Steve_Edwards:
Hello everybody and welcome to another transnational episode of Views on View. My name is Steve Edwards, the host with the face for radio and the voice for being a mime, but I'm still your show host, not show host. With me today, I have one other person, my special returning guest and guest host, Mr. Drew Baker. We're coming all the way from down under in Australia. How you doing, Drew?
Drew_Baker:
Great Steve, good to be here.
Steve_Edwards:
So, why don't you give everybody a little update on why you're in Australia instead of normally in LA. I find the process quite interesting for those of us who don't have to deal with visas
Drew_Baker:
Yeah,
Steve_Edwards:
and
Drew_Baker:
so
Steve_Edwards:
immigration
Drew_Baker:
I,
Steve_Edwards:
and all that.
Drew_Baker:
yeah, it's funny. And the visa that I'm on is also kind of got an interesting backstory to it all. So I'm on a, what's called an E3 work visa. that I have to renew, well, it's specifically for Australians and you get it for two years and it's renewable indefinitely. And it's very similar to the H1B, which probably everyone in the tech world is familiar with. So it's same rules as the H1B, except you don't have to like sort of justify that you've tried to hire an American for it. You can just hire an Australian. But they have to have the right qualifications and school history and work experience and all those things. But it's really, really cheap It's only for Australians. And how we got that visa was it was an act of Congress called the Emergency Wartime Appropriations Act. And we got that visa the day we committed to going into Iraq with George Bush. So,
Steve_Edwards:
Oh, I thought it was just because you guys had the best accents.
Drew_Baker:
no, well, you know, part of that, but
Steve_Edwards:
Partly.
Drew_Baker:
yeah. So it was a kickback for going to war. So yeah, that's how we got that visa, but it's been great for me. I've been on it for like 10 years now.
Steve_Edwards:
So every five years you gotta go home for a little bit, reapply and then turn around and
Drew_Baker:
No,
Steve_Edwards:
come back.
Drew_Baker:
every two years, every
Steve_Edwards:
Never,
Drew_Baker:
two years.
Steve_Edwards:
I'm sorry, sorry, every
Drew_Baker:
Yeah.
Steve_Edwards:
two years. So five times I meant to say.
Drew_Baker:
Yeah, exactly. And it was really tricky during COVID, obviously, because all the embassies were closed. And yeah, it was a whole thing. So that's
Steve_Edwards:
get me started.
Drew_Baker:
how I
Steve_Edwards:
Right.
Drew_Baker:
spent one month in Frankfurt trying
Steve_Edwards:
So,
Drew_Baker:
to get my visa renewed.
Steve_Edwards:
okay, so that's Frankfurt, Germany, not Frankfurt, Kentucky, right?
Drew_Baker:
Yeah, exactly.
Steve_Edwards:
Right, so I was recently, my sixth grade son has been studying his states and state capitals and Frankfurt is the capital of Kentucky. And he was always, he was having problems remembering that so I told him just to think Kentucky hot dog, you know, Frankfurter, and so that's how he remembers that.
Drew_Baker:
There you go.
Steve_Edwards:
Thank you, thank you. And then before I forget, before we move into our topic du jour, I'd like to welcome our studio audience. How you doing, audience? All right, thank you. I don't always remember to introduce them, but they're always here, at least in spirit. So today's topic is not view specific. I guess you could say that this is going to be our view on hiring, pun intended. So about two years ago, starting in April of 2020, I was going through the hiring process where I was trying to find a job. And then I've been where I'm at for the past just over two years as of November 1st and over the past year I've had to do the hiring. I was looking for up to three developers. I eventually hired two Uh, and so what I thought we would talk about today is the hiring process coming at it from both sides as the Hiree and the hirer and I mentioned this to drew and he was like, oh dude, we got to talk about this I got so much to say and looking at the list of bullet points he sent me, he has a lot to say. So we will get to all those bullet points, but I'm gonna start out just sort of by talking about what I went through and the processes I went through when I was trying to get a job. And my particular thing that I was looking for was a view developer. Didn't mean that that's what I was hard set on. But that was what I really want to do is that's what I've been doing for the previous year So for a little bit of context This was starting in April of 2020 and starting about that time. There's a little thing going on called COVID now When I lost my previous job, it actually the timing was there but it actually had nothing to do with COVID the company I was at had a new CEO come in and because the The previous one was really horrible at managing things, including finances. And the company was based in San Diego, but we had an engineering shop up here in the south of Portland, in the Portland area. And they started by cutting a couple positions here and there, a manager position and a couple other people. And then one Monday, we call it Bloody Monday, 14 of us got let go. And they basically just gutted the development shot up here, shop here. And so all of a sudden we're looking to hire. Now in the previous eight, nine years, since I had been in full-time software development, I had been mostly in the Drupal world and finding a position really hadn't been that difficult for me. I'd had a couple of times where companies had shut down because of financial issues or, uh, you know, various other reasons and I'd lost a job. And I'd been generally been able to find one fairly quickly in this case though. as is actually going on right now, there was a lot of tech layoffs going on, a lot of downsizing. And so where normally the field might not have been quite as competitive, it was incredibly competitive. You had all kinds of developers and engineers out there looking for positions. And of course, remote work was exploding because of, you know, restrictions. and so, and people not wanting to be in the office together. And so, that compounded things even more, because I was looking for remote work. And so, I started looking at jobs and posting and applying and applying and applying. And I think I still have a directory with all of my cover letters, which is probably the one thing I hated more than anything was writing cover letters. Because what you don't want to do, and we'll probably talk to this a little later when we... discuss the being on the hiring side of things, doing the hiring, you don't want just a cookie cutter off-the-shelf cover letter, you know, that you submit the same for every job. Hey, I feel like I'd really be an asset to your company because I can do this and this. You know, you got to tailor it to what they're doing. So anyway, I wrote a lot, a lot of cover letters. Ironically, side note, a little while later after that, my wife was applying for a job and she asked me to help her write a cover letter and and I whipped one out for her and she says, dang, that's pretty good. I said, trust me, when you've had the experience I had, you get really good at it. So, wrote a lot of resumes, cover letters, and I got a few bytes. And what was interesting, and some of the things I hated more than anything, was some of the things you were asked to do during a hiring process. So for instance, one of the very first ones I had, was for a small insurance company, and I don't even remember the name, that had I'd been referred to by somebody that had worked with me at where I got laid off and Never talked to anybody, never met anybody. They had me do a coding challenge. Now there's various types of coding challenges and we'll probably talk about the various ones down the road including the one that we used that I used when hiring. But the ones that I hated were the multi-hour multi-day projects. you know, here, code up this thing that does this and this, and make sure you incorporate this and this and this. And one of the first ones I did, I'll never forget this, they wanted to take no more than three to four hours, but yet they wanted to basically implement this whole user, user login roles system. And oh, any good developer, and the line literally said, any good developer should be able to do this in a couple hours. I said, what? I mean there's whole projects, you know, Auth0 or you know any number of things out there meant to, that are meant to solve this kind of problem and I should just be able to whip something up in a couple hours? I don't think so. And so I know in that particular case they didn't like it and I forget the reasons why and I never talked to anybody and all I got was the, oh it was the emails through recruiter because they were going through recruiter. But there are another, another... projects like this I can think of a couple where you know here spend a day or spend four or five hours whipping up some project and and we'll look at it and and tell you what we think and a lot of time you know my experience there was one thing or another you know if I didn't do enough tests or this wasn't right hey your code is beautiful you write really great code but you didn't do this and this and there's one particular project I remember where they view-based framework for a view app that I had never heard of before, have not heard of since then, and it was probably one of the most painful things to use. You know, if I had been able to use something like a Viewtify or a Bootstrap View or even Tailwind or something like that, but this was written by somebody where English was not their first language and everything was translated and it was just horrible. And I told them afterwards, I said that was a pain to use, you know. You guys might want to think about using another framework and he said okay good. Thanks for the feedback But those ones where you're you know here you are trying to write all these Things and do hour long you want to do half day long or multiple hour projects And then oh, yeah, we don't like this or that It blew my mind Not so much it to me it just seems a waste doesn't seem like an accurate, you know representation of what you can what you can do. And I suppose there are some where I could have taken two, three, four days, but I had a family to take care of. I had other work to do. I had so many other things going on. And taking that much time for a job interview, just as a test project was, was to me not one of the best uses of my time. Any thoughts on those, Drew? I know we might get to those later, but what's your thoughts on big, huge projects like that just for a job interview?
Drew_Baker:
Yeah, so just so everyone knows, I have worked at Funkhouse now for 10 years. So I have not applied for a job anytime recently. So my experience is much more on the other side of it, on hiring people. And when it comes to the coding challenges, like we've had people do those and iterate it over
Steve_Edwards:
So here I am bitching
Drew_Baker:
this.
Steve_Edwards:
and moaning, and you're like, oh yeah, we do those all the time. Ha ha.
Drew_Baker:
Well, because the truth is they are very, there is a really good way to tell if someone is actually knows what they're doing, and hearing you talk about like weird frameworks and things like that, part of what we would want out of those coding challenges. is to see how people would respond to weird scenarios, you know? And it wasn't necessarily like, are we gonna use this framework? It's more like, can you figure this thing out that I know you've never heard of? Because, you know, a lot of the times we're gonna have be dealing with problems that you've never dealt with before, you know? So there's some purpose to some of those things, not saying that maybe like those ones had no purpose, who knows, but, you know, I just know that we have specifically tried to ask. people to do some things that we know that they probably haven't done before just to see. So you know there's that too to it all and then you mentioned the feedback you know getting feedback on on your code challenges. On the code challenges that we would ask people to do I would always give feedback and always try and be critical in some way you know not in a mean way or in a you know evil way, just in a direct feedback way, because I wanted to see how that person would respond to feedback. You know, so even if you aced the test, you were going to get some negative feedback, no matter what it was, just to see how you responded because that's a big part of working with someone is being able to tell them like, hey, I don't want you to do it that way or you did it the wrong way or whatever it is and see how they respond. So, keep in mind when you're going through those coding challenges, is that not actually always about the code? It's about working with this person and how they're gonna respond to things. So that was interesting. But we had a rule and this is like, the people listening out there that... thinking about hiring people. A good rule that we followed, and this is not, we didn't invent this, I think I came across this on Hacker News, was we were never gonna ask anyone to do a coding challenge or put any more time in than we ourselves were gonna put into that person. So if we were going to spend half an hour, you know. per person looking through their resume and sort of evaluating them on paper. And then we were gonna spend a couple of hours on phone calls with that person. We were gonna put two or three hours into a good candidate. So we would not expect that candidate to put any more time than that into us. That was kind of the rule that we followed. We had three or four people involved. So if you talk, that was three times four people. We're putting a good chunk of time in ourselves. So if we're gonna ask someone to do something take them three or four hours, we felt like that was kind of fair. But we weren't gonna ask the person that just had submitted a resume and had to put no other time in, hey, you know, do this four hour coding challenge. Like it had to be like. we felt like this person was good and we put some time into them. So we would only ever ask people to do a coding challenge after we'd met with them a few times. And we felt like, okay, this is a personality fit. We think there's a culture fit here. On paper, they seem like they can do the job. Their work history suggests they'll be able to do this stuff. Okay, do this coding challenge and we hope that you can back up everything you've told us. Yeah.
Steve_Edwards:
Yeah, that's, I mean, that I was strongly agree with because we did the same thing. You know, I'll get to that when I talk about me being on the hiring side of things, but it wasn't used as an initial screen. You know, you know, here, go do this for our project. And if we like you, then we'll talk to you because, you know, you could get, you know, as well as I do that, you could get somebody who's a code genius. But if they're a pain in the rear to work with and they're, you know, divisive or they're, you know, mean to people are. just not easy to work with, then you've wasted a whole bunch of time because you would never want to work with them in the first place, right?
Drew_Baker:
Yep.
Steve_Edwards:
So, so anyway,
Drew_Baker:
We-
Steve_Edwards:
yeah, that's, I just, I just had a sore spot. Maybe I'm just sore because I never really did really well at them. I've learned a lot since then, especially on the testing side of things, since then.
Drew_Baker:
It's funny,
Steve_Edwards:
And I could...
Drew_Baker:
we don't, like, so for example, Funkhouse, my company, we build really high end marketing creative sort of portfolio websites for people and like e-commerce and things like that. So our coding challenge was build essentially like a homepage with a menu that might open and close and a slideshow.
Steve_Edwards:
Mm-hmm.
Drew_Baker:
That was it, right? It was very indicative of the work that we would do. It wasn't like this abstract, you know, FizzBiz, you know, whiteboard test or something like that.
Steve_Edwards:
All
Drew_Baker:
It was
Steve_Edwards:
right.
Drew_Baker:
build a thing that we're gonna, you're actually going to be doing. So we felt like the, it was a one-to-one kind of. test there. But what we would do, and this is something that I think you should do as a high as someone looking to hire someone, we would do like a multiple choice question before you could even submit your resume. So you have to answer four or five multiple choices, you know, real easy stuff. Like what's the difference between position fixed and position absolute, you know, or whatever. And that was really effective because you could then filter all the resumes submitted by like who got five out of five on the test, you know, and that straight away, like, you know, we're hiring people that are supposed to be an expert at UI and they don't know the difference between like position absolute or position fixed. Yeah, like then move on. So that was a good sort of, I don't know if I call it a coding test, but it was like a knowledge test. And I would really recommend that, especially if you're hiring for a position where you expect you're going to get lots and lots and lots of applicants. That's a really good idea.
Steve_Edwards:
Yeah, well, yeah, like I said, I'll get to that in a minute when I talk about being on your side of things. You know, one of the other fun things I read, I ran into was an interview process. For the most part, when I did get to interviews, they were pretty straightforward, you know, talking about what you could and couldn't do and what your experience and that kind of stuff. I had one interview that still rubs me the wrong way for a company here in the US, you know, they were and they were using Vue and Laravel. And at the time, I hadn't been exposed to Laravel at all. I knew what it was. You know, I'd been working in PHP for years. Didn't know it, and that wasn't a concern. But a lot of the interview questions were some of the most arcane code-related specifics about different types of inheritance and how you would do this and how you would do that and why is this type better than this and so on. And I went through three interviews and... I did a fairly good job answering some things and it was like, you know, groups on Zoom. Some of the stuff, you know, I didn't know all right, but, and I didn't get the position, but I couldn't help thinking afterwards that none of those questions have ever had any impact on how I've done my job, on how I've written my code. If I've written it this way, I've written it that way. My experience having been at multiple places is... there's going to be certain ways that your organization does things. You know, whether it's do you use classes in JavaScript or objects, you know, are you using, how is your, how are your classes defined in Laravel and what tools do you use in Laravel ecosystem? How do you import your components into view, other components into view component? Do you do it dynamically or do you just use an import? Whatever. There's all kinds of different things. But you've got standards and you sort of adjust to the way that your company is doing it when you come in. Unless you're maybe starting something from the ground up and you have to make all those decisions. But I guess that comes back to one of my points is if you're going to interview somebody, make it on stuff that is relevant to their day to day job. What's the kind of stuff you're going to be dealing with on a day to day basis? You know, what's the kind of decisions you're going to be making? Not stuff that... I guess if you can reply, it makes you sound important, but really has no impact on how you do your job on a day-to-day basis. And I'm looking at your face going, okay, he's gonna disagree with me here.
Drew_Baker:
No, no, that's totally
Steve_Edwards:
But.
Drew_Baker:
true. It's totally true. And I would go a step further with it, which is like, like we're obviously view heavy, but when we would ask people to do the coding challenges. we wouldn't require that they'd necessarily do it in Vue. It depends on the position that we were hiring for. If we were looking for someone that was more sort of senior and wanted to be more of a leader, then yeah, we wanted them to know Vue. But a lot of the junior and mid-tier developers that we hired, if you were an expert at React, we're pretty confident we can teach you Vue in a couple of weeks.
Steve_Edwards:
Sure.
Drew_Baker:
Vue is like... easy mode react. So it wasn't that. So with the code challenges, we didn't enforce view on anyone was like, cause of exactly what you said, which is like, you're going to come in. We're going to have, we have our own style guides. We have our own way of doing things. And for us to expect that you can just like know those things is not realistic. So what I'm looking for is like good, good behavior, like good coding practices, good, like for example, Are you just like being consistent on things like indenting and single quotes versus double quotes and... like in the view world, are you using slots or are you using props or like, and is there any sort of rhyme or reason to what you're doing? Because what I'm looking for is like, is this person disciplined? Is this person consistent? Do they approach this like an engineer or do they approach this like a hacker? Because the hacker is the worst person you can hire, I think. Like,
Steve_Edwards:
Mm-hmm.
Drew_Baker:
depends on the job, right? Like if you're looking for someone that can just like maintain anyone's code and like figure out anything, then cool. But if you're building something, as an engineering mindset, or at least that's my theory. So you wanted someone, I was looking for people that had approached this with some structure and some thought and they had organized their files, their components are all named correctly or named with some sort of logic. So did they take the time to just run it all through ESLint or Pretia, those sorts of things. If I run your app that you sent me, does it generate any kind of error messages? Those aren't even, like I like to say whenever I catch one of my team members that have done one of those mistakes, like these aren't like, oh, you're the world's best programmer. These are just like, did you do the basics right?
Steve_Edwards:
All right.
Drew_Baker:
And so focus on, I think, well, you know, everyone has their own criteria, which is kind of the point of this discussion. But my advice is like, make sure you nail the basics. Just get the obvious stuff done and you're already doing better than most.
Steve_Edwards:
Sure, for sure. So, you know, other than that, there was nothing about the interviews that really stood out to me too much. Although there is one I remember. So this is in the era of, you know, a lot of people working remotely for the first time. Just, you know, maybe they, especially there's one company I interviewed with and that was based in San Francisco that I recall. But you had a lot of people working from home and didn't have all their spaces set up. Like they normally would. I'm fortunate in that, you know, I started working remotely in 2009 and the house that I have We specifically went looking for something with an office a separate office at the time because when I first started remote working remotely I had a little 1200 square foot ranch house and I had two kids that were aged like 10 and they were 10 and 7 at the time and My desk was in the middle of our kitchen slash dining room And so when they were at school, it wasn't so bad. But during the summer in everybody's home, it was just brutal trying to work in the middle of all the chaos. And we're like, okay, we need a bigger house. And so, you know, now I have my own office here and from a isolation standpoint, I can, you know, be up here by myself. Although it doesn't always stop everybody from barging in, but it's better. All this to say that there was one person I interviewed with who was a manager. for logging. I think I did some sort of logging like log rocket type of company. And he was interviewed me via zoom in his pajamas sitting in his bed. You know, so I was like, okay, maybe you're not used to this or not. Didn't strike me as the most professional thing. you know, I at least made sure to get out of my pajamas when I put something on the upper half of me shall we say. But that one made me laugh more than anything. I still remember that and just like, oh okay.
Drew_Baker:
Yeah, that's, I mean, what you're hitting on there is a good thing to think about when you're going to this process. Like you're also as a, as a prospective candidate, you're interviewing the company too.
Steve_Edwards:
Right.
Drew_Baker:
So don't think that it's always about like, Oh, I'm trying to impress these guys. Like, are they impressing you? That's
Steve_Edwards:
All right.
Drew_Baker:
a good one. Like if that's what's happening, then what do you think is going to be like working for those guys? And maybe you're into that. Maybe you're like, Oh, this is casual. I'm just going to be easy.
Steve_Edwards:
Right.
Drew_Baker:
But yeah, I would like to think that you're giving off a bit more of a professional vibe than that.
Steve_Edwards:
So anyway, now in terms of where I looked for jobs, I did a lot, I'm trying to think back, I did a lot on LinkedIn and I know I got a lot of job postings off of LinkedIn. And indeed, I know I looked for a lot like indeed in some of your bigger sites, there's another one, a zip recruiter, I think. And what's interesting from having posted, you know, or applied for jobs on there is years later I'm still getting email or job requests, hey we need this position filled, are you interested? From those times that I'm constantly saying, okay, unsubscribe me from your list, unsubscribe me from list. And what's even funnier is you can tell that they've got to be automated bots because I'm getting you know, job solicitations for things like a business analyst, which I haven't done since 2000, early 2000s, uh, administrative assistance or, um, some other more physical ones that I'm like, when did I do that? Of course, being the JavaScript developer, you always get the Java developer positions, uh, that they see. So that's sort of funny.
Drew_Baker:
Even I got one from LinkedIn, I think today even, it was like a manager at Apple. And then I read the description and it was to manage one of their stores. Ha ha
Steve_Edwards:
Oh,
Drew_Baker:
ha.
Steve_Edwards:
right. So yeah, I think it got a lot. And now the one that I eventually got, well, I got off of view jobs, uh, which was, uh, where I'm at, at gov tribe. But there, I got a few off of there, I think. But, uh, but yeah, for a lot of LinkedIn, a lot of job boards, you know, and sometimes, you know, personal references, there was a couple I interviewed. where people that I had worked with before had recommended me and said, hey, check this guy out. And for differing reasons, they didn't pan out.
Drew_Baker:
Those ones are the best ones though. Like if you,
Steve_Edwards:
Yeah.
Drew_Baker:
if you can, and that's the advantage you have just being older and knowing more people, you know, over like the privilege that we have being in this industry for a while is like, you know people, but as a sort of starting out, you can't let them help you. But yeah, if you can get an intro, that helps a lot for sure.
Steve_Edwards:
Oh, I had one job. I'll never forget this. So speaking of that, I had, I was referred to this one guy, uh, by, I think it was by Chuck, the guy that, you know, uh, top end devs that manages this podcast and it was a small company base here in the States. And they were like, yeah, we'd like you. Yeah. We want to bring you on except for such, such reasons. Got to be August 1st or something like that. And then at some point I go to check in with them. and find out that, oh, this old, old friend of mine from college that I've wanted to work for a while just came available. And so we're going to give him the position instead. And I was like, oh,
Drew_Baker:
Yeah.
Steve_Edwards:
you got to be kidding. So
Drew_Baker:
I
Steve_Edwards:
this
Drew_Baker:
think,
Steve_Edwards:
took, so yeah, go ahead.
Drew_Baker:
I was gonna say on the other side of that for us hiring people, we've found, we've used ZipRecruiter and I like ZipRecruiter a lot because it does allow you to do the screening questions.
Steve_Edwards:
Hmm.
Drew_Baker:
And we got a lot of candidates there, but, or a lot of candidates from that. Like. a couple of hundred if we were trying to hire for like a mid tier developer, I think we would get 200 applicants through Zippercrooter. So that's good. And then that's not super expensive either. Indeed we've used, and I had like nobody, like it was like six people maybe or something. We've used LinkedIn, we do a lot. That's okay. Depends on the roles actually. Like in certain industries, you seem to get a better engagement with LinkedIn, like tech for sure, but like on the design side, like nobody. We've done, I think that consistently the most interesting and best candidates come from Hacker News, like the who's hiring posts that go out on the first of every month.
Steve_Edwards:
Oh right, I hadn't thought about this.
Drew_Baker:
Those ones. That's a little... I'm giving away a little secret there because that's... those are good. And I'd hate to see those be like compromised with a bunch of like bad postings, but those are good. And...
Steve_Edwards:
So how's that work? I think what it is is they open up a thread and then you can comment and say, oh, okay, we're hiring for such
Drew_Baker:
Yep,
Steve_Edwards:
a thing, right?
Drew_Baker:
yep, yep. And then gets flooded with thousands of people looking for things or, because there's another one that's like, I'm looking for a job. And then there's
Steve_Edwards:
Right.
Drew_Baker:
other one that's like, who's hiring. So the
Steve_Edwards:
Right.
Drew_Baker:
who's hiring on you'll get all kinds of interesting software jobs on there. But it's kind of good because you can just open up all the pages in different tabs and just like command F and look for view jobs, you know? So it's pretty interesting that one. I would say. The thing I've learned from doing that is consistently, you get people applying for jobs that they're not qualified for. Everyone applies above what they're capable for. No one applies below what they're capable of. So if you're hiring like a mid developer, you're gonna get like nine out of 10 junior developers applying for that role. Or like if you're hiring for an advanced, you're gonna get a whole lot of mediums. So it's just that kind of an interesting thing to keep in mind when you're doing those things.
Steve_Edwards:
Yeah, I remember, oh, some of the other things I did was I would, you know, various Slack channels or discord channels for, you know, different communities, like a view community, Laravel, a lot of times, at least on discord and Slack, they will have like a jobs, uh, channel or a jobs room. And you can either post, Hey, I'm looking for somebody or Hey, I'm looking for work. This is what I'm looking for. Uh,
Drew_Baker:
Yeah, those are great too. Yeah, I've hired freelancers through some of those Slack channels before,
Steve_Edwards:
Mm-hmm.
Drew_Baker:
which has always been useful. Like if you've got a specific tech stack you're dealing with for some little job, you can always find those communities and it's great.
Steve_Edwards:
Right.
Drew_Baker:
The best candidates, I would say, like the tippy top ones and the hardest ones to find have been people we've gone out and poached. So. That takes a lot of time and a lot of effort, but how we would do that is we would have somewhat like for on the design side, we did this. We would have one of our designers go through and try and find a whole bunch of successful companies that are in our space, and then find people that work at those companies. that we felt like had a role that was probably, we're trying to like match up, like, oh, who built that website? You know, and we try and find out who did that. And then
Steve_Edwards:
Ha
Drew_Baker:
try and figure,
Steve_Edwards:
ha.
Drew_Baker:
like we'd find out the company because most of the companies will talk about what they did. And then we would try and figure out, all right, who actually had that company worked on it? You know, and we would get a list. And the problem is you have to have... that has to be either, if it's a technical side, that has to be like a technical person that finds that. You can't be like your intern is not gonna be able to figure that out. So we would then generate that list and then we would have one of our salespeople go and target those people and try and find their emails and email them and say, hey, like we saw this thing you did and we really liked you. And would you be interested in talking about changing employers and approach those people? Those are the best people. And, you know, a friend of mine was a recruiter for a media arts lab, which is like Apple's in-house, creative ad agency. And all he did was travel around meeting people, just accumulating a rolodex of people so that whenever Apple needed something, he was like, ah, I met this guy at this thing and he's the perfect dude for it. And that was his whole job. And
Steve_Edwards:
Hmm.
Drew_Baker:
his rule was, we only poach people. It was,
Steve_Edwards:
out.
Drew_Baker:
if you're unemployed, we're not interested. You know, we only want people that are working somewhere else. And that was just like brutal to hear. And then as I've gotten, gotten to the point where I'm running company and I have a whole bunch of employees, I'm scared, scared of those people. Like don't, don't
Steve_Edwards:
Oh,
Drew_Baker:
poach
Steve_Edwards:
right,
Drew_Baker:
my people.
Steve_Edwards:
exactly. Oh, I know, man. I wonder what the logic is for that because I'm thinking, okay, I could be a great developer, it could be unemployed at the moment because of something
Drew_Baker:
Yeah.
Steve_Edwards:
beyond my control. The company went under, they had money issues,
Drew_Baker:
Like
Steve_Edwards:
whatever.
Drew_Baker:
your tech company got bought by viewing air and now you can't
Steve_Edwards:
Yeah,
Drew_Baker:
work there. Yeah, who
Steve_Edwards:
yeah,
Drew_Baker:
knows?
Steve_Edwards:
exactly. So yeah, that seems odd that they would have that. But yeah, I had, so when I was, what am I gonna say, the second, Drupal agency I worked for, this is back around 2010 to 2012. Our boss was very, very, the owner of a company, very temperamental guy. Part of the reason I was not working there much longer, was very, very conscious of that and protective against that. And boy, if anybody tried to swipe one of his developers or something like that, he was on them like sticky on tape. I had that happen to me where the standard case where you've got some sort of small business or somebody that wants a website done and so they come to the agency and the rate is just too expensive for an agency. You need to have such a rate. They can't afford it but then they'll approach the developer on the side and say, hey, I can't afford this but would you want to do this for me on the side?
Drew_Baker:
Yeah.
Steve_Edwards:
I generally wouldn't do that partially because I knew how my boss was. I mean, I can understand the scenario and what they're trying to do. You know, they only have so much money and they're trying to fund somebody to do the work for them. But at one point, my boss threatened somebody so bad that he was like shaking, he threatened to call the cops on him or something like that, all for just approaching me as a developer. And I was like, really? That's a bit over the top.
Drew_Baker:
Yeah, that's a bad attitude.
Steve_Edwards:
Yeah.
Drew_Baker:
I personally take the approach of, you know, you should want to work for Funkhouse, not because I've given you no other option
Steve_Edwards:
Right,
Drew_Baker:
or, you know,
Steve_Edwards:
right.
Drew_Baker:
that's my
Steve_Edwards:
You
Drew_Baker:
approach.
Steve_Edwards:
make it so they don't wanna leave, cause otherwise you're always protecting against themselves, you know?
Drew_Baker:
Yeah,
Steve_Edwards:
So
Drew_Baker:
you
Steve_Edwards:
that's.
Drew_Baker:
can't worry about that stuff. You just make it a good place to work and that's the best you can do. I mean, all this non-competes and all that kind of stuff. And I just think it's a little bit, it's a little bit the wrong incentives. But an interesting one that's kind of related and we've dealt with is clients poaching employees like you were talking about,
Steve_Edwards:
Yeah,
Drew_Baker:
not like on
Steve_Edwards:
right.
Drew_Baker:
a moonlighting, like freelance basis on a like, hey. this person quit and now goes work for you.
Steve_Edwards:
Mm-hmm.
Drew_Baker:
That one is a dangerous one and you can't do a whole lot about it. And I think there's a little bit of it's built into our industry, especially on these like long-term jobs. Like there's a very common in the agency world to be like, ah. Like I know an agency that does a lot of stuff for Walmart and they've got three agency employees that are based out of the Walmart headquarters in like Wisconsin or wherever it is, you know.
Steve_Edwards:
Well, they're
Drew_Baker:
Like,
Steve_Edwards:
Arkansas's and Arkansas or...
Drew_Baker:
yeah, I don't know, wherever it is, not
Steve_Edwards:
Yeah.
Drew_Baker:
California.
Steve_Edwards:
Right.
Drew_Baker:
But they're a California based agency and they've got employees that live in the Walmart office, you know, and it's like, it's going to be pretty hard to like not have that person just work at Walmart one day. If they like working there, you know, so there's not, sometimes you can't do much about it, but we've definitely had some awkward conversations with clients being like, Hey, we know you just did this. Like it's going to make it tricky for us to continue working for us when you're just like raiding our people.
Steve_Edwards:
Right.
Drew_Baker:
Those you can kind of protect against contractually and stuff as well, like where you can make it like, you know, I think what we ended up doing was building into our like contracts with our clients was if you poach one of our employees or they come work for you within a certain window, you owe us a recruiting fee. So.
Steve_Edwards:
Oh dude, let me taste, oh. I won't get into the details of this story, but I had that happen to me where I'd left somewhere, it was by mutual agreement, and it wasn't like I had been poached. I knew I was leaving here, and I had done a bunch of work for this client, I'd loved them, had been a fan of them for a while, and I contacted them and said, hey, would you be interested in having me come on board? And they were like, oh yes, and they had to up their offer to get me, you know, to match salary and stuff like that. And you talk about one of these little contracts with non-competes, my old boss just flipped a lid and it was a whole big mess. I'll never forget it. I'll have to tell you off air about all the details but yeah that can get quite quite hairy for sure. So...
Drew_Baker:
Um, yeah, I, I, I've definitely handled some of those things. I, in hindsight, I wish I'd done them better. Not, not like people leaving, but like for being poached or anything like that, more just like people quitting after a few months or like quitting to start a competitor against us, you know, uh,
Steve_Edwards:
Oh yeah,
Drew_Baker:
and
Steve_Edwards:
oh that's brutal.
Drew_Baker:
that's a, it's brutal. It's hard to, it's hard to like. We've had people that we've relocated to California and six months later they quit to try and team up and start with some friends and start a competitor against us. Those sorts of stories. And it's hard to, I don't think that we've ever been mean or threatening or we've never done anything like that, but definitely been like, okay, well, today's your last day. Get your stuff and leave. And
Steve_Edwards:
Oh yeah, oh for sure.
Drew_Baker:
then being like. shocked at the treatment and we're being like, well, like you're competing against us now. Like we're not going to have you continue to work here while you're starting a competitor. So, you know, but then there's
Steve_Edwards:
Right.
Drew_Baker:
people that have, you know, I'm in a really awkward position in it. I have an identical twin brother who is a freelance designer and web developer. and he kind of does the same sort of he does like cheap versions of what we do and he'll
Steve_Edwards:
Ha!
Drew_Baker:
he'll he'll admit that you know you get what you pay for you know they're not he's definitely not as he's he's very talented but he's he's made more of a designer than he is a developer and but you know we have a good relationship with brothers that helps. But also like he works for us sometimes and kind of gets the position that he's in and we've send leads to him. And it kind of helps us sometimes because we are, you know, clients come to us, they can't afford us, like you said, and it's nice for us to be able to like, hey, he's someone that we trust and is good, you know, that is. an option for those clients. So you can leave in a company and have a good relationship. You know, I've certainly got a lot of old employees that work for me in a freelance capacity. So I think it's important to keep good relationships with people that leave, because you never know when that person might be able to help you in some way. So, you know, I think when someone from advice from an employer for employees leaving. it is much better to have that person leave on good terms than to be an asshole. So
Steve_Edwards:
Yes.
Drew_Baker:
I think, you know, think of it like that way, especially what are some little pro tip here. When it comes to like maintaining old websites or old projects, like we have projects, I was working on one the other day from 2016. The best person to work on that is the guy who built it who probably doesn't work for you anymore. But. Would you be able to pay him 100 bucks an hour to fix it, as
Steve_Edwards:
Right.
Drew_Baker:
like a freelance gig? Probably, cause that's easy money for that guy or girl. So that's a good little tip I think is like, you can backfill the maintenance stuff with the people that used to do it. So keep a good relationship, don't be an asshole. So,
Steve_Edwards:
Yeah, yeah, that's for sure. When I was at a very large corporation here a few years ago and we were rebuilding this ancient site that was like, we're doing it in Drupal and Apache Solar and some other stuff, but the original stuff we were placing was early 2000s and part of the reason that the project had urgency is that Microsoft was sunsetting support on a lot of these products because they were so old. you know, like SQL Server 2000 and CMS 2000, I think, is what it's called. Just, and a lot of it was written in like classic first generation ASP, you know, not ASP.NET, just classic ASP. And so I was tasked with having to interpret what the heck this code was doing, where it's getting the data in the database, and on and on. And my boss said, would it help if we got the original developers in here? So... These guys, it had been so long these guys had retired. And, you know, older guys in their 60s or something, but we brought them in so they could look at the code. And some of the cases they're going, I don't remember what the heck I was doing here. But other cases they were able to provide a little information. So it was, yeah, it was helpful for what I needed to do for sure.
Drew_Baker:
Earlier, Steve, you mentioned recruiters and I'm curious what your involvement with recruiters has been, because I've got some takes on that for sure.
Steve_Edwards:
So on the hiring side, when I got my first full-time view job back in 2019, it was through a recruiter and he had actually poached me from where I was. He had contacted me on LinkedIn and the, what did they say? He says, well, we're looking for this and this. We want experience with Java and view. And I don't remember the descriptions, but I, I replied and I said, well, I was, cause I was always getting. you know, messages and I just happened to reply and said, well, I really don't know Java. I'm not sure if that's a killer. He said, no, that's really for what you're gonna be doing. It's really not an issue. It's just one of those things they throw in. And I ended up interviewing and taking that job. And then I was there like exactly a year before we all got laid off. And during this time, I had five to six other recruiters engaged, I think, but I rarely ever heard from any of them. And I think part of it was there weren't a lot of view developer type jobs out there. There were some JavaScript ones. And I actually interviewed some that were like React. And I said, hey, I'll learn React. I don't have a problem with it. And they decided that no, they wanted somebody that was a little more up to speed on React, which was fine. But my experience has been. at least from my contact on that side of things was, yeah, they were great people and, you know, they'd ask me questions and sometimes they'd throw things my way.
Drew_Baker:
Were you also
Steve_Edwards:
But
Drew_Baker:
looking for jobs on your own or you just like, I've got a recruiter, I'm just sitting
Steve_Edwards:
Oh,
Drew_Baker:
back and.
Steve_Edwards:
oh, I was pounding the pavement like, you know, the not, not the literal pavement, the way it used to be, you know, we had to go around and classified newspaper and, you know, get jobs in the classified ads and go turn in resumes. Uh, but no, I, yeah, I pro I got more from my own work than I ever did from recruiter that one I did, but the job that I have now, I got through my own. It had nothing to do with the recruiter. So I've had sort of a mixed bag of success, shall we say. But again, at the time, looking at the circumstances and the job market at the time, it was sort of understandable that it didn't have a lot coming my way. You know, it's funny when you see the same recruiter, different recruiters propose the same position to you too.
Drew_Baker:
Yeah.
Steve_Edwards:
Which happens for sure. But,
Drew_Baker:
It's
Steve_Edwards:
you know, that was my experience.
Drew_Baker:
on our side of it, we don't use recruiters. Oh, we've used them a few times in certain roles. Mostly we have a development office in Croatia and we've used recruiters there because we don't know as many people there obviously, but in Los Angeles. So just so people know, the way the recruiters work from the company's point of view is that we have to pay. it's negotiable, but it's somewhere between 15 and 20% of the yearly salary for that person. So if you're hiring someone at 100 grand, you're gonna have to pay the recruiter 15 grand to 20 grand the day you sort of sign them to a long-term deal. And some of them will have like a 90-day clause, like if that person quits within 90 days, that you don't
Steve_Edwards:
Right.
Drew_Baker:
have to pay them, something like that.
Steve_Edwards:
Right.
Drew_Baker:
But it's a big chunk of money. And so when you get into like senior roles in tech, where like in California, that can be 180, 200 grand salaries more. even, it's a big chunk of change that you have to pay. And so we, like we're a small company, we just can't afford it. So if you're working with a recruiter, just keep that in mind, but that you're only gonna get shown jobs that can afford it. So you're going to probably be sort of pricing yourself out of small, small companies by doing that. You'll be looking to be working at big companies if you do that, which... Maybe great, that means they've got money and they can afford
Steve_Edwards:
Mm-hmm.
Drew_Baker:
it and all those things. But certain things are gonna come along without certain cultures, certain kind of work you'll be doing, stuff like that. So just keep that in mind when you're working with a recruiter. But it can also get you in some pretty good doors, especially big tech companies.
Steve_Edwards:
The last thing I want to talk about from the hiring side is just consistency and being persistent. It's so demoralizing when you've been used to not having to work incredibly hard to find positions just because you were in a job market that had a lot of demand for your skills to going where you can't even get responses from. 80 to 90% of the people you send resumes to. You know, you see, oh, I'd be great for this. I fit here because of this and this experience. I applied for one at a very well-known tech company for a dev rel type position. And I've done over my course of my career, I've done lots of training, lots, I've done speaking, I've done lots of written communication and stuff. So I thought I had a pretty good background for it. And the person running the dev rels at the time, a very well-known person in the JavaScript community who's jumped around to a few different companies. But I never even got a sniff. And I was recommended by another very prominent member or given the information by another prominent. So I was sort of really bummed about that because I thought it'd be great. But my point is, you know, you got to keep knocking. You know, I guess it depends on how bad you need or want a job. And in my case, with a family to support. I had to find the jobs. And now I was doing this on top of doing, I still had bills to pay, I still had a family. And so I was doing contracting work. So I'd be contracting like full time during the day and then having to pound the pavement, the figurative pavement outside of that, just to find a job. But it took me, what did I say, six months? Six months or so to finally get this job. And this one I got through a posting on Viewjobs, which was interesting. Now what was interesting about this one is that, at the time, if you looked at developers react far in the way, the highest in demand skill, if you wanted to react position, they were a dime a dozen. They were out there all available in view, not so much. And so when I interviewed with my bosses, Jay and Nate, one of the things they told me was that I was, they had interviewed a bunch of people, but I was the first one to come along that really had view experience. And almost everybody else was, a React developer who'd been playing around with Vue because they liked it but hadn't done anything on their own yet. So I was fortunate to find this and I actually had to Vue chops was the way they put it. And then I started here.
Drew_Baker:
Yeah, that's interesting. I think the consistency thing is you just reminding me, it's like we have a job posting out right now, Funkhouse does for a mid tier developer. And probably I... I haven't even looked at any of the applicants and it's been up for like a week and a half. Just because I got dragged into rescuing a whole bunch of client projects and visa renewal came up and I had to jump on it. Just stuff gets in the way, especially small businesses. So it's not, the point of that is like, not that I'm terrible at my job, is that don't take it personally. It might
Steve_Edwards:
Yeah.
Drew_Baker:
not even be that they even looked at your. at
Steve_Edwards:
Right.
Drew_Baker:
your application or that something came along or who knows what, you know. So it's not about you necessarily, it's just about how it works. And especially in the remote world, I'm curious, Steve, we should talk about like what goes into a good resume and I'm curious what
Steve_Edwards:
Oh,
Drew_Baker:
yours,
Steve_Edwards:
well yeah, we'll
Drew_Baker:
what
Steve_Edwards:
get
Drew_Baker:
your,
Steve_Edwards:
there,
Drew_Baker:
yeah.
Steve_Edwards:
yes.
Drew_Baker:
But in the remote sort of world that we've all moved into now, the amount of applicants they get too can be just insane. It could
Steve_Edwards:
Yes.
Drew_Baker:
be thousands of people applied. Even if we put a job posting out that's like must be based on certain, we're not gonna say California anymore because it's more gonna be like time-based, but you must be on this time zone or something like that. You're still gonna get 400 developers apply from India or
Steve_Edwards:
Yes,
Drew_Baker:
different parts of the world. that you're just
Steve_Edwards:
so
Drew_Baker:
like
Steve_Edwards:
true.
Drew_Baker:
not even close to the same time zone, you know, or even I would say even like kind of worse and it's more annoying is like dev shops applying for a
Steve_Edwards:
Ugh.
Drew_Baker:
role,
Steve_Edwards:
Ha ha ha.
Drew_Baker:
you know, like please dev shops out there, please stop doing that.
Steve_Edwards:
Yes.
Drew_Baker:
You know, I'm looking to hire a person, not 10 people that don't even really work for me.
Steve_Edwards:
Alright. Right.
Drew_Baker:
So
Steve_Edwards:
Alright.
Drew_Baker:
yeah, so there's a lot that goes into it. That's not really about you when you're applying for those things.
Steve_Edwards:
Right. You know, you see a lot of posts, I see blog posts, I see emails about how for an HR person, you know, if they're just getting deluded, you know, a lot of times they'll have some sort of automated system that's weeding resumes out or, you know, picking the ones that they want. And so you'll see a lot of tips on how to write a resume with, you know, so that'll get picked up by these bots and that. As someone who reviewed resumes individually, it just drove me nuts. You could tell a keyword resume that was written just for the purpose of getting past those types of filters.
Drew_Baker:
Let's talk about resumes. I've got some strong
Steve_Edwards:
Yeah.
Drew_Baker:
opinions on these.
Steve_Edwards:
So when I, now when I started hiring, this is last November, uh, we were hiring, we had initially wanted one and then we got approved for about three positions or we wanted a view and Laravel developer just because that's what we do every day. Um, you know, true full stack, both front end and back end and any given ticket I'm working on both sides. Uh, of the app of our front end application and, uh, you know, some Mongo throwing in there as well. But so we want, you know, we word up a pretty good description. And, you know, you mentioned earlier about job requirements, about people apply above what they can do. And that's typical. I would do the same thing. You know, I think from a, most employer know that, you know, when you fill out job requirements, generally you're going to have your must haves and your nice to haves. And you know that you're, it's going to be hard. I think the rule I've heard is if you can find somebody that matches everything you've described, you usually can't afford them. And so, you know, as someone looking, I know that I'm going to get people that don't have everything, but I'm sort of looking for certain things, right? And so we put it out there. We happen to use ADP as a platform. And so our base job application was there. But we would put links to it elsewhere and say, okay, here's the job like on Viewjobs. I know I put one out on like a Valerie Karpov, the Mongoose maintainer. Uh, he has a mastering JS. He has a job support to put something there. Um, and like view jobs. And then I would go into a lot of these communities, Laravel and view and, and Nuxt and change log at, you know, all these different places and say, Hey, I got a job posting here and I was getting some applicants. And then I asked our HR, Hey, can you put it on? Indeed. Whew. I got flooded. And what was interesting was what you just mentioned about people outside of your time zone or continent. We had our requirement for location just to be located in the U.S. Anywhere from West, you know, West Coast, East Coast didn't matter. We just wanted you in the U.S. But we got so many people applying from, you know, in, you know, the Middle East or, you know, Asia, you know, India, like you mentioned, to get a lot from Africa. and various places and we put in some filtering in the job application, are you registered to work in the US? Are you physically located in the US and so on? And that would filter some of them. And I knew how many I'd get because they would submit something on ADP and I would get a notification email, but then I'd go and look and they weren't actually there in the queue and that was because they'd been filtered out because they weren't eligible. So indeed it was where I got a lot. And in the end, and then we also used a recruiter. Now this is what's interesting. put out a post about this. We initially had one recruiter, and the first guy ghosted us. We actually had a recruiter ghost us. He was giving us things, and all of a sudden we couldn't get ahold of him. I don't know if we ever found out what happened to him, but he just quit answering, and we didn't know if he got fired or something, but we never got a communication. Hey, this guy's not working for us anymore. Here's a new guy. So we went back to that agency and said, hey, we haven't heard from this guy, you got somebody else. And so they gave us a new guy and he would bring me positions. And he gave us a few candidates and I'd go through the interview process and stuff, but never really got any really good ones. And then another department within our company, another division, they had a recruiter, they said, oh, this gal's awesome, use her. So I got all the approvals and got a contract signed and went through her. which we eventually found went through her and she was really good. She was one that had worked in HR companies for 15 years or something like that. So she sort of knew both sides of it. And she gave me some really good ones. And the nice thing about the recruiters is that you can tell them, I actually gave them some screening questions at one point because they were sending me people that really didn't, didn't have some of the basic skills and I finally said, hey, can you just ask them some of these questions and if they can't answer them, then I don't wanna talk to them. And so that was sort of how we did some of the screening questions that aren't in. Now the way we did the process was we would do, if I got an interview, say I got somebody that I liked on Indeed or a recruiter gave me somebody that, hey, that I would like, and I would have an interview with them, generally took about an hour, and I would try to feel them out just to get a, That's not literally. You know, just to get an idea of their skills, their background, why were they looking for a change? So
Drew_Baker:
You would
Steve_Edwards:
on.
Drew_Baker:
just coordinate that via email, like, hey, on Tuesday
Steve_Edwards:
Yeah,
Drew_Baker:
at 11 o'clock,
Steve_Edwards:
yeah,
Drew_Baker:
let's...
Steve_Edwards:
I got like a staple in the, hey, we saw your resume, we'd like to talk to you about this position, what's your availability? And we'd set up a time and do it over zoom. And so I had a list of technical questions, um, that I would ask them. And very basic stuff, some view specific, some Laravel stuff, like what are the main three parts of a view single file component? Um, you know, in Laravel, what is, uh, you know, questions about things like controllers and resources and how you define a route. Some just super high level basic stuff that anybody who's saying, yeah, this is what I can do, could answer. And then if I thought, yeah, these were good, we'd like to send them down the line, keep going. So we had a code test. Now, the way
Drew_Baker:
So
Steve_Edwards:
we
Drew_Baker:
you,
Steve_Edwards:
did
Drew_Baker:
wait,
Steve_Edwards:
it.
Drew_Baker:
so Steve, you would do like a one hour kind of meeting and just shoot the shit kind of and get an idea
Steve_Edwards:
Yeah,
Drew_Baker:
of what they could do.
Steve_Edwards:
yeah,
Drew_Baker:
And just yourself one-on-one
Steve_Edwards:
yep, just me.
Drew_Baker:
and then
Steve_Edwards:
I was
Drew_Baker:
go
Steve_Edwards:
the,
Drew_Baker:
into a coding test.
Steve_Edwards:
yeah. Now the coding test, we used a platform. And I went back and forth with my boss on this just because of my past experience with the coding test and he really wanted to do it and it's called, oh my gosh, I can't believe I'm forgetting the name of it. I ingrained in my brain for so long. It's like LeetCode type of application. where they have a whole pool of questions that you can choose from and create your own custom tests. Test Dome, that's what it is, it's called Test Dome. And they're okay, like I said, I wasn't a real big fan, but my boss really wanted to do it. And so what we did was we had six questions, two plain JavaScript, two Laravel, and two Vue specific. And they're pretty basic things, like changing the color on a link dynamically. you know, writing a class that does certain things and so on. And so then we set a passing score of 50%. And so if they could do this test and get at least 50%, okay, they're good. And we'd go back and look at it and see what they did or didn't do. And if that was good, then we would do a second interview with myself and my boss, Jay. And in the second interview, he would do most of the talking because I had already been talking the first time. And he would get into some more. lower level stuff on Laravel side and on the view side with how would they do things. Just basically engaging their familiarity with the tool. And that filtered out. A lot of times the first interview I'd filter people out, the code test would filter out a bunch. And then we'd get some filtered out in the second interview too. And so we ended up getting, after a few months we ended up getting two. Two really, really good guys, really good people that we really like and have had for a few months now. But some of the stories, some of the things that ran into the process are just hysterical. Make me laugh. We had, the first interesting one though, talking about ghosting, was we had this guy that we really liked. He was super friendly, he was ex-military. Had a lot of good, seemed to have a lot of good coding experience. And so we got to that we're all ready to make this guy an offer. And all we want to do is check some references. So he gives us some references, but they're from like way back, like five, six years ago, and he's had two or three jobs since this time, which isn't, you know, atypical from a developer standpoint. And I said, Hey, these, these, these references were good, but we'd like to get a couple more recent. Do you have anybody a little more recent, maybe from these positions? Nothing. He completely dropped us, completely ghosted us after that. And we were like, okay, you know, we figured maybe there was something in his more recent past he didn't want us to know about, or, you know, been fired or something. God, who knows? I didn't know, but that, so between the recruiter and the recruitee, we had two people ghost us. We had another guy that we got into the second interview, and he was, he was Indian, I'm pretty sure, just from his accent. parents, or you know, in Asia. And we're going through, and so he passed the code test, and he did pretty well. And my boss tends to be a lot more skeptical than I am. And so he's looking through the code test, and one of the things you can see is how long it took him to answer each question. It was designed, it should have taken, I think there was a cap of like two hours or something like that, and a lot of people didn't even need all of that. And on one of the questions, it took If you look from start to finish, it was like a minute or two minutes. And I hadn't noticed that. And, and he's like, do you see how long it took him to do this? Now, if he had typed that out by himself, he could not have done it in that amount of time with the amount of code that was involved and what was actually there as the answer. And so he starts Googling around and sure enough, he finds a gist on GitHub with the answer for this question. So basically he had copy pasted it. So then. Okay, so then we're talking to him and and we've gone through all the code stuff and he's like, yeah I can do everything you need. Yeah, whatever and my boss starts asking about where he lives and he supposedly lived in New Jersey I think was the address he'd given us. So you live here. Yeah. Yeah live here And he'd asked him a couple more questions all sudden he dropped and never came back never heard from him again so we figured that the the game was up and he was trying to you know, pull one over on us, for sure. Had another guy,
Drew_Baker:
I've
Steve_Edwards:
had another
Drew_Baker:
got
Steve_Edwards:
guy
Drew_Baker:
a...
Steve_Edwards:
that I interviewed where through the first interview where I just, I was like, he was very, how do you say, cocky, really arrogant. And I was like, after about five minutes, I was like, okay, no, sorry, this guy is not coming across good at all. And I'm not even gonna spend any more time on it. And I went through a few more questions, you know, just to be polite, and said, thank, we'll let you know. But. You know, I could tell within about two minutes,
Drew_Baker:
And then
Steve_Edwards:
this
Drew_Baker:
do
Steve_Edwards:
guy
Drew_Baker:
you send
Steve_Edwards:
was.
Drew_Baker:
an email to the people or do you let the people know that like, hey, we're not gonna be moving forward with you?
Steve_Edwards:
Yes, I do. I'm just, that's one of the things that will drive me nuts is somebody not communicating or letting me know, hey, what's going on, what's going on? So I always let people know, hey, we decided to move forward in a different direction or however you want to wordsmith it. But yeah, I will always communicate because to me, that's one of the items on my list of things not to do when you're hiring is to not communicate because it's just unprofessional. We had one guy that I was interviewing. super nice guy, had some good skills, it seemed like. And the call got dropped in the middle of it. And this is, you know, we're doing it over Zoom. And he emailed them later and he's like, oh, sorry, there are some guys doing some construction work in my neighborhood and they cut a fiber line into my neighborhood. Oh, okay, well, you want to set up a second time? Yeah, sure, so we set up a time. He doesn't show up. And I emailed him like, dude, what's up? He says, yeah, I'm still interested. I was like, forget it at this point, if you're not. you know, gonna show up, you're not interested, then I'm not gonna waste time on you. But then one of the best ones, the last story I got was, interview the guy, like them, send them the code test, and the way it works is you go and add them on TestDome and it sends them an email, says here's a link to take the test, you have so many days to get it done. And then TestDome will send you an email after a certain time that says, hey, he has or hasn't taken the test yet. And so this guy hadn't taken the test. And so I followed up with him and he wrote back and I wish I'd saved the email. But he basically said, Hey, I want you to know that Jesus is Lord and he's going to come back again soon and something else. And I said, okay. Uh, I'm not sure what that is to the job, but thank you for, for sharing. You know, not that I disagree with you or anything. I just don't understand why that was relevant to, you know, here. And I'm not going to take this code test for. some reason. Okay, that goes up on my list of really weird responses to interviews. So, so yeah, the guys that we did hire, interestingly enough, were both foreign nationals that live here in the States. But, and it's been fun because I get to practice some of my foreign language skills with them. But both really great guys, and one was off Indeed, and one was from a Now it was interesting enough that the one off Indeed, you know I just had a ton of applicants through there and I would go through and filter them out and mark them as yeah I want to interview you, no I don't, you know for whatever reason. And I actually had to be in my second tier. So I had like a first, I sort of had a group of first year people, yeah these are the ones that I like the most. And then I had a second tier group of, yeah I'll look at these if none of the first ones work out. I eventually got to this guy. And once I interviewed him and talked to him, I was like, oh yeah, I really like him. And once my boss interviewed him, he was like, yeah, this guy's good. Yeah, we really like him and we ended up hiring him. But it was funny that he wasn't in my top tier list, but he ended up being one of the best candidates that we had for sure.
Drew_Baker:
That's... it's interesting that because we... I've had a... I had a guy that... like the last... one of the last guys we had actually... he... got five out of five on the multiple choice questions. And so it made me think like, do we even need to do the rest of it? Or do we just, whoever got five out of five, just like focus on those guys. It's just interesting to think about, like Malcolm Gladwell did that great podcast on revisionist history, just about hiring and versus the LSATs, I think. If you're interested in this kind of stuff, I really recommend listening to it, it's great. And his whole sort of takeaway is like, you can't predict the future. There's no correlation between these things. So just pick someone. Which is kind of interesting because I've definitely had the best programmers that have ever worked for me. One guy just walked in the front door of our office and was like, I've been following you guys for a long time. I love the work. I'm a junior, but I just sort of had the right attitude. and he worked for us for a long time and grew into like a phenomenal developer. And then another guy was out of Ithaca College and took classes at Cornell and was like computer science and machine learning. It was like textbook like this guy's got the right background for he's gonna be good. And so it can come from anywhere really. So the point there is like, yeah, it can be the first year, it can be the second year, it can be the guy that walked off the street. It's kind of hard to know.
Steve_Edwards:
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, generally, now one of the things that we did was we put weight on internal recommendations. So if like one of our good people had somebody, hey, I think this guy might be good, we would give them a shot. And we actually had one come through that way as a young guy. He didn't have any view experience or Laravel. I think he had like a React and Node background, if I remember correctly. Super nice guy, willing to learn, you know, had nothing against him at all. And we actually went back to him because we hadn't had anybody in a while. And we were like, hey, he's a known quantity. So let's, you know, we'll bring him along, you know, as a junior and it can help train him up that way. Now it didn't work out. Part of the reason was his communication, but he was in Europe for like the whole summer, I think it was in Romania or somewhere around there. Um, and then it never got back to me when he got back, but we would have given weight to a known quantity with lesser experience
Drew_Baker:
Yeah.
Steve_Edwards:
for sure.
Drew_Baker:
So we, our process is sort of similar. It's a little different. You know, we put together a job posting and my business partner, Nick, is really good at company culture stuff. And so our job postings, I think have a lot about that. And we try and kind of it. pre-screen a little bit in the job posting and hope that people read it.
Steve_Edwards:
Mm-hmm.
Drew_Baker:
Cover letters, you know, I know you hate writing, they make a big difference for sure.
Steve_Edwards:
Mm-hmm.
Drew_Baker:
Like reading a good cover letter. Like if you write a... One, if you just write a cover letter that is somewhat customized to the job posting in our company, you'll get looked at, definitely,
Steve_Edwards:
Mm-hmm.
Drew_Baker:
because most people don't. So
Steve_Edwards:
Mm-hmm.
Drew_Baker:
you'll get looked at. And then when I look at resumes, I'm looking for relevant work experience. And I'm gonna be real skeptical if your resume has, like you said, 50 keywords. Like the classic, I swear what's going on, there must be some boot camps out there that like give people this resume template because you see it all the time. And here's like the biggest red flag. you know, top of the resume will be like skills and the skills will be like view, react, svelte, no JS, uh, postgres. Like it'll just be like the world's best programmer. And you're like, okay, so I know what you've done is you went to a bootcamp and you built a website that use like 10 of these things and your, your knowledge is like one centimeter deep on all of these things.
Steve_Edwards:
Jack
Drew_Baker:
You're,
Steve_Edwards:
of all trades, master of none.
Drew_Baker:
not even, I mean, Not even a jack of all trades, like just a, I've, I've, you know, seen the sticker or whatever. It's just like the worst. Anyway, so those kinds of things are like pointless. Do not do that. Definitely be specific. Like I'm really good at this. These four things, you know, these three things. And then don't even mention the other ones. Like you're applying for a view job. Don't put jQuery on your resume. Like it's just not relevant. And it makes me sort of question like, wait, what are you even applying for here? Education, I think everyone's got like a different opinion on this, but not important, I don't think. Like, you know, I'm not looking to see what you went to college for really. And if you, I would say even if you went to college for something not tech related, it can also be a negative. You know, like if your college is like, I was, when I studied music, like I've got three dudes that work for me that have come out of the music industry. But I would see that as a negative a little bit of like, okay, especially if it's like a junior job, it's like, oh, I don't know if this guy even really knows what he wants to do, you know? So. Maybe don't mention that you went to school and you have a bachelor's degree or something, but don't get hung up on like all of your music achievements. It doesn't think it makes a difference. But your experience totally. And what I, like if you, again, if you're applying for a junior role and you don't have any experience because you're new to this, well then what I wanna see is like. Stack Overflow profile, like have you, like it's free and easy for you to go on Stack Overflow and answer a bunch of questions. Like do that. What's your GitHub profile? And don't just go on there and like clone a whole bunch of other repos and like have them living in there. Like write some stuff, deploy some code, show me that you actually can get something up on Netlify or Vercel or something like that. Like these are easy things that you can do. Not just like a generic to-do app, just. Build something, you know, have a code that I can see. That would help a lot too. And then references, absolutely. But those don't come into a later, like good references don't really like get your resume looked at. That just like will help seal the deal if we like you.
Steve_Edwards:
Oh yeah, I would never understand why people would put them on a resume, you know,
Drew_Baker:
Yeah.
Steve_Edwards:
because I mean, the point of the resume isn't to get to the job, it's to get you the interview, right?
Drew_Baker:
Exactly.
Steve_Edwards:
It's basically to get you to help make you stand out from everybody else that's applying.
Drew_Baker:
I saw
Steve_Edwards:
And
Drew_Baker:
great,
Steve_Edwards:
so...
Drew_Baker:
great advice on, I think it was on Hacker News about that, about like, don't lead with your education. Like there's this
Steve_Edwards:
Yes.
Drew_Baker:
tendency to be like, I'm just going to go chronological, you know, like I did this, then I did this, you know, and then like your experience, you know, make sure that like the most recent experiences at the top of the page, because that's really what people are going to be looking for. Like skills, like what can you do? What code have you written? Where have you worked? What projects have you done? education is lost. Like there's an argument to be made that like don't even put, don't put years on your resume. Like, you know, I studied this in this course in 2001 because it kind of, it can date you, which is like not helping you or, and also serves no, don't give people reasons to kind of like, you know, discriminate against you, I guess. Like there's no reason, right? So that's some resume stuff. So then we would filter through the resumes and a lot of the times it'll be me doing it because I think you really want, like we're hiring technical roles, you have a technical person read it. So, you know, if you're listening to this podcast, like Steve knows what he's doing, I know what I'm doing, we're reading your resume. So you can't really like cheat, like you can't say, like I said, if you say like, I'm an expert at View, Reacts, Felt and JQuery, we're gonna know like, oh, that's a little bit strange, you know, having said all that. at J.Crew as well. So like, but anyway, then we, what I would do, and this is a little bit different and our recruiter once was horrified that I told him that I do this. I will just call you out of the blue. I will just be like, I like this person and I'm just, your phone number's on your resume. I'm just going to call you and see how you respond. Like what happens? Do you answer the phone? If you answer the phone, are you polite? Are you like, thrown off guard and I'm like, hi, it's Drew from Funk House. Do you apply for a job here? I just wanted to have a quick chat about what it is you're doing. And that call is gonna go for like 10 minutes. And it's really just gonna be me, how do you communicate? Are you good if you caught off guard? Like, it's just more about like, what do you like as a person? And I try and like filter it quickly, like. Yeah, so what are you looking for? Like what happened? Why are you available? Like what happened to your old job? What is the work you like to do? What do you like not doing? What's the kind of company you like to work for? These kinds of questions, not like, hey, tell me what a directive is in view. It's very like what... what do you like as a person and what are you looking to do? Because one of the things that we're always looking for is like a cultural fit and a personality fit. That's the first thing. After that, then it's like, can you actually do the job? But like, starts with like, am I gonna wanna sit next to this person for eight hours a day? And you know, those are things. So if that little phone call goes well, then I'll generally end that with a like, hey, like, you know, sounds like you'd be a good fit and I think you'd like what we do. I'd like to get you in for a meeting with myself and one of my other partners. And that first meeting would be an hour long meeting. And that would generally be me and another partner at the company, which would be my partner, Nick. And Nick's not technical at all. So he's really going hard on like personality fit and how does this person answer questions? And do they seem to know what they're talking about? You know, that's his kind of, he's more of like the vibes guy. And I'm definitely like, not being like mean, bit of the bad cop of like, cool, great. Can you do this? Tell me about like this. Cause I'm thinking like, if you screw this up, I'm the one who has to like rescue this project or whatever it is. So I'm asking like, tell me about this. And for us, it's weird. The thing that I'm like, I think is a really good barometer of like, is this person gonna be productive for us is CSS. What do you know about CSS? Because that is the thing that most people Like you can be a really good view developer and really never have touched CSS. You know, you could be like, I'm just using bootstrap on everything, you know.
Steve_Edwards:
I resemble that remark.
Drew_Baker:
And that's just specific to our use case. That does not comment on like, you don't know what you're doing. It's just like, we need, we custom CSS all the way on so many things. And it's tough. So a lot of questions around that. And these are just quick, just questions. I'm not having you do any white boarding or anything like that. And if that one hour... meeting goes well and we feel good at the end of it, we'll ask you to do a code test or code challenge. And that won't be like on the spot. I'll say, I'm gonna email it to you. And we would do something, again, I just tried to make it much more a one-to-one of the work that you'll be doing. So it was, and if you're interested, people, you can go on Funkhouse's GitHub repo and you can see this, it's called a technical assessment. And I would have, there's a few different levels on there. We have like a level one and a level two. to for different advanced or junior or mid-tier developer positions. And it would be, it's basically a micro website, build a micro site. So there's a link to fonts and an XD file and can you build this? And the requirements are pretty loose. Like you don't have to do it in Vue. You can do it in just regular HTML, just hard code the whole thing. I'm just looking to see what you know, what you don't know, and your good habits, bad habits, stuff like that. And if the code challenge goes well, and we look at it, like I said before, I'm gonna give some negative feedback I'm gonna give some positive feedback. We're gonna ask you to change some stuff, but actually we don't ask them to like do revisions. I'll say, you know, like, hey, like, did you realize like you could use the spread operator here instead of something that you did with the race? And you see if they change it, you know, if they take some pride to be like, I want to do that the right way, you know. That's a good indication of like, oh, this person actually like has some professional pride, not just like I'm doing the bare minimum to get this job. Cause that's, it's a cliche of like, so why do you wanna work here? You know, and you're like, this is the 10th interview I've had this week. Like I'm not passionate about any of this yet, you know? So I get, like I get it, but at the same time, like I kind of wanna know that you care. Maybe not about this job, but just at least about being good at what you do. I'm a big fan of like, did you do the homework? Have you got some professional pride in this job? Do you wanna be a really, really good programmer? Those are the people I wanna hire. Not like, you know, this just pays the bills and like, I'm just so happy to like clock in and clock out. That's the worst person to hire, I think. But it's, you know, different roles, different companies and things like that, just for us. Yeah, so then if that goes well, then we will... Say, hey, we're really impressed. We want to make you an offer and we'll give you a written. job offer, which is just a one page. Here's the role that we're asking you to do. And here's sort of your key responsibilities that we're gonna judge you against in the future. And here's the salary and compensation and stuff like that. And that's sort of how it goes. And the whole process can take a couple of weeks per person. And we generally will have one, like ideally we have the one person we want, and then maybe like two people that we would fall back on if we couldn't get to a deal first person, that's a good scenario to be in. But when it gets real competitive, you might just have the one person. So Steve, I think maybe a good place to finish is like what happens after that negotiation and I'm curious if you've got any good stories about that, I've got some good ones.
Steve_Edwards:
No, actually I want to go back in some of the, I think you're stealing some of my thunder,
Drew_Baker:
Yeah
Steve_Edwards:
but you know, some of the points you mentioned about the resume and how you present yourself, you mentioned the guy that, you know, lists 20 different areas of, quote unquote, expertise, and I had a guy like that, and he listed, you know, some of the things you'll see on resume is, you know, levels of skill, and then you'll see where they list certain areas like frameworks like, you know, Node, React, View, PHP, CSS, anything they can think, jQuery. And then they'll give themselves a level of expertise. You know, on a one through five, I'm a three, or I'm a five or something like that. Okay, I don't know what that tells me. It tells me what you think about yourself. But I had one guy that listed, it must have been 15 to 20 different areas, and every single area he rated himself an expert. And so at the beginning of the interview, I asked him specifically about that. I said, you list all these things and you claim that you're an expert. How can you be an expert in all of these things? That takes a lot of time. Oh no, I'm really good. I'm an expert in this. And so I said, okay. And so I started going through the view questions and some of the basic view stuff he couldn't answer. And that was one of the things that he was an expert in. And his reasoning was, well, I work in different things and it's been a few months since I worked in view so I can't remember. all that stuff, like, okay. And I don't think he got past the first interview. But to your point, you know, I just wanna reiterate, tailor it to what they need. If I need Vue and Laravel and Mongo, I really don't care if you're good at jQuery or if you're good at Node.js. You know, I use Node.js to start at my web server, you know, for Webpack, that's it. So I don't need somebody that's good at Node and can't do Laravel or Vue. I need somebody that's good at these things and this is why. But, you know, and then like you said, you said about listing things that are way back, you know, I don't really care that if you were in the honor society in high school or, you know, something like that, I want stuff that's gonna tell me, yes, you can do the job that I need you to do, that's it. And if you have all these other things, now to play devil's advocate, what that could mean is that, They're willing to learn new things, and they've tried many things to learn them, which means they're willing to learn for you. So, you know, that's not all a negative, but if I have a big list of competitive things, I'm gonna filter out the people that are gonna be able to come in and hit the ground running best versus somebody that I'm gonna have to train up, you know, and show
Drew_Baker:
On
Steve_Edwards:
how
Drew_Baker:
that
Steve_Edwards:
to do things.
Drew_Baker:
note, if you're present on social media, you should put all your accounts to private while you're looking for a job. Or
Steve_Edwards:
Yes.
Drew_Baker:
unless you're proud of it. Like unless you've... you've put some thought into this and your Instagram profile isn't you on spring break going crazy in Mexico or you posting your thoughts on the last election, one way or the other. It's not going to help you unless you've thought about it or you're... you're fine being judged on that because we have definitely not hired people based on like their Instagram profile, like looking
Steve_Edwards:
Hmm.
Drew_Baker:
at it and being like this person making some judgments on it, you know.
Steve_Edwards:
Yes,
Drew_Baker:
So
Steve_Edwards:
that's
Drew_Baker:
or Twitter
Steve_Edwards:
true.
Drew_Baker:
or whatever it is. So unless
Steve_Edwards:
Right.
Drew_Baker:
you're confident about that, you know, like my Instagram accounts public and I'm Totally fine with that because I know it is and I've thought about it, but a lot of people, especially if you're like applying for a junior role and your last four years have been you in college, you haven't actually thought that much about, oh, what's this gonna look like when I apply for a job? So just keep that in mind.
Steve_Edwards:
Yeah, my Twitter I tend to keep to dad jokes and tech. I will throw in a couple of things here and there once in a while, but yeah, I keep it pretty tame for that reason. Same
Drew_Baker:
The
Steve_Edwards:
with Instagram.
Drew_Baker:
expert thing that you said too, I don't expect people to know everything. Even I don't know everything. I'm sure
Steve_Edwards:
Right.
Drew_Baker:
if I was applying for a new job, I could get asked questions that I wouldn't know for sure. It's more about how you respond to that scenario, and
Steve_Edwards:
Mm-hmm.
Drew_Baker:
saying like, no, well, it's been a while since I've worked and I can't remember. That's a bad answer. The answer is like, well, I don't really know that off the top of my head, but here's how I would solve it. I would look here, this is a really good resource. I've done something kind of similar before with this. Those like, show me how you think, show me how you study, show me how you do your homework. Those are the things that make you an expert developer, is like, you
Steve_Edwards:
Well,
Drew_Baker:
know
Steve_Edwards:
you know,
Drew_Baker:
how
Steve_Edwards:
that
Drew_Baker:
to.
Steve_Edwards:
brings to mind something. The other thing is, you know, a lot of developers, including myself, and so this is one reason I'm sympathetic, are self-taught. They didn't go through a boot camp, even a boot camp, they didn't go through computer science. They learned on their own while they were doing another job. That was how I first got into PHP and MySQL back in the day was side projects and staying up late at night, working on stuff, and that was how I got hired at my very first full-time developer job is because I had Drupal modules, you know, same as WordPress plugins, you know. that they could look at and see. And I actually beat out another guy who ended up getting hired later because of my code and things that I had done. But I made an effort. And I say that because I had one guy who was a young guy and he had some decent development experience, but none of it was review and Laravel and his whole thing was, hey, I wanna learn, I'm willing to learn. And so I asked him, well, what have you done? Have you taken any courses, online courses? There's a plethora of them out there. Have you done any side projects? played with it, have you actually gotten in and gotten your hands dirty so to speak. And he hadn't done anything. And that one came through a recruiter and so I gave the recruiter some feedback to pass on to him that says, you know, if you want to get in and learn something, you need to show that you've made an initial effort to learn it outside of it. You don't have to be an expert, but just at least showing an effort to learn it, if that's what you really want to get into.
Drew_Baker:
Totally.
Steve_Edwards:
You know.
Drew_Baker:
I've interviewed some people that have applied for junior roles that have, you know, like one guy who worked for like... is a different country, but he worked for essentially that country's IRS. And he
Steve_Edwards:
Mm-hmm.
Drew_Baker:
was like, I hate it. I went to school, you know, I went to school for economics and it turns out that I hate working here and I would love to be a programmer like my friend who's a programmer, you know, and it's the same thing to you. It's like, okay, cool. But like I could hire someone that spent four years studying this at school. Or I could hire you who's studied something else in school and has so far done nothing other than looked at his friend that is in tech and makes money. You know,
Steve_Edwards:
Hahaha.
Drew_Baker:
like, so you kind of need to, if you haven't gone to school for programming, actually, I don't think any one that currently is in my engineering team had went to school for CS or anything. So it's like very common, but you need to have, to your point, you need to have put the effort in, you know, show me four years of effort.
Steve_Edwards:
Right, right. So we're going way long here, so let's sort of wrap it up. I'm talking about offers and negotiations, stuff like that. What's your thoughts on negotiating, not only salary?
Drew_Baker:
Yeah, well, first of all, you can negotiate yourself out of the offer.
Steve_Edwards:
Mm-hmm.
Drew_Baker:
And not in a, because they can't afford me, but in because you've, like my business partner Nick tells a great story of a friend of his that like just negotiated so hard that they were like, guy, we don't wanna deal with you. And it wasn't about salary, it was just like, this guy's a pain in the ass, and so be careful, saying that, like be careful. when you push back really hard on these things. Salary absolutely is important. And we are the whole, you know, if I didn't get paid, I wouldn't work here. So like everyone,
Steve_Edwards:
Right.
Drew_Baker:
you know, everyone understands that. Some bosses, especially in like small businesses and stuff, don't get that. And actually, recently in the news, there seems to be a lot of like, oh, we're gonna, I need you to go, I need programmers to be in hardcore mode and put in long hours. You're gonna get paid the same. And by the way, I'm filthy rich. Who wants to do the job? I would definitely have been one of the people that was like, ah, why? But anyway, so yes, salary is important for sure. But you'd be really surprised about how people don't, from my perspective, don't negotiate on anything else. It's just straight up, they're like, I wanna get paid X. And that's it. But everything else is negotiable. Well.
Steve_Edwards:
Like what? Give me an example.
Drew_Baker:
How about instead of paying, like, let's say the job offer is just to make the numbers easy, 100 grand a year.
Steve_Edwards:
Mm-hmm. Right.
Drew_Baker:
Instead of being like, oh, I want to get 120. Well, what about, I'll do it for a hundred, but I want five weeks vacation, you know, or I want to finish early on Fridays, you know, instead, or I'll do it for 110, but I can't start for another month and a half. you know, or whatever, right? Like, there's plenty of those things that you can negotiate on. And now we're in the remote world, it's like, I wanna be remote X amount of time. You know, maybe it's full-time and that doesn't matter, but certain roles will definitely be wanting you in a location or a certain time. Or like, yeah, I'll do this role and I'll do it for, you know, what you're asking for, like 100 grand, but just so you know, I'm gonna be in Europe for three months of the year. and you have to deal with the time zone. And I will do all these things to make that fine. I will work late my time so that it doesn't disrupt you guys, but just so you know. Whatever, there's plenty of things that you can negotiate for. And especially in our remote world now, there's a lot of different ways to play that. So just think about what makes you happy, and it's not necessarily to get paid more and work harder. There's a combination.
Steve_Edwards:
Well, I guess it's going to depend on the size of the company. You know, if you're a smaller agency like yourself, then obviously you've got a lot of more fluctuate. But if you're in a, you know, it could be a huge
Drew_Baker:
Yeah.
Steve_Edwards:
multinational corporation or a bigger company maybe, you know, they've to avoid creating problems, they just have to have a strict set of guidelines. And this is how we do things. You get this much vacation and so on and so forth just to avoid, well, he got to do this. Why can't I do that type of, you know, situation? So it's that's going to be very dependent, you know, in a smaller agency like where you're at, I could see you'd have that flexibility.
Drew_Baker:
Yeah, yeah, totally.
Steve_Edwards:
For
Drew_Baker:
And
Steve_Edwards:
sure.
Drew_Baker:
that's what size company do you not work for? What kind of things are important to you? Those are things to think about. But yeah, just because I'm making Twitter jokes. I did notice that Elon Musk is in a lawsuit in Delaware with Tesla stock owners because he's getting paid the most money ever for a CEO and he didn't even have to commit to doing that job full time.
Steve_Edwards:
Oh.
Drew_Baker:
So everything is negotiable.
Steve_Edwards:
Yes, yes, yeah, I'm sure it is. Alright, so we've been going way long here, so we're going to wrap this up. Any quick hits you want to mention before we head on to picks?
Drew_Baker:
No, I don't think we covered a lot of stuff there. It was a great conversation, but yeah, let's get into pics.
Steve_Edwards:
Yeah, so as of this recording, in the past week, so we're in right before Thanksgiving, past week there's been announcements of like, what Meta's letting go of a few thousand, Stripes let go of a bunch, Twitter's let go of a bunch for different reasons. Trying to think of some of the other big, so there's been some significant layoffs in the developer community for various reasons, mostly to do with economic downturn. So there's a lot of people out there looking for work. There's gonna be a lot of competition, so it's really tough. So I'm very grateful to be on the hiring side and not the job-looking side of things at this point in time, for sure. But if you're looking, keep your head up and keep trying. And good luck, is all I can say. So with that, we'll move on to picks. Picks are part of the show where we get to talk about things that are non-tech related or could be anything ranging from books, movies, food, some cool tool that I got to move, whatever. My specialty is the dad joke. And so I'll share a few dad jokes here while Drew takes some time to think about picks that he might have, unless
Drew_Baker:
I've got
Steve_Edwards:
he...
Drew_Baker:
my picks. Do you want to start with mine and then finish on a joke?
Steve_Edwards:
Uh, yeah, let's do that. We'll save the best for last.
Drew_Baker:
Yeah, I think so. So at the end of the year, web.dev puts out a state of CSS kind of update. And
Steve_Edwards:
Yes.
Drew_Baker:
the state of CSS 2022 one is really, really interesting and goes through some of the new CSS features and kind of what they've been focusing on as a collective, like between all the browser vendors. And so I really encourage anyone to check that out, but some of the highlights that make my life much better was the dynamic view height units. So if anyone's ever had to deal with 100 VH in CSS on a mobile device, you'll know what I'm talking about. So what... The recap of that is if you in CSS set 100 vh on a unit or on an element, on a desktop, that's just gonna be 100% of the view height, which is what you expect. But on a mobile phone, it will actually be 100% of the view height, ignoring the height of the browser address bar. So you'll actually be more than 100 vh. depending on if the address bar is visible or not. So when you're at the top of a scroll, at the top of the page, the address bar is visible. And so this thing that you thought would fill the screen will actually go bigger than the screen. And it's so annoying, especially with like full screen slideshows and things like that at the top of the page. But now they've introduced and standardized a new unit called DVH, dynamic view height, which will change depending on how the address bar is sized. And man, I can't tell you how many problems and how many like client notes that's gonna solve. So I'm very excited for that. But there's a whole bunch of other things mentioned in that article that are really, really interesting and excited for and makes our lives easier. So check it out, web.dev state of CSS 2022.
Steve_Edwards:
So this isn't the survey, right? There's a, isn't there like a state of CSS survey?
Drew_Baker:
No, this
Steve_Edwards:
I
Drew_Baker:
is
Steve_Edwards:
know there's
Drew_Baker:
not
Steve_Edwards:
a
Drew_Baker:
the
Steve_Edwards:
JavaScript
Drew_Baker:
survey.
Steve_Edwards:
one.
Drew_Baker:
This is just like
Steve_Edwards:
Okay.
Drew_Baker:
the recap of basically what came out of the like Google I.O. 2022 kind of conference and stuff like that. It's really interesting.
Steve_Edwards:
Oh, I see. Okay. Yeah, well, we'll put a link to that in the show notes for sure. Uh, oh yeah, here it is. Okay. Cool. Anything else?
Drew_Baker:
That's the main one.
Steve_Edwards:
Alrighty.
Drew_Baker:
Well, and
Steve_Edwards:
So.
Drew_Baker:
that Nuxt came out. Nuxt 3 launched. So it's in production and it's out of beta. It's a big deal.
Steve_Edwards:
Yeah, yeah, I've been seeing a lot about that. That's really cool. Really good, I know that's been a long time coming for sure. Wasn't it like over a year in beta? Didn't it go into beta August of last year? Where
Drew_Baker:
I think
Steve_Edwards:
is that
Drew_Baker:
so,
Steve_Edwards:
this year?
Drew_Baker:
yeah, it's been a long time.
Steve_Edwards:
And it's been like, yeah, you and I and Daniel talked quite a
Drew_Baker:
Yeah.
Steve_Edwards:
couple times about Daniel Rowe of the NUX Core team. I like to name drop, you know, it makes me sound important. So I have this one, this is a video, you sort of have to see it and it's really funny. It's titled front end developer and back end developer. And what it shows is. So this guy's pretending to do a magic show for a bunch of people and he's on one side of looks like a kitchen counter and all these people are on the other side. And so he's holding this brown, you know, standard grocery bag and he shows them there's nothing in it. Well, the backside of the bag has a hole cut in it and then hiding down behind the counter is this other gal. And so he sets the bag down and he waves his hands over it and stuff and she reaches up and puts a picture of some sort of, you know, juice or punch or something like that. it. And then so he reaches in and pulls it out and it looks like he hasn't done anything. And they go through that three or four times where she's putting something in there while he's got the bag on the counter and then he pulls it out and everybody thinks he just pulled it out of thin air. And so the idea is the guy, the magician is labeled as the front-end dev and the gal that's putting all the juice and stuff in the bag behind the scenes is the back-end dev. It's really funny
Drew_Baker:
Hahaha
Steve_Edwards:
if you see it. It's it's hard to do it just in describing it but once you see it you totally get what it's saying. And as someone who's done both and does both, I can totally get it. And now for the dad jokes of the week. So the other night, my wife and I went out to dinner and we're sitting there looking at the menu and the waitress comes up to us and says, hey, can I take your order? And I said, no, it's mine.
Drew_Baker:
I'm sorry.
Steve_Edwards:
Right? And then there's a bakery on the corner, you know, they make some nice fresh baked stuff. And I went in and I said, Hey, I'd like to buy a muffin with some chocolate chips. And she said, sorry, we only take cash. You can't pay with chocolate chips, although I can think of some people that would love to take payment in chocolate chips, like my wife. And then, you know, I'm an older guy. I've been married for 25 years, but the other day I got asked out by five different girls. Turns out I was in the ladies' bathroom. So not exactly the place I want to be. So, all right, with that, we will wrap it up. Thank you to everybody for listening to this very long episode. Hopefully it was some very useful information. Drew, if people want to contact you or share the pearls of wisdom that drip from your lips every day, where can they bet, or give you money? See if they want to give you money, for instance. How can they best get ahold of you?
Drew_Baker:
You can find me on GitHub under the Funkhaus repo and our whole account there. Just check it out. There's some bunch of interesting open source stuff on there. And also I'm on Twitter, Drew Baker underscore. And also just email me, drew at Funkhaus.us. That's spelled like the German way, F-U-N-K-H-A-U-S.us.
Steve_Edwards:
Very good. I am wonder95 in most places. Twitter, get up to five dad jokes a week on Twitter if you wanna follow me there and occasional tech stuff. And that's it. We will wrap it up. Oh, before I forget, I would like to say thank you to the studio audience today. You've been really great. So, thank you to the studio audience for joining us and I hope you enjoyed this video. I hope you enjoyed it. And if you want tickets to be in our studio audience, you can contact me on Twitter at wonder95. So with that, we will wrap it up for this episode of Views on View. Thank you, Drew, for coming all the way from Australia. And we will talk at you next time.