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How can we achieve diversity and excellence while hiring new employees and building great teams? Listen to this fantastic discussion with Jeff Johnson and Edward Stull. While we often talk about mentoring developers from the software developer’s perspective, we haven’t talked much about what it’s like from the hiring manager’s side of things. Have you ever wondered what the hiring process was really like behind the scenes? Learn the answers to many of your burning questions in episode 23. Arsalan Ahmed hosts a panel discussion with two of the tech industry’s finest, Jeff Johnson and Edward Stull concerning team building and the hiring process.

Happy Learning!

Arsalan: Today, on our discussion panel we have Jeff Johnson and Edward Stull. I’m really excited about this discussion panel because it’s going to be about building a team and doing the hiring, but from two different perspectives. Jeff is on an upward trajectory but is still fairly new to the industry. Jeff has the experience of being a startup CTO and hiring in that context, as well as being on the other side and being hired several times in the last few years. We also have Edward Stull who is a user experience expert but he has been in managerial positions. He has managed teams and hired a ton of people. So here we have two different perspectives, which is what the thought show is all about.

Arsalan: So, right off the bat, I want to ask both of your general impressions about building a team and hiring. Is that something you both enjoy?

Edward: I really enjoy hiring because it ends up setting the success of what your everyday life is going to be. If you have a good team, work can be a real joy. If you have problems with the team, then it can be like a bad relationship. The job of hiring folks is probably the most important task you can do. Teams are echo systems. So, you want people to be happy and like they are doing good work. But, the introduction of new people into that echo system can make that team either happier or less so.

Jeff: I totally agree. It is such a core piece. When you’re looking at developing a product, the team is almost the product in and of itself. The growth from line 0and the person to the point you reach as you tack on more team members and libraries become more of a comfortable, natural progression.

Arsalan: If you need to grow and build a team, how do you approach that task? Do you need to think about it, form a strategy, or do a mass hiring, or just get whoever you can get?

Edward: Having a strategy for your hiring process is definitely beneficial. At a larger company, people have requisition orders to staff folks. But, sometimes you just have an acute need. Knowing what you’re getting into with that hiring is not only good for you but also good for the person you’re hiring. Knowing what you’re getting into is definitely good practice.

Arsalan: In my experience what a lot of companies end up doing is saying they have the budget to hire two warm bodies. So that usually means they need to go out and push for resumes from recruitment companies or put job qualifications and requirements on job websites, to recruiters, or whatever. Then they get back a bunch of resumes, interview the candidates and choose the two people from the candidate pool. What you think, Jeff?

Jeff: I think that’s a big part of the perception in a bigger established environment where you’re working with these business constraints that say this is our budget. We want our team to be as good as it can and we want our team to be filled, and with the right people on it. If your manager can look at you as being beyond just a resource, and say, “Here’s how your career looks here and here’s a growth opportunity that you could have here if you chose to proceed with certain steps on your own.” I think it’s possible to define a good trajectory for a person even if on paper they are a resource.

Edward: I often use the term “trajectory” as well. This is especially true if you hire someone who’s young and they are within the first couple of jobs that they have ever had. You have to be especially careful with hiring younger folks because even as the hiring manager, you could really mess up their career because their perception of work and their boss affects their craft. So, that trajectory comment that Jeff was making is really important. Ultimately it is the person’s responsibility, but your contribution to that as a manager can be huge to folks.

Jeff: I think that it is a really good point that it can go wrong. I think it’s really a good company’s responsibility to acknowledge that they are going to fill a role, but know how they are going to develop the situation and what the expectation is of where it’s heading. I think that ties well with the fact that you really ought to have a hiring plan beyond “two bodies.”

Arsalan: I hope people are able to detect my sarcasm in my last expression. I think that using the word resources works because when you are building an invoice it’s easier to list out your needs in the form of a resource. You can’t throw money and people at a problem and expected to automatically solve itself. Applications and software have some science to and engineering to them. This is another thing that people like to use the term “engineer” when they hire developers, and it’s kind of disingenuous because we are not really engineers. Engineering is a disciplined set of activities that you do to engineer a product. It’s well known, well understood, and doesn’t change often. A developer has to use something that you can’t really point to. As a team, we sometimes feel like developers are interchangeable because they are not really adding anything valuable to the product. They’re just doing the mindless work.

Jeff: I definitely see where you’re coming from because you sometimes get these teams that end up taking on the role of a kind of spec execution programmer. Those are teams where it’s not an area where you get to use some of the creativeness that a lot of software developers got into the field to do. You’re not going to get the best out of that team, either, and I don’t think you’re going to see that kind of growth. A big requirement for that role is identifying how to mix that art and the engineering together to identify folks who have the kind of passion for pursuing that. That’s why it’s difficult to assess a software engineer by having them do a test or create a sample widget for a pass/fail grade. It’s not that simple because so much more goes into it.

Arsalan: It is hard to figure out how to create a team because you don’t really have a bullet list to follow. As an industry, we don’t really know how to filter people and find the right person. When you are a CTO for a startup, what was your product about?

Jeff: it was and still is a web application for scheduling and payment processing for leisure class studios like dance or yoga. It’s “Class Bug” if anyone of you out there is looking to start a yoga studio.

Arsalan: I hope you’re still a shareholder and still get a cut out of it.

Jeff: I’m still committing code just not to the degree of the 24 hours that the startup world can be sometimes. We are web-based, but there’s no way that you could put out a list and say which specific programming languages, and other skills you need. It’s not that easy.

Arsalan: So, my question to you, Jeff, was this. When you have to hire people because you have more work than you can handle, how do you list the qualifications, come up with a list, and how do you communicate the list of what those new people need to have? What are those qualifications? What comes to your mind, Jeff?

Jeff: I would say that for me, it’s easy to start with the tech stack. For me, the qualifications that stand out are the things that would make a great team working experience. They seem like fluff in a lot of cases, but they are core components that you do want to assess when you agree to meet someone.

• The ability to schedule and manage their own work
• The ability to manage a project from either side of it
• The knowledge of understanding a system as a whole
• Communication

Communication is really important. It’s not just about being able to read and write well. It’s also about being able to seek out others if you have a problem or question. It’s also being able to ask for help before that problem becomes a bigger issue.

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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Sarah’s Bio:

Sarah is a Ruby and JavaScript developer based in San Francisco, California. As the Chief Consultant at DevMynd Software, she spends most of her time pairing with her clients’ developers, helping level up their team. Her particular areas of interest are Object-Oriented Programming, service refactorings, growing teams, and inter-developer dynamics.

She has written about my experiences pair programming and also her approach to testing but her most popular article, by a huge margin, is about the dangers of shiny new technology.

Sarah is writing a book with Sandi Metz about how to refactor Rails applications towards happiness and she can be found on Twitter, GitHub, and LinkedIn.

Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Arsalan: Today we have Sarah Mei. Sarah is a JavaScript developer, a Ruby developer, a conference organizer, a speaker, an author, and a lot more. So, Sarah, how are you?

Sarah: I’m doing well. How are you?

Arsalan: I’m doing great. I know a lot about you. I know you have your hands in a lot of different things. You are involved in the community, you’re a programmer, and I think I can call you and activist of some sort because you talk about a lot of issues that people face in conferences, especially women. But, before we do all that, I want people to get a feel for who you are. So, could you describe yourself for the audience? How do you see yourself?

Sarah: I’ve been a developer for about 20 years now. I am currently the chief consultant at Devmynd. What that usually means is that I do short-term, 3 to 6-month projects with teams. I go in and help them level up on something like pair programming, Ruby, Javascript, test leveling, factoring and etc. That’s what I do for my day job.

Sarah:  I also do other things as well. I am one of the organizers for RubyConf and RailsConf, which are the 2 largest Ruby conferences in the world as part of my work with Ruby Central. I am also on the board of RubyTogether, which is a group that is working to make Ruby’s structure more stable. I am also one of the founders of Rails Bridge, which is working to get underrepresented folks into the Rails communities. I’ve also started working on something called Bridge Foundry, which is a higher level group which is helping to bring the Rails Bridge model to other communities.

Sarah: I also do a lot of conference speaking. Most of my talks are about things like software design, team dynamics, how those two things intersect, how you build software in a group, and how you do that with developers who tend to not have the highest levels of people skills.

Arsalan: That’s absolutely true. People skills is a skill that programmers tend to struggle with. I think a lot of us are introverts by nature. We are not used to expressing our opinions or sharing our feelings. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the struggles that new and aspiring developers have gone through in your experience?

Sarah: Yes, absolutely. I do some mentoring with one of the code schools here in San Francisco called Hackbright Academy. They are a women’s hack Academy that teaches Python. One of the things I’ve discovered is that I don’t really need to know much Python in order to help people because a lot of the times it’s the concepts that they have trouble with and they really just need help figuring out what to Google, and that is a pretty useful skill.

Arsalan: Google-oriented programming.

Sarah: Absolutely.

Arsalan: I have some mixed feelings about Stackoverflow. When it first came into existence, it was amazing. I would use it as a user and it was a good place to get a reputation, but also a great place to get answers within seconds to a difficult problem. That happened years ago, but now I see so many questions without any answers. I have to say that these days I would recommend going to Google first and to Stackoverflow second. What do you think about that?

Sarah: Yes, I always go to Google first. But, at least for the type of things that I’m looking for, they usually tend to be higher up on the Stackoverflow results. So, I find myself the Stackoverflow quite a bit. I did a lot of Stackoverflow questions several years ago when I had a job that left me up with a lot of free time. It was fun. I haven’t answered a question in about 3 to 4 years, but I still get points on there when people keep putting them up.

Arsalan: Yes, Stackoverflow and Google are both great resources. So, today I want to talk to you about how you guide new and aspiring developers, some perhaps without a computer science degree. You have some experience because you are one of the mentors at a code academy. How do you see these code academies versus a regular computer science degree?

Sarah: I think they are quite different, for sure. When I started Rails Bridge with Sarah Allen back in 2009, we did a thing where we would have people come in for a day to try out Rails. The people who were excited about it often wanted more classes to take and there wasn’t anything for us to really point them at. At that time, there weren’t any code schools and there wasn’t even a dev boot camp, which I think was pretty close to the first one. There were community college classes, very expensive $3k corporate training places, or you could go the 4-year degree route. But, none of those seemed like something we wanted to recommend. So, having the coding academies available as an option has been amazing because you have these people who are switching careers and discover that they like programming. The coding schools give them a way in. That is obvious and not as expensive as a four-year degree or some of the other options.

Arsalan: So, it is an inexpensive way to get your foot in the door and learn the essential skills to get your first job. You’re not going to become the world’s best programmer or have the breadth of knowledge, but would it be fair to say that you would have enough knowledge to hold your own in an entry level position?

Sarah: Yes, I think so. It depends on the term of your program, but it can be enough to get your foot in the door in a junior internship program or as a junior developer. I worked on a team of developers where there was a recent code school grad and a recent college grad and the difference between the two was interesting.

Sarah: When working with the code school grad if we were talking about something that’s was more computer science and she didn’t understand it; we would talk about it for a few minutes and look it up on Wikipedia and figure it out. The computer science grad to attend of new all of that for certain, but the CS engineering degrees tend to focus less on the software developing side of things and the communications side of things that the code schools do. In my experience it was easier to spot-learn the computer science stuff, than it was to spot-learn the communications stuff.

Arsalan: true, but this may not apply to every CS grad. Some CS grads will go and practice what they learn from Opensource projects and other places. But, just because you have a computer science degree doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a great programmer.

Sarah: The computer science stuff is all on Wikipedia if you ever need to learn it. Having a computer science background can be helpful, but a lot of computer science programs do not teach you how to program. Learning how to program is a byproduct of doing the degree program.

Arsalan: Absolutely. That’s because their goal is different. They are not trying to produce IT workers or programmers. They are trying to produce computer scientists, which is absurd.

Sarah: I think of computer science degree as similar to an English department at the University. There are many aspects to the degree program that you need it for everything. So it still has its own department. Applied computer science is basically something that you need in every other scientific discipline at this point.

Arsalan: the goal is different. Their goal is to sort of enhance the knowledge that we have in computing and logic. I think it is more logic than anything else. But when it comes to technologies you might learn about artificial intelligence or other networks, compiler design, or other complicated topics and algorithms. While you may later develop a new algorithm or something, the thing is, most companies don’t really need that. The companies that are doing the hiring are looking for people who can build applications to solve real-world problems and often by using the Ruby and Rails frameworks. As it turns out Ruby and Rails are very intuitive. So it was very interesting when I found out that most code schools are using the Rails framework to teach programming. Is there a particular reason for that?

Sarah: I think part of the reason is because it’s relatively easy to get started with. It’s visual, which is very helpful to a lot of people. I think there are a lot of people out there who are motivated by what you can do with programming, but not necessarily by programming itself.

Arsalan: Is that because Rails has a very supporting and encouraging community?

Sarah: I think all open source communities have struggled with being open and welcoming to newcomers to an extent. I think it that we have more experience in this area because we’ve dealt with it for a while before other technical communities started really getting involved.

Arsalan: So, let’s say I’m somebody who’s working in another profession and I’m intrigued by software development to the point that I’m considering switching over. I have a few choices. I can start learning on my own through books, blogs or something else. Or I can go to code school and receive more rigorous training and perhaps a recommendation for some open jobs. What are some tips that you could give me as somebody who is switching from one field to computer science that will help me?

Sarah: I’m going to give you the easy answer first. The biggest thing that helps me is you can restrict your Google searches so that you are not seeing things that are two years old, because, an answer that was posted two years ago is unlikely to be true now. Learning how to do search results that only showed me things that were posted in the last year has been a huge thing for me.

Arsalan: When information is old, like if you get an old news article from two years ago, the information is useless.

Sarah: Yes, that is almost always true with software development except in some very limited cases. The other tip that I would suggest is to not sell yourself short. You have a lot to offer to a team. There’s going to be some people who don’t value that. It’s really easy to get into that mindset and it’s very difficult to avoid it, but less experienced developers often have a lot to offer often from their previous lives. There are all these skills that people have that go beyond the code that they can contribute and I think that a lot more of these companies are starting to see and appreciate that.

Arsalan: I think this is a really good point. In addition to the team dynamics, I think there are benefits coming from a different background. We talk about diversity, like racial diversity, ethnic diversity, religious diversity, lifestyle diversity, and even job diversity. In job diversity, they bring their different perspectives and I think that can be really good for team dynamics. But, I also think that for a startup, it is critical to have people from different backgrounds, so that you’re not in this monoculture or thinking with tunnel vision. If you’re building a product for a segment of the population, but you don’t have anyone who represents that population, then you really don’t know where they’re coming from.

Arsalan: the problem that I see is that we tend to try to get these rock star developers for every position, especially in the Silicon Valley, but also throughout the rest of the country. It’s this rock star developer wanted mentality. I see it all the time.

Sarah: I think in order to be in the public’s eye like that, you have to be focused on yourself. You have to have a lot of internal narcissism around. “I am worthy. I am someone that other people should be around.” While I think this can be a good thing, I think that optimizing for that is probably not what you want in a team. If you get a lot of rock stars together, it might be amazing, but it might also be a train wreck. More often, I see it turn out as a train wreck then amazing.

Sarah: Another thing that I see a lot of is people wanting to hire mid-level and senior-level developers.. The companies that I see succeeding are the ones who have figured out how to hire less experienced developers and hire junior level developers, and work with them usefully. It’s a different way to approach teamwork when you have folks coming from a different place.

Sarah: so, when you bring on the first junior developer. You have to change a lot of the ways that you typically work. Things that were implicit before now have to be said out loud. You don’t always know what those things are. It’s kind of like a blind spot. You have to bring on these junior developers to know what those things are. Discovering them can be painful because you need to create an environment where the junior person will be comfortable asking questions.

Sarah: I think the trap that people always fall into is that they hire developers who all work the same way. And this can be more efficient, but you spend less time talking and more time building. But the question is: are you building the right things?

Arsalan: Yes, I think the communication is a fundamental problem in any company. I feel that a lot of companies are trying to hire just one person and that would be the most experienced person that they can find. The problem that I see with that is, we have a bunch of people who are purportedly senior. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they know the right things to do. There’s no communication that really surfaces. So, you collect a technical debt. But also you make decisions that are not necessarily good for the business or the product, but nobody knows because their egos come into play.

Sarah: A lot of times people will post a job, but then say that nobody applied except for white men. Then, you wonder why and you go and look at the team page and see that most of them are white men. There are quite a few mid-level and senior developers that come from minority groups, but they don’t apply because it’s difficult to tell whether or not they can be successful at a place like that. And so those people tend not to change jobs so much because changing jobs is a risk unless it’s someone they know or someone that’s in their network. This is why networking is so important.

Arsalan: That’s a very good point. Let’s say that you have a company that once diversity, but is finding it hard to locate diverse talent. Don’t make it explicit. Make it implicit. Let the public know that you are looking for a diverse group to apply. I think that unless you state this very explicitly you are always going to have some kind of bias because of the unknown.

Sarah: Yes, absolutely. I think that this is another case that shows that having a network is really important. I think that good managers who are able to hire good talent are often the ones who have spent years building up this network of people who they’ve met on social media, among other places. Having the ability to talk to someone and letting them know that “I would love to have you on my team. If you’re interested, here’s the job, which is posted, let me know” and this is often the most successful strategy, but it does take time.

Arsalan: So, the ability to network is very important if you are looking to hire someone, or if you want to get hired. I want to encourage people to go and put themselves out there. Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there. There are a lot of nice and supportive people out there. Even if you have three solid years of experience, but they are looking for someone with five years of experience, you should still apply.

Sarah: Yes, there are some interesting studies that show that men will apply if they meet at least 60% of the job skills, but women will only apply on an average of about 90% of the job skills requested. They often give this long list of things that they would like you to have. But, with their really screening for is someone who they feel they can work with and who is going to be a good addition to the team, but a lot of times they just really don’t know how to write job ads. So they’re kind of crippled in their way of how to hire and that sometimes comes to play in the interview as well. Even if you only meet half the criteria, you should still apply and tell them why you’re excited about the job.

Arsalan: I want to talk about conferences because there’s just so much to talk about. Conferences are interesting because they exist and they thrive and every year we have more and more applicants who are trying to go there and more people who are trying to present. I know that the vast majority of developers have never been to a conference. I also know that you work with conferences. So, as a new developer, I might be struggling just to keep a job or to learn to program. Maybe that’s for someone with ten years or more experience. Why should I go?

Sarah: when I first started going to conferences. It was all about going to the talks. I would go to every talk that I was able to go to. Then I realized that going to a conference is not about the talks. Most conferences have various tracks that you can attend, but the most important track that you could attend is called the “hallway” track. That’s the track where you stand outside of the session in a hallway and you talk to all the people who are there. And you can go to lunch with them, or to dinner with them. This is very difficult to do for the introvert. It’s all about making those connections. My personal rule was to make at least one connection at every conference I attended.

Sarah: The networking aspect of this is invaluable and can potentially lead to more opportunities later on. Another great thing about conferences is that there are often people there who are hiring. So you have this possibility a skipping the whole HR process. The conferences can provide a much faster way of getting in front of people quickly.

Arsalan: People get together for the purpose of sharing their knowledge. If it’s a Ruby conference, people are there to talk about Ruby. So if you have a Ruby question or Ruby comment, people will be glad to answer your questions. But as a first-time conference attendee, my question to you would be I don’t know if I should talk to one of the speakers or just pick a random person in the hallway. Should I do some research so that I know who to pick at the conference to talk to or to take to lunch or dinner? Should I see if I can find them on Twitter and have a twitter conference with them? Or do you think that you should just go and see what you find?

Sarah: I think that either approach could be successful. If you are interested in talking to a speaker and going to a talk, try to come up with some interesting things to talk to them about it. It’s because I guarantee they’re more interested in talking to you about it, then you realize.

Arsalan: I’ve heard other people tell me that it’s not a good idea to line up in front of the speaker after the talk because there could be ten or twenty people there waiting to shake hands with them, or to talk with them. Some people have suggested that it’s better to tweak them or contact them to let them know that you’re interested in saying hello and then finding them elsewhere like in the hallway or asking them to meet you for coffee or something. As a speaker, do you think there’s any truth to that?

Sarah: I think it depends on the speaker. A lot of speakers have a preference to how they want to be contacted and they may even indicate that in the slides during the talk. As for talking with the speaker right after their talk, I am not opposed to it. If somebody wants to talk to me after one of my presentations, but as you said, it can get a little hairy sometimes, if there are around twenty people standing there waiting.

Sarah: That’s also true if there’s another talk scheduled to be in the same room afterward. One thing that a presenter can do that I’ve seen it work really well with others is to kind of herd everyone out of the presentation room and either into the hallway or an area with couches or even another vacant room and have a discussion there. Try with different speakers because there’s definitely going to be some speakers who are harder and easier to approach than others.

Sarah: It’s really helpful to speakers who you approach when you offer up some comments or suggestions like “I really liked your talk, it reminds me of…” I appreciate that, but what’s really helpful to me are people who make suggestions to me that help me to further develop my topic like, “have you thought of this?” or “have your thought of that?” People who offer up suggestions are very helpful for me to improve my talks for the next time, except for those who are argumentative.

Arsalan: Yes, don’t have an argument with the speaker. People who are being argumentative or forceful at a conference often are the ones who discourage some groups of people, like some women or other groups from participating in the conferences or going because who wants to go and see that kind of behavior? It’s not restricted to programming or the tech industry either because when you speak up and then someone shuts you down, it’s not a nurturing and learning environment anymore. Can you tell us about your own personal experiences and how we can improve things?

Sarah: Most of the people who go to conferences want to do the right thing. Often, when we are not clear about what the right thing is, people can have different interpretations. There are some people out there who are definitely bad actors and there are others who are inadvertently currently contributing to the problem. This is why in the last couple of years. The Ruby community and the tech community, in general, have pushed for codes of conduct at conferences. Because I think that we do need guidelines and reassurances that the conference organizers have your back if something does happen and lets you know what steps you need to take to handle that situation. It also lets the conference authority know how to handle the situation if it happens because pretty much something usually happens at every conference.

Sarah: I think that some things that are equally important to talk about are things called micro-aggressions. These are things that people do without really realizing it. For example, if someone mistakes me as someone else’s wife rather than an actual participant, or if someone sees a black person and thinks that they must be in the wrong place. These are things that may not necessarily violate the code of conduct, but they do make people feel as though they are outsiders. The goal of every conference is to help people to feel like they are part of the community and anything that takes away from that is something that conference organizers will want to avoid. Micro-aggressions are a harder problem to tackle.

Arsalan: I think some of this is on the organizers because they are responsible for the well-being of the attendees and ensuring that everyone is taken care of. I think about 75% of this is on the community itself as well. I’m aware of certain incidents where at a conference something inappropriate was happening. A woman was being harassed in front of other men and other attendees, and nobody said or did anything. That incident got swept under the carpet because that person was really powerful. If I were not a very good state of mind and unable to plead my before the conference organizers, then I would expect others within the conference community to step in to file a complaint on my behalf. We can do better than this as a community.

Arsalan: We have to wrap things up and will have to do another interview at another time, but if you’d like to say a few things about what you’re working on, or how people can get in touch with you, then this is your time. Then, we will continue this discussion in a follow-up interview.

Sarah: I’ve been doing quite a bit of writing related to this kind of stuff. You can find most of it on the Devmynd blog. I also talk about a lot of the stuff on Twitter, which is the place where I talk about these things the most. Twitter is also the best way to reach me. I’m always interested in talking more to people about their conference experiences, looking for jobs, and being a junior developer. Thank you for having me.

Arsalan: Absolutely. And all of these show links. We will try to include at the end of this podcast. Sarah is a wonderful person to talk to you if you’re a new developer. If you’re an aspiring developer, looking to change careers, want to join the code camp, or if you want to talk about getting started, I think that she would be happy to help you. I would be happy to forward a message if you would like to add a comment to the blog MentoringDevelopers.com. Or, you can go in and give us a rating on iTunes@MentoringDevelopers.com/iTunes. We will make sure to forward your messages to Sarah Mei. Sarah, thank you so much for joining us and we will have to have to back.

Important Links

• Microsoft
• RailsBridge
• RubyConf
• RailsConf
• BurlingtonRuby
• ClojureConf
• JSConf
• Devmynd
• Ruby Central
• Ruby Together
• Rails Bridge
• Bridge Foundry
• Hackbright Academy
• Stackoverflow
• Devbootcamp

 

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.

If you found this episode useful, please go ahead and share it with your friends and family. You can also listen directly and give your feedback on the website.

You can subscribe to Mentoring Developers via iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google Podcasts. 

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You may have heard people talk about the importance of mentorship in software development and engineering. You might be wondering… that’s great. I know it would take my career into high gear if I had a mentor but how do I find a mentor that will care about what I need and that will be willing and happy to help me.

It’s hard to reach out and ask for help especially from people that seem faraway and distant – unreachable. Is it a good idea to approach strangers for assistance and impromptu mentorship? What’s the best way to organize a group of learners and find a mentor for the group?

Listen to Episode 21 of the Mentoring Developers podcast to see what our panelists have to say about all the above questions and more. You might find nuggets of wisdom and advice to carry you forward in your career.

Happy Learning!

Thanks for Listening!

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Glenn’s Bio:

By day Glenn Block works at Splunk making it easier for developers to work with Big Data as he drives the development of Splunk’s Dev platform. By night, Glenn is an active maintainer and contributor of several OSS projects including scripts (https://github.com/scriptcs/scri…). He is a polyglot with his most recent favorite language being node.js, and he is very passionate about Web API development. Glenn is a frequent speaker internationally on various topics that affect developers and a published author. You can find him tweeting as @gblock into the wee hours of the night.

Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Arsalan: Today we have Glenn block with us. How are you, Glenn?

Glenn: I’m good. How are you, Arsalan?

Arsalan: I’m doing fantastic and it’s so good to have you because you are somebody that a whole lot of people look up to. You have a ton of experience. You work at Microsoft in a very important position and were going to talk about that. But, first, I want to learn about you, Glenn. How do you describe yourself?

Glenn: I am a person who loves to learning new things. That’s a big part of who I am. I also really like helping people. I’ve been fortunate enough to be in places where I’ve been able to help people either from a work perspective by helping guide others or within the community by putting together events or just connecting with other developers. I love connecting with other people. I really enjoy networking and just meeting people. Fortunately, I’ve been able to work in places where my work has brought me to different parts of the world as well. So, I haven’t just been limited to my local area. I love exploring the world and going to different places, meeting new people, and learning new things.

Glenn: I’m also a parent. I’m married and I have a daughter who is now 11 years old. That’s also been a pretty amazing thing to just watch my daughter grow up and helping to guide her along the path as well. She’s not at all interested into being a technologist. So, I’m not guiding her along that path. I love reading. I’m big into reading and I love cafés. If you come to Seattle, you might find me hanging out and drinking my latte in a café. I’m a big latte and espresso person.

Arsalan: How do you like Seattle?

Glenn: There are parts of it that I like. The rain can really get to you. Although lately what looks like global warming we haven’t been getting really much of it. Seattle is a cool city. It’s beautiful if you’re into the outdoors. There are lots of great places to go that are really not far away. It’s a big rock climbing, snowboarding, skiing, the outdoors community here.

Arsalan: So, you have a lot of experience. You’re currently working at Microsoft. What are you doing there?

Glenn: I don’t work at Microsoft anymore. I work at Splunk, but I drive our developer platform. Splunk is a data analytics product. It has quite a few of ways that you can integrate with the as a developer. One that’s become increasingly interesting over the last year has been systems that want to push their data directly to Splunk. So I spent a lot of energy in the last year, helping us to build out capabilities in Splunk that offer a really easy way to push from third-party systems, or even from IOT from devices, into Splunk. But, overall, my focus is on developer interactions with the product.

Arsalan: So, you’re working with APIs and you’re focused on rest services for the last few years. Is that a true statement?

Glenn: Well, not so much in my work. In my work environment, a lot of the API work that I’ve done at has actually been our SDKs that developers will use to talk to our APIs. So I drive about eight different SDKs for different languages that make it easy for developers who want to integrate with our rest API and to do it in an idiomatic way, according to whatever language they’re using. I work on core enhancements to the product to enable better integration scenarios, but APIs are definitely there.

Arsalan: Cool. We were talking earlier and you said that you had started coding very early. Do you remember your first encounter with programming? How did you pick it up?

Glenn: At the age of seven, I used to go to the library a lot. I read a lot of books in the library and I remember finding this book, which was a computer literacy book for kids. It talked about the basics of what computers were and would describe binary and some very basic programming. That little book, which was about 50 pages and had a lot of pictures in it, just hooked me. That was my beginning to getting into computers.

Glenn: In school, I think we had a Commodore pet. This is really geeky, but my mom saw that I was getting into the computer, so she sent me to a computer code camp. I don’t know if I’ve ever said that before. They had a pet. I worked for the summer programming on a pet which was an early Commodore computer with a green screen, but it was a personal computer. I learned the basics of Basic. That was the beginning and I kept going from there.

Arsalan: You kept going and you never got tired of it?

Glenn: No, and tired is a good thing to mention because by the time I was 12 I had my own computer and I think that at 10 or 11 my mom had gotten me a Vic 20. My uncle had a Vic 20 and he wanted to get rid of it, so that was a 4.77 MHz machine with 4K of RAM and an 8K expansion card and it had a tape drive and I had to use a black and white television for my monitor. So, that’s going back ways. But, it was better than Hollerith cards. We had come further than that.

Glenn: The reason that I mentioned “tired” is because I used to be programming at 2 o’clock in the morning when I was around 11. My mom didn’t know it. I have my computer in my room with my black and white TV and I would just be up coding like crazy. So, no, it is fair to say that I did not get bored and it just kept growing, kind of like a virus but a good one.

Arsalan: Yes, that’s an amazing story. So, you started coding and by the time you graduated high school you would’ve had several years of experience and you would’ve felt pretty good about coding.

Glenn: Yes, so this was way before the Internet, but what had taken off were bulletin board systems. So, there was ARPANET, but I didn’t know about it. It was very common for your computer to have a modem, a modulator/demodulator, which is a box that you could then use to call up other computers. So by the time I was 13, I was exposed to the bulletin boards and things. When I was 14 or 15 I started running my own bulletin board. So, that was a big thing. I had this board that I ran and people would upload software and some of it was free and some of it was not, but it was a lot of fun. I had this whole community back then of introverted geeks, but it was a community nevertheless.

Arsalan: Yes, I think that for a lot of us that was one of the most important experiences of sharing stuff. That led us to the Internet. When you were thinking about what to do with your life, did you think about going to college and studying computer science, engineering, or something like that?

Glenn: I absolutely went to school for computer science. I ended up shifting a little bit later more towards the business side. So, there were business computer information systems, which was kind of a blend between software development and the business side of it. I was in every kind of computer programming class available in elementary school and high school. I was probably not doing as much non-computer work as I should’ve been, but I was obsessed and had very good grades in all the computer classes.

Arsalan: That’s great. To have that obsession definitely, takes you far. I want to know if you think it was worth it now that you have so much experience. What if you didn’t go to college? What if you didn’t get a computer science degree?

Glenn: I think college offered a level of refinement. So, it was advantageous. I didn’t go as far as some people, but I definitely found value in it. There were things that I got exposed to like systems analysis. Some of it I haven’t used and some of it I have, like building data flow charts, data diagrams and things. There have been moments when that proved useful.

Glenn: I don’t think college can teach you passion for programming. That’s something that an individual can grow within themselves. I think did provide some structure.

Arsalan: Some people say that the value of college is not in the technical knowledge that you gain, but in the other knowledge that you gain around the humanities, the way you communicate with people and write.

Glenn: Yes, I think I certainly benefited there in college in general and in communication. I didn’t realize I was going to end up doing a huge amount of public speaking, but in college, I took a course on business communications. It involved is doing quite a bit of presenting and it was something that I was completely comfortable with. I think college helped with the structured level of having to work with teams to get stuff done and this notion of requirements that you have to deliver on. It can also help build connections.

Glenn: College is where I was exposed to Linux. It could also be that had I been in high school at that time    I had a friend who is really into Slackware Linux and he was in one of my computer classes and that got me exposed to wanting to play with it. Back then it was really painful to work with Linux. You had to build your own kernel and such and I’m not the Linux expert even to this day. I’m probably stronger now than I was then. I think there are some organic things that are hard to measure but are valuable nevertheless.

Arsalan: During college did you work in software or did someone pay you to work in software?

Glenn: I ran the computer lab. I wasn’t getting paid to write software, but I did little things on the side. The first time I ever got paid to build anything, I was in junior high. I had a TRSA color computer and I built this architectural software thing for a guy who paid me $180, and I thought, “Wow, I am rich. This is amazing.” I was really young, so I was surprised. He probably got his money’s worth, but I was like “Wow, you actually want me to build that?”

Glenn: In college, the only pay that I got was to run that computer lab. So, I was that guy who you bring your document to have it printed out. So I would tell them which computer they could log in on or I would log in for them and print their document out. It wasn’t a super exciting job, but it did give me a lot of chances to write code while I was there half bored to death and between helping people print their documents.

Arsalan: So, when and how did you get your first job as a programmer?

Glenn: I used to go to RadioShack a lot to play around with their computers back in junior high. This is getting really geeky. I would go hang out there after school and play with the computers because they always had better computers than I had at home. I couldn’t afford the bigger ones at that time.

Glenn: So, my first real paid programming job was out of high school. I did a little bit of programming and networking for a small consulting company. Then, when I was in my 20s, I went to work for this company that did direct mail. They were a very large company in New York that did big direct mail business for new homeowners. That was their specialty. They had a lot of seed programs. So, I joined there initially in their operations department. While I was in the operations department, I started programming dbase. It became apparent to my bosses that I could write code, but I hadn’t done C. I knew a little from school, but then I developed into a full-fledged C programmer. So I kind of learned on the job while I was doing their dbase 3 programming stuff. That then led to me becoming a C programmer. That was my first actual programming job.

Arsalan: When you were working in your first job. Did you find it easy to be accepted as a valuable contributing member of the organization and developer community in general? Did you struggle with anything?

Glenn: I had no community presence ever. So “community” for me involved the developers that I worked with in my company. It was a different world then. Everything has changed now. Social is so much of what we do now as developers. Or, at least, social is a very big aspect of it if you want to tap into it. Back then I was just getting stuff done. I think the thing that worked well for me was that I was always very aggressive going after stuff. I would always try to do above the bare minimum. I never tried to just get the job done. I was always thinking about how I could get the job done more efficiently or how I could do it better or improve. So, I think that worked out well. It’s a mix because I think sometimes people are threatened by that.

Arsalan: How did you keep growing your skill set? Did you even try that? Or, were you thinking that you were doing dbase right now and the next hot thing was that other thing over there, the C++?

Glenn: I started doing C, but the hot thing actually became Visual Basics. I had a guy who I worked with who was a genius C and C++ programmer. His name was David. He was learning how to build Windows apps. That was his thing. He wanted to build real Windows apps. In those days building Windows apps was a thing. It was like 1 million lines of code. Now, a lot of that code would be generated by tools. The code that would get generated to build Windows apps was massive. I remember how excited he was when he got hired to do real Windows development. Back then it was really like a black art if you knew how to do it. For me, I saw a quicker route.

Glenn: I happened to be in a store somewhere and I saw a Visual Basics starter kit, which was for Visual Basics 4. Actually, at my job, they did a lot of Access developments and they had some VB 3 development. When I looked at VB 3, I wasn’t super impressed, but from VB 3 to VB 4 there were big jumps in terms of the overall experience of building apps. I looked at that and thought, “Wow, I could build the equivalent to what David has to do with 1 million lines, and do it in very few lines using a drag-and-drop editor and using Visual Basic.” I fell in love with Visual Basic right then and there.

Glenn: Then, I had the opportunity to sell it within my team because we would build these and ANSI screen C apps that would be used for data analysis. It was kind of the early days of big data, but it wasn’t very big. I think we were using a 5 GB database, which was really huge at the time. We had our own proprietary data store that we built on top of Btrieve. We built all these UIs that were ANSI DOS console based UIs and I had to rebuild this research application that we had and I was like “Why don’t we use Visual Basic?” We were Windows for workgroups, just to give you an idea. I got the buy-in to try it out and built the prototype to show how this could work, and then I was able to build that app. It led me on a path where I would be writing Visual Basic code for quite a while.

Glenn: Ultimately, I realized that where I was, was not where I wanted to be because VB became a thing that I was really excited about and I wanted to be in a place where that was important. It was interesting where I was, but there wasn’t going to be a lot of VB going forward. Plus, the work they were doing was not all that exciting to me. So, I went through a recruiter and got a job making double what I was making, which was nice. It was working in a shop doing a lot of access developments that wanted to migrate over to VB to do more and more VB development. This was around the VB 4 and 5 timeframe. That job set me off on a more interesting trajectory.

Arsalan: Do you think that one strategy for new developers that can work is to follow the leader in the technology of what’s hot and what’s good and try to be on top of it and be on the cutting edge? That’s a moving target versus the other approach, which is to be good at one thing like Java, for example, and have deep knowledge in that to differentiate themselves.

Glenn: I think it really depends on the individual. I think one challenge today is that technology is moving so fast that if you want to stay relevant, there are challenges you have to face. Recently I’ve been getting pretty heavily into the whole DevOps world and also looking at things like containerization and it’s an explosion of technology in terms of what you start using there. Something that is hot today might not be tomorrow.

Glenn: That’s a bit of an art and I’ve gotten better with it over the years. I usually don’t jump on something right away. I’ll wait a bit. But, there are signs when things are really taking hold and when I see those signs then I have to decide whether or not it is really relevant to my world, or will be relevant. In my current world, one of the things that I start to get a lot into is containerization and the realization that this is actually going to impact my world. In that case, it’s better to learn something like that now.

Glenn: You can stay with the technology and just get deep, but the challenge is preventing you from getting stale because that happens. Does it matter to you? It may if you want to be able to have more options. That’s what I look at. This is where foresight comes in. Maybe this may not be important to us now, but in a year that may change. So to have that foresight to figure out that this is something worth knowing or diving into can give you an edge if that turns out to be the direction that you go. But, there is no crystal ball.

Arsalan: Right, there’s no crystal ball. You have to follow your instincts. I’m wondering about what you have seen over the years as your career grew? Now you are in management. I’m assuming that you have a lot of say in who gets hired in Splunk and in other places where you worked. You must have seen new people come in and observed how they do. Can you talk about some of the struggles that new developers or new hires go through and if you have any personal experience in that? What’s your advice for them?

Glenn: This is a reason that I’m really interested in this podcast and why I’m a big fan of the mentoring culture. It’s the idea that somebody comes in and there’s somebody there to help them along or guide them. That’s a place where organizations can certainly help. It’s what my current organization could do a lot better. Microsoft had a very good mentoring culture. I hold that often as being the gold standard where it was really recognized that mentoring is a valuable thing for employees to do, both on the mentoring side and on the mentee side.

Glenn: For the individual side, that’s a tough one. At Splunk, we look for individuals who are really motivated. It also depends on your level. If someone’s coming in at the senior level, the expectation is going to be different, but for us, it becomes pretty important. Passion and drive, I think I can say are consistently important wherever I’ve gone. Or, I would say that early on, passion and drive may have been less critical when people were just doing their job and then going home.

Glenn: For me, I look for people who are really driven, who love what they’re doing and who view programming as a kind of art. Right now we’re in the midst of hiring some people and we certainly look for that passion and drive. Another aspect is the ability to work with teams. If you’re younger then that can take more time, and it’s understood that we need to work with you and decide whether or not you have the right attitude to interact and work well in our culture. If that person is more senior, then we’re going to have a much higher expectation that that person is going to be able to just fit in. Not everyone likes to be in a team culture, but for us, a lot of what we do is team-based.

Arsalan: Have you noticed that new hires or new developers with less than two years of experience tend to struggle more in the technical tasks? Or, do you think they have different struggles fitting in and other types of problems?

Glenn: I think a lot of places where engineers struggle when they get started is with communication. It’s knowing when they are blocked and being able to communicate that. That’s a place where I’ve seen a common pitfall. Either they’re worried and don’t want to send a message that they can’t do it, or they get trapped. Managers have to be conscious that somebody may get trapped in a place where they’re blocked and they really do need help, even if they’re not necessarily able to communicate that. Or they think that they can find their way through it, but for the amount of time that you could spend. I think the advice that I would give would be to not be afraid to reach out.

Glenn: Often, I would much rather know that you are blocked. There’s a balance because you want someone to struggle a bit because it’s healthy for them to be able to learn how to work through a problem and figure it out. But, there’s a real balance there. There’s a difference between saying, “okay, I kind of can’t figure it out and could use some pointers” versus “I just cannot make progress.” Then it can become almost demeaning to the individual when they’re stuck and they don’t want to communicate it. My advice would be that I value you much more if you communicate with me. If you communicate to me that you’re blocked, then I can help you.

Arsalan: So, the summary of that I believe is to try your best. Try to find a solution. But, if you’re stuck in a problem and you come to a standstill, then reach out.

Glenn: Right, and use your peers as well. This becomes more relevant as you get more senior. The most important thing is to help solve problems. You don’t always have to be the person with the answer. Use the people around you in a positive way. Networking helps. The important thing is finding the solution, not necessarily your solution, but the best solution to the problem.

Arsalan: I think that the idea that you have to prove a point or that you have to prove that you are better than others can be pretty toxic or create a toxic atmosphere. People are trying to take credit for things or defuse the blame or direct the blame to someone else.

Glenn: There is that, and that’s a big problem. People taking credit for things they didn’t do or people pushing blame. But the thing that I was talking about was just a natural inclination. You care about the things that you care about and you want your idea to be the winning idea.

Arsalan: That’s all true and I think that we really have to watch out for that. From the point of view of managers and hiring people, do you think that in general, we have organizing nations that nurture and enable new developers to come in and shine and thrive? Do you think that’s what the industry is doing in general?

Glenn: I think it’s hard to put a blanket statement on that. I’ve seen some good and bad examples. So, I think it’s a mixed bag.

Arsalan: Let’s say that I have a startup company and I want to hire a bunch of new developers. I’m not sure how to go about it, how to onboard them, or how to hire them. Can you give me advice as the hiring manager?

Glenn: I think some of the things that startups have brought in, which have trickled into the bigger organizations as they tried to emulate startups, are the whole cultural aspects. We’re building a fun culture. I’m talking about things like perks, like food, games, and little things that don’t usually cost a huge amount, but actually, go a long way. Creating a fun culture is one nice thing that a startup has a lot of ability to do. But, it also depends on how well-funded they are too, of course. There are limits.

Glenn: I think having really good transparency is another thing. When you’re a startup you are asking people to come on board when there’s a potentially higher level of risk. So, making them feel like there’s real transparency as to what the company is doing, its goals, what the outlook is are really important things. Promoting a lot of innovation is also important in the startup and making people feel that this is part of their ownership. Offering developers interesting technologies that they can work on is always a plus. Whether or not a stack is a hot stack or not is even more important when you’re in an investor-driven startup world.

Arsalan: Do you think that it’s a good idea for startups to have a regimented mentorship program where people come in and go through a process and come out with the confidence that they need to succeed? A lot of time startups don’t do that because they feel that they don’t have the capacity, money, or the resources to train anybody. They just want very senior people and that’s kind of how they roll. What do you think?

Glenn: There are some startups that are not going to be able to afford the person they want unless they give them a really high equity and they can get someone who is really interested in taking a gamble with that company. Depending on how much funding they’ve raised, they may not be able to afford that person.

Glenn: I don’t think you need a lot to have a mentoring culture. If you have a really small startup, let’s say you are the CEO, you could say, “Hey if you come on board with us. One of the perks I’m going to give you is 30 minutes a month.” Maybe that won’t last forever, but you’re going to get a chance to get mentored from the person who’s running the business and find out what’s important to them. There are different levels of mentoring culture, but I don’t think it takes a lot. I think you can build one without a huge investment.

Arsalan: You had mentors. Did they have any effect on you? Did they help you?

Glenn: I’m a huge believer in mentors. I was fortunate enough to have some really great ones. When I worked at Microsoft, I really started to care about mentorship. I had mentors outside of Microsoft that were friends that I knew from the industry, particularly in the bay area. They were not in my workplace but were able to advise be to go further, if that’s what I wanted. That ultimately helped incentivize me to get to Microsoft because I was feeling like I wanted more and I wasn’t super happy in the company that I was in and I wasn’t working on any interesting technology. But at Microsoft, in particular, I had some fantastic mentors. I have a couple of really good mentors now at Splunk.

Glenn: One thing I would suggest would be to have a couple of different mentors at different levels, one who is closer to my level and who has been doing the job longer who can just advise me on some of the things to look for, then maybe one more who was significantly more senior who would just help broaden my perspective and help me to grow and help me to think about things on a completely different level.

Glenn: Sometimes mentors can lead to opportunity as well. If your mentor has you on the back of their mind and something comes up that you could potentially be a good fit for, it’s a natural. Some of my mentorships have benefited me and created further opportunities, but the higher-level value is just having somebody that I could talk to, that could be wrong with me, advise me on things that I should be thinking about, and help me to have a better perspective on a problem that I was experiencing.

Glenn: I also mentored a bunch of people at Microsoft. While I was at Microsoft I branched out a bit and I have some folks from the community that I mentor as well on the side. I think it’s also incumbent on you that when you benefited from being men toward that you mentor others as well.

Arsalan: How would a person go about getting a mentor? Mentors are busy people.

Glenn: They are busy. There have been times when I have been better than others as both a mentor and mentee. I talked about the social world that we’re in now. There are user groups everywhere. I think that going to things like user groups may be a great place for you to meet people who can potentially provide you with guidance or vice versa. I have a lot of people who I can reach out to if I have a question about something, but a mentor provides a more personalized relationship with people. A user group is one great way to do that. Social media places like twitter or discussion forums are another way to meet, but in a paragraph people and potentially build a mentor-mentee relationship.

Arsalan: Do you think that it’s a good idea for new people to try to go out and give presentations at user groups and perhaps conferences?

Glenn: I think you can, but I think it also depends on where you are in your development and where you want to put your attention. I would say that it’s good to go regardless, even if it’s just to learn about what other people are doing. I would never discourage someone from speaking. It builds good skills such as confidence and other kinds of things and it becomes a way to get to know people. The hard thing is when you are really at the junior level you are always learning, but at some point, you will have learned enough that you can confidently talk about it. When you are at an early learning phase, it’s good to focus more on learning than speaking about the learning. Then there comes a time when you get to a place where you can do both if you want. Teaching is about the experience and it’s hard to teach if you lack the experience.

Arsalan: That makes sense. On the other side of the argument, anyone who is doing anything worthwhile, even at the junior level, if other people lack the information on space that topic and are interested in it, they may see it as an opportunity to learn about what that other person is doing. There are benefits to both sides of it.

Glenn: Okay, I’ll modify a bit of what I said. Regardless of what I said, I’m very supportive of people who want to speak. If they want to speak, then they should certainly speak. There are people who explain how they waded their way through things that they spent a couple of months learning. They’re going to be able to communicate their experience and help somebody else who might want to tread in their path. So, I was just giving a general guideline, but I have seen individuals who have put too much attention to early on educating people on staff before they really got the foundation. I think that can be hurtful.

Arsalan: Do you listen to any podcast? Are there any that you would recommend our listeners to listen to?

Glenn: I don’t listen to a lot of podcasts these days. When I do, sometimes I listen to .Net Rocks! And sometimes I listen to Henselminutes. I don’t listen to either very frequently, but I do listen to both. There are some very new podcasts that I’ve been getting into lately because I’ve been getting more into the whole continuous integration and continuous deployment world. I’m not a regular listener, but I do it do it in an organic fashion. I can’t remember the name of it right now. If I feel like listening to one then I will but I’m certainly not religious about it and now I have one.

Arsalan: You have one?

Glenn: It’s not really a podcast yet, per se. It’s more of a Google hangouts session, but were going to be turning it into a podcast.

Arsalan: And you’re doing it with someone else?

Glenn: Yes, with Darrell Miller which I think you’ve interviewed.

Arsalan: Yes, I recently interviewed Darrell.

Glenn: I just remembered that the name of the new podcast that I listen to is called The New Stack. So for anyone who’s interested in the container world or the ecosystem around containers like Mesos or Kubernetes and all of that, that’s a new podcast that I’m getting into with The New Stack.

Arsalan: I’ll be excited to get a chance to hear that and our listeners would love to hear from someone as accomplished as you about some of the new directions where technology is heading. Do you spend any time watching screencasts or reading blogs?

Glenn: I actually read quite a few blogs, but I do it in a very organic fashion. I basically find out about blogs through Twitter or some of the people that I know on Facebook who will post a link to something. I don’t use an RSS reader, but I absolutely do a lot of reading and a lot of that is based on the things that I see in social media. I still blog to some degree. Most of the blogging that I do is for the Splunk blog than for my own personal blog, but I do still blog and my personal blog. I always share that link on Twitter. That is my main way of consuming and sharing information.

Arsalan: Do you think that it’s important for new developers to show the world what they can do perhaps through a website, a blog, or have open source projects just to project their skills and get a name for themselves? That seems to be a growing trend these days that developers should promote themselves, and hiring managers and other developers are looking at their GitHub profiles or their LinkedIn profiles and the body of work that they’ve done.

Glenn: An easy way to get to know people, and to interact and grow your network is through open source development. It’s not just about hiring managers. It’s that you’re working with other technologists when you’re working on open source projects, whether you start one or you’re working with other people. So, I’m a big fan of that and not just from the hiring side. There are some companies out there that will look at your GitHub to get a sense of who you are. So, doing open source work on there can be very valuable for many reasons.

Arsalan: I think with everything that you’ve told us, all of our listeners would do well to write it down and try to act on it because this is coming from someone who is really successful. So, we’re going to wrap up this interview and I want to give you the chance to talk about any final words or to give us any final advice for new developers or companies who are looking to hire. Or, you can talk about some of the projects that you are working on that you would like people to go to and visit.

Glenn: I think I just focus on the mentoring aspect. I would advise anyone who’s listening and who considers themselves to be more than a beginner to help the beginners. If you are senior-level, then help others. I think that what comes around goes around and there’s real value there. Don’t be afraid to look to others. It’s been a real value in my career to let others help guide me. You’ll find people who are willing to do it. You just have to have a good heart and go in with a good intention and that shines through, and you’ll find people who are absolutely willing to help you.

Glenn: As far as keeping up with the latest technology, it’s good to know what’s there, but there’s a lot going on. So try to evaluate which ones are right for you to invest your time in. Have confidence in yourself. A big part of succeeding in this industry is about building your own confidence and knowing that you can achieve what you set out to achieve.

Arsalan: Glenn, it was a pleasure talking to you and hopefully we’ll catch you later on for a follow-up interview.

Glenn: Thank you, it was my pleasure to be on this call.

 

Important Links

• Microsoft
• Splunk
• .Net Rocks!
• Hanselminutes
• The New Stack
• Mesos
• Kubernetes
• Opensources
• GitHub

 

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