A Very Analytical Approach to the Job Search w/Jerome Hardaway

website.

So yeah, all righty, let's see here. Send, send anyway, send it now. All righty, good morning everybody, good morning. Oh, I gotta do one more thing, hold on, hold on.

You're new at this?

Say what?

Say you're new at this? What's going on? Yeah, I'm sorry.

You're good, brother, you're good. Forgot one thing. All right, sweet. Uh, good morning everybody, say hey, would love to hear you. This is the only live for the week. Um, uh, the Torque Boys, me and Jason, we are headed down to Dallas tomorrow to go hang out, uh, with, uh, Danny Thompson, the Commit Your Code guys and gals. Gonna be a great conversation, gonna be, give me a great time. We have a booth We're going to be pioneering our resume review session. So I will be— we'll be doing live resume reviews. We're gonna have like a projector and a screen, and we're doing live resume reviews at the booth. Always trying to find ways to give back to people. Jerome and I are obviously chatting about resume reviews backstage. Uh, so excited to, uh, do that live down in Dallas. Uh, if you are watching this and are in Dallas area, we are throwing a Torque Community private event, invite only. If you have not gotten the invite yet and you are in Dallas, please shoot me a DM so we can get you on the list. It's gonna be a great time. Gonna drop some new swag at the event. It's gonna be a grand little time. The vibes are gonna be immaculate as always. But excited for this episode. Jerome, this is Jerome. This is the only second time on the show, right? Second time or third time?

Second or third for Torque? No, this is 3.

This is 3.

This is 3. I love it.

I love it. So honestly, Jerome is one of the reasons why I wanted to pull this thing to an hour, because every time Jerome and I got together, it easily went an hour because Jerome's got a lot of good thoughts. Um, and so Jerome was one of the catalysts for over the last few years. I was like, man, I want to go deeper. I want to have better conversations, more meaningful conversations. Um, and so now we're at an hour. Um, and one of the reasons why it's for Jerome. So thanks, Jerome, for that. Um, I see some people tuning in.

Welcome.

Good morning. Please say, hey, I would love to hear from you. It's like I tell people, and Jerome's obviously a big fan of this, like, you know, this is a networking event. Um, this is essentially a, a, uh, a virtual meetup. Um, the people in the comments are the people attending, so you can message back and forth with them. Uh, like I tell everybody, connect with every guest too. Jerome is a wealth of information. You will see that here over the next hour. Um, he's going to come with a lot of data. Jerome is a data guy. I'm a vibes guy. Jerome's a data guy. We work real well together. Um, and so he's gonna have a lot of good information. So please go connect with him, send him a note. Um, and then as always, want to get through kind of some housekeeping things. Uh, torque.community, check them out. Uh, check us out. We just dropped— check them out. I'm speaking in third person this morning. Uh, torque.community, we just dropped a brand new site redesign. It's pretty, it's nice. Go check it out. All of our events are on it. Um, also listen, if you want to be kept up to date when I go live with amazing guests like Jerome, uh, shoot me a text. This is actually my number. It's not some AI bot. It's actually me. Um, so I just sent out a text to a few folks that were live. So we'd love to have you. Um, so, uh, and again, the Dev Alex, Chris, Sally, Jeff, LinkedIn user Jerome is— he is, he is a legend. Uh, Taran, it's good to see you. Elliot, uh, Cameron, it's good to see you as well. Um, and, uh, again, y'all keep commenting. All right, Jerome, let's give the people what they want, man. Just a little bit about yourself. Who are you? What do you do? For the people who don't know who Jerome is, which is very rare because Jerome's somewhat of a celebrity. So—

I am not a celebrity. I try to avoid celebrity. I've I'm at home minding my business. So yeah, so software engineer by trade. I started coding around 2010, 2011, right after military. I work with a lot of vets and military spouses, Vets Who Code. I've done every stack imaginable. I've worked in WordPress, I've worked in Rails, I've worked in like a little bit of .NET, PHP. Past 5 years I've been in data engineering. And AI engineering. So what that means is I understand from end to end the whole scope of building AI products, like going from gathering data to sanitizing the data, building your ETL pipeline. And then after you have the ETL completed, you got a knowledge base, then you turn that knowledge base into an inference pipeline or RAG application, like chatbot, whatever you want to call it. I've gone end to end on that a few times. So I've worked with some pretty— I've worked at Microsoft for almost 5 years, uh, worked for the Democratic Party for some of this year, working with a, uh, got a super cool opportunity that, uh, Taylor and I was talking about, like this G14 classified. I can't even talk about it. I'm just happy to not be in politics anymore. But, and now I'm in, uh, I'm in finance, kind of like, yeah, I'm in, I'm kind of in Like the— like, I'm in a weird— I'm in AI. So like, I guess that's the best way to say it. I am in AI engineering and in data engineering. Uh, so, uh, like I said, when I'm not doing that, um, I am at Bet2Code and I'm building a lot of things. Actually, I'm doing some things behind the scenes with our platform, uh, adding some AI toolings, doing 3, uh, adding 2 new verticals to our education, uh, and ready to debut some cool stuff on Veterans Day. So be out there for that. And, uh, Speaker and I'm a dad and I am always tired. So, but other than that—

Speaker and dad, I'm always tired. That, that could, uh, yeah, that, that is no truer statement. That may be the truest statement you will say on the show today. Um, uh, all right, so Jerome, I mean, so again, so to let y'all know, like, I do a lot of listening. I have a lot of people on text, uh, texting basis. Jerome is one of them. Um, and you know, Jerome over the last few weeks has been sending me just Uh, tons of data. Um, you know, one thing I admire about Jerome is he's very analytical. Uh, you know, uh, to be honest with you, he, uh, speaks truth. He is very frank with me. Um, throughout my career, he's definitely called some things out that he's liked about some things I've been a part of and some things he doesn't like that I've been a part of. And I really, really appreciate that candor. And so literally, like, I'm reading through our text messages right now. We can get into those, man, but I mean, you— I, I mean, I don't even know where to start. So where, where do you want to start with this latest job search, man? I mean, do we want to start talk about Dice? Do we want to talk about that first before people get bored and tune out?

I, I guess, well, we can, but one, I'm, I'm only frank with you because I like you. Like, a lot of people I don't like, like, oh sure, you know, yeah, that's a great idea. I mean, if you like it, I love it. Like, that's the, that's the Southern lie, right? Like, right there. If you like it, I love it. Like, oh no. You're gonna be, uh, you're definitely getting lied to right there. Like, but no, that's not me. Uh, like, I keep it 100 with you because, like, I like you. So if you want me to, I will start lying to you. That makes our relationship—

No, no, no, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I'm pulling up, I'm pulling up your Substack article. I mean, I don't know if you want to start here and kind of just walk through it together.

Yeah, together. Okay, uh, we could do that, or I have another— I Uh, may I share my screen?

Yeah, sure, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, go ahead. It's, it's the, uh, it's the plus button down there with the screen. Do you see it?

Affirmed.

I got the, you know, and again, for those of you tuning in, welcome, good morning. If you are having connection issues, it's okay, we will have this, uh, this is— will be streamed to other platforms.

So yeah, so I made this for the sake— for the purpose of this talk, so You know, Substack says, you know, it's a 60-day job hunt. It was definitely, it was 60 days. Uh, I went from 0 to 4 offers within 60 days. How did I do that? Right. So I'm talking about one of the reasons why I created this, why I even, you know, did the Substack and this is because I was getting frustrated with all the generic advice that was out there being given to people. Yeah. It was, it was very irritating for me because I was like, that's not what you should be telling people.

Sure.

Um, I, I need people to like, we had to look at, because I've, you know, like you said, I've always been a strategy person. I was in the military. Military, you can't go off of the vibes. You— because going off, you know, doing intel based off the vibes, bad things happen. Um, and I was seeing a lot of bad things happening in this current market. So first, I think the first thing we have to understand is I was hoping to get this information out because we're at the— we're at what, the first month Um, so you have this month and maybe what, beginning of November before the September surge, as they call it, is done. Because once like, you know, Thanksgiving happens, people aren't really hiring at the same time until January pops back up, right?

Right.

So, um, that's one of the reasons why I was like, yo, we gotta talk about this because I wanna get this on people's radars so people can think of it fast, uh, think of it sooner. So this 60, uh, days, uh, data-driven approach, uh, final outcomes, 4 competitive job offers on the end of 60 days. 50% pay increase and created 3, uh, distinct specialized resumes. Now I want to talk about the— so at first I had one super resume. I put everything for the past 10 years.

Okay.

On this resume, I chose 10 years because one, the app in finance, the— they don't— they usually don't go further, any further back than 10 years on average. Uh, those are the strictest Uh, resume, those are the strictest ones that I've learned in the past. Those are the strictest background checks, so they go 10 years in the past. So that's why we— I chose 10 years. Also, with my ATS, um, research, I, I found that, oh, you know what, 10 years is the sweet spot. Once you, uh, start going past 10 years of information on your resume or in your websites and all this other stuff, you tend to, um We start seeing ageism pop up once you get past 10 years. Like, you know, it's wrong, but it's a reality. People start wondering, oh, can you do this if you're, you know, been doing this for 15, 20 years? So that is one thing that I was like, same thing for ageism. And regardless, lack of experience, it seemed like 5 years and 10 years seems to be what works. If you put less than 5 years on, People are like, oh, you don't have enough experience. If you put more than 10 years, you're a risk, right? Um, and so like, that is what I—

so, so, so, so the main, main thing to get out right now, keep your resume. If you're more than 10 years in the industry, keep it 10 years.

Yes, keep it 10. Uh, or, you know, maybe add some of the freelance projects or something you did if you're less than 5. Right. So that's one thing. Second thing that I, uh, that I definitely learned is that ATSs, they are trash. So if you have— because of my background with ISE, like literally I have this jump of 3, 4, 5 years, just straight front-end work. Then I got a bunch of data engineering and AI work and product engineering work because of Microsoft. And then like it just, it wasn't, uh, it didn't provide enough context for artificial intelligence. And so ATS systems that use artificial— I said ATS systems when the system— so I'm an idiot. Uh, so ATSs that use, uh, AI could not really understand my resume.

Okay.

So what I had to do is I had to take— I took my resume and created 3 separate verticals, one for front end, one for data engineering, and one for AI engineering. I absolutely actually— this made me like Python even more because there was so much of the work in Python and Azure that I learned and picked up because it's transferable between data engineering and AI engineering. It was super cool, super clean to be able to see that outcome. Now, Let's go ahead and talk about the— so that's why I created it. Here's mine. As you see, outcomes.

Yeah. And real quick, Terron, I'll drop the article in the show notes after. I can't do it live, so I will drop it after we go live.

Yeah. All right. Um, I did. So as I just spoke about my 3-pronged, uh, approach, uh, As you see, uh, here's the skills that I did without here.

So, so you broke out your resume into these 3 main areas?

Affirm.

Okay.

Yes, these are 3 areas. Uh, and I was able— so the conversion rate for like JavaScript was actually the, uh, they like conversion rate was high, quality was the like the focus. It wasn't as, uh, It wasn't as deep as I wanted, like the conversion of like, when I say conversion, and for context, like from application to getting the interview to going through the phases, like whenever I apply for a front end job after I stopped everything at 10 years, and also try to keep it at like a high level IC section, because you know, they're trying to flatten orgs.

So if you go past Yeah, so, so, so then how'd you write your resume? You brought up a good point. I'm gonna interrupt you here. Organizations are trying to flatten— companies are trying to flatten organizations, not as much hierarchy. You're very senior in your career. Are all 3 of these resumes geared more towards the IC level? And did you do that on purpose?

I did that on purpose, uh, because I did manage people in my last, my last role, but I intentionally was like, I want to be a person of mentor But I have mentorship experience, but I want to be an IC because like I said, they're flattening, they're flattening that role. They want people with more hands on keyboard.

Yeah.

And less middle management.

Yeah.

So I was like, okay, we see that tactic. You see that in the job market currently.

Yeah.

Like, you know, people, the people that are now getting impacted the most in the, in big tech are middle managers, engineering managers, engineering manager 2, to the point where I'm seeing And like, there's a software engineer 4, senior software engineer 2, things of that nature popping up because people rather, they rather have a higher level of IC than a, uh, than engineering managers now. Right?

Yep.

So these are the, but as you see, like I said, JavaScript, it was high conversion in regards to quality, uh, 3 deep interviews I went, but they also had the most interview rounds, like Frontend, I don't know why, like frontend is the easiest one to sell. So I don't understand why it has the most interview rounds. It's insane. There was a coding— everyone had a coding challenge, which I want to iterate to people, used to be you did not have to do like— you didn't have to just— there were alternatives, alternatives for coding challenge. Now, not so much. Uh, the coding challenge comes early in the, in the resume. It's always something LeetCode, usually LeetCode middle is what I saw. A lot of us saw a lot of LeetCode middles. So whether you're doing JavaScript, Python—

What is, what is LeetCode middle? I've never heard that. What is that?

All right, so I'm gonna say LeetCode middle. I'm thinking in the concept of like how we left, like, so there's easy, middle, hard. Okay, okay. So the LeetCode problems were usually in the mid tier. Okay, but they were verbatim. In the mid-tier for every, everybody I did a code challenge for, it was verbatim LeetCode mid-tier. Like if you saw, like, and pretty much it was just, now here's a good part I did like, it was just enough to know that you actually knew how to code. I actually got the like same stacks and queues question twice in 2 separate interviews. I was like, oh, so y'all were just picking the first LeetCode middle, uh, code challenge y'all see and just throwing it on here. All right, whatever. So that was, that was nice. That, that's something that you have to think of, like, I recommend starting in my article, I recommend if you don't have a lot of experience with LeetCode, and that started Code Wars. Code Wars is way more friendly. It helps prepare you for like coding, tougher coding challenges and solidifying how to think like that. But they, they're easy is like actually easy versus like LeetCode's easy is like, oh, you know, sophomore year at like a computer science coding program, right?

Okay.

So that's what, that's what I, that's what I did. I did that. I ran through 3 different books starting with Daily Coding Problem and then Crushing the Coding Interview. I did a very systemic approach that's in my Substack. of how I study explicitly for coding challenges, because I was like, that's a problem that I'm having. I haven't been focusing on, I haven't had to focus on. So let me do that. But when it came to Python engineer, the demand, like right now that I saw—

Hot, hot.

Python and SQL are— it's, it's, it's very hot. Like, yeah, so like the response times were The response times were fast. The interviews were much flatter. Like for the average JavaScript interview was 5, was 4 to 5 rounds. The average Python interview was 3 rounds if I was lucky.

Why do you think that is? I'm curious. Why do you think that is?

Because one, because I have applied experience in Python. So I was able to, I'm able to talk about that, but 2, because it's a talent war on that, in that stack and in those areas of data engineering. And that's one thing people like, everybody's talking about AI. But what's really hot right now is data engineering and product engineering combined, because most data scientists and data engineers, they don't build customer-facing products.

Yeah.

They build internal products. They don't think about how to solve for when a bunch of people are using the same app at the same time. Software engineers, they do.

Right.

So converting your experience as a software engineer into understanding data engineering and AI engineering, how to go from that whole building a knowledge base and doing inference pipelines and cleaning, making sure you have the guardrails and doing cache, prompt caching, things of that, all that stuff. Like once you start learning how to do that stuff, when it comes to product engineering, like you know, using a Next.js application, for instance. Yeah, it makes you more valuable because data scientists don't push code to prod, right? Same with data engineers.

So what about this? What about this question right here? Do you think that companies pushing for developers to utilize AI more and more, that's still using LeetCode in the interviews, will continue to be the thing, or do you think you see it advancing to something different?

I, based upon what I experienced I don't, I can't say that that's going to be conclusive right now because of the way, like, I was explicitly asked about what coding tools that I use my day to day, what AI coding tools. Uh, they want people who use AI coding tools, but the code challenge is to see if you actually understand how to code, how you think, right? They just want to see if you can actually solve a problem. And I think that's why—

Yeah.

LeetCode, Moodle, why it was such a low barrier of entry, right?

Like, just Please, because they still want to just see that you can do the thing.

Yeah, can you do the thing? It doesn't even have to be 100% clean and pristine. You can, you know, force it, and then you can refactor after, but we just want to make sure you can do it. Right. So that is what it is. So here's the response time, like, first 1 or 2 weeks, as you see, it was very little response times. But by the time week 5 and 6 rolled around, I was going through applications. Like, I was getting targeted applications asking to apply, and by week 7, I was deep in, um, by week 7, 8, I was deep in, uh, interviews. Like, to the point I was turning down interviews.

Yeah.

Now, this is only just—

Okay, hold on, hold on. But what do you make of this, right? Like, so, so, so if I'm a job seeker looking at this, what I would infer based off this data is Man, like, you really don't get things rolling until like a month into it.

I think for me, because I was doing research from, uh, you know, if you're— if you already know what's going on, it's gonna— your pipeline's gonna be smaller, shorter than mine. So if you have the— if you have the exact same, um, rule follow— exact same rules and philosophies as me, and then you start jumping into this, your pipeline's gonna be, uh, your— it's gonna be tighter, right? Your conversions is going to be much tighter. But mine wasn't because I was actually taking— I was figuring out, I was solving the problem as I was. I, like I said, I approached it as a problem. So I was looking at the problem, solving the problem, and trying to optimize it, right?

Yeah.

Like, like you do code. This is, for me, this is the— this is much more fun than actually doing code. Um, but once I, uh, Once I got there, like, once I figured out the resume component and the ATS to recruiter component, that's when I did something that I always tell people to do, reach out to your network. I knew that my highest time of people on my LinkedIn was 7:45 AM on Thursday. So it literally took me—

Really?

Yeah, it's all data, right? Like, I use LinkedIn as my social, as my signal booster for people that were looking at my resume on Dice, right? And so that way I've made it easier for them to find me. People share it, it raises that LinkedIn engine optimization. I, on those days that I was not doing my, my ask, I was focusing on generating value, talking about things that were data engineering focused, AI engineering focused, planning those out, scheduling them an entire week in advance, talking and trying to explain to people what inference pipeline was, talking about Presidio for PII, talking about cache prompting, talking about How, uh, AI safety is the most overlooked.

So you used, you used LinkedIn to signal that, you know, these things, you pick certain topics to talk about on LinkedIn, which then drove activity to the type of roles that you wanted to get.

Absolutely. That's, that's literally what I did. And I try to tell people like, no, just talk about the things that you're building.

Yeah.

I don't know. That is the hardest thing to get people to do. Like, no, talk about it. Because then you can start a conversation.

I literally told her this morning, I said, you can literally become known for anything if you just talk about it.

Yes, you can.

Literally anything.

Anything.

Yeah.

I started talking about AI around 2021.

Yeah. And that, that was in my talk for All Things Open. Like there are a bunch of people who had just started being loud about AI and you guys are now known for AI. It's funny how that works.

I'll scroll down. Microsoft.

I, I wanna get to DICE, uh, distribution of application results.

Here we go. So here's no response, 20— was 20, so 43% were no response. Uh, initial interviews, 32%. Final interviews, 17%. Offers—

This is great. So I want to point this out here for people who— and, and for people who listen to this in audio form via podcast, you're going to be very lost because we've been sharing our screen pretty much the entire time. But Jerome's got a— Jerome's got a pie chart up right now, and Jerome, as senior as he is, Got no responses for almost half of his applications.

Yes. Now mind you, I'm senior and I have a very unique—

All the hot skills. I mean, you're backend Python to AI.

Not only that, like, there's not many people that have, oh, I was awarded by a president of the United States on their resume, right?

And you still didn't hear back from almost 50%.

Yeah. So just, so think about that. Like, I, I've been invited to the White House for my work with, uh, for the work that I do currently, like in real time, and still not 50%, like not almost 50% of no responses of all, uh, resumes. So that is something that, you know, you're not going crazy, you're not getting like relaxed. Like it's, it's a wild market. It was a wild market out there for anybody. It didn't really start picking up until halfway through the, like through the market, I start getting, um, that's where the whole dice thing comes into play.

Yeah, so let's talk about that because I definitely want to know.

Like, that's not on here, but so we can stop sharing and I can go into that. So boom, so now we're done.

Uh, do you want me to share the Substack article? Is that— well, will that have it?

Uh, I think it has it, but we could just talk about it.

Okay, cool. Yeah, go ahead, go ahead.

Yeah, make it more organic for the people that are just listening while they're driving in cars, while they're work— while they're working. So what I— one of the problems that I was seeing other people report was that LinkedIn Easy Apply just was not working for them. Uh, LinkedIn, uh, applying on LinkedIn wasn't working for them. They were getting people that were not, you know, responding or anything. Even to the, like, hilariously enough, I was getting people that weren't— they just now started responding and letting me know, oh, well, we decided we're not taking— I'm like, oh, I applied to that. Like in July, dude. It's like almost October. Like, my, my toddler is about to be 4, bro. Like, I have a— I got a birthday coming up like a little bit. Like, what are y'all talking about? Uh, so, but what I, I just literally went on Dice, signed in, and they still have their system is very like trigger-based. So you sign in, you put your resume up.

Yeah.

You see, which I like, uh, it's trigger-based. Sign in, you put your stuff up, everybody is able to see your stuff, and it starts triggering with all these keywords. And people there, there are real people, because then they'll have a lot of AI baked into the system. So there are real people looking at keyword search phrases and looking at your resume, uh, or they're searching for your res— for resumes. And then they, uh, then they are Looking, um, at your resume deeper. And then they go to your LinkedIn, and that's where keeping your LinkedIn active wins, right? Because I treated LinkedIn as just a social media network that wasn't a psychopath land, right? So, because, you know, Threads is funny but not smart. Uh, Bluesky is smart but not funny. They don't have a sense of humor. It's all those diagrams, right? Yeah. Twitter is a hellscape. So LinkedIn is the only place that I could like really literally like LinkedIn and YouTube are like the only places. Yeah, you know, you do comments and stuff on YouTube now. That was crazy. Like whole post.

Yeah.

Um, those are the only places that you can really go to that didn't have anything like wild going on. Uh, so using LinkedIn as a social media network to, you know, signal boost, right? Like that's where its value was starting to Uh, for me was signal boosting, uh, my, uh, knowledge base and then being able to go through and, you know, see my recommendations and stuff. Also recommendations, that's not in my data points, but those LinkedIn recommendations. Does it help? Yes. And not only does LinkedIn recommendation help, you need to get somebody who has directly managed you. At least you need at least so On 2 separate occasions, I was asked for one person who was my— who I was a direct report of as a reference. And Josh Holmes, he not only— well, I was a direct report of his at Microsoft. He not only put a great glowing review on my LinkedIn, it's like a Yelp review almost.

Dude, I say that all the time. I was like, listen, Listen, listen, what is the first thing you do when you look to go to a new restaurant? You go to Google reviews or Yelp reviews, right? It's the same thing with your LinkedIn. It's not gonna make or break you, but it's only going to help you.

Yeah, like literally, I mean, have you ever seen something on Instagram like, oh, this video looks nice, and then like you go click it and then, uh, you send it to your wife and then she looks at it, um, no, we're not going there. Like, look at these stars. Like, no, this is 3.2 stars, Terrell. It's a little bit grass walls and drama. I'm not doing that. I'm not paying $20 to park there. And I was like, okay, new plan. Um, but yeah, so those LinkedIn reviews work. Make sure you get at least one person who is a direct report of yours or mentor or something like that, someone who you had to answer to in this space as a potential, um, reference. Like, that is what really closed the deal with me, having a person who had a person, having a person, uh, reported to me, having a person I was a direct report to really helped. Like, I had one reference was like, and it was just, it worked. Being able to speak strongly. Uh, now this is one thing that, like, this was the first interview process. Like, when I— last time I interviewed, AWS was the hottest Uh, when it came to cloud, this time everything has been Azure. It's everything.

Dude, it's so funny. I literally just went live with somebody. Uh, who did I go live with? There was just an Azure guy, and literally we talked about that. I was like, I feel like Azure was hot. Azure's always like— when I was recruiting at Vaco 5 years ago, like, whenever we were like, we need an AWS person, it's like, I'll just go just shout it from the rooftops and I'll find 20,000 people. Whenever, whenever it was Azure, it was like I couldn't find anybody. And it's still the case.

Azure's hot because Azure has the most models right now. So what's driving cloud is AI. So whoever has the most trustworthy AI is winning. So that's why Azure— you hear a lot of GCP, you hear a lot of Azure, not so much of AWS when it comes to SageMaker. Right.

Yeah.

But the Azure jobs are blowing up. And if you're sleeping on Azure right now— now I will say Azure, I will not defend Azure and how hard it is to use Azure. Like, Azure is an enterprise-level skill, I'm not gonna lie. But the, you know, the reward is there for knowing Azure because there's so many jobs out there of people like Everybody's on multi-cloud. So knowing AWS and Azure is fine. But they're all explicitly asking for Azure. I am— every interview I've been in, every role, the offers I got, they were multi-cloud.

Yeah.

And they were multi-data. Some was on-prem, some was in cloud. They were all multi-cloud. And they all asked explicitly only about Azure. They didn't even know, you'll figure out AWS. But we need someone that knows Azure or has been around Azure enough to like get comfortable with it, right?

Yeah.

So I highly recommend look at Azure if you're looking at any AI roles because you're going to be working with it. Yeah.

Let's go to Naz's question here. How can a beginner get LinkedIn, how, like reviews or references on LinkedIn? Like what would be your best approach there?

Um, well, teachers, mentors, instructors, people that you collaborate with on groups, going in DMs and asking people for, to review your project. So like, There was a young woman when I was on Twitter, she slid into my DMs and asked me to go do a PR code review of her work.

There you go.

And it was like, yeah, I'll do that. And then people like— I tell people all the time, product-focused networking wins. Because people like when you ask them questions. But people like when you execute on what they tell you. And And I was like, yo, somebody come back. I give them feedback and they come back and they did the thing I told them to do.

Yep. Yep.

I'm like, yo, you're awesome because you listen. You know how hard it is to get people to listen, especially right now when the market— so the market has done kind of a— it's done a curve. It's a downward— it's a bell curve type thing, right? Where the market looking closer to 2018, 2019, and people think they feel like the market's bad because we had 3 years where the market was like super hot. But now the market's closer to where it should have been 3 years ago if we hadn't had COVID. Having said that, when I tell people what to do, they still are kind of like, I kind of want to wish we could just do it the way things used to be. It was like, no, that was an anomaly. Like, you're asking for a time that you're asking for, you know, you want the weird time to be the normal time. And that's just like a weird time to be normal. Yeah, like, that's not how, you know, life works. Right?

Right.

So the whole, like, the process that I'm seeing is that people, they don't— like, one thing that I saw people speaking about that I think I wrote that seems to have gotten a lot of views, I didn't even know until I looked at it. And when I did a Refactor Tech meetup, people were like, no, we're all talking about this, about making artifacts using your GitHub, making your design doc in your GitHub issues, converting that to a ticket and stuff.

Yeah.

So that way you have things to show for your interview. And we were like, wait, y'all not doing that? And they're like, that's, that's brilliant. We never thought to do that. I was like, I always do that. Like, yeah, you, I, you know, in the military we had a term, train how, um, train how you fight.

Yeah.

Right. Yeah. You know, so I take that in the same way of being in tech. You got, you need to train how you work, right? You're not, you're gonna have a planning meeting at work. You might as well have a planning meeting for your personal projects and plan that out. You're gonna have to do design docs at work. You might as well do design docs at home. docs for your projects, personal projects. You're gonna have to do tickets. Might as well do tickets, pull them out, do PRs. You get GitHub Copilot, GitHub Copilot do the PR for you, and then you can learn from the AI how to improve your own code by going back and forth with GitHub Copilot, right? Like, these are things that people aren't doing that is— that just gonna give you growth. Right. Um, and give you an advantage because, yeah, you're not, you know, a lot of people just aren't doing it.

100%. So you've said a lot of good information, right? So I wanna, I wanna just distill it down a little bit. So first thing you talked about is if you are senior in your career, keep it to 10 years of experience. The sweet spot that you saw was like kind of like that 5-year and then that 10-year, but nothing for For ATS, like, that's right.

Yeah, 5 to 10 years. Like, as you saw Workday, they're going through a thing right now. They have a weird case. Yeah, because like, you know, dude was like, I'm getting 100% fail rate, I must, you know, I'm gonna sue. Uh, but—

And then, and then you broke down, which I've talked about a lot, you had basically 3 different— so you had a master resume Yes. Actually, you essentially had 3 focused resumes. Let me ask you this question. Did you ever use the master instead of the 3?

Absolutely. I had to get, I had to get a test, right? So I had to test the data, right? And that's where I was, uh, when I was seeing that the, uh, my master resume, my primary resume, well, that's unabridged, was like I said, it was for AI, it was too contextual, contextually all over the place, right?

Yes.

Gonna get a good read. So the AI couldn't, with context, proper context and power, understand my resume or say what I was like an expert in.

Yep.

I knew a human wasn't gonna be able to do that.

Yeah.

So that's when I broke it down into 3 different verticals and focus only on that I love that. I love that. I did the test before, like I did a week only using that, seeing how many— oh, it's like a 7% comeback. And then, um, after I did that, I started like, okay, let's do all this down and focus on this. Let's take this off this resume completely. And going back and forth, like I built a whole like ResumeGPT to do this. I use Harvard data. I use all of my— I use my connects. I use all my resumes, use all my Performance reports. I use every article that I always— that has ever been written by me, uh, every video ever been done. So I was like, this is how I did it. Like, I created a scoring mechanism. This is how, like, I— because even my troops now, when they send me, like, their portfolio, I score their portfolio. When they send me the resume, I score their resume. I have, like, whenever someone sends me a resume, I score it.

Yeah.

And I always ask them, Send me your unabridged, uh, resume first. If you want me to redo your resume, I need to know everything and then we can make it and based upon the roles you want. And so that way, and I show them like, yo, this is how I, this is the process that I'm going through. I'm not just going, I'm not eyeballing this. I'm looking, I look at it, I guide, but I also am like, I have, I've been focusing on creating these mechanisms to amplify the stuff that I can do by creating scoring systems. Like, all right, uh, trying to keep the language. below, like, at 7th grade reading level, because, yeah, most Americans read at 7th grade reading level, right? So you gotta keep it so it's easy. Like, I try to tell people, yeah, you want— when you're trying to win, you want to be approachable. So I'm thinking of all this, like, removing words, because I know I, I, you know, speak half military, a third military, a third Southern, and then a third technical. It's very hard to understand what I'm saying.

Yeah.

time, like, right, talking to, talking to, you know, a country Einstein over here. Sometimes it's what my mom says. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but like, that is how I— like, that, that's the process that I've been working on. So yes, one resume.

Comes in here, systems is process is what I'm getting right now. And I— yes, like, like, if you go back, I've interviewed a ton of people who've had success in their job search. One of the most consistent themes that I always hear with people who navigate the job search well is they have processes, they have systems. They wake up, they approach the job search like a job, they get after it day in, day out, and they're successful. So yes, 100%. 100%.

Approach, approach, approach. Uh, how you approach a job search tells me more about how you approach coding than actually seeing you code.

Yes.

Because the job search in itself is a problem you have to solve. Not just getting a job, but getting a job that you're going to be happy at, right? Like, you know, you can get a job that pays well that absolutely sucks, but can you get a job that you're happy at? Can you do the right signals, uh, in your career that's gonna like draw the right people to you?

Sure.

That is, you know, you know, people literally— I have, you know, people literally beating down my like inbox like, I have a job that I know is perfect for you based upon everything you've put out, right? Like that. I know that you would do well over here. I know that you would do well over here. And I got offers at those places they knew that I was gonna do well at, right? That is how that works.

It's funny how that works because it's a problem. So, so the next thing I want to highlight again that you've said, to slow down because it feels like we had kind of a rush of people here this last half, is that you use LinkedIn To amplify and talk about the things, you know, to signal to people that you are an SME in that area. But then a lot of your actual just job search leads came from Dice. So, so LinkedIn was like the social conversation, but Dice was the thing that drove it.

Yeah. So I was applying leveraging LinkedIn and I was like, I'm not gonna do that anymore.

So you were, okay. So you were applying.

Yeah, that was, that's where I, I was like, nope, it's not making any sense. I'm not getting good leads. I'm gonna go to Dice. I did not apply to any jobs on Dice. I just put— I logged in, you know, like, let me say, they're very tricky.

Yeah, let's unpack that real quick. So Dice, you, you rise to the top of every recruiter, every hiring manager search if you log in every 24 hours.

Yes. So I put my resume on there I put my 3— I put 3 resumes on there, and then I just would log in, and then that's it.

That's all you did?

Yeah.

So you didn't even apply to jobs on Dice? You just used it as a way for intake?

2 of the 4 offers I were cold were Dice and crazy recruiters that reached out to me, the roles I did not know existed. And yeah, so like, that is like, I did not know anything about these roles that came to Uh, because I, because I leveraged— I knew that Dice did— I was doing my research. I knew that Dice did not have a lot of AI baked into it, and it was still like— and you know that, like we just said, that trigger focus of Dice, correct? It worked. It helps. Yeah.

Which is crazy. It was hot when I was recruiting 10 years ago.

Yeah.

So shout out to Dice just as a platform for keeping it very pure or true or whatever. I don't know what you want to say there.

But classic, right? Like sometimes the old ways work, right? Like they just kept it.

And it's also Dice, for those of you listening or watching, it's only tech specific. So like one of the problems I saw as a recruiter is when I was recruiting, let's just say quality assurance analyst back in the day. If I typed in quality assurance analyst on CareerBuilder, I get like construction workers.

Yeah.

But like, but, but if you do quality assurance analyst on Dice, you are going to get QA analyst. In tech, because you have to be in tech to be on DICE.

Yeah. Taryn was like, so what's a good way to talk about your freelance projects? You use— there's a project section in LinkedIn that you can do it. Now, here's my thing. If you're not gonna have videos, you're not gonna have demos, you're not gonna have working things, don't, don't post those projects. Every demo, everything that I showed them, I have something working for.

Yes.

And GitHub makes it It's so easy to, you know, if you just have simple UIs and things of each repo, like you can literally use GitHub Pages and turn each repo into a separate page. You know, just add that to a nav on your portfolio, right? And call it a day. So I definitely recommend you doing, you doing just that.

Yeah.

On your resume, you can talk about your projects. And then as long as you only talk about the components of your project that is relevant to the resume, I, I think that's a great idea. I did that on multiple, um, times. There's projects that I worked on at work that I couldn't give names to, that I couldn't give, uh, all the details to, but just talking through that process of the technologies, of leveraging this from this end all the way to this end, and then how you go to production about the project. I was like, oh, this person knows what they're talking about. I had one real— I— because of that, and when I— we want to get into like The biggest thing I saw in my job, this might be different just for seniors, um, there was a lot of system design conversation, one. And if you knew the, uh, if you knew about the, the thing that you're building and you talked well about it, you could end up skipping rounds. So one, one offer I skipped around because it's supposed to be— my first interview was supposed to be 30 minutes and it went 92 minutes. And we were just talking about system design, about, you know, Azure and things like that. And they were like, you know what, we're just gonna go ahead and—

Yeah, dude, if you can get people talking on interviews, they kind of jump you a few rounds.

Yeah, you do it well. Don't— yeah, go deep on every single one. Ask a lot of answer questions, ask questions. I know a lot of people do not ask questions. I was asking questions about why people are making certain architectural decisions in their, uh, in their application. And there was a resume where they were kind of defending it. It turned into a reverse interview. Like, they were defending their decision because I was asking, why didn't you do this?

Crazy.

And they were like, you know, and they were like, you know what, you're just gonna talk to the VP. And then I talked to the VP and it was like the weirdest conversation ever. And they're like, yeah, we're just gonna send you an offer letter. Yeah, we didn't talk about anything technical. Cool. We talked about sports. But whatever. And I'll let you know that I don't watch most sports ball. I'm a big boxing fan. So whatever. I love it. So like, but that is how you— that's how you do it. What's bigger incentive for people breaking into tech? A project that checks all the skill boxes or a project that is done well and being used? I will say this from my personal experience as a person who broke into tech without, without a CS degree or boot camp experience initially. I Built a thing. Like, I, I— the story of Etch A Code is out there on a million podcasts. I literally was playing hooky from work that day. I was chilling, chilling with my lady, about to like do nothing. I got a friend calling me, asked me to help a family of a fallen veteran. I did the only thing I knew what to do, which was like build a website and then tell the story on social media. Raised $27,000. Yeah, $2,000 in 27 hours. And then next thing you know, I was getting jobs. Uh, yeah. So a thing that people use, a thing that people, thing that people use will always beat, you know, just having small projects. One thing that works well end to end, because one that touches people, because your, your little piddly projects, your JavaScript calculators, whatever, they don't really touch people until you get— Right. A website that people are using and then you get a call from somebody, people use, hey yo, your images are, uh, up uploading very slow, like, so the images are big. So now you got to figure out why the image is doing this and how to make it smaller and things like that. Or your form isn't working, or your form is working on your end but the people don't know the form is working on that end. Like on Vets and Code, we had that problem, and then we had— we would do a little green message to let people know that, you know, it and they still weren't seeing it. So now when you do the form and you submit, I make it rain like military medals when you hit submit. So because it's my website, I could do what I want, right?

Yeah.

So like, yeah, when you submit now, you know, we got emojis that rain down, so you know that something worked. Um, but like, that is— I've— I— a good— a product will always outrank a project, but you better be able to talk about it. I see a lot of times people Uh, they gonna get templates and things. They cannot speak about the things that are in that template, and they make it really easy to like search through that template and see what's going on. It's like, you know, I'm gonna ask you questions about this, right? Yeah. So let me—

so we got 12 minutes left. I, I, I wanna— I have some rapid fire, but I do wanna ask you kind of 2 things. One's a little bit of a hot take. Do we think bootcamps have ruined— do we? I'm trying to think how to frame this question. Do we think bootcamps have ruined frontend JavaScript development?

Yes.

Because, because of the amount of people they've put into the market, which is, which has made backend skillset So much more in demand.

No, I mean, it's just like anything. So remember when— you might not have been around when this was, uh, when it started, when boot camps first kicked off in 2014. They were all—

I was your grad in 2011, big dog.

Yeah, so there you go, right? So yeah, the market's just saturated. The market used to be saturated with Ruby devs, right? And then the computer science people were like, we don't like the fact that these people can't like do computer sciencey things because of Ruby on Rails, so we're not gonna hire any more RubyDales, right? So, uh, so like, that is what happened. Same thing with the JavaScript department. But how do we solve it, right? Here's the real problem that I see with boot camps. They were not paying attention to the market. So when the market started cooling off, they still had to make— Yeah, they were still pumping out. So they were still pumping out 20, 30 JavaScript engineers for, uh, like every—

Cohort.

Yeah, cohort. Yeah, a cohort a month. And it was like, but you can clearly tell that that's not being the thing. Or, and they weren't changing it, right? Like, so we now know that architecture and system design is being valued a lot more than just being able to build a CRUD application. They want to know, the new junior needs to know why they made decisions, right? What, what you're choosing. Like, okay, you chose Supabase because what, lovable? picked it for you. What about— so how would I make Supabase HIPAA compliant? Oh, so you don't know that. So now you're interviewing at a medical place, and you have a database attached to your frontend project that you just let the AI pick for you, and you don't know anything about it. Yeah, thank you. We will let you know of our decision later. And then they'll email you, you know, thanks for considering us. 16 months later. Yeah, you can find out 6 months later and get a job. That is how, like, that's what we're seeing. I'm seeing not a lot of decisions. We're still treating learning how to code or coding in itself or boot camps like it was in 2017, 2018, 2019. No, the new senior is— the new junior is kind of like senior because, you know, things are different now, right? It's just like how the new front-end designer in 2011 wouldn't be able to get a job as a front-end designer today, right?

Yeah.

Like, that is, that is just something that, that happens, right? Skills evolve, so does the market, so do what you need to learn, right? So you need to understand the architectural value. You need to understand, all right, you chose Next.js, like, all right, so how will you use your images? I can use Next Image, or you're gonna use a CDN for your images, and why are you gonna do that? All right, these are the type of conversations, the things you need to think about.

How does somebody learn? I mean, like, again, not a coder over here by any means, so like, this has kind of become a theme, right? And where it's like, you know, people using AI too much to rely on AI too much. How does somebody learn these things? My suggestion is find a damn mentor.

But like, I mean, I wrote an article, said find a mentor. Better yet, find 2. You need to find— I always recommend people have 2 mentors. It's like Rich Dad Poor Dad. You want a person, uh, what can help you for the things you need today that you can learn with, and you want a person who you want to be like 5, 10 years from now, right? Or you want things like that. So I do not— I believe in— that's what I believe in. I believe in finding 2 mentors. You need a mentor of who the person you want to be when you grow up.

Yeah.

And you need a mentor who can, you know, like the 2nd grade teacher helps you, uh, learn how to read and write and, you know, make full sentences. But then Michael Jordan on your poster is the person that you aspire to be, right? It's the same concept, right?

Yeah.

Um, so like that, that's how I look at it. Uh, but you absolutely— if you don't have a mentor, you need to be talking to people, get feedback. Uh, build one. The thing about building in public is you're not just supposed to be showing off a finished product, you're supposed to be putting yourself in a position of vulnerability to get feedback. People are very self-conscious. They do not want to be told that they suck at something. I, I tell my veterans all the time, being bad at something is The first step of being sort of good at something. Took that from Adventure Time. It works for my kids, it works for them. It is okay to be trash. The problem is when you don't— when you're trash and you don't want to show you're trash. First, the minute you admit you're trash, it's all— it's only up from there. Like, look, I'm garbage at this, can you help me step up my game? Of course, let's do this. But you don't let anyone know, no one can help you because, you know, you're letting— you didn't ask for help. So that's what the purpose of building in public does. Here's my GitHub. What would you do? Here's a repo. I'm trying to focus on data engineering. How would you help me? Oh, I don't have any GitHub. I don't have a GitHub project board. I should— I do that? Yes, you should do a GitHub project board because guess what? Now as a recruiter, when I go to your GitHub and say, that's what I'm working on now, you can see the ticket flow that I have right now. I can press this little public GitHub project board that you have and I can see your projects in real time and like, oh, what you're working on, What's in done? What's in— what's in— what's in done? What's in review? What's in your backlog? Wait, this person has their own personal backlog of what they're learning and what they're building. That's cool. That's super cool. Like, all this stuff is in public. Like, what are you— I know, now I can ask this person what they're— oh, they have a— they have a hobbies lane, how they're taking care of their hobbies on GitHub. Oh snap, I want to ask them about this. I've learned so much from them, right?

Yeah.

People, you have— when you come building in public is about vulnerability. It's not about just signals. I talk about the things I'm learning. I talk about the things that I need to learn and talk about the things I, uh, I should, uh, focus more. Talk about— I, I give— I like to give flowers. I'm a big— you know me, I'm a big flower—

Yeah.

When it comes to LinkedIn, because I'm, you know, I just had a co— a former coworker her pass, uh, while doing a charity bike ride last month. And I'm like, people do not give people enough of their flowers when they're—

No.

So I'm like, I make sure that like when, uh, Josh Holmes, when he, uh, when he was laid off from Microsoft, I made sure everybody knew that like this is the best manager that I have had since my days in the military. I can— I literally can draw a line between my top manager Uh, my supervisor in Iraq and my supervisor with Josh. And they're like, they're the top 2. Those are the people when I lead, I look at. I want to be— I want to lead with empathy. I want to make decisions critically, uh, thinking about things, uh, from with positive intent, but also focusing on the reality of the situation. I want to be able to tell people like, look, this is the weekend we had to focus on the way the world is while also, uh, working on how to think we want things to aspire to be. And it's okay to say no. I want to talk about how you build, like, building coalitions for people you might not agree with.

Yeah.

But you also build that coalition with that person you might not always agree with because they can handle the people that you're definitely never going to agree with, right? Like, I talk to you because I'm like, oh, you talk to people I'm definitely never going to talk to. So it's like, yo, it works, right? That's it. But there was a question that was very— someone asked me about Betsu Code.

Uh, well, no, I said this one, finding a mentor was hard. I, I mean, here's the deal, and I was like, listen, like, if you— I think so many people are willing to help, but you have to drive the relationship.

Nas, what, uh, what's your— what is— where are you at? Like, where— what country are you in? Slide in my DMs on LinkedIn and we'll see if I can get some time to, to work with you.

There you go.

There you go. Done. Like, all right, it's not— it really isn't that hard letting people know that you want to mentor.

Yeah, yeah, I will.

I will. I can see what I'll do. I'll, I'll either see what I can work with you, or I can connect with someone if not.

Yeah, absolutely. All right, let's wrap up here. Rapid fire questions. You ready, Jerome?

Yep, ready.

All right, what's one tech tool or app you can't live without right now?

Monologue by Every. It does my— it does diction. I can talk to it and it just writes everything I do. It's like a scribe. So that's one thing.

Okay, awesome, awesome. Oh, the question earlier was, how is the curriculum at Vet2Code adjusted to the new world?

Uh, well, the, uh, well, there are 3 vertical— well, you know what, I don't want to give out any secrets.

This is, this is a really like long answer.

That's a long question. Like, because there are 3—

I will tell you this, as long as Jerome in charge, they are pivoting.

I know we already pivoted like 2 years ago. We just haven't debuted the stuff. We've already got a lot of like, we have some, I don't want to give it away. Because like, there's, we have Demo Day showing up. So we have Demo Day, we have a platform, some platform things, we have some AI things to show off. We have some, like, we've been working with GitHub, we've been working with Google. We've been working with Azure. So literally we've been working like Adi Osmani is on our board now. So we've been working very close with Google and local Kilpatrick also. So doing a lot of Google Gemini work and a lot of data engineering and looking in Python and how to make this, how to make it practical. And like, for instance, our code challenge, You just gotta be there on November 11th because our code challenge module is— I'm very proud of the code challenge module.

How do you drive the interactions without pushing someone away? I'm kind of curious what this is in referencing to.

If you, uh, give more than you ask. Like, that's pretty simple. If you keep asking me something but I don't see any action, I'm gonna get annoyed with you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. All right, back to rapid fire. Uh, what's the very first job you ever got paid to do?

Taco Bell.

Nice, I love it. Hell yeah. Um, let me ask you this, uh, if, if, if you couldn't, uh, are— if you could craft your own on-site, off-site, remote, what type of setup would you have for the office? Or are you just like fully remote, never want to go back in ever again?

Uh, I am fully remote, never want to go back in again. But if I had to do an off-site, it would not be in America, it would be like a one big room, either in French Polynesia, or we would go to—

So destination once a year, all hands is what you're saying?

Yeah, destination once a year. We got nothing but tables and chairs. Everybody sees everybody's work. There might be some booths if you need to take phone, phone calls. But I want like once a year or maybe twice a year, like, hey, y'all, let's all jump on on a plane, go to Tokyo. Uh, we're gonna go get, you know, wagyu for, you know, a like third of the price. And yeah, we're gonna eat our way, or, you know, eat our way through Kyoto, right? Like, Kyoto, like that market in Kyoto is like— I'm going back. So I go there like every year now.

Nice.

And because I gotta go get my seeds, my spices for like when barbecue season rolls up, man. Like, I am out.

So—

I love it. I love it.

Um, uh, yeah, next. So what did you want to be when you originally grew— like, like when you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Man, when I was a little kid, I wanted to be archaeologist. Yeah, a what? Archaeologist. I wanted to study—

I thought you said an oncologist. I was like, I don't even know what that is now.

You know how weird of a child— like, I was a weird kid, and even that's too weird for For me. Uh, that's funny.

That's funny.

Uh, archaeologist. I wanted to study dinosaurs and, you know, uh, look at the different periods of how, you know, the planet moved through things, right? I was interested in how dinosaurs became oil because no one really explained that to me.

Yeah, yeah. Um, what's, uh, what's a career mistake you're weirdly great Grateful for, if there is any?

Trying out DevRail. So, okay, I, uh, Indiana Hardaway.

Indiana Hardaway, dude, that is funny as hell.

I have a daughter, I'm gonna call her— that is fantastic— India. I would make her India Hardaway. That'd be cool. Uh, but yeah, so when I left CBS for a DevRel position before Microsoft. And I realized quickly that I did not like DevRel.

Yeah.

Because I like, one, building things. And 2, they want to kind of own your brand. And I'm just not a fan of people owning my brand because my brand can't be tied to your brand. Like, especially if you're not going to pay me. Like, I need like money, money for my brand, especially like in 2020. I was like, like shit hot. I was getting 2 articles in Business Insider, GitHub Star, like all this stuff. And I was like, nah, this is not right for me. Plus, I just, I don't want to have to toe the company line when it comes to the technologies. Like, I feel like the beauty of not— the beauty of not being in DevRel, also kind of not being in Microsoft, is you get to go and you get to play with all the technologies and not sell just the tech. Or, uh, that, you know, is there, or only be just focusing on the technology that's, you know, in the room because there's so much. Um, so like, that is like my biggest, like, oh, you know, trying out DevRel, finding out, you know what, I absolutely hate this. Like, I like talking about— when it comes to tech, I like talking about veterans, but, and jobs. I don't really like talking about, you know, whatever, like about InnerSource or any— some stupid stuff about that. Yeah. Like that. Yeah, that was biggest. Like that was a huge mistake, but I'm grateful for it. I tried it. Hated it.

Yeah, I love it. What's uh um uh if I told you tomorrow that you couldn't do anything in tech and you couldn't do that to code because that's tech, what hobby would you pursue or cooking?

Cooking. So I've been we've been playing my wife and I've been playing with this new style of like cooking since the pandemic called Delta. Pacific, where we try to blend flavors and stuff from our hometowns in the South with like flavors of countries we like in Southeast Asia.

That's cool.

So a lot of Sichuan style and southern style cooking is done in my house. That's a lot of like— I've become a pork belly master. A lot of Vietnamese and Texas style beef cooking, like, because you know, with pho, pho is beef-based, uh, kind of essentially beef-based.

Right, right.

Like Texas style of making brisket and then converting it with how we do the beef and with pho and stuff like that. So that's what I would do. I would become like— I'd open a restaurant, call it Delta Pacific, and then, you know.

I love that. That's cool. That's really, really cool. Last question, we'll wrap up here. And again, thanks for everybody tuned in. I appreciate the comments have been great. Uh, it seems like y'all got a lot of value out of this. I will drop—

they're like, they want a 2-hour one.

It's hilarious. Yeah, I will drop a— I'll drop the link to the article cool in the LinkedIn post, but I'll also drop it in the Torque community too so you can check it out. Um, but Jerome, I mean, this show is called Guidance Counselor 2.0 because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school, and college, but now as adults we don't really have them. What would be your biggest piece of career advice to young Jerome getting started in his career?

Start. That would be— just start. You're gonna mess— I mean, I think people get so overwhelmed with the idea of messing up, right? I think so. My background's in, like, the sport I was in was boxing when I was a kid.

Okay.

And you have to learn that everybody has a plan to get hit in the mouth, right? Mike Tyson made that saying from, um, uh, he made that saying famous, but that was always in the boxing gym. You always know how planning got it to get hit in the mouth. So start, be adaptable, focus on your skills. Like, we had on the wall, we had this, uh, So you had this mantra, skills pay the bills. Uh, like, no, we drill the skills because skills pay the bills, right?

Right.

And like, that was our mantra. You drill the skills because skills pay the bills. Drill the skills because skills pay the bills. And you are— everybody has a plan till they get hit in the mouth, but those skills are going to come and save you. That's why you drill them. Like, and so start, because as long as you're putting in the work, you're gonna make mistakes. We're gonna learn how to adapt our mistakes. Gonna have to learn how to You know, take a step back, pivot, go move forward. You're gonna learn that, hey, yo, like, this ain't gonna be a knockout. I'm gonna have to, you know, drag this. I'm gonna have to drill down on this. I'm gonna have to move slower. Oh, I have a weakness, you know. Oh, my short game is not— my inside fighting game is weak, but my long style fighting game is strong. But I can't really work on that right now because I'm in the middle of getting punched in the face. So I need to focus on keeping this person on the outside so I could do my long— my long-range fighting game. Like, these are the type of things that come up with boxing. That's just life in general, right? Like, you know, so start, start a thing, ask questions, always ask for feedback, you know, feedback, um, get from the right people. Feedback is a gift. Sometimes feedback isn't a gift, but then, you know, you build that trusted advisory of people that you can always ask questions to, right? Like, that's— but yeah, but first things first, just starting.

I love it. That's awesome. Well, y'all, thank you again for hanging out with us today. We appreciate it. Only episode for Guidance Counselor 2.0 this week. Again, we'll be in Dallas starting tomorrow. So hope to see you at Commit Your Code. Jerome, thank you, my friend. I appreciate it. And y'all have a good one. And we'll see y'all next week. Peace.