ep. 14 - emceeing an engineering conference

I personally think overall we need to be doing a better job of communicating to the community. Like, you can't assume anything, like, like a person's gonna know how to use anything. And so, like, I don't— like, for me, Like, like if we were to go with your thing of like, hey, we can't change stuff. Well then like I would be obsolete then because like I have to change stuff all the time for meetings or travel or all that stuff. I think it's either you or Angelus or somebody every week goes, hey, here are the events this week. Check the cal.torque.discord if you want to like put it on your calendar, but here's what's going on. Alrighty, we are here. We are in Salt Lake City, Utah. It's my first time being here. Uh, it's pretty. You're probably wondering, Taylor, what are you in Salt Lake for now? Like, I have so many people DMing me. They're like, where are you in the world? So I'm emceeing Epic Web Dev Conf that Kent C. Dodds puts on. Super excited. Came in a day early just to get my bearings, get some work done. About to dive into it, but I'm gonna take you along for the ride over the next few days. I don't have Patrick with me. Patrick, miss you, friend. Miss you, buddy. So this is the, this is the first conference I've taken the DJI with me since Momentum Developer Conference back in October. And I feel like my brain like works a little differently, like just with the DJI. So excited to take you along for the ride. Also gonna talk about Torque, like what's been going on. Like we've had so many changes going on that I wanna update you on. So we're gonna do that. My voice seems to be holding up. It's been a challenge over the last two conferences between Amsterdam and Raleigh, but feel really, really good. Excited to emcee this conference. Excited to take you along for the ride, and it's gonna be a good one. So yeah, maybe let's get to work. Maybe find a coffee shop to work at. I don't know, but it's gonna be great. Weather's beautiful. Excited. Let's get in. Good morning. Couldn't get up this morning, kind of tired from traveling yesterday. Today's gonna be a great day. Uh, we're gonna head to a coffee shop right around the street. It opens up in 32 minutes, not that anybody's counting, and, uh, gonna work for about 2 hours. And I have a bunch of calls. I'm actually excited to highlight some of these calls, give you a little behind the scenes. We'll talk about Torque today, everything that's going on. And then MC duties start this afternoon at around 2:15 Mountain Standard Time, which I'm pumped about. So I can't wait to bring you along. It's gonna be a great day. Let's go. You know, I'm traveling so much now that the 2 things I have to do when I land is find good coffee shops and get some soda water from Like, that's like, that's it. I mean, if I can, if I can do those 2 things, I'm golden. So let's go get some coffee. Living from one piece of paper to the next, taking it day to day. So one of the things that we're responsible for, uh, on the Torque Community Team is bringing people into the platform and then obviously engaging them, right? That's pretty much the community team, bringing them in and then engaging them. And I've been working on some Salesforce reports. Shout out Pravesh for helping me. But just kind of like did some, did some looking at some numbers this morning and very proud of our team. Ideally, we want to— ideally, we want to place 80% of our placements, people we get jobs from the community. And Um, over the last 3 months, like back in December, we were at 29%. So that means like 29% of the placements were outside of the community and the platform. And I want to give a shout out to our team because this month in March, we brought that number down to 12%, which is massive. So very, very excited for our team, very proud of our team for getting people added, getting people engaged. Again, one of the, one of the benefits of using Torque is that like if you're a hiring manager watching this and you hit us up, typically when you, when a recruiter messages somebody cold on LinkedIn, the response rate's only about 25%. If you use us at Torque, we reach out to somebody on our platform, 75% is a response rate typically because we engage with them. They know who Torque is. They're, you know, they, they're following us along, all this stuff. So the fact we were able to bring down the placement from 29% to 12% is Absolutely massive. So shout out to the community team. We're doing the Lord's work right now. And honestly, the fact that we brought that number down to 12% from 29% in just 3 months is tremendous. All right, so we just finished conversation with Brianna, um, around swag. So we're gonna do a swag drop here soon. We're gonna have 2 hoodies, 2 t-shirts, and the Severance-themed shirt we did. for sale to our community. And then obviously hooking our ambassadors up who've done great work spreading the Torque name. So really excited about that. And then just got off a call with Angelos, who's on the community ops team with Brianna. And I love this about our team, like everybody wants to get involved. And so he wants to start a podcast. So we just talked about the ins and outs of starting podcasts, what it looks like doing a live stream. So what we're going to do with Angelos is, I think one of the biggest things that people need help with starting their careers is just what's out there. Like, what's a business analyst? What's a project manager? What's a designer? What's a product owner do? So what Angelos is going to do is he is going to start a podcast where he interviews people, both technical and non-technical within IT, just to see what they do, to allow people to understand how people got into positions of where they're at, to help educate people who may be getting into tech or be career transitioners. So I'm really excited about this. I think it's gonna be a huge help for a lot of people in our community. All right, we are back at the hotel room. Uh, T-minus, what time is it? T-minus about 2 hours before MC duties start. Finished up some more work. Great back-to-back-to-back-to-back meetings this morning. Excited to take you along for day 1 of MCing Epic Web Dev Conference. All right, so I don't know where the conference center is. I'm supposed to be there for soundcheck soon. I have no idea where to go. Here she is. There's my MC host. What's going on, team host? Let's go! I got the power. I have all the power. Well, welcome to Epic Web Dev Conf. Are y'all ready to have an epic time? Woo! Yeah, I see what you did there. Yeah, thank you. That was smart. Thank you. So my name is Taylor Desseyn. Um, I am VP of Community at a jobs career platform called Torque. Um, this is my first time emceeing Epic Web Dev Conf. I'm one of the emcees that we're interviewing CL. Um, if you did the render, you may have seen me. Excited to be here, excited to make some new friends, and, uh, excited to see this whole, uh, dog and puppy stuff with Bri. This whole shebang. Whole shebang. Love it. Just finished up the speaker dinner at Roost Chris. Shout out to Clerk for sponsoring. Appreciate that. It was great. Just went to kind of the after-party of day 1, I guess you could say. Hung out with some folks, made some friends. I'm headed back to the hotel to prep for my MC responsibilities tomorrow. Had a really good kind of dry run today with some of the lightning talks. But realized I need to kind of prep a little bit more. It just, it was just a lot to try to like read stuff off screenshots and Excel docs. So I'm gonna go back and prep a little bit. Me and Bri have kind of a system where we're alternating, where she takes like one speaker as like she's kind of the main talker and then I'm kind of the other main talker. But you know, so, so, so we don't talk over each other because I know I have a tendency. I've been told by people in my life that I have a tendency to talk over people. So I'm trying not to do that. So yeah, headed back to hotel, going to prep, going to go get to bed early because tomorrow's going to be a long day. Let's go. Day 2. Got the coffees. It's time, folks. I'm going to look like a blue Oompa Loompa. Do I look good at least? Taking off into space. Anyways, let's get it. Day 2, full conference, MC duties. It's gonna be a blast. Let's go. So excited for this next one. I've seen this gentleman speak a few times, um, and, uh, if you watch one of my latest vlogs, I basically give him 16 hugs and you can see the look on his face. It's like, can you please stop giving me hugs? Um, so again, I'm gonna I'm trying not to fanboy too much, but up next is Aaron Francis. Really excited for this one. Give it up for the great Aaron Francis! Alrighty, we are through the first part of the conference. It was amazing. The feedback for me and Bree have been resounding. People just have loved what we're doing. Super grateful. The jokes have been great. Everything, for the most part, have landed. And the energy's just through the roof. Single-track conferences have their own energy. I'm not used to, I usually don't go to single-track conferences, but I just think, like, I understand conferences have to scale, but being able to have a single-track conference, the energy is palpable. Everybody's super excited, everyone's supporting each other. Just an amazing, amazing, just an amazing morning. So lunch break now. We're gonna finish out a bunch of speakers this afternoon. Just a heck, heck of a day at Epic Web Dev. All right, so one thing that isn't being talked about enough with this onesie is how hard it is to go to the bathroom. Women, I don't know how you do it. Um, I've already dislocated my shoulder a few times trying to get off this onesie to go to the bathroom. Got to catch up with Hank Taylor, who's head of marketing at Laravel. I bounced some ideas off of him, kind of with some future, some Torque stuff. He, uh, he had some great ideas around events. I'll tell you what, if you need to talk about events, Hank Taylor's your guy. It was a great conversation with him, and, uh, we're gonna go ahead and go back in, strap in for the second half of the Conference. Let's get it. I wouldn't even follow you. I'm so glad like your dad's watching. Also, it's like, hey, you guys are like sick. That was amazing. I got 2 answers right. You did. You did. I got 2 answers right. I'm learning. See, even a recruiter can do this. Everybody wave. Here we go. Okay. One, two, and three. Good morning. It's time to go home. Tired, worn out, but man, just, uh, just grateful. Let's get to packing. Let's get some coffee. Let's get to the airport. All right, coffee's acquired. What's my second one? Um, breakfast is I'm gonna head to the airport in about half an hour. Wanted to kind of just give just some updates about Torque. It's gonna be short and sweet. Obviously, by the time you watch this, it's gonna be a little different in timeline, but really excited to launch our ambassador program. We're closing it up this week, so it's the end of March right now. We're gonna announce our ambassadors, really have people who are passionate about what we're doing. I mean, at the end of the day, we can't build this community— I think we have a pretty special community for Torque On like spreading the word basically of like building this amazing job search community. I mean, I had somebody in my DMs literally message me yesterday. See if you can find it quickly. She, uh, this person goes, you see, I like the idea of Torque. I've been a corporate developer for 8 years. I've been laid off 4 times in the last 3 years. Golang is not everyone's cup of tea, so I'm making a leap of faith as a freelance contractor. And I believe a platform like Torque is just what this sad world needs for facing the current IT crisis. Like, and here's the deal, y'all, I'm getting massive amounts of DMs about this. And so all that being said, um, you know, the feedback's been tremendous. So we want to spread the word with ambassador programs. We're going to launch our mentor-mentee program. I just saw some numbers. We already have 80 mentees signed up. I mean, we haven't even been pushing it really. Um, so that's exciting. Uh, we have, uh, our first swag drop coming. So by the time this video puts it's out, it'll already been out in the wild. Um, you know, we're— I had a great conversation with Hank Taylor, uh, head of marketing at Laravel, just about the importance of really good swag. So that's coming. Um, and just a lot of— we're launching another podcast to help people realize what else is out there other than software engineering in tech to get into it. So that's going to be headed up by my guy Angelo on our team. We're so excited about that. Um, and then a lot of really internal stuff's about to happen between Ronstadt and Torque and So you're going to start seeing us a lot of other places. So really, really exciting. Cannot wait for the next 6 months. Going to be a whirlwind. All right. At the airport. Epic Web Dev. Kent, CDODs, thank you. It was a blast. Also, Salt Lake City Airport, my absolute favorite now to work out of. Headed home. It's been a heck of a time. Grateful for this opportunity. Just the caliber of speakers was unbelievable. unbelievable. You know, honestly, I surprised myself with some pretty good jokes, which was great. So yeah, we're off for about 3 weeks or so. Then we are headed down to Talentland in Guadalajara again with the community team for a very, very big conference. I can't wait to highlight that. But again, great time. It's time to go see the fam and get some rest. Peace.