How AI is Effecting the Interviewing w/Head of Dev Relations, Angie Jones

All right, let me alert the troops. Give me a second. Good morning, everybody. I mean everybody, I mean nobody. Good morning, good morning, good morning. I always feel like a greeter at church. Morning. Please shake your hand. Please shake people's hands. Introduce yourself. Be great.

All righty.

And we've alerted the troops. Okay, cool. All right. Morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. Uh, excited about this interview. So again, for those of you who are trickling in now, You know, I don't have preset questions. Never have, never will. I like to see what's on the guest's mind. I like this to be a platform for individuals to really just kind of talk. You know, I know I have a unique opportunity to pull in a lot of tech folk who talk tech talk all the time. And I think what's fun about this live show and kind of what this is, is it's kind of like the soft skills part of the tech side of things, whatever. So excited to have Angie on. And I literally hopped on with Angie 5 minutes ago and I said, hey, what you wanna talk about? And she was like, I don't know, what do you wanna talk about? I said, well, I have a topic and the topic is how AI is affecting the interviewing process. I just realized I forgot to put process in my title, but anyways, we'll edit that in post. But so excited for this topic and excited to have Angie. I wanna go through quick, obviously, kind of housekeeping stuff first and foremost. I am an Appwrite Hero, probably the only non-technical person on a Hero program. So shout out Appwrite. Was able to sign on them with another year. I guess they've liked what I've done, kind of touting their name. So go check out Appwrite. Also, if you wanna be kind of just kept up on everything we're doing with Torque and kind of just help people get connected, Check out our site, torque.community. We have a lot of live streams. We pretty much stream every day of the week. We get people connected. We have a bunch of Discord stuff going on too. So if you want to check that out, please go to torque.community. If you want to get updated on when I go live, I literally just sent out the text that says I go live with Angie. So shoot me a text. This is actually me. It's not AI. It's not a bot. It's actually me. And so text me, text live if you want to get updated. And we got some people tuned in. Jeff's good to see you. Jordan. Taya, Chris, Devon, Ricardo, uh, it's wonderful to see y'all this morning. Um, Bjorn, great to see y'all. Yeah, we got people tuning in, which is great. All right, so, uh, uh, Angie, for those of you who don't know you, give— just give a quick background about who you are, uh, to the folks watching.

Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me. Um, Taylor, uh, Angie Jones here. I am Head of Developer Relations for Block. Um, I've been in the tech industry for a very long time, um, multiple decades at this point. But yeah, excited to be here. I focus on all things tech, and right now AI is the main focus for me as well as the rest of the industry.

Yes, absolutely. I am curious, kind of a quick icebreaker. I've been following your career ever since I kind of ran into you at conferences years ago. I am curious, you know, on kind of the shift to AI for you, right? I think you've become very vocal in AI. You have a great newsletter. For those of you, go follow up, go sign. If you're not connected with Angie on LinkedIn, do that. LinkedIn sends you kind of a request to sign up for a newsletter, but definitely do that. Just give me kind of your thoughts on the transition to AI and why you've become more vocal about that.

Yeah, so, um, I am an inventor. I have, uh, about 27 patents. And so from—

Oh, I did not know that.

Yeah, so for the entirety of my career, I, uh, have worked on the cutting edge of tech, right? Um, this is what I do, this is what I really enjoy. And so, um, it was a natural transition. Like, you know, wherever I see the industry heading, uh, I try to get ahead of that. And one, to educate myself, but more importantly, to educate everyone else. And so as someone who's in developer relations, like, that's my passion is to make sure like we all understand what's going on in the industry at any given time.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. So talk, talk about some stuff. You guys released the new AI agent. Is that correct? Is that, is that accurate of me saying? Is that, is that the technical term? Is that the proper—

That's right. You got it.

I'm learning things. I'm learning things.

Open source, that is. An open source AI agent.

Yeah. So talk, uh, talk about that because it seems—

Yeah, sure. So we, um, like everybody else, you know, have been, uh, looking at AI tools and how they can make us more efficient. And so we built, uh, an AI agent in-house, uh, for our engineering folks. So a small team of engineering, uh, engineers at the company built this, uh, AI agent called Goose. And, uh, they built it to be a developer AI agent. So AI agents, for those who don't know, uh, is basically AI that can do stuff for you. So for example, all of us are familiar with something like a ChatGPT where you're asking questions, right?

Yeah.

So ChatGPT will tell you, oh, okay, if you want to do this, if I say, how do I do something? it'll say, give you a list of steps of things to do. An AI agent takes that further and does the steps for you. It doesn't tell you what to do, you tell it the problem like, hey, that text you sent out, you're like, oh, I didn't use AI. I could say, hey, send a text to all my people and it could just do the thing for you.

Yeah.

That's what an AI agent is. Well, we built one. There's AI agents for all kinds of things. People put them in different applications and stuff like that. Well, we built one for developers to help them do all sorts of development tasks. For example, I can say, set up my environment to do X, Y, and Z, right? And it'll know, okay, what dependencies do you need? What application and software do I need to install? And it'll just do the thing for me. So we built that so that our engineers could move faster. We found that they were saving a substantial amount of time in using this. Then we open-sourced it. Now it's available to anyone who wants to use it. But here's the funny thing, Taylor. Other people in the company like yourself who are not necessarily engineers said, now wait a minute.

Yeah.

We want to save some time too. We want to have fun. The task then became, let's see if this can just do regular stuff, and it can. We improved it in ways that Everyday people can use it. And now our entire company is using it no matter what department you sit in. I know. And other companies are using it. And then just your regular developers are using it as well.

So I love that. I love it. So I have to ask—

Goose. I don't know.

I was wondering about this. Why Goose?

Yeah, so, um, it's a Top Gun reference. I've never seen the movie, but apparently Yeah, Goose is like the sidekick or something like that. Okay, so this is your sidekick.

I love that movie. That's wonderful. That's awesome. You heard it here first, folks. I don't know if I've seen that content come out of why it's called Goose. You've heard it here first on Guidance Counselor 2.0. That is why. I think that's brilliant. I think that's brilliant. I do have to say it's pretty cool. I had the pleasure to see Angie in Raleigh for all things OpenAI. She gave a talk about Goose. Didn't understand half of it, but it sounded great. And, uh, you know, uh, it was funny, we had the same plane, uh, on the way home. And, uh, and, you know, you don't— I'm nosy, right? And Angie sat right in front of me on the— shout out Southwest— on the way home. And, uh, I was kind of peering over her shoulder on what she was doing. And it was so funny, you turned around to me and like you showed me like what it did. And I was— I mean— For me, I was impressed. I was impressed. I mean, it seems like a really cool tool. So, so people can just go and— I mean, where can people get it? Like, how does one acquire a Goose? The AI tool, not the animal.

Right. So you can go to our website, which is block.github.io/goose. If you don't remember that, just Search for Codename Goose. So we had to put a little something in there so you can search it.

Otherwise, is it BL? Here, I'm gonna throw it up here. It's BLCK or BLOCK?

BLOCK dot dot GitHub dot IO.

Okay, backslash goose.

That's right.

Does that look right?

Yeah, that looks good.

All right, cool. Awesome. So so so so people can use this. Whatever they want to use it for.

Yes. So I'll give you, if you don't mind, uh, just a very everyday example.

Yeah, I love it.

Okay, so, um, Goose is an MCP client.

So, um, I'm hearing stuff about MCP. What is MCP?

All right, I'm so glad you asked.

We're gonna get into the topic here in a minute, but we started early because I knew we were gonna have a lot to talk about. So what is the MCP?

All right, so MCP is a standard. It stands for Model Context Protocol, and it's a standard that allows these AI agents to connect with your, your systems and your tools and your data, right? So I have Goose installed. It's a local install, so it's not like in the web or cloud-based or anything like that. So I have Goose installed, and if I want Goose to interact with my other applications I can do that via MCP. So any API or anything like that, databases, all of that good stuff, you can kind of wrap it into an MCP server and then the AI agent can just utilize it. So you can have as many of these as you want. Here's a great example. So, um, yesterday is Monday, right? On Mondays, this is how I use Goose. So I use Asana for my task tracking. Yes.

Sure.

All right. And then I have a calendar, Google Calendar, that has all of my meetings and things like that.

Yeah.

At some point in between those meetings, I got to do some other work, which is in Asana. Yes.

You got to find time to do the actual work. Yeah, it's wild, right?

All right. So I say, hey, Goose, here's an MCP server for Asana. Here's an MCP server for Google Calendar. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to go to Asana. I want you to find all of my tasks that I have not completed. And then I want you to look at my calendar and figure out where I can plug these tasks into. And then using your brilliant AI mind, this is what I want you to do. Don't just slap stuff on my calendar. Look at the context of the, the task. And I want you to kind of group things that are similar together so that I'm not doing a whole lot of context switching, right? And so it was able to look at it and say, okay, these things will require you to talk to people. Um, let's put this on us on the same day, right? These things are more technical. You're going to need to focus quite deeply. Let's find a day where you don't have a lot of meetings and plug those things. You see what I mean?

Absolutely.

And so, and within 30 seconds, I have my entire week planned out.

That's impressive. That's impressive. Uh, Curtis coming in here. What up, Curtis? Former guest of the show. Hey, I've been diving into Goose and it's on like massive productivity. Hey, this is— you can literally just take this clip and add it to your website. Uh, I'm literally working on an MCP server for Slack Docs right now.

I use the Slack MCP. I think it's community. So here's the other thing, Taylor. Slack, I don't know if y'all got it already, Curtis, but y'all may get on it. Okay, so look, anybody can make MCP server. So right now I'm using a Slack MCP server that's just made by a community member. Like, you don't have to work at Slack, but I'm sure Curtis and the team are working on an official one, which will be great. I'll swap it out when that— when I see it. But, uh, right now I'm just using the community-built one, and, um, it works pretty great.

That's awesome, that's awesome. Yeah, some things I do with it: repurpose content, get me free times and X-minute free chunks for meetings, analyze Analytics reviews, codes work, man. Everything. Yeah, yeah, Jace. Yeah, Jace, I was about to text you. We need to look at Goose, uh, or at least I do. Um, so I love it. And then, and then Roselle's obviously in the chat as well.

Hey, Roselle.

Um, all right, so let's actually talk now. Now, now that we got that out of the way, let's, let's, let's, let's talk about, you know, again, you know, hopped on with Angie and I was like, what do you want to talk about? And, you know, we talked about the, the, the market right now and, and how it's obviously not ideal and And, you know, I asked her, I said, you know, one of the things I haven't talked to anybody about yet on this show that I've been interested in is how is AI affecting interviewing? So that's what we're gonna talk about today. And so, Angie, just some initial thoughts. What are you seeing? What have you experienced? Because I, because I've put out some posts. I was like, how do hiring managers really navigate hiring right now with AI out there?

Yeah. So Okay, I got some hot takes.

I love hot takes. Hot takes on a Tuesday is my favorite.

So, okay, first of all, we're seeing like AI all over the place in every part of the interview cycle, right? And you know what's funny is that on the hiring manager side, they use AI. Like they use AI to go through the thousands of applications there are and kind of filter out the best ones for the job. We literally just posted a tutorial yesterday for Goose that was like, hey, evaluate this resume against this job rec and give me a score for the person. And it like analyzed it and things like that. So, and then we're seeing it on the other side from the applicant's point of view. And for some reason, that part is viewed as taboo, but not the part where the hiring manager is using it. Why is that? You know what I mean?

Interesting.

Okay, so why can't they use AI? In fact, if I were to hire someone and they know how to use AI effectively, that's a bonus, you know, on the job. So why would I fault them for using it during the interview process?

Interesting.

Now, the key here is to use it ethically. Now, if you're going to have AI answer your questions that I'm asking you, That's not cool.

Have you seen that? Have you seen somebody though just have ChatGPT up? Could you tell they were just ripping it off?

Well, people have been doing this even before AI existed, where you can tell they're reading from Google search results or something like that, right? So that's— this is nothing new, but people have taken it to the extreme where, you know, they, they might, um, have an AI bot like actually answering the questions. It's not them, or actually uh, writing the code for them. That's not cool. But what I think we should make space for is if I'm doing, um, a coding challenge, for example, I asked you to do a coding challenge, I don't think it's fair to say disable all of your AI help within your IDE and just answer it raw. Like, the same, the same argument is for like, okay, anything. Like, if they come on the job and you are going to allow them to use it, why not allow them to use it now? And if you know how to interview people and you know your stuff, then you can tell, like, if they still know what they're doing or not. Like, if you use AI to help you generate this code, Sure. explain it back to me. Tell me what parts are not good, you know. Where would you then step in as a human being and a developer to fix this or improve Prove it. Like, talk to me about it. And and I think that's enough of a signal to make a decision on if this person is competent or not. Because let's face it, on the job they're going to use AI. Now, um, I think that we should allow for this, but again in an ethical way. So I'm not cool with if you're trying to trick me with AI. But don't trick Angie.

Angie get angry.

I'm not gonna get tricked, right? That's the thing. And, um, so, so let's just be honest. And as hiring managers, let's be realistic, um, and set candidates up for success. In fact, I want to see if you know how to use AI, right? Are you just going to generate the code and say, okay, there it is, it runs, right? Or are you going to kind of look at what was generated? Are you going to, you know, figure out like if this is good or if it's not? And talk to me about that. So that's my take on it.

Yeah, no, I love that. So much to unpack here. I think— what are you guys doing? I am curious. I guess for me as a non-technical person and kind of a recruiter, I guess I don't see a huge concern I think it would be really obvious for a conversation type of interview step, and it would be very obvious if you're just reading off of— I think that's very easy to screen. How are you guys addressing take-home tests, live coding tests? Like, what does that look like for y'all? Because I've been wondering, I think the idea of take-home tests now maybe is not as much of a thing as it used to be, because I feel like take-home tests, you just go and run all this through.

Mm-hmm.

All these Copilot, Lenny, or whatever, all these, you know.

No, really.

Things.

Yeah.

Like, so what's that like? How are you guys addressing that?

Yeah, so we do a coding test that's live, like a pair programming type of situation.

Yeah.

Um, and I don't know if, if we've even adopted the stuff that I'm talking about. This is very much so an Angie take. So don't—

Yeah, no, I love this. Yeah, this is, this is why we have these chats. I just want raw and unfiltered. I mean, Yeah, yeah. Sometimes talking about it is your best medicine, by the way. Yeah, you know, because you can eventually implement it, right?

So, um, we do the live thing, right? And I, I, I, I think— I don't know what, what folks are using these days, so everybody might use something different, I don't know. But, uh, you have like some system or whatever that you log into, and I think like the, the AI stuff is not enabled in that environment, so you wouldn't be able to use it anyway. Now, of course, somebody could just kind of try to copy it and put it, but we'll see if you're copying the code or something like that. Like, I don't know, I guess there might be ways around it, but again, like, I just think all of that is really deceitful. And more than anything, like, the deceit is what'll knock you out of the, the interview process.

Yeah.

More than just the AI, you know.

Yeah, absolutely. What I do, I wanna go back to kind of what you said around using AI, you know, when in the interview and how to use it well. And, you know, at the end of the day, you're gonna use it at your job, so why not enable the interviewer? I think that's huge because when I started recruiting, I'll never forget when I started recruiting back in the day, like 2011, I was told, I was told, get this, big hot take from my manager who obviously had no idea what she was talking about. She said, bad developers Google, good developers don't. And which is hilarious now because now that, I mean, even early in my career when I got into recruiting engineers day in, day out, like everybody Googles, right?

Yeah.

But I feel like that's where we're at. It's just a more powerful Google thing, right? So in the sense of, if you are in your interview and you're making people code essentially on Notepad, Right, with no tools or anything, it would have said— and correct me if I'm using these terms wrong, but I feel like it was the same thing. Like, like, when you get a job, you're going to use tools at your job to make you a better developer. So why not make the interview process very similar to the environment you're walking into?

Yes. And, and, and more importantly, let's think about this. Let's say that I had a developer that I said, go code in Notepad, and I don't want you to use any tools at all because I want to make sure you know how to code, right? All right, they do that, the code is fine, beautiful, we hire this person, and then we're trying to force them to utilize AI tools to be more efficient. Now what if that same person goes, I don't want to use AI tools, right? I am old school, I want to develop in, you know, Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, like, like, I don't want to use any tools. So then I'm dinging that same person that I told not to use AI tools up front and then tried to force them to use AI tools, and I'm dinging them and saying, you're moving slower than everybody else, like, you're not being efficient, why don't you use AI tools? Like, do we not think that's hypocritical?

I mean, to me it does. To me it does. And again, I think that's where, as a non-technical guy viewing the industry at a macro level, I think that's where I've never understood hiring managers making the interview process not like the environment they're stepping into. I never understood that, right? I think it's the whole, you know, that, I think it's the meme of it's like the interview is like a Tyrannosaurus Rex that looks really mean and then the actual job is the Tyrannosaurus Rex off Toy Story. Right. I never understood that. I never understood that. And so I would imagine that if you're using AI heavily, that it would behoove you as a manager to have that type of environment interview process.

Yeah.

Let me ask you this and kind of going back to Goose a little bit. And when I meet with engineering leaders like yourself, I always want to kind of get a peek under the hood of how you like to be approached, how you like to be, how people like to position themselves to you when they're interviewing. Would you say you are going to probably look at somebody who is maybe building in public with Goose, utilizing your tool? Like, if they want to come work for you, I would imagine, I would imagine that would probably be of use to maybe be doing some cool stuff with Goose in public. Thoughts on that?

Um, that definitely would be a bonus. Um, even if it's not Goose, you know, just some sort of AI agent Um, bonus points for the MCP ecosystem.

Yeah.

And, uh, yeah, I think that definitely will help you stand out. So we were talking, Taylor, earlier about how rough the market is right now, and I'm like, I barely know advice to give people because it's really brutal out here. But I have seen, like, folks stand out, and that's exactly how they stand out, is by creating content like that catches people's eye. where the job opportunities might even come to you versus you seeking them out, you know what I mean? And so you see people who get it, you're like, oh, they get it. Oh, they already know how to use tools. Oh wow, they're using it in ways that we hadn't even thought of. That's somebody we want on the team, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

So, uh, those are standout ways, even if it's not in AI. I saw a woman, um, who recently got laid off And maybe about a month, she had a new job. And I thought, oh, that's really impressive. But I watched her job search, and it was— it was— I was very intrigued by it because I hadn't seen this before.

And real quick, did you know this person or not? I want to try to make a point. Did you know this person?

I didn't know her.

Okay. Okay.

Okay. Yeah, I know her. So she's on my LinkedIn, and she's a leader. So she, um, She, she posted that she lost her job. That message there, I watched very carefully. The message was very thoughtful. You know, you feel a lot of emotions on layoffs, you know, um, and it's natural to want to vent, but that's not extremely helpful as you're trying to seek jobs, right? So I, I think you should find a safe space to vent, vent with your friends and your family. maybe not so much on your LinkedIn profile because the next manager is looking at that and you are justified, but also, hey, nobody wants somebody like that on the team who's kind of like bitter.

Yeah.

Even though you have every right to be. It's totally unfair, but I'm just telling you the truth because that's what I do. All right, so, um, this lady, she had a very thoughtful message. She was appreciative of her time at her job, but you know, uh, whatever. I'm on a— I'm on the hunt now for my new job. And I watched every day she would post, and she would post about things she was doing. It could be everyday things, but she turned those into lessons on leadership. And then at the end of the post, hey, by the way, I'm looking for a job. If y'all want a leader like me, holla at your girl. You know what I mean? And it was just brilliantly executed, like, and, and you've got to take a peek into her mind and her thought process How she approaches leadership. That's things that you can't necessarily put on a resume, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

Um, and, and, and I wasn't surprised that she got scooped up relatively quickly.

Yeah, yeah. And let me ask you this. I'm assuming— trying to make another point here, hopefully you go with me— I'm, I'm, I'm assuming that you probably didn't like or comment on everything she posted.

That's true.

But you saw it.

Oh yeah.

And I think that's what I'm trying to get at here, is that I think people are like, oh well, I'm not getting likes, I'm not getting comments, I'm not getting engagement, I'm just not gonna post. And you see what I'm saying? And it's like, you know, I tweeted this the other day. I said, just because your stuff is not getting likes doesn't mean people are not seeing it. And I think like I think that's the unlock, right? This person was on your radar even though you did not engage with them consistently. You saw the whole thing and you were invested. And so that's what I want to encourage others. I guess a prime example here where it's like people are watching. Yeah, all the time.

That's right. If you look at any post, the number of impressions far exceeds the number of engagement, right? I look at, um, even how my friends and things use social media and they're like cracking up laughing at a post and they all think it's the best thing they've seen and then they keep scrolling. Like, I literally asked my husband like, why didn't you click like on it? And he was like, huh, I hadn't even thought to click like.

Yes, yes, yes. I mean, I literally— that's so funny you brought that up, uh, and your husband's great. Um, uh, I, you know, I was talking to, um, one of my social media friends and I was like, I, I have a, I have a meme, a GIF, whatever, going viral on TikTok. It's got like half a million views.

Oh wow.

And only 50 followers came from it. Now you're probably like, that's a lot of followers. Back like a year ago, that would have netted me 2,000 to 3,000 followers. And, and I think like there— and again, I don't want to go too social media tactic-y here on this conversation, but again, just want to encourage people to, to put yourself out there and, and to not worry about the likes and the comments because I think people There's so much content these days, people just wanna watch and they're probably not gonna engage with you. But that doesn't mean— and then I think this is the prime example. And Roxy brought it up too. Yeah, Aaron Francis, if you have not, I actually talked about— I actually had Aaron Francis on a few weeks ago. You check that out, it's on my YouTube, but— and it's on my podcast on Spotify. But Aaron's talk's very similar to this, right? Aaron is very open about just his journey of building in public and how things happen.

Mm-hmm.

And it's been, it's been great. And honestly, you could probably speak to it too about starting to put out more with AI. I'm sure you've gotten a lot of requests and a lot of attraction from it by just starting to go.

Yeah, you're, you're absolutely right. A lot of opportunities. I was— I have a young developer advocate on my team. She's junior. Her name is Ebony Lewis. And, uh, Ebony, she's just learning the DevRel game or whatever. And I told Ebony, um, I was like, you have to start posting externally. Like, that's how people will know who you are. That's how you'll get opportunities. And she was a bit hesitant at first, and then she started posting not long ago. And within like the first 2 weeks of posting, like literally opportunities just coming to her in her DMs and things like that from conferences that she applied to and got rejected. Now they're like sending her a direct invitation to come and talk. And I said, see what I told you? And so she's like, okay, you are absolutely right. And, uh, she's posted about this, so I'm not like telling her business, but she's posted this very thing, like, okay, I got out, I started talking, and like now opportunities are coming to me. That's the key. Like, how will people— and she posted this— how will people know to call you if you didn't tell them? You know, so you have to get out there and tell them, even if people aren't liking, even if they aren't commenting, they see it. Word of mouth gets around. Somebody will say, oh, I'm looking for somebody to talk about AI. Oh yeah, I just saw this girl, Ebony. Make the connection, you know what I mean?

Yeah, absolutely. And again, right, the power of, you know, you know, power content. And Aaron said this in his talk, like, is it fair Is it fair that that's the way the world works now? Probably not.

Yeah.

You have to post stuff to get seen. But prime example, if I have an AI question now, I'm going to Angie or I'm going to Gant, right? Like in my mind, or April at Microsoft. Like when I hear AI, those are the 3 people. Why? Because they're consistently doing that. And which leads to kind of my other thing too, and I'm curious about this. I tweeted this this morning. that I think niching down right now and becoming a specialist is incredibly important in today's market. We are no longer in the age of where COVID was, where like, if you can spell React, we'll hire you. It's now, hey, we need this specific problem solved using this specific technology. Have you seen that as well, or are you still on the generalist train?

Specialists always, shine to me. But generalists, like, you know, um, you want somebody who, okay, after this problem and I give you the next one, you can solve that one too, right? Even if it's like different tools and stuff like that. And so it's a balance. I'm someone who I like— I like to be a T. Like, I go really deep in something, but I also am a generalist in a lot of other things.

Yeah, yeah, I love that. I love that. I'm trying to think of anything else. I had a question and it escaped my mind. Anything else that maybe popped into your brain since, since we've been yapping that, that you want to get out for, for job seekers right now?

I would say just kind of general, like, tips and advice. We all know that the market is rough right now. We know that for any given job, there's like an abundance of applicants. So ways to kind of stand out, I think, um, if you can use a reference. People message me after the fact, and I think that is so wrong. Like, people say, hey Angie, I applied at Block.

Angie loses out. She can't—

Yeah. And I'm like, why didn't you come to me before you did that? So go to the person. Here's how it works behind the scenes. Like, If someone refers you at a company, there's like some, some sort of indicator of that on your resume. Like maybe you float to the top of the 3,000 applicants that are there. And people, you know, these are people that the company has already employed. And so their word kind of means a little something like, oh, you know that person? All right, cool. Now that doesn't guarantee you anything, but At least your resume will be looked at versus not even looked at at all, you know.

Yes.

There's a lot of resumes that's not looked at. No one has time to look at thousands of resumes. If you pull a crop and it's like, okay, there's 10 people in here that I can interview, I'm just gonna go with those. I'm not gonna look at the rest unless I— okay, none of those 10 were it, maybe I might pull again. But you know, this is how it works. Again, not fair, yada yada yada. It's the way it is. All right, so, uh, utilize your network.

Yeah.

Uh, get people to refer you if you know someone at the company, right? Um, and then find ways to stand out. Now, I used to say things like, oh, I think a cover letter is stupid. In this economy, put your cover letter on there if you want to. You know, you gotta find In this economy, you gotta find a way to stand out.

Um, yeah, yeah.

I mean, if I'm looking at your resume, most people are gonna maybe like— especially if I'm about to interview you, people might go and look at your social media, especially if you have links to it right on your resume. Here's my LinkedIn. I, I might click that link and I go to your LinkedIn and I want to see what you're talking about. If you are talking about the thing that I'm like hiring for That's a no-brainer. Yes.

Kelly Vaughn said that on a recent live we went. She actually, she said she would rather look at your social proof of what you're putting out because she says, you know, we were hiring an API person, and if you have a bunch of LinkedIn posts and blog posts on API, she goes, that's gonna mean more to me than a portfolio.

That's true. Yeah, that's very true. It gives a lot of signal like this is something that you are comfortable enough with that you would go publicly talking about it. Like, think about the signal that that gives, you know?

Right. 100%. All right, rapid fire. We'll wrap it up here. Angie, you're a gem. Thank you so much for today. Everybody, everybody go connect with Angie. She's awesome. Um, so first question, um, I always ask, if I told you tomorrow morning that you woke— when you woke up, you could not do anything in tech, what is the one hobby that you would pursue?

Cooking. I love to cook.

I love it. What are any, any, any dish, any like thing you're—

I'm from New Orleans, so like, uh, one dish that I make that for people when they come visit me is yakameen. So yakameen is like this kind of Cajun ramen infusion. All right, okay, right. It's beautiful.

I want that. That sounds great. Um, uh, next thing, um, what is, uh, aside from goose, aside from goose, because, you know, You obviously promoted that. What's kind of another framework, language, AI, something or other that you're working on tinkering with that you're pretty excited about?

MCP. I can't stop talking about it. MCP, that whole ecosystem is just like so simple and brilliant, and I'm obsessed.

I love it. I don't get this reference. Air frying tips. Angie.

Okay, so I'm an air fryer ambassador.

Okay, I love, I love my air fryer. I love it.

Okay, very good. So I literally just did a talk in Valencia 2 weeks ago. The title was Air Fryers, Automation, and AI. A hit. A hit.

Stop. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. I love that so much. Next question. Anybody in the, anybody in the community, anybody in the tech community, That you love what they're doing, that you want to give the flowers to?

Uh, April's. Uh, April, is it Spike?

Yeah, I think it's Spike.

Mary, so I don't know if her name changed or not.

She's great.

But um, April is just making such beautiful content.

Like, I mean, it's unbelievable.

Makes me feel so good when I watch her stuff, and she's doing really cool stuff with agents and fashion and AI and you name it. Like, she's pretty impressive.

Yeah, she's awesome. She's a force for sure.

Yeah.

Um, uh, uh, let's see here. Last question. The 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 necessarily have a guidance counselor to turn to and just ask for general career advice. What would be your biggest piece of career advice to young Angie? If you go back in time and tell, tell young Angie one thing 10 years ago, 15, 20 years ago, what would it be?

Be fearless. Be fearless. Like, we have so much fear as we enter this industry, and we're surrounded by these brilliant minds. And it's really easy to feel imposter syndrome and feel intimidated. But I mean, just be fearless. Like, literally, do not carry any fear with you. And just go for it. Learn, consume, share, and that'll take you far.

100%. Jasmine comes in here. Where can we hear that talk? Air fryer talk.

Um, I think they're gonna release it this week, actually. So if you follow me on LinkedIn, I will definitely promote it. There you go.

Cool. You heard it here first.

And I'll put it in my newsletter.

There you go. There you go. All right, y'all, it's a pleasure. Hopefully you guys enjoyed this. Very excited I get to have Jordan Wallace on the show tomorrow. Um, so, uh, gonna talk job search stuff with Jordan Wallace. She is a, uh, a fellow Ronstadt Torque employee. So we're gonna have a Good time, um, with her tomorrow morning, 9:30 AM Central. Go follow Angie. I'll tag her in the show notes after this. Um, Angie, you're a gem. Thank you so much. Stay on so I can say bye to you, uh, off air. But y'all have a great Tuesday, and we'll see you on the Torque Discord. Peace.