2. Great opportunities to do advanced studies in graduate school for research and deep analysis in a CS program. Can get MS and PhD degrees and even beyond using Post Docs.
9. professorship and teaching
   1. Unless you teach at a code school, little opportunity to teach at a formal educational institute for code schools
   2. Realistic opportunity to teach as an adjunct after a BS. The probability increases dramatically with an MS degree. With a PhD, you could potentially get a tenured position which has its benefits in terms of more free time, summers off, and time to pursue research and academic ambitions.
10. credibility
    1. Starting out, not much in terms of credibility for code schools
    2. With a BS degree in CS, people generally give you the benefit of the doubt.
11. Ability to get your foot in the door
    1. Depending on how connected a code school is to the industry, getting your first job may be easier or harder than with a BS degree. Without extraordinary connections, this may be a steep climb.
    2. For a lot of large corporations, using a BS degree as required qualification for a developer job makes it easier for them to whittle down the mountain of resumes they get for job postings. It doesn’t necessarily mean they think candidates with BS degrees are better. For a number of these types of companies, it is possible to get your foot in the door on the back of a decent GPA in a BS degree and a couple of school projects.
12. Promotions and raises
    1. For most small and medium sized companies that have software developers on staff, once an employee has worked several years as a developer, his or her education does not matter at all. In some more regulated and larger organizations like state and federal governments, not having a 4-year degree could harm your chance of getting ahead and may even determine how much salary you are offered.
    2. Sometimes promotions are offered based on academic qualifications for newer employees. For developers with more than 4 of experience under their belt and with a good working relationship with management, academic excellence and degrees matters very little.
13. Prestige
    1. Not much in terms of prestige at parties for code schools
    2. Some elite colleges will inject a sense of prestige among graduates which may propel them to aim higher and ultimately achieve more. Such academic institutions are rare but they do exist and you might choose these top schools if you like to rub shoulders with high achievers.

Important Links

• https://www.freecodecamp.com
• https://www.appacademy.io
• https://generalassemb.ly

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Listen in to episode 50 as Arsalan and Quincy discuss how Free Code Camp came to be and how you can benefit from this wonderful resource. Don’t forget to sign up for Arsalan Ahmed’s Five Steps to Success as a Software Developer email series to guide you on your coding journey.

 

Quincy Larson’s Bio:

Quincy Larson did his grad work in China through an American university and went through an intensive Mandarin program. During his five years in China, he taught at and served as an interpreter for various language training operations. He also recruited MBA students.

Quincy worked as a teacher and tutor throughout college and graduate school and later served as director of several schools in the US and China. He increased their academic rigor while simultaneously growing their student populations. Along the way, he learned to code.

Quincy wrote scripts to automate his school workflows so he could free teachers and administrators to spend more time with students. From this experience was born a new opportunity for aspiring software developers called Free Code Camp. Quincy started Free Code Camp, an open source community of 500,000+ people who learn to code together and build projects for nonprofits in the process.

You can find more information about Quincy and his experience on Free Code Camp, Quora, Medium, or Twitter.

 

Don’t forget to stop by and say hello to Quincy on Twitter!

 

Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Arsalan: Hi everyone. Today my guest is Quincy Larson. Quincy, something very interesting that I learned the about you is that you went to China for grad school. That’s the first time that I’ve heard of somebody going to China, and something interesting happened there. Tell me a little bit about that.

Quincy: Sure. I was 23 years old and I had just finished school and was working as a newspaper editor. Journalism wasn’t exactly a booming industry and I wanted to go back and gain some additional skills and learn specifically about economics and finance. A university in my city happened to have one of the oldest MBA programs in China. So, this university was all Chinese and they had American professors that would fly in and teach. During the first 10 days of the month, you would read the entire textbook of 400 or 500 pages and then you did the pre-work. Then, you had 10 solid days of lectures. Then, you had 10 days more to finish your final project in each class. So, it was like a rapid-fire circuit of classes.

Quincy: I flew over there and audited one class which was basically Mandarin 101. So, there I was in TingChing, China, which is a big city, but it’s not a tier 1 city like Shanghai or Beijing. I was on a campus of about 20,000 people and I was the only westerner. So, literally everyone in the international dormitory was from East Asia, primarily Korea.

Quincy: All of my interactions were in Chinese. So, it wasn’t just the cultural differences between the U.S. and China, but the language jump was pretty terrifying. Every conversation I had I was constantly second-guessing whether I was sufficiently communicating or if people were just being polite because Chinese people are very polite. They will nod and smile and then walk off and it will become clear to you later on that they did not understand you because whatever you asked was not done. Or, you’ll be halfway through a conversation and it’ll become clear that they didn’t understand some early part of the conversation and they were just being polite. Or, you’ll see people in the hallway and they’ll turn around and start to run because they don’t want to have an awkward conversation with you. So, in many ways, this experience was perfect for the rigors and frustrations of learning to code. It was a very ambiguous process and there were loose feedback groups and essentially no error messages. In many ways, it was much harder and it gave me the humility, later on, to slog it out and learn to code.

Arsalan: So, does it give you the sense that you can’t run away from it, this is where you are, there’s nowhere to go? There’s only one path to follow. And no matter how many times you fall down, you gotta just get up and keep going.

Quincy: Yeah, I’m really fond of the Winston Churchill quote: “if you’re going through hell, keep going.” I had a blast in China, don’t get me wrong. I did an intensive Mandarin program and after I finish my MBA I stayed there. One of my graduate classmates ultimately became my wife and we lived in her hometown for a couple of years and I taught and became a school director.

Quincy: That was my transition from journalist to educator and it was a very important process in my life, but it was very challenging. I feel the same way about coding. I feel that transitioning from being a teacher to a school director to being a developer was an equally important transition and it was very challenging. So, I’ve done this twice and hopefully this will be the last time because I’m so excited about technology and I think this is the job of the future. I always say that software engineering will be the last job that will ever be automated.

Arsalan: That’s interesting. Since college, I’ve been hearing the software development will be automated one day. This has been a computer scientist dream or this idea of this utopia where software writes itself.

Quincy: It’s certainly been a project manager’s dream. A quick counter to that for whenever somebody says something like “oh, they’re just going to be able to automate this stuff soon anyway. There’s no point in me learning to code.” But, you think about what code is. You think about specs. Specs are very specific instructions about what to do. We know what the word is for a sufficiently detailed spec to produce a program is. It’s code. So, when you’re coding, you’re really writing an extremely detailed spec telling the computer exactly what to do. Depending on how many layers of abstraction up you are, it may be very general and you may be able to use declarative programming instead of it being so imperative, for example. You may even be able to use a domain specific language to write something that is much more natural and easy for a layperson to pick up.

Quincy: My feeling is that we are nowhere near this situation that a person who doesn’t know how to program at all will be able to accomplish much. They accomplish more every single day, but at the same time, the programmers themselves are able to accomplish more and more. So, it’s not like the layperson is catching up with the programmers. Back in the day, they had windows, publisher and you could literally drag and drop and use a WYSIWYG editor to create a website. That was 20 years ago and you don’t see many people using that today. Even if you used a square space, you’re usually very limited in what it will look like. So, if you want to color even slightly outside of those lines, you suddenly have to learn how to program.

Arsalan: I think that tool is Microsoft Front Page if I remember correctly.

Quincy: Microsoft Front Page, thank you.

Arsalan: So, right now people are thinking that this guy sounds interesting. You went to China. You learned Mandarin. You went to graduate school there. There are lots of little tidbit pieces of information, but I really don’t know what he’s about. I don’t think that we have really shown people why it is that you are on the show, what you are doing, and where you came from. I want to talk about where you came from, where you are now, and where you are headed, but first I want to ask you about you. I want to know how you see yourself. That’s how we like to start this show. Can you describe yourself? Who is Quincy Larson?

Quincy: I am a really simple guy. Basically, I wake up and eat the exact same breakfast every day. I hang out with my baby daughter who is 14 months old. I usually take her for a run around the city. I generally try to run for about an hour a day while pushing her. So, it’s about 10k a day.

Arsalan: I was a little concerned because I thought she was running with you at 14 months.

Quincy: oh no. I put her in a stroller. She’s surprisingly fast, but I don’t think she could do 10k in a day, not yet. Then, at some point, I catch up on all of my messaged. I do practically everything asynchronously. The project that I work on for about 80 hours a week is called Free Code Camp. It’s an open source community that helps you learn to code so that you can get a developer job. One of the ways that we do that is through a comprehensive, open source curriculum that is about 1200 hours long of interactive coding, not just reading books or watching videos. You’re actually coding the entire time. Then, you build projects that help nonprofits.

Quincy: So, you get practical experience building production code that real people are going to use. Right now we have about 300,000 people every month that are working through the curriculum and when they reach a certain point, it may take some people six months and others a few years of starting and stopping as life gets in the way, but eventually they reach a point where they are ready to start working on open source projects and doing agile software development.

Arsalan: Did you just say, 300,000 people?

Quincy: Yes. 300,000 people every month use Free Code Camp.

Arsalan: Different people? Different accounts? Not 300,000 hits?

Quincy: No, it’s about 320,000 individual users according to Google analytics for the core platform. Then, of course, the learning platform is only a small part of Free Code Camp. We also have a forum that is one of the most active technology-related forums on the Internet. We have a YouTube channel that publishes all kinds of short whiteboard conceptual explanations of different technologies and different mathematical computer science-related concepts. We have a Medium publication that is the most widely read technical publication. It covers programming, design, and data science. We also have a very active chat room system where 24/7 you can go and get help with a programming question or you can just hang out and talk about technology.

Arsalan: Wow. I’m really impressed. First of all, you’ve got really good engagement. People are going there and using this. I can do it too, but to get people to use it, get people going through the system and giving you feedback so that you can improve it sounds amazing. It’s called Free Code Camp. Does it work like a code camp? Do you have cohorts? What do you have?

Quincy: We use a concept that I call flash cohorting. Whoever you happen to be coding alongside in the chat rooms or in the forum, whoever you are talking to, that is your cohort. It is not cohort it in any traditional sense. It is completely free. It is completely self-paced. It runs completely in the browser. You don’t even need to get PuTTY or something to be able to run Linux. You don’t need to set up a dev environment at all. You can literally just do everything in the browser and then later if you feel like setting up a dev environment, that’s great, but it’s not necessary. We wanted to make it as convenient as possible. Because it’s completely self-paced, you don’t need to sacrifice anything. You don’t need to leave your kids behind and go to New York City to do an intensive coding boot camp, for example. You don’t need to go back and do a graduate degree. You can literally just go on and practice at your convenience. It’s really designed for busy adults like people who have kids or people who have full-time jobs for people who are otherwise not able to just drop everything and focus on learning how to code.

Arsalan: That is almost everybody. If you’re not just out of high school or in your early 20s, you are probably one of those people who can’t just drop everything, and that is why a lot of people are not going to a lot of the code camps. When I talk to people, one of the problems that we face is that these code camps can’t be everywhere. They are only in certain cities and you have to be there and you have to be dedicated and spent countless hours working on that. Even if you could come up with the money to pay for that, you would also be losing your potential income. So there is an opportunity cost there and it’s a little too much for most people, but I’m really intrigued by this concept because I’ve seen several websites.

Arsalan: Correct me if I’m wrong, but does it sound a little like the Code Academy website or the Code School website where both of them have their interpreters or some kind of ID running where you can execute your code and see the results. What is it most like? Is it more like a Code School type course where you see a video and they make you do certain exercises right there and they run tests?

Quincy: Both Code School and Code Academy are excellent resources for learning specific topics. In my opinion, they are a collection of beginner friendly resources to help you get started with the technology. One thing that they don’t strive to do is put the entirety of web development into a cohesive curriculum where you start with one technology and then you advance to learning something different. We start with HTML and then you advance to learning JavaScript, and then data structures and algorithms. Then you learn how to use web development tools like Jquery, ReACT, and D3. Then, you learn how to do the backend stuff like Load Express.

Quincy: You’re building projects the entire time. You will build more than a dozen significant projects that will take 10 or 20 hours each. You’ll build a bunch of APIs and you’ll write a ton of algorithms. What we built as far as our curriculum is very rigorous and it’s all cohesive. Everybody who goes through Free Code Camp goes through the same linear curriculum, so that at any point, it’s kind of like the Appalachian Trail, you can ask people who are coming the other way what to expect. You might stop and camp for a day and see the same people. So you kind of has a little bit of a cohort effect going even though there’s no time pressure whatsoever.

Arsalan: That is really interesting. Some of the material that you’re talking about, if I can envision it, sounds like articles and reading. It’s not programming. Like data structures, if you’re studying data structures, you’re going to learn it. So I’m assuming that these are some kind of articles that they read. Walk me through my first week of Free Code Camp.

Quincy: Sure. So, first of all, to answer your point, the entire thing is programming. What we learn is the practical aspects of data structures that you build.

Arsalan: You don’t explain it?

Quincy: We explain it somewhat, but it’s extremely terse. It’s like this structure is generally used for this. Let’s build this structure. They can do additional reading for the theory aspect. So, one thing that Free Code Camp is very adamant about is that we are not trying to teach computer science and a lot of the theory associated with it explicitly. Our core curriculum is very practical in nature and we have a bunch of recommended resources outside of Free Code Camp that you can go read like the ACM reading list. We also have a great list of advanced JavaScript books, for example. There is a whole lot of theory. That is excellent to learn as well, but we want to focus on practical skills and action and interactivity.

Quincy: You’re right, if you wanted to learn theory, then you would have to stop coding and read maybe 100 pages worth of explanation of how the structure came about and why it’s important and what its use cases are. Instead, we just try to be as succinct as possible and say this is what this data structure looks like. This is what it does. This is one possible application of binary search trees and stuff like that. That’s one of the concepts that is more conceptual, but the vast majority of what we teach is very practical. We teach how to manipulate the Dom for example. That’s highly practical. You can learn a lot just by doing without a ton of explanation that you’d get if you had a programming book.

Quincy: So, one important point about Free Code Camp is we do not see ourselves as a one-stop shop where we’re going to teach you everything you need to know. We have a cohesive program that gives you a ton of practice and you can use whatever additional resources you want. It can be used in conjunction with the computer science degree, for example. A lot of people do traditional academic degree programs while they are working through Free Code Camp for example, and they use it for practice and a lot of professors recommend it for the additional practice.

Quincy: One question that you had asked, Arsalan, was what one week of Free Code Camp is like. That completely depends on you because maybe you only have an hour or two during that week that you can actually code. You’re going to go and get set up and will help you get a GitHub account. We hope you join our chat room so you can get help if you get stuck. We will teach you a couple of very basic tips to help you debug something if things don’t work. We teach a simple set system called Read, Search, and Ask. First, you read the problem, the documentation, or the error. Next, you search it. If you still can’t figure out the problem or how to get past it, then you ask and we have the forum and the chat room where you can do that.

Quincy: So, maybe you have someone who is between jobs and has a ton of time. They may take a week off and just crank. But, I would necessarily recommend that. I really do think that sustainable learning over a longer period of time is much more effective than short bursts of learning. We have a number of hours that’s in our curriculum. That’s highly subjective because it depends on a lot of factors. It depends on whether you were in a perfectly quiet room and well rested and thinking straight, or whether your kids were playing on this floor and you are getting calls and you are back and forth. It depends on whether you’ve taken advanced mathematics before or computer science classes before or whether you’ve programmed in a different language before. All of these factors are going to impact the rate at which you can learn.

All of these factors are going to impact the rate at which you can learn. You’ll learn some basic CSS. You start building some very basic projects. Currently, we’re building them on CodePen. We are working on our own multi-file editors so you can build projects right on Free Code Camp, but the entire thing is driven by tests. You have tests that evaluate your code every step of the way and telling you very clearly what is failing so you can fix it.

Quincy: Hopefully, you will sign up to join one of the 1,500 local study groups around the world so you can meet with people after work and sit down at a café and code with them and so you’ll have some friends that you’re coding with. Hopefully, you’ll participate in our chat rooms and on our forum and meet some people that way and you’ll feel some sense of comraderies that will help propel you forward so you won’t burn out or forget that the Free Code Camp’s community even exists and just give up your coding ambitions. Unfortunately, that happens to a lot of people, but what we find is that they’ll come back later and restart the process and they’ll kind of strobe in and out. As long as they’re making forward progress, we’re happy. We just want to be as useful as possible to as many people as possible.

Arsalan: Can I tell you about this? Now, let me put on my listener hat of somebody who is interested, but has tried a few things that hasn’t worked. It sounds too good to be true. I’m thinking “what’s the catch?” I’m wondering whether or not I’m going to have to buy something later. Devil’s advocate is thinking how is he making money because if you’re not making money then I’m probably in trouble, right?

Quincy: We have a shop and we sell merchandise. We sell Free Code Camp stickers, putty, and shirts. We have some books in the shop that we recommend. If you click through to buy one of those books, then we get an affiliate payment for that. Probably 1% or 2% of all people who use the Free Code Camp go and buy something from the shop, but when you have hundreds of thousands of people using it, it starts to add up and offset the cost of the servers. We have two other people who work on Free Code Camp full time and the shop earnings help me to pay for payroll and stuff like that. Our goal is not to make money, but to create an important path for people to learn coding and get their first code job.

Arsalan: I can see that. This sounds like exactly the type of thing that I would’ve wanted to have when I was starting out. I didn’t have anything like it. I didn’t have a mentor. I didn’t have anyone to talk to. I was the only one out of all the people who I talked to who was doing anything like this. When I started in high school, I didn’t have the computer. I didn’t know what I was doing. I had to learn everything the hard way. Right now, I think that people are really lucky that there is an Internet. Back when I started, there was no Internet. There is an Internet that you can go to and it’s very open and we have resources like yours and other resources like the Khan Academy. There are other places that offer free courses. Code School is one of them and so is Code Academy. But, what you’re describing to me, I can’t even imagine. Until my producer for this show mentioned to me, she is probably going to listen to this episode later and I didn’t tell her I would talk about this, but she has been taking your course.

Quincy: Oh really?

Arsalan: She mentioned it to me and I was like “what? Really?” I’m always trying to see what the catch is.

Quincy: Right.

Arsalan: But, so far you have told me that you are going to teach people data structures, how to structure and essentially how to create your application from a data structure point of view and then you’re going to tell them about HTML so that they know how to create a basic presentation. I think you even mentioned D3, which is charting.

Quincy: Data visualization, yeah.

Arsalan: Data visualization. Then, you mentioned React. This is not necessarily beginner’s stuff. This is stuff that, let’s say that I am a software developer who has done a couple of projects in React and D3 and Java Script and HTML and I know some data structures. I don’t need to be an expert, but I know how to use a programming language properly which means using data structures and I probably know how to do some of the backend a little bit. That is enough for me to get a job.

Quincy: Yes, and I’ll tell you that so far, more than 5,000 people who have used Free Code Camp have gotten their first developer job .

Arsalan: That’s amazing. So now I’m thinking that you have some of these automated tests just like Code School and other places. I keep mentioning them. I’m not sure if you see them as competitors and I apologize if you do.

Quincy: I don’t. I see them as additional resources and we recommend all kinds of resources. I see our competitors as Netflix and Legal Legends.

Arsalan: That’s hilarious. Yeah, so if you’re wasting your time and not being productive, then go on Free Code Camp. That’s good. So, what I wanted to know is: you’re spending 80 hours a week and you have an automated suite and I’m sure that you’re busy fixing your tests and you’re adding more. I can understand that, but you also have more employees. Unless somebody is going through people’s code, which you’re not, this is all automated. When I make a submission, nobody is looking at it, right?

Quincy: That’s the thing. You asked what the catch was. There is no formal catch. There are plenty of people who have never talked to anybody. They just work through the curriculum and often I hear about these people because they message me saying that they got a job and I’m like “wow, I don’t even know who you are. I’ve never heard of you before. I guess you been quietly using this resource on your own.” That is totally cool. Free Code Camp is essentially organized self-study together where you are basically learning all of the code on your own, but you have all these resources and you have this huge community that is they are to support you when you want it. Because we are completely open source, everything is volunteer driven and most of the commits to code base are done by volunteer contributors. Almost all of the help questions, like in our chat room and our forum, are from other campers who have learned this stuff from like a month before and are practicing that knowledge by helping other people apply it.

Quincy: The model works because people are cool, friendly, and they care about each other. Since it’s open source, anybody can literally walk in and try to help. We have flash cohorts and flash mentorships where you just happen to talk to somebody who just happens to know this issue because they experienced it going through the same linear curriculum that everybody goes through and they can turn around and help you with it. We don’t code hers people to go help. We do offer brownie points in chat rooms. Everybody has a little score. So if somebody says thanks, Arsalan and mentions you in the chat room then you’ll get a brownie point. The brownie points aren’t useful for anything other than bragging power. It’s like karma on Reddit or something. So, people do that out of the kindness of their heart, Free Code Camp is really powered by human kindness.

Important Links

• Free Code Camp
• Gitter IM

Thanks for Listening!

Do you have some feedback or some advice for us or our audience? Please give us a review on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Stitcher and share your thoughts.

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Our next guest is Liz Rush and while Liz has only been coding for the last few years, she has become an expert at branding herself, which has turned out quite well for her and even opened up new opportunities. Listen in to episode 49 of Mentoring Developers as Arsalan Ahmed and Liz Rush discuss how she got into tech, what she’s done, and how she designed and built her reputation for success.

 

Liz’s Bio:

Liz Rush is an independent software developer & evangelist in Seattle, WA. Liz has worked on development teams large and small to build web apps, experimental services, and complex data platforms. She is a graduate of Ada Developers Academy’s inaugural cohort and remains active as an alumna mentor. Prior to transitioning into tech, her professional background was in technical translation & marketing and she studied at St. Louis University in Madrid. When she’s not blogging or coding, she can be found volunteering or out at live music & techno shows.

Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Arsalan: Hi everyone. My guest today is Liz Rush. Liz, how are you?

Liz: I’m great. Thanks for having me.

Arsalan: It’s so good to have you because you have a lot of interesting stories in your career. Everybody who I interview has interesting stories, but you’re a little bit unique.

Liz: Well, thanks.

Arsalan: Tell me a little about yourself. Who is Liz Rush?

Liz: Well, I am a web and IOS developer in Seattle. I made the transition into development a few years ago through a coding boot camp. Right now I am working as a consultant at a wonderful consultancy called Foundry Interactive as well as doing freelance development and evangelism work.

Liz: Aside from code, I really like to speak at conferences and blog about making the career switch into development. I am also an alumna mentor for Ada Developer’s Academy, which is the nonprofit code school for women that I went through. In addition to that, I also moderate our alumni stack team where graduates and current interns can connect over experiences and share resources. Outside of tech, I really enjoy doing volunteer work in feminist activism and I have hobbies that include sewing and embroidery.

Arsalan: So, I’m thinking “wow, this is incredible.” I think my audience right now would agree. But, I know that in the world of software development, in any industry, two or three years is not a long time. You’re hitting home runs after home runs. It’s amazing.

Liz: Thanks. I’ve practiced my elevator pitch about who I am a few times, but you’re right. I’ve only been doing this a couple of years. I was part of the inaugural cohort of Ada Developer’s Academy. So, this was a new boot camp for women in Seattle where we didn’t pay any tuition and we did a 6-month classroom portion and a 6-month internship at a Puget Sound company. So, I graduated from Ada Developer’s Academy about two years ago. The program is about a year long. I’ve been coding for about three years.

Arsalan: That is incredible and not only that, there’s something very unique about the way you’re approaching this. Okay, so let me explain myself. Not only are you a professional software engineer, you’re also a speaker and not just somebody who has given just one or two talks. This is one of the things that you do. You’re also volunteering. You’re an activist. You’re doing all these things. You’re putting yourself out there and I know from experience and other people’s experiences that when you are an activist and you have a message which is going to rub people the wrong way, you’re going to have haters. It makes life hard.

Liz: Definitely. Yes.

Arsalan: Especially if you are new and may not be as self-confident or may not have established yourself yet and no really sure if you lose your job or if you lose your income. If you lose your current way of making money or something happens to it, there is uncertainty because you just started. I know from experience that it takes a long time to really master your craft. So, certainly, when you started giving talks you were not an expert software engineer. So, tell me a little bit about when you gave your first conference talk. How long had it been at that time since you had started programming?

Liz: My first conference talk was a local conference called Cascadia Ruby. I gave a talk with a project partner of mine from the boot camp, Singway. Singway Sue and I gave a talk about our final project as a kind of case study. So, we had not even graduated from our boot camp. We were about 8 or 9 months into learning to code when we decided to give that conference talk. It was a wonderful experience. We ended up giving it at this regional Ruby conference and also at Ruby Conf that year in San Diego. It was a lot of fun, but I think that one of the great things in particular about the Ruby community is that there is such an emphasis in how beginners and novices at programming have a certain way of sharing insights and knowledge that everyone can learn from even if they’re not expert software developers yet. So, I think because we started out in the Ruby community, we were able to grow that sense of confidence and be able to go out and do things like speak or volunteer at code events and things like that without feeling too intimidated.

Arsalan: That makes sense. Ruby is a very welcoming community. It is one of the best communities out there. If you’re a new developer or if you want to become a developer, they’ll welcome you with open arms.

Liz: Absolutely.

Arsalan: That’s not going to be the case if you go to a Java group or a .Net group or I would say even a Python group or JavaScript group. You’re going to be more intimidated. I think it’s great that you were able to do it, but you know, not everybody gets to do what you did. Was there something special about you or were you in the right place at the right time?

Liz: Wow, what a question to ask. I don’t think that there’s necessarily something special about me that made me feel like I could be more successful in that environment or giving talks or doing public speaking. But, I do have to give a lot of credit to my upbringing and having a strong role model with my mother. She was an entrepreneur. She was the president of her own company and she taught me from an early age that I have something to say, my perspective is valuable and I shouldn’t be shy about using my voice where appropriate. So, I think because of that upbringing, I’ve never been afraid to speak out or speak my mind and that’s really what’s helped me make this transition into tech and be able to do public speaking because if I can be outgoing in any environment, then just because its tech doesn’t mean it should be more intimidating than anything else.

Arsalan: Yeah, the way I see things is that entrepreneurship is an attitude. It is not a profession. You can be an entrepreneur inside a job or in whatever capacity you’re in and an entrepreneur has a voice.

Liz: Yeah, definitely. I think that it really ties into how people view the word “hustle” these days. Like having a hustle or being someone with a lot of hustle. A lot of that is about being outgoing and having an attitude of being assertive and self-confident.

Arsalan: Right. So, here’s the problem. Most of my listeners and most software developers are not extroverts. They’re not outgoing and they’re actually introverts. It’s the idea of going out there and butting heads and selling yourself. Essentially, the way I see hustle is being able to sell. It’s about not giving up and not giving in and being brash. Be in your face. Don’t take no for an answer. That’s the pushy salesman type thing that we don’t like when we go to a store, but that’s kind of what we’re expected to be if you’re an entrepreneur.

Liz: Yeah, I think that in software, we tend to also have this difficulty where we have this false dichotomy of being an introvert or an extrovert. So, you had touched on the fact that a lot of software engineers of introverts, but the funny thing is that I view myself as an introvert. Nobody else views me as an introvert because they see me out doing these things, but I like a lot of downtimes. I like being alone. I need time to recharge and be away from people.

Liz: I find it incredibly exhausting and draining to do a lot some of these things, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I am not capable. So, I think there’s this conversation that often happens where people say that they can’t do these things because they’re an introvert. I don’t think that’s true. I think you can strategically be extroverted when you need to be or show that hustle without it having to be who you are. It doesn’t necessarily mean that just because you like public speaking that’s the core essence of who you are and if you don’t like public speaking that you can’t do it. It’s kind of one of those things where you have to push your own idea of what your boundaries are and what your limits are to see what you’re capable of even if it goes against your own self-image sometimes. That’s how we learn and grow as people.

Arsalan: I’m so glad you said that because I believe that too. I think the important thing to realize is that when you are speaking in public when you are giving a talk or even when you are mingling with people in a social event purposely, you’re there because you have a goal to achieve. Then it becomes a performance. So, you’re out there in front of a hundred or a thousand people and you may not enjoy being in front of people, but you know that in order for you to achieve what you need to achieve, you need to give a performance.

Liz: Absolutely. Yeah.

Arsalan: After you’ve given the performance, you go back to your quiet life and that’s fine. You don’t have to be a celebrity and you don’t have to be the life of the party, but it’s a skill. If you know how to speak to a group and give a presentation, but you don’t enjoy it, you will use this tool to achieve your goal and then move on.

Liz: I absolutely agree. I think that a lot of times there can be a little bit of confusion and I’ve noticed this with other people I have seen move into technology from other industries, there’s a lot of emphasis on having your own self-branding, which I think is a wonderful tool to advance your career. I do it. I try to curate my brand, as you might say. But, there’s also a failure to acknowledge that a lot of this is performance and it is practicing skills that you have and doing them, not necessarily the core of who you are.

Liz: I found that to be one of the things I really struggled with when I first got into programming was that I knew that this wasn’t the whole of who I am. It often feels like programming can be seen as whom you are. I am a programmer. This is my culture. This is who I am. This is how I behave and this is what I talk about. This is how I spend my free time. Yet, I think that really limits not only how we view ourselves, but how we view other people who purchase or paid in the industry or who could purchase or pay in the industry if they saw themselves reflected in it.

Arsalan: Those are really good points, especially the point about branding. We talk about branding on this podcast a lot because you have an opportunity to present yourself in a certain way so that when people are looking for someone like you or maybe they’re looking for you exactly, you appear in the way that you want to appear. That’s what you’re talking about.

Arsalan: The branding would include your online presence, your social media presence, your resume, your LinkedIn profile, and all that stuff, but also how you conduct. If people are doing Google searches on you, what they find is part of that branding. Something that struck me was when my producer found you and got in touch with you about coming on the show, I didn’t really know how to find you to do some research on you, so I just Googled you and I found you right on the first page. I think it was maybe the first or second result on Google because you have spent the time making sure that if people are looking for Liz Rush Software, they’ll find you and when they do, they will go to your website which is, by the way, fabulous.

Liz: Thank you.

Arsalan: It’s really nice and I was thinking I should ask her to make my website. It’s nice. It’s simple and I don’t think it’s WordPress. It’s just a static website, isn’t it?

Liz: No, I used the blogging platform, Ghost. It’s an open-source CMS based on Note.

Arsalan: Nice. You’re hanging out with the cool kids, the new kids. We’re still old school WordPress people. I’ve looked at a lot of CMS especially in the Ruby world; there are a lot of CMS’. I think Jekyll is one that generates a static site for you so it’s faster. It’s a nice idea, but sometimes you need a little bit more.  If you want to do some extra stuff and you don’t have time to build a website, then you use a CMS site like WordPress, which has a lot of plugins and so on. In your case, your website is really your resume.

Liz: Yeah, it is. I think that’s very true for most software engineers, especially for people who work on the frontend as well.

Arsalan: Yeah, absolutely. So, where can people see that website? I want to plug it in right now so if people are listening to this podcast right now, they can go in and check it out immediately.

Liz: My website is lizmrush.com and it’s just kind of where I keep blog posts and links to other resources. I don’t blog super frequently, but I try to when I can and talk about the projects that I’m doing and what I’m up to. We had talked about branding for a little bit. My blog actually came about as part of one of the projects for the boot camp that I went through.

Liz: So, I think that this was something that was really smart that the founders did. The founders of Ada Developers Academy booked us where they ensured that every student in the first group to go through the program had to have a Twitter account and they also had to make a blog as part of their development studies. Blogging is kind of a great sample project to do in any language. You’ve got posts and you have to relate them to categories or tags and dates. You know, you get to learn a lot through building your own blog.

Liz: So, the program had us do that and I thought it was very smart and it has really helped my career. I was not on Twitter before I joined the boot camp and they made us join Twitter even though I really didn’t want to. Now, I’m really into Twitter and I’ve actually gotten jobs through Twitter both freelance and full-time jobs. I think that’s one thing. People can start on that as soon as they get interested in technology. It’s just participating in the community through Twitter and social media or blogging and that just kind of naturally develops into your own personal brand.

Arsalan: How did you get a job offer from Twitter? Did somebody just see your tweet and say “hey, you want to work for us?”

Liz: Well, a group of us from Ada Developers Academy, when we were students, we all got diversity scholarships to the conference Strange Loop in St. Louis, which has definitely remained as one of my favorite conferences. So we all went down there. While we were down there at the conference, one of my peers was saying that she wanted to find a new job. We were all working in our internships, but she knew that wasn’t going to be a good fit for her. So, she wasn’t sure whether she should tweet about it or not. So, I offered to do it because I don’t care if somebody sees that we’re looking for jobs on Twitter.

Liz: So, I just tweeted and put in the hashtag of the conference where we were at and a lot of people replied and I ended up meeting someone who gave me my first job offer out of the boot camp program.

Arsalan: That’s an incredible story. I think the key takeaway for me is that you took initiative and you were not scared. Most people would be a little scared to put themselves out there and show their vulnerability and their need. You need a job, but you could come at it from the point of view of somebody who is doing a transaction. You have a service that you are offering and there are people who need the service. So, you’re not really asking for a job. It’s not begging. You’re offering your service and that’s totally fine. If you had a restaurant, you would place an ad and you would think that was completely normal.

Liz: I think that’s definitely true. I think that it’s important to remember that people love to help. I think that is one thing that is especially true in development communities where people are working in software and also have that inner section about caring about diversity in tech or getting more women into tech. So, people want to help you. So, if you tweet out that you’re looking for a job, an internship, or an apprenticeship and you ask people to retweet it, people will do it because it feels good to help other people. So I know that for me, even just tweeting “hey, we’re looking for jobs…anyone hiring?” It helps me, but I realized that it also helps other people to find those connections as well and while it may be a transaction to get a job, it’s also a community action. If we think of it as a big developer community, we don’t want people in our community to not be able to find a job. We have so many companies who need to fill roles and so many people looking for jobs that it’s only natural for us to want to help each other connect.

Arsalan: One of the things that strike me about you is that you don’t seem to have the inhibitions and the hang-ups that a lot of us have, a lot of people who have only ever done software development. I feel like you have a sort of light license to be different. You’re talking about how people expect you to be a certain way or act a certain way and make your life all about coding or programming and be a geek. There are some people who are traditionally like this and that’s how we’ve been.

Arsalan: Software development has been a field that has basically been occupied by nerds and people who like to be nerds. That’s all we did and that’s all we wanted to do and we didn’t have a life beyond that, but things have changed.

Arsalan: Software development has exploded. We are now the place in the world where we need software developers at literally every company of every industry and we need to build software of all kinds. We don’t find ourselves needing to be super geeky and building low-level software and microprocessors and forms where and all that stuff.

Arsalan: Coming from another part of the universe and not the geek world, you got into programming. You didn’t have the baggage first. Secondly, you brought with you some skills that a lot of us don’t already have. So, tell me a little bit about what you did before you got into programming and how did you get started with that?

Liz: I first became interested in coding when I was working for a company in Portland that was a small tech company. I was hired on as an administrative assistant and I did translation work for them. They had a web app that was in English and they had a large customer base that was Spanish speaking. So, my background was in translation.

Liz: I actually did my undergraduate degree at the University and Madrid, Spain. So, I had been working and living abroad in Spain for the last four years prior to that. I returned to the US and start working for this tech company doing a translation. The thing about translating a web app is that you translated and then you’re done. That’s it. So, I was left thinking to myself what do I do with my time now?

Liz: I’m not one who really enjoy sitting around doing nothing so I ended up getting involved with the testing team and learning a little bit about testing. I had one manager who is really encouraging and taught me about test automation. That’s what really sparked my interest in the fact that I didn’t really want to just translate an app, I wanted to be the person building the app.

Liz: From there I reached out to people I primarily knew in my network from my older brother who was a software development manager. He connected me with the female developer who volunteered to be my mentor. She and I would Skype about once every other weekend. She tried to teach me about Rails over the course of the summer. She heard about the development boot camp in Seattle that was just getting started called Ada Developers Academy. She said I should apply and that’s how I did it.

Liz: It wasn’t super thought out. I applied to the boot camp and they accepted me and said that I had to move to Seattle with less than three weeks’ notice. So I thought why not because I had done a lot of impulsive career-changing or moving to different countries or what have you. There’s always ups and downs and bumps in the road, but I believe that things generally work out for the best. So, I thought I just go for it.

Arsalan: So, you packed up and moved to a city where you didn’t know anybody. Did you know anybody there?

Liz: I knew a few people in Seattle before I moved here. My brother lived here and of course, I grew up in Idaho, which is not too far. Seattle is one of those destinations where everyone who grew up in Idaho once to be. I knew a few people, but it was mostly kind of like a blind. But, I thought that this was a cool code school. They’ve never done it before, and I’ve never done it, and it’s tuition free. So, what do I have to lose?

Arsalan: Yeah, that is incredible. What’s their business model?

Liz: It’s really fantastic. It’s very unique. Ada Developers Academy has a business model where they have companies who sponsor students. So what they did was find companies both large and small in the Seattle region that bought into the program and paid up front for a student who would become their intern after six months. So lots of different companies in the area paid into it and said, “we believe that this company can train 15 women to be calm software developers, in six months,” which is what they did and at the end of the first six months we all did interviews at these companies and each one of them received an intern to work with for the next six months.

Liz: So the business model is “recruiting is hard. Finding women to work on your software team is hard. So, if you invest in a student early, you can bring them on as an intern, trained them up and have them learn the skills, the workflow, and the environment of your company. If you’re lucky, and they like you, they’re going to want to stay on and take a full-time role with you.” So the business model is kind of thought of as a symbiotic relationship between companies who need developers, and students who need real-world experience. It’s not just a 12-week boot camp where you learn by yourself and then you’re out in the world on your own. It really creates a strong community tie.

Arsalan: That is so smart. I think this is a really good model for other schools, code camps and boot camps to follow. There’s a great need out there. I know a lot of these boot camps are popping up everywhere, but we actually need more.

Liz: Yeah, I think we need more and we also need this sense of social responsibility and accountability. There are a lot of boot camps here in Seattle and across the nation. A lot of them charge up to $20,000 for four months and that just seems a little bit out there. So I was really proud to get into a program that sees the value not only in training women but seeing it as part of a larger ecosystem in the environment and part of this economy of software in the Seattle region.

Arsalan: All right, let me play devil’s advocate for a bit. I’ve never done this before. This is a first, but I think I need to do it because there is a counter argument. While it’s not my position, I know lots of people who believe this. Why should we care about women being software developers? What difference does it make? We should not pick people based on their gender. We should be gender-neutral and not just hand out jobs to these people who may or may not be qualified, but they’re getting in just because they’re women.

Liz: Yes, I’ve heard that one a lot. I’ve even heard that argument in interviews where someone is trying to hire me, but there are two things. First, there is a presumption that someone who is from a diverse background or who may be a minority, is somehow immediately less qualified than they would otherwise be. So the idea is that if you are part of one of these diverse programs, or if you’re a minority, applying for a job, you’re getting a boost for a job that you might otherwise not be qualified for. What I usually think when I hear that is that the person has some unmitigated biases against people, but also they just don’t realize that I really kick ass at writing code. I think that something that people forget that just because somebody is a minority, or comes from a boot camp, that doesn’t mean that they are not technically skilled. So, that’s one thing that we have to keep in mind. Not an either-or situation.

Liz: To speak to the other part of your question about why should we care and why should we invest in hiring women and minorities because we’re just writing software, I’d like to answer that with a little bit of a story.

Liz: I took a job at a small Seattle-based company that was building a dating app. The company’s name was Siron. I was working on an iOS platform with a couple of other developers. All of the other developers were men. I was the only female developer. There was some existing code base that we got into and things were going pretty smoothly, but we kept running into this problem where the original code base had all these ideas built into the code about gender relations because it’s a dating app.

Liz: So, it would say something like a helper or class would be named after male dater versus female dater. What does the UI look like with a male looking at a female’s profile, for example? Those assumptions were built into the logic of the code.

Liz: I got in there and said “wait a minute, this is insane. Why is this restricted so that only male members can look at female members and vice versa?” It was very strict about the way that profiles could interact based on those two things. So I suggested that we needed to refactor the app so that it’s not based on whether someone’s a man or a woman and who they can and can’t view, because what about the LGBT community?

Liz: Secondly, it makes the code really difficult to work with. So, I started advocating that we needed to change this because it was going to limit our ability to add new features. We put it off for a while because we were a small team of five developers and we didn’t have a whole lot of time and money. In the end, we kept running into the same problem where we want to change something, but the biases built into the code made it much more difficult to change things.

Liz: So, eventually we got to do a giant refactor so that we could make the platform more inclusive of all types of relationships and it made the code better. It was a business use case. Nobody else at the company or on the mail development team spoke up about it. So that’s why we need to hire women. It’s not just because they’re women, but because we often see things from our perspective that might get missed if we have a homogenous development culture.

Liz: It’s a business case in most situations. We’ve seen all the studies. We’ve read all the articles about how diverse teams come up with more profitable ideas and solutions to business problems. It’s not necessarily only about doing the right thing. It’s also about being the best that we can with the skills that we have, and building out the correct kind of team to further our businesses.

Arsalan: Wow. If I had an applause button right here in my set up, I would press it right now because this was amazing. This was a good speech. In fact, I should take this snippet and extract it and somehow tweeted out because it was well said, my friend.

Liz: Thank you.

Arsalan: It’s important that we realize that diversity is good on its own. You don’t need a reason to have diversity. Let me just put it this way, having a diverse team is good on its own merit because once you have a diverse team, not only will you have a balanced outlook on what you’re building, you will look at things that you missed and you will make a better product for your customers. Customers are going to like it, which means that you are going to make more money as a business. Therefore, it makes a business case.

Arsalan: It’s not just because you’re a woman and you have a perspective on the LGBT community, not every woman will have it. Some women may be fine with the distinction that men are attracted to women and women are attracted to men. For a lot of straight people, this would be fine. Yet, having diversity as a general rule, allows you to have people who are men and team members who are women and you can have this or that. You can have people who are older or people who are younger. You can have interns or you can have people with gray hair. You can have all these people working together and this team will necessarily be better, than a team that is all women or all men or all of one particular age group.

Liz: Yeah, there are a lot of different kinds of diversity that often gets overlooked in favor of the women or not women diversity conversation. The truth of the matter is that when you are forced to work with people, who are different from you on whatever axis that might be, you learned skills about empathy, communication, and working with people who are different from you and that helps you grow as a person, but it also helps you to be a better teammate. That’s what’s really important about diversity. It makes your team stronger.

Arsalan: Right, and I see this on every episode and I’ll say it again. Don’t be afraid of political correctness. I don’t know what you think about this, Liz, but it just makes me laugh and cry at the same time when I hear this tirade against political correctness. It’s like “I don’t want to be politically correct. I want to be honest, and obnoxious.” So, don’t be obnoxious. Be politically correct. Because offending people and hurting people’s feelings and excluding people does not make you a better person and it does not make for a better team. I have seen this personally. Let me give you an example.

Arsalan: I worked in a team a very long time ago where we were building this Sass app. It was offered as a service. The test data was kind of R-rated. It had topics and data that nobody was going to see. It was test data and it was just for the developers and everybody was a young male between 20 and 30 years old. So, it was cool and it was fun. But, I can’t imagine a woman being in the middle that team and looking at that data. That would’ve been embarrassing for everybody.

Liz: Yeah, absolutely. I think that a lot of times. If even if you’re not on a diverse team, it helps to put yourself in a situation and think, well, what if I was somebody who wouldn’t be comfortable with this? Am I doing the right thing? That can help guide how you run your team and how you interact with your teammates.

Arsalan: Absolutely. Having empathy with your teammates and thinking about the other, whatever the other is in your case, think of the other, as you and what would think or do if you were in that position? If you do that with your teammates, invariably you are going to do that with your customers and your users.

Liz: Absolutely.

Arsalan: don’t just have this tunnel vision where you are catering to just your group. You know what’s going to happen if everybody started to do that? Let’s say I’m making a dating app and I make the apps so that it’s only for people who are straight because that’s the majority. So that’s what I focus on. You can sort of make that business case.

Arsalan: You can say that you don’t want to spend time catering for that and so somebody is going to come around and say that 99% or 95% of can see so you don’t want to make this website accessible. You don’t care because they are a small minority and you don’t want to invest your time on that. But if you continue going down that route, you will find yourself producing a software app that will be considered racist, bigoted and narrow-minded. When you look at it yourself at the end of it, you’re not going to like it yourself because most people don’t want to discriminate against others. What we say to ourselves is, “I don’t really have to care about this other because that person is maybe one out of 100 or I’m not there physically. So I can go ahead and offend somebody that I don’t see.” This is how I feel about this. Try to make your teams diverse and whatever Liz said.

Liz: Exactly.

Arsalan: Was it easy for you to become accepted as a valuable member of the community? Now, I can say community because you are really involved in the community. You are unique. You are young and you are a junior in a lot of ways, but you are putting yourself out there. Did people accept you as a woman in the developer community?

Liz: You know I have a lot of difficulty with this question in general. I felt accepted by certain parts of the community, the larger development community. I think that a lot of it was because I went through this nonprofit boot camp. The fact that it’s nonprofit meant that the people who are involved in it are involved because they had a reason that was not financially motivated. So I was already surrounded by a lot of really great people who wanted to see me succeed because they believed in the mission of the boot camp. That was fantastic. That really helped me as I transitioned into development.

Liz: However, once I started working in development teams full time, I had a really difficult time. I did an internship as part of the boot camp and I switched teams inside my internship company a few times, which I love because I got exposed to a lot of different technologies. I would go to work and think that these were my people. I fit in here. This is great. Then, I’d switch to another team and the first day on the new team they might make weight jokes in front of me. So, it was hard.

Liz: It was difficult to put myself in a male-dominated industry working with all men all the time and still retain a sense of self-confidence. Part of that was the external factor of the things that men say in male-dominated industries that can be really alienating for women. Part of it was also that we talk about these issues in text so much that it can be intimidating when you go through a program like a boot camp and you’re trying to make it and get your job and become a software engineer, but you also have to confront all these larger social issues.

Liz: So, I think that’s one thing that makes it difficult. If you’re a minority or a woman trying to get into tech or as a junior in technology, you don’t have to just learn the technology or be a good engineer, you have to do those things and confront these bigger social issues. That was really hard for me when I first started. I found it very discouraging.

Arsalan: So, do you think this is systemic? Is it something that is built into the system? Or, is it sporadic individuals here and there?

Liz: I think it’s both. I say systemic and built into the system, but I don’t mean just software. These are issues that plague everybody in every industry, especially those that are male-dominated. So, I say that it’s a problem with the industry and I don’t mean for other people in the industry to take that personally, but we do have issues around that. We have seen more and more women become comfortable speaking up about discrimination or the difficulties that they have with technology companies and finding a place to fit in when it has previously been so homogenous.

Liz: There are sometimes these feelings that you are not wanted because you are playing with someone else’s toys and you don’t want the other person to throw a tantrum over you playing with their toys. So I think that it can be really difficult, but it’s important to keep in mind the bigger picture.

Liz: Something that really helped me as a new developer is that I did face these issues that I feel as systemic and occasionally sporadic for problems. But in the end, I became quite empowered through learning technology. I ended up with a wonderful career that has a lot of job security. I increased my income by three times what I was making before I learn to code.

Liz: I also got involved in the community where is something wasn’t working, if a job wasn’t working out or the culture, the wrong fit for me, I could just get up and walk away. I’m not talking about table flipping and just leaving the room, but I could strategically find something that was a better fit for me because there are so many opportunities in this industry. I think that’s what’s really empowering about it. Despite all the stuff you have to deal with, despite the systemic issues, you can also carve your own path and figure out what works best for you so that you can create this career that you want.

Important Links

• Foundry Interactive
• Ada Developers Academy
• Cascadia Ruby Conference
• RubyConf
• Ghost (blogging platform)
• Strange Loop Conference

 

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Meet Cassandra Ferris. Cassandra is not a developer. Nor is she a consultant. Cassandra is a recruiter. Now, recruiters, at least in the tech industry, have in some cases gained a bad rap, but don’t let that stop you from listening in. Cassandra has a unique background and history that is very interesting. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a recruiter or how to approach a recruiter? Well, wonder no more. Listen in to episode 44 as Arsalan and Cassandra discuss what life is like for a recruiter. We promise that you won’t want to miss out on this one.

Cassandra’s Bio:

Cassandra Faris is the Talent Manager at Improving, a software development consulting and training company in Columbus, Ohio. She is highly involved in the regional technical community. She is President of the Microsoft-focused Dog Food Conference and Marketing Lead for CloudDevelop, a cross-platform cloud computing conference. She has an MBA in Organizational Leadership and Marketing and is an avid tabletop gamer, runner, and rabid soccer fan who travels as much as possible.

Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Arsalan: Hi everyone. Today my guest is Cassandra Faris. Cassandra, how are you?

Cassandra: Good. How are you?

Arsalan: I’m doing great and I’m so excited to have you on the show. I’ve been trying to get you on the show because I think you’re very unique.  I can say it easily that you are the most unique of all my guests so far and that’s because you’re not a developer yourself, but you hire developers and you work in Human Resources. You’re a recruiter. Is that right?

Cassandra: That’s correct. I am in charge of talent management for a software development consulting company called Improvement.

Arsalan: That’s awesome. I want to talk to you about all the stuff that goes into hiring and what makes a good developer for you to hire. What do you look for? What do you not look for or what do you try to avoid? But first I want to ask you about something very interesting about your life. You did something in Mexico and there’s some story behind that. Tell us a little about that.

Cassandra: When I went to college my minor was actually Spanish. I spent two summers while in college living in Mexico studying one summer and interning with a human rights group the following summer.  I came out of that experience as a Spanish-English bilingual. Being bilingual is actually the skill set that got me started with recruiting. My first recruiting role was with a diversity staffing agency and I was in charge of hiring and Human Resources for temporary warehouse employees. Throughout the day, my work was primarily conducted in Spanish.

Arsalan: Did you find that challenging?

Cassandra: I did. The biggest challenge when I’m going into a situation where I Have to speak Spanish is just learning the vocabulary. So, picking up the vocabulary for interviewing questions, HR issues as well as speaking the warehouse language was challenging and interesting.

Arsalan: Do challenges motivate you? Is that what gets you going?

Cassandra: It’s one of the things that get me going, yes. I like that challenges. I like helping people develop their careers as well. That’s something I’m really passionate about. In the case of the warehouse employees, several people were new to the country and several were political refugees and others had other situations that brought them here. So, it was exciting helping people get their start here in America.

Arsalan: It’s just so interesting. People have different backgrounds. We tend to assume that everyone has the same experiences as our own. I would never have known that this was how you got started. For me, this was a complete surprise and it’s wonderful because that reminds me that when I get to know people I will learn about their unique experiences and that’s what’s going to help me to have empathy for different situations, which makes me a good person to be around, right? Then, I will not judge people based on outward appearances and I will have the patience to learn about their quirks and unique situations. I think that makes for a better workforce. What do you think, Cassandra?

Cassandra: Oh, definitely. I think that’s part of what makes the world like mine fun and interesting is getting to know different people, their stories, knowing what they want to do and what motivates them and being able to empathize with all their different situations.

Arsalan: Okay, so we know a little about you, Cassandra. We know that you are a recruiter. We know that you got started in a diversity-oriented setting, but we don’t know much else. How do you define yourself right now? Do you see yourself as a 24/7 recruiter? Who is Cassandra Faris?

Cassandra: Well, my role is talent management and community outreach. So, it’s kind of two pieces of what I do. The talent management component is hiring software developers, BSPMs and everybody that supports the dev team and then helping them grow their careers and career skills. On the community end, I actually organize a couple of technical conferences. I speak at technical conferences and I do some marketing as well for my company and it all ties together with growing the dev community and being involved in it and contributing to the dev community as well as learning from it.

Arsalan: Okay. So, right now, your job is to hire people. Do you also onboard people or do you work with them once they’re hired?

Cassandra: Yes. I do onboarding and then once they’re hired, I help people. My employees will come on and they might have a certain career goal that they’re trying to reach or a certain skill they’re trying to pick up. Over time my role is evolving more and more into a role where I do that kind of mentoring and guiding of my employees.

Arsalan: That’s really interesting. I’m wondering if you have to go to school for this kind of thing. Do you have to get a special education to be a recruiter?

Cassandra: Not really. Recruiters come from all different backgrounds. For me, personally, I got my MBA in a focus called organizational leadership and the minor was marketing. The organizational component, specifically the HR component as well as marketing is what lead me to recruit because it kind of marries human resources and marketing.

Arsalan: So, you got your MBA, which is a highly desirable degree because then you can be a manager at a large corporation. I’m assuming that’s one of the goals of getting an MBA. So, what was your first job?

Cassandra: My very first job out of college?

Arsalan: Yes.

Cassandra: I was actually a warehouse supervisor in a greenhouse. I worked for a greenhouse that grew all the plants that ship to like a Lowes or Home Depot. My job was to supervise the employees who worked on that warehouse line. That was also a Spanish-speaking job. I started that job through a staffing agency and then was hired on full time to the company.

Arsalan: Okay. How long did it take for you after you left that job before you got a recruiting job?

Cassandra: There were a few years between there. I did some apartment leasing and some sales. Then, as I was completing my MBA program, I was also selling insurance for Nationwide and over time I decided that a sales job was not really the right role for me. It was a little too transactional for what I like to do. So, when I got my MBA I targeted the recruiting and HR world as a career. I find that more rewarding.

Arsalan: So, that was a conscious choice. It didn’t just fall into your lap. You wanted to become a recruiter and then you had a plan.

Cassandra: Yes. I wanted to do something with HR or marketing, so I didn’t necessarily set out to be a recruiter, I kind of fell into it given those two interests.

Arsalan: Okay. That’s really interesting. How did you start? I’m just wondering if my audience wants to become recruiters how they get started. Do they start off at some kind of internship? Is there a path or a corporate ladder that you have to climb?

Cassandra: There are all sorts of different paths that people take to it. I landed in it in a supervisory role in warehousing. So I’ve come straight from that path and I think that MBA is what allowed me to skip over the entry-level recruiting. But there are people who go into recruiting right out of college. There are bigger companies that will grow and build their recruiters. For me, the more conscious decision was to specifically target the tech industry. As I reached a point when it was time for a change from the warehouse job, I started wanting to be involved in the tech industry as a recruiter. So that was a more conscious decision for me.

Arsalan: You know the next question has to be “why the tech industry?”

Cassandra: It’s fun, interesting, and I’m always learning something. Every day, every person I talk to, every candidate I interview, every talk I go to I learn something new. It was partially the learning and partially the interest in technology, not necessarily as a programmer, but in technology in the way that it impacts our daily lives and the things we can do with it, and also the fact that it’s a growing industry. There’s good stability. There’s good security. There’s very low unemployment. So there are a lot of reasons that made me target that industry.

Arsalan: Do you find yourself going to a lot of developer events, gatherings and meetups?

Cassandra: Yes. I am at several developer events per month. The company I work for actually hosts several of them in our office. So, I’ll go to those are all go to the other ones around town. I’ll also go to a number of conferences. I also go to a lot of conferences because I like to have a high level of understanding of the technologies that my candidates are working with and understand the technologies do, how they’re changing, what the trends are in the industry and keep up to speed on those.

Cassandra: Additionally, I mentioned earlier that I organize a couple of different technical conferences. I’m actually the president of a Microsoft focused conference called Dogfood Con. That’s about a 450 person conference. It has tracks for developers, dev ops, IT, DBAs, as well as software professional skills track. I also do the marketing for a cloud computing conference called CloudDevelop and that’s just a cross-platform cloud computing conference. So, I’m definitely entrenched within the dev community. I have also spoken that a number of different technical conferences and user groups.

Arsalan: Okay. So, you have your hands full. You are immersed in developer culture. You want to be in the know and be in the middle so you can attract the best talent, right?

Cassandra: Exactly.

Arsalan: That’s your goal. I’m putting myself in the shoes of the person who goes to these meetups and conferences, and he or she sees a person who is a recruiter and conference organizer like yourself. But ultimately, this is all in the spirit of finding the best talent for you. Perhaps that person is interested in finding a better job or finding their first job, or just feeling out the work environment and trying to see if there’s something better. But, perhaps there a little bit shy and not really sure what to do in that situation. Yet, they are at that meetup or conference and you are there as well. What would you recommend to that person? Should they approach you? Should they try to email you? If they do approach you, what’s the best way of approaching you? What should they say to you?

Cassandra: Recruiters are usually pretty easy to spot at events. A lot of times will mention that that’s what we do, or if it’s a user group, sometimes a let us announce that we’re hiring. If it’s at a conference, a lot of times I’m working at my company’s conference booth. In any of those situations, the best thing to do is to just come up to me and chat. A lot of times how it looks, is that people will come up to me and they’ll say that they’re looking for a job or their friend is looking for a job and all have a short conversation with them about what they do and then I will have them email me so we can schedule a longer conversation. Usually, I’ll give them my card and asked them to shoot me an email, send me a resume and let’s meet up for coffee, lunch, or just have a more in-depth conversation. But having a little conversation at that conference or event is a good place to start.

Arsalan: So, that person is probably the person who’s trying to reach you or contact you. It’s also possible that there’s a line of people and it’s possible that they are not really sure what to say. Should they say, “my name is so-and-so? This is what I do and if you have any good opportunities, let me know.” Or, should they just strike a more social conversation?

Cassandra: Actually, you can do either one. It just kind of depends on what you’re more comfortable doing. It’s perfectly acceptable to also just come up and ask what skills you’re hiring for, and that’s a good place to start.

Arsalan: Did you know that I interviewed your husband a while back for this podcast?

Cassandra: Yes. I was actually in the house while you were interviewing him.

Arsalan: You were kind enough not to interrupt during the interview.

Cassandra: Yes, we both get each other’s jobs.

Arsalan: Did you listen to that? What did you think of that episode?

Cassandra: I thought it was good. I think there were some good points about how to grow your talent.

Arsalan: Yes, he’s a great guy. We’ve been in touch since then. So, everybody should check out the interview with Jared Ferris and will put the link in the show notes. Also, there’s a whole bunch of notes that Cassandra mentioned about all the things that she’s doing. We will try to have all that the show notes, so that when you are listening to this episode. You can go to www.mentoringdevelopers.com/episode 44 and you will see the transcript for this interview, some links, and all the show notes and a way for you to listen to it in iTunes, and etc.

Arsalan: It’s fascinating for me because we’re seeing your career, your life from the other side. I want people, developers, newbie developers, aspiring developers, all kinds of developers and designers to empathize with your situation because recruiters are unfortunately not the most liked people in our industry. What you do and people like you do is essential for us. It is a service, but sometimes there is an issue with the way that recruiters go about their business. That sometimes creates a situation where there is occasionally hostility towards recruiters. I don’t know if you have felt it.

Cassandra: I have but I don’t feel it very much anymore. But early on there was a little bit of people wondering what this recruiter was doing at the technical meet up. I think I overcame it pretty quickly, by being open about who I am and what my job is as well as my being at the technical events, not necessarily with the goal of hiring people, but more just so that I can learn. Do I hire people at those events? Yes. But is that the goal? No, it’s not the only one. So I think that for me it’s been a matter of building credibility and becoming entrenched in and a part of our dev community and giving back to it, and contributing to it. You know, sharing my knowledge about the things that I talk about and the things that are also important skills for developers as well is just helping support the community through sponsorships and organization, and marketing and promotion. I feel like I’ve helped our community grow and that has helped me as a recruiter.

Arsalan: Imagine I am a software developer and I just got my first job. It’s not a great job, but I’m doing it and it’s been a year or two and I feel like my talents are not being utilized. I don’t have the advancement opportunities at the company. The company is not encouraging me to go to conferences or to improve myself. I am essentially at a dead-end job and I now want to see what else is out there. Perhaps I could get a job as a more senior person or a mid-level person. I don’t want another entry-level job. I want to work in the company that I appreciate somebody who wants to learn and who will essentially hold my hand a little bit and help me grow. That’s what I want. What do I have to do? If you’re somebody who is recruiting for that type of position, what do you want to see in my resume and what do you want to see when you talk to me?

Cassandra: If your company is not encouraging you, you can take initiative to do things on your own, whether that means taking classes online or going to meet ups or doing something to grow your knowledge. Your employer should support it, but they might not always necessarily do that. In general, once you get past about a year to two years of experience as a developer, a whole bunch of opportunities will open up just by virtue of there being a lot of demand for mid-level developers.

Cassandra: One of the biggest barriers to starting as a software developer is getting that first one to two years of experience. Once you’re there, you have all sorts of options. When you’re ready to start looking for something new, you’ll want to start that process early. What you don’t want to do, is you don’t want to wait until you’re so desperate to get out of your job that you take the first thing that comes along. Instead, when you’re making that first move, you want to do is do some research and look at market salaries, the types of companies within the area, and maybe there’s a specific industry that you want to work in and target. So you need to do a little bit of research.

Cassandra: You want to start updating your resume and reaching out to your network. You don’t need to necessarily throw your resume up on a job board yet, but start putting out feelers. Start having those conversations early so that you can give yourself a few months to find the right job.

Arsalan: I want to know about how to craft a good resume for somebody who has maybe a couple of years of experience, but maybe not more than that. Are there different formats? I just want to have an idea of what you think makes a resume that get your attention.

Cassandra: There are a few things. It used to be that resumes were not supposed to be more than one page and that kind of harkens back to the days when resumes were a piece of paper and you only want to look at one piece of paper. Now that they are electronic, it’s okay if they go on to two pages and as you get more senior, maybe on to three pages. The biggest things that I look for on resumes include that I want a summary of what you do, this could be a quick little summary of you telling me that your developer, what you do, how much experience you have and what you specialize in.

Cassandra: From there, I want to see what technologies you have worked with. Obviously, a chronological list of jobs that you’ve had is helpful. On those bullet points where you’re talking about your job, I want to know what you’re doing. I see a lot of resumes that will say things like wrote SQL queries or wrote store procedures or developed .Net applications. That’s great, but what are you doing?

Cassandra: I’d much rather see developed .Net applications for insurance rating software or developed SQL queries for retail data or something that talks about what the software you’re working on does, who the users are, or how it ties into the business. I look for something they give some context, rather than just a list of queries. If you are applying for a .Net developer position, it’s safe to assume you’re writing C sharp. That’s implied. So, what are you doing with that C sharp? What unique components have you created and how are you contributing to the project? That’s all very important to me.

Arsalan: That’s a very interesting thing to hear because the reason people do that is essentially because we’ve been told that you need to have these keywords in the description of those jobs. Some people are searching for C sharp, Java, Ruby, SQL, whatever. What we have been told is that if you have these technologies only in a list of keywords at the top. They want to know where you use these technologies and I think that’s probably what’s making a lot of developers emphasize those skills and technologies inside their job descriptions. But that’s why we don’t think about the function.

Arsalan: I think we have evolved to a point where things have standardized as you were saying that if you are a .Net developer using C sharp, that’s no surprise. But, what you’re doing with that will indicate what industry you are working on and what type of applications you’re making. For me, that’s a good reminder to stay away from very heavy keyword user resumes and resumes that read more like a description. Am I oversimplifying this? A lot of times what we have is bullet points under job names. From what I’m understanding is to not worry about short phrases, bullet points and action words like we were told in college.

Cassandra: You do still want to call out those languages within your bullet points and call out the technologies, but give a little bit more detail about what you’re doing. Created JavaScript components for an updated retail website is much better than simply writing that you “wrote JavaScript.” Just let us know what you’re doing with the technology. Bullet points are good for readability and I do think the action words are still very important (designed, developed, built, created). All those things are still good ways to start the bullet points. I don’t necessarily like seeing resumes that contain a paragraph under every job. It’s hard to read. It’s hard to extract the pieces of information that I need. I do want to touch on the keywords in the keyword component of resumes.

Cassandra: one of the reasons for that is sometimes you apply for resumes online or you post your resume on job boards and they have to be searchable. Resumes get parsed and they pull out the information and the technologies. So, if you’re taking that kind of approach to your job search where you are putting your resume up online and see what comes out, or just kind of blindly applying to companies, then keep the keywords in your resume. I just don’t think that’s necessarily the best way to look for jobs. I think it’s better to go through your network, people you know and kind of try things that way first. In that case, those keywords would be a little less important than they would be if you were just putting, your resume up on a job board.

Arsalan: Job portals are like shark infested waters.

Cassandra: They’re terrible.

Arsalan: You get a lot of recruiters who call you, contact you and email you because your information and your resume are there. An overwhelming majority of these people who contact you don’t really have any way of hiring you. They just want to see if you bite and if you respond to them, then they’ll start the conversation. These are like mass emails people sent automated. They take a lot of time and this is why they’re such a bad reputation for recruiters within the developer community because we get so many of these emails every day. Most of them are just spam.

Cassandra: I’ll let you in on a little secret. Candidates also do that. I get more of the job board resumes that are terrible resumes, than not. There are companies that will actually spam recruiters with resumes of a lot of times there’s subcontractors who they are trying to hire. They’ll just spam us with all these resumes that have nothing to do with the position that the person is applying for. So we get that as well. So job boards are also a frustration on our end. Plus, we are competing with every other recruiter in town to try to get a hold of you. So I am very rarely on job boards. I don’t use them very much in my recruiting. I think in the past two years. I have only hired one or two people off of the job board. That’s all that I have gone out sourced from the job board.

Arsalan: That’s an incredible thing to hear. That’s for all of our interviews are spanned. If you’re developer and you’re looking to get hired, the first thing you do is post your resume online and maybe apply for jobs or just wait. Like we said, most of the times the people who contact you are not going to be the right people. But if you know somebody like Cassandra, somebody was taking personal interest in your career, then you have a better chance. Not only do you have a better chance of not wasting your time, but also for getting a job where the chances of you actually getting hired are higher. You’re probably also going to make more money that way.

Cassandra: Here’s another thing. Another way that you can actually use the Internet. That is a very effective way of applying for jobs is that rather than posting your resume on job boards, update your resume and create a LinkedIn profile, if you haven’t made one. Yes, you’re going to get contacted by recruiters, but if you make a LinkedIn profile, then you can be proactive in your job search. There might also be a company that you really want to work for. Or, you can go on LinkedIn and find a recruiter or a human resources person or maybe, a developer who works there, find those people and contact them through LinkedIn and ask about jobs that way. That way you have a little more control over what you’re applying for, and who’s getting and seeing your resume rather than if you just blindly post online.

Arsalan: I think that’s really good advice. I think we’re coming to towards the end of the interview and it’s been an amazing interview because were finally getting to hear from a recruiter, somebody who will not spam us, but will listen to us and help find the right fit for us. So, we appreciate that Cassandra.

Cassandra: Thank you. Also, I do a conference talk called “Job Search Questions You’re Afraid to Ask.” Those slides are posted up on my LinkedIn profile and the talk actually covers when it is time to look for a new job and what you should be asking about. It also touches on some legal issues, things like non-compete on intellectual property and he gives you some guidance on how to make a decision about what you want to do. When I created that slide deck, I created to be something that could stand alone as a resource. So it might be a good idea to review it. If you are looking for something new and kind of looking for some guidance. It’s not comprehensive, but it does aggregate a lot of years of interviews and a lot of years of helping people to job searches with things that they should be asking about, but don’t necessarily know.

Arsalan: Yes, that sounds amazing. Why don’t you send me the links to your slides and your conferences that you go to and anything else and will make sure to put it on the show notes of the people can go to mentoringdevelopers.com/episode44 to see them.

Arsalan: So, Cassandra, it was a pleasure having you on the show. Before we go, I’d like to ask you if you have any final piece of advice for people looking for jobs?

Cassandra: Anybody who has ever talk to me in person knows this, but I will talk all day long about the importance of having a network. So, start going to user groups. Start going to conferences. Start meeting people in our industry and when you meet those people, stay in touch with them. So, if you meet somebody at a conference, after the conference, send them an email or send them a tweet, or a LinkedIn, however, it is that you like to stay in touch. Grab lunch or coffee with them every once in a while, or just have an online conversation. Because then whenever you’re looking for a job, you can always tap into your network and you can ask them whether they know of anybody who is hiring. For 22 months straight, everybody who I had hired had been through word-of-mouth, through networks. Then, I had one guy apply for a job off of the job board and I hired him recently, but it’s super important to have a trusted network of people who can help you through job search and who you can also help through their job searches. So, I think that’s the biggest piece of advice that I would give.

Arsalan: I think I fully endorse this recommendation. This is awesome. If you don’t have a network or a mentor, if you really want to talk to recruiter and get an idea of your skill set and where you stand, you can contact Cassandra and will have all the information and show notes for you. You can also email me at us@mentoringdevelopers.com or you can tweet at me at @mentoringdevs, or you can also go to my website at mentoringdevelopers.com/episode44 or whatever the episode number is. You can also go to iTunes or etc and leave a comment. We are looking for responses and feedback from all of you because we can then shape the podcast to match what you need. Also, if you go to mentoring developers.com/list, you will be signed onto an email list and you will receive a five email course where I talk about the five best ways of finding success as a developer. It’s really good advice.

Arsalan: All right, Cassandra, I’ll see you later.

Cassandra: Thank you.

Important Links

Dog Food Conference

CloudDevelop

Job Search Questions You’re Afraid to Ask

Twitter: @cassandrafaris

Cassandra on LinkedIn

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