How to Crush the Application and Interview Process w/Brad Garropy

All righty, we are here. We made it.

Uh, technology, you can't hear me. Great. Yeah, I can't.

Yeah, I can hear you.

Okay, good, good.

Yeah, yeah, don't touch anything else. No, don't, don't move. Uh, what's going on everybody? Good morning. A little late this morning. Um, uh, Brad's camera just decided to not work. Um, I was in the DMs going, hey man, where'd you go? Where'd you go? What— who, who— what brand is that? What brand is that? Do we need to them?

It's old. It's a Sony A6000, so it's a little old.

All right, Sony, Sony, count your days. Get together, lock it in. Uh, I'm pumped for this conversation. Um, I know Brad— this is Brad's second time on the show. Um, Brad, were you— where were you at when we talked last? Were you at Stripe or were you at—

you were at Atlassian I was at Atlassian, then I moved to Stripe, and then I had to go on a job search again. So yeah, a lot of practice in the last year.

Yeah. So we're gonna talk about practice. What you talking about, practice? For those of you tuning in, welcome.

Please say hey.

We'd love to hear from you. Again, like I tell folks, this is really a meetup. This is a virtual meetup. It's kind of like what I call it. To be frank with you, I feel like you really can't get these caliber guests in a meetup. But you can get them on the show. So, um, excited for this. So please, please say hey. Would love to hear from you. It's like I tell everybody, um, say hey. You know, I know there's a lot of people who network, um, on this show. I know we have a lot of Torque people that network on the show. Um, and it's like I tell folks, you know, I, you know, kind of my vision and kind of what we want to do at Torque is, is, is we really want to, really want to open up our network, our, our, our catalog, our Rolodex. People don't use Rolodexes anymore. But essentially open up our Rolodex for you. And so, you know, it's like I tell folks, connect with every guest that I have on the show. Shoot Brad a message, say, hey, it was good to see you on Guidance Counselor 2.0 today. It's like I tell folks, if you do this like time and time and time again, and I've been doing this for 5 years now, your network would be pretty expansive at this point. So again, message Brad, tell him, tell him you saw him this morning. A few housekeeping things, as always. First off, I want to give a shout out to Appwrite. I'm part of the Heroes Program. I don't know what they do. I'm just kidding. I kind of know what they do. Uh, but love the team out there. Check them out. Um, great tool, a great piece of software. Um, if you want to be kept up to date with what we're doing in the Torque community, torque.community, we'd love to have you. Got a lot going on out there. And listen, if you want to know when I go live, text me. This is actually my number. This is like my other number, my work number. Um, so text LIVE to 615-235-5650. Um, it is actually me on the other end. It's not some AI bot that I programmed.

It's actually me.

Um, and, uh, a few people tuned in this morning. Um, Jordan, it's good to see you. Ricardo, Roxy, I almost wore that Curly Boy shirt today. Sebastian, it's good to see you. Jason, good to see you. I got the Cloudflare socks right now.

There you go. I love it.

I love it. Um, and just good to see you, Michael. It's good to see you, Mark. Great to see you as well. All right, enough with me yapping. Chris, good to see you this morning. Enough of me yapping. Again, please say hey, uh, if you are tuning in. But Brad, let's give the people what they want, man. Just who are you? What do you do now? And then we'll dive in.

Yeah. So, uh, my name is Brad Garoppi. I've been doing software for like 15 years now. It feels like a long time.

You look great.

You look great for doing it for 15 years. Um, it hasn't worn me down too much, honestly. I, I'm, I'm in a really fun spot right now. Um, I, I've had probably 5 different companies I've worked for over the years. All have been fairly big companies, and every step I've taken has, has gone to a smaller and smaller company.

Yep.

Front-end dev, you know, trying to stay up with the times.

Yeah.

And yeah, still loving what I do. I think that's what's most important.

I love it. I love it. So yeah, for those of you who tune in, so I had Brad on really before the last year of his career where he's, you know, bounced around a little bit and found some jobs. And so, you know, Brad, I just wanna go ahead and dive in, man. I mean, you know, listen, I mean, I feel like you're Thanos right now collecting some stones at some big companies, right? Atlassian, Stripe, Cloudflare. There's a lot to unpack here, but I guess I wanna ask you, how's it been the last year, right? I mean, obviously bouncing around, it can be stressful. Just kind of give some overall arching thoughts of really just navigating your career the last year.

You know, I've learned a lot about culture at different companies over the past year. Yeah. You know, I bet when you jump, I bet when you jump around, you find out what you like, you find out what you don't like, you find out how a company operates. And I'm starting to get that sense now of like, as soon as you land, you're like, okay, what's going on? And you go, oh shit, this is not for me. Or you go, oh, this feels really good. And, you know, every now and then you don't have a fit. Every now and then things don't work out and you want to go back on the job hunt, right?

Yeah.

But another thing I found that like, there's 2 kinds of job hunts. There's one where you're casually looking.

Yes.

maybe feeling things out, and then there's another one where you are going hard, you're focused, you're practicing, you're driving towards an end result.

Yes.

And I've had both of those types of job hunts, and, um, I don't know, like something about the—

Do you have a preference?

I like the focused ones, to be honest. There's pressure, but at the same time, when your head is so in the game, every interview is just another interview. You're ready for it, you've prepped for it, you've studied for it.

Yeah.

I, I was the kind of guy who like didn't wanna practice LeetCode and stuff. And this time around I was like, I'm gonna do it. And I just, my brain just started going into that mode. And as soon as you can think that way, they're not that hard. Use a set, use a map, use a for loop. You're good to go. Like, so when you're, when you're in it, it feels really good. And I feel like it's a 2-part thing. Like your resume has to hit so that you're getting these interviews.

Yes.

And then you need to do well enough on the tech screens to just keep the process flowing.

Yeah, so much to unpack there. Uh, Brad, that's a cool shirt. Where can I get that?

Uh, bradgarapie.com/store.

There you go. Uh, Roxy said she's gonna try to, try to find a link and drop it. I love it. This is a shameless self-promo here. I love it. Um, all right, so I wanna, I wanna ask you, there's, there's kind of a few things unpacked. First off, how, how fast do you feel like you kind of get a read on companies when you start around the culture Um, and do you, uh, have you, so there's that question and then the kind of the second tail question of that is like, have you gotten better at ferreting that stuff out during the job, during the interview process?

Dude, the second question is the hard one. Uh, the first question, I feel like within 3 weeks you get outta your, 3 weeks. Yeah. You get outta your like initial phase, whatever you're getting mentored or you're getting run through training programs, you actually start working with a team. How people interact with you when you're asking questions early on will set the tone for the entire relationship of like how that goes. If they, if they say, no, you're a senior, you should know everything. Red flag.

Have you been told that?

Uh, inadvertently, kind of. Yeah. Yeah. There's some companies who are like, we want to hire amazing engineers, sit you down and whip you to produce features top to bottom. And And I gotta say, I feel like I'm also learning the difference of like where companies are headquartered kind of makes a difference. Like really San Francisco companies tend to be a little bit more like everybody's an A+ engineer and we fully expect that asking for help is like, you know, it's like, bro, you should know that kind of stuff. But these companies have huge code bases at the end of the day and it's complicated. Yeah.

Let me ask you this, 'cause I, you know, I've been on job search twice in the last year or so. Well, yeah, well, two— well, really 2 years now, but at the time it was twice in, in about a year. I feel like it's really hard during the interview process to figure out the culture and the vibe of the company. And I feel like I'm gonna— my hot take is I don't think— I don't know if you can really ever ferret that out in the, in the interview process because I feel like I wasn't even getting the information I needed until 3rd, 4th, 5th round in because the first little bits, just tell me about yourself, blah, blah, blah. I mean, do you have any tips that you've picked up along the way with interviewing on more on how to really dig in more to that, even though you're probably never going to get the full picture?

Yeah, it's really hard to get the full picture. I think number one, if you can get your interviews with people on the team that you're gonna work with, you'll get a much better understanding of just the personalities you'll be dealing with. But typically, like, typically people are always nice. It's more like company culture that is what's standing in the way. But the more you can talk to your teammates, the more you'll get a general sense of how they work together.

Is that something you ask or have you asked like, hey, can I speak to somebody on the team? Like, is that something that you've like worked into your like questions?

I've kind of tried, but a lot of companies are like, This is just the process. And it's like, yeah, but how am I supposed to know who I'm working with?

I know, right? It seems so flawed. I know, I know.

I have like a list of questions that I try to ask very specifically around collaboration. Do you have them pulled up?

I see you looking at your computer.

Do you have them pulled up? Yeah, I got 'em right here. Yeah, dude.

Yeah, yeah. Let's pull 'em up. Let's get a little practical tactical this morning.

I love asking about like team rituals. How do you plan? How do you track your work? How do you divvy up your work? How do you determine success? Is this success on an individual or on a team delivering a feature? How do you, do you do like stack ranking? Like what do performance reviews look like? That's gonna give you a good sense of like, is this an every man for himself type of company or is this a we win as a team type of company? And like that, to me, that's very important.

Yeah.

Yep. I love that. I love that.

So let me ask you this. Do you think you got, so like I said, obviously, you know, you're not interviewing at mom-and-pop places. You're interviewing at companies that are relatively large, have a pretty good presence. Um, what are some mistakes you've learned over the last year or so through the interview process? Yeah, through the interview process, like things you maybe could have done differently, maybe, you know, some, some mistakes you've made.

You know, I think it is practice with the LeetCode stuff that truly made me feel way more comfortable in those, in those interviews. Um, and okay, so I'll start there. Yes. Like once you get your brain moving in what they want to see, they want you to talk out the solution. They want you to use kind of basic data structures that are meant for the job. Sets and maps are the most common ones. Where it's like faster lookups or whatever, you know? And so like, you can impress people early on where you're, where they're like, oh, you just hit the data structures that we wanted you to. Like you said, the things that tick the boxes, we're very impressed, you know? And it's not that hard. You just have to tune your brain to think that way.

Sure.

And reviewing fundamentals of things like React, you know, sometimes developers get into the weeds on CI/CD stuff or things that aren't like programming on the web. And it's important to like remember your vanilla JavaScript, remember the fundamentals of React. If you can nail those, then again, they're just like, wow, you really know your stuff. And it's like, well, yeah, this— I almost had to study this because like this is not generally day to day. You deal with different problems. Sure. Day to day. Yep. I had a second half to this and now I'm forgetting it. That's okay.

I'll keep asking questions. We can come back to it when it comes to Um, uh, when it— I'm always fascinated with people's processes, right? I feel like interviewing and, and, and, and the whole interview process is almost like training for a marathon, right? Not only do you have to interview, you also have to do the work your own. How did you structure your days, your weeks? You know, I had Lawrence Lockhart on, on, on a few weeks ago. We talked kind of about how he structured his day, block and tackling. Mornings were spent for this, afternoons were spent for this. Obviously you've been on the job search, you know, a few times over the last year, year and a half. What did your days or week look like?

Yeah, you know, job search is really interesting. At the beginning, you're front-loading like a ton of applications.

Yeah.

Because you need to, you need to get this ball rolling because it takes companies a while to get through the process. So, you know, have your spreadsheet, have your job application tracker, track the day you applied, who you talk to, what company it is, what position it is, like have all that there. From there, I link out to a Notion that literally tracks every single interview and I write down who the interview was with. I link to their GitHub, I link to their LinkedIn. I try to find something in common with them so that like you're there, you're like, oh shit, you went to UT, you know, Hook 'Em Horns, whatever. Like anything, anything to break the ice. 'Cause as soon as you break the ice, it becomes a conversation.

Dude, it's a complete— Complete different conversation.

Yeah.

Complete different conversation.

So the beginning is like front-loading applications and preparing yourself for each of those initial interviews. As soon as that's all done, and typically it takes me like 30-ish applications, maybe 40 over the course of like 3 months to knock out a job search. I've had faster ones. I've had slower ones. Sure.

Sure.

That's kind of typical. After that, it's study mode. You know, normally you're planning for a week out for these things.

Yep.

Go practice your LeetCode, go build some React apps, go review, you know, like listen to Scott and Wes's podcast, the Stumped Ones, and like try to answer those questions yourself. Just get your brain in that mode too. Yep. And then, then you'll do really well in these like initial tech screens. Like, you know, you actually know what you're talking about. Yep.

What, what about, I mean, listen, you know, you've kind of threaded the needle 3 times now with these companies, right? These are not easy companies to get into. What would you say your secret sauce is?

You know, I would've always loved to have said my GitHub profile and my Twitter and my podcast and my YouTube channel. Nobody gives a crap. It's, it's great. Interesting. It builds your network for people to reach out to for positions.

Yes.

And I, you know, I, I got to talk to people who worked at Cloudflare that knew what happened on the inside. And I could be like, is this a good place to work? And they can tell you yes. So it's less of a black box, but it doesn't help you like build street cred unless, unless you build like some open source library that some company wants and they wanna hire you for that, you know?

Sure.

So do that kind of stuff, but just know it's not gonna get you a job offer straight up. You still have to perform in the interview process. And I think my, my biggest thing is just being able to talk and code at the same time.

Oh, really?

So, so literally you don't have to stream, but turn on your camera and record on your computer and then delete it when it's done or, or watch yourself and then delete it when it's done.

Sure. I would probably recommend watching yourself cuz you pick up a lot, you realize a lot of tics you have.

Yeah.

So, so like, why do I open my mouth like that when I, when I code? Like, why, why does my eye droop?

Get comfortable, uh, get comfortable thinking out loud. Get comfortable, like, thinking through something and not feeling so much pressure, like, knowing that you can get to the end. That also comes with practice and rehearsal, almost, you know.

What, what did you do? What did you do with— because I, I, I love this, you've said so many good things. Um, uh, how do you, like, when you practice coding I'm not a coder, right? Like, do you just like Google, give me a coding problem and then you just like try to code it or like what, what does that look like?

Yeah, so I would, I would go to Twitch, I would go live and I would either go to LeetCode or HackerRank and that's just kind of what I would do to practice. Those are mostly like generic programming problems. They do have some React problems.

Sure.

Which are like, okay, but, you know, even through the process, people will give you take-home tests or you'll encounter a new interview question. And every single time I take those questions and I like finalize that solution and post it up to my GitHub privately to not break any NDAs or whatever.

Sure.

So that, so you finish that exercise and really drive towards the right solution. And I'm talking with tests, with accessibility, with All the, all the stuff that needs to go in there.

And then you're just yapping the whole time while you're doing it too.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's what you gotta do. Yeah. And you just have to practice going through those things, getting— I love that. Polishing them up. And now if you ever wanna review, just go reimplement one of those right now. You got a GitHub full of question banks.

Sure.

You just go look at the prompt and, and try to re-engineer it.

Let me go back. I wanna go back to the, I feel like I quickly glanced over it and, cuz, cuz again, I wanna, I wanna really kind of try to give people as much, you know, uh, good, good information as possible. I want to go back to your prepping. When you got laid off, what was your first go-to? I'm always fascinated, like, like, what was— what, what is somebody's go-to? You get the word you're laid off, or you just left on your own, what's, what's first? What do you do first?

Uh, immediately offload all the data that I can. Uh, if, you know, if I, if I need it, like by any feedback I got, any like performance review type stuff, like get the things that matter long-term about yourself, your performance. Like you don't wanna lose any of that stuff.

Okay.

Um, obviously lots of that stuff belongs to the company.

Sure.

There, you know, but take with you what you can as far as like things that are transferable between jobs. And I'm not talking code. I'm talking, yeah, feedback.

I'm talking Um, so, so what, so, so you're downloading like reviews just so you can potentially give to somebody during the interview or something? Because that's kind of an interesting take.

No, what I like to do is, is kind of summarize my performance at a job. Um, did I do well? Did I do poorly? What can I take into the next job that is going to be, uh, helpful? You know, what did I learn about this company or the, the way that other people work that I can transfer and use in the next company if I ever hit these situations again or whatever it is. Okay. Um, try to always like gain transferable knowledge and skills anytime you make a transition. Okay. Uh, but after that, it's straight up just like, yeah, connect with everybody, you know, LinkedIn, whoever you need to from, from that company, and then just start the application process and tracking process.

So, so, so you, so how did you get the job? I wanna kind of, I wanna, I wanna hit all 3. How did you get the job at Atlassian? Was that a referral? Was that just a cold apply? What was that? Do you remember?

Ooh, that was a while ago. That one. No, I don't remember. Okay.

What about Stripe?

Stripe reached out.

Stripe reached out. How, where did they reach out at?

Email. A recruiter reached out over email and I, I just followed up. But I was looking at the time anyway.

Sure.

I think I was like open to work or whatever. And so like, You know, I was getting emails and that one hit and I was like, okay, I'm gonna—

So the open to work banner does work.

Yeah, yeah, true. I mean, it does.

People got some weird takes on that. Don't be— it's just, it's just a signal. It just helps. Like, us recruiters need to know that you're looking. Like, we need, we need all the help we can get. People are like, don't put it up, it looks desperate. Like, I don't, I don't— you obviously have never been a recruiter before. It helps us. We need to know. Um, uh, how did you get the job at Cloudflare?

Uh, I applied at Cloudflare. Really?

Okay. Okay.

Yeah. It was one of those ones where like the description looked really good.

Sure.

Uh, and I, I followed up.

All right. Let me ask you this. When you submitted your resume, when you applied, did you customize your resume? Did you look at the job description? Did you cross-reference like what, or did you just yeet your resume into the, into the ether?

I, I feel like this is the biggest, look, I feel like my job searching process works, obviously.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's no wrong answer.

I never do. I never customize my resume and I never write a cover letter. Never.

Um, but obviously your resume is good enough because you're getting these looks.

It must be, right? Like, the magic sauce must be there. I do have a section in my resume where it's kind of like a word dump, but it's like tools and technologies that I know, and it's this whole section of just like Stuff.

Yeah.

You know, that, that I've worked with. And so, sure, people ever need to filter on keywords, it's kind of there. And then after that I got work experience, and then after that I got side projects. Okay.

Do you, um, let me ask you this. I, I, I liked your question about your kind of build. I mean, you're obviously prolific content creator, your podcast and your YouTube, blah, blah, blah. I know that doesn't get you the job. Has that helped at least with conversations in the interview? Like, I mean, I mean, you know, I'm just curious because you're very out there, so it's got to have some sort of impact, right? Or no?

You know, you know the thing that has the impact? People go, oh, your setup looks good. Like, do you pod— do you podcast? And then you go, yeah. And then they go, whoa. And then like, that's it. That's it. Really? Okay. Yeah.

Okay. Interesting.

I mean, maybe it is just like a, like a switch flips in their brain or it's like, this guy's a professional, you know? Instead of just like being on your laptop camera or something, you know, it's a step up.

Sure. No, I mean, listen, I do think, you know, I've said this, people have come at me with some different thoughts. I think having in today's world, if you don't have a good setup and you look good and you don't use fake backgrounds, virtual backgrounds, and your room is clean, it comes like It gives a different vibe to the interview.

It does. You know, I'm also the guy whose camera died this morning. And, you know, I was like, do we need to reschedule? It happens. It happens. There's always a technology problem. Yeah, that's right. That's right, Kelly. Yeah.

Um, let me ask you this. Uh, I honestly don't know what companies want with a cover letter. Have you, have you dealt with any cover letters at all? Like, have you had to write any cover letters in your job search?

Uh, never. What I do have though is like one sentence at the top of my resume that kind of says like, what I'm looking for. Like, I want a remote or hybrid. I want primarily frontend development. I wanna be able to lead teams and projects. I like that. You know, just the generic stuff. Yeah.

Like a specific, I mean, I usually hate objectives, but at least you say like what you want.

Right. Okay. Right. Okay.

Uh, bring, bring on Brad and his next resume review. Yeah.

Yeah.

We, he—

I'll put, I'll put it out there. bradgeraghee.com/resume.

Okay. I love it. I love it. Um, Let's see here. What else? We have another question too. So let me, I know a lot of people. Yeah. If you wanna drop it in the private chat, drop that in the private chat and I'll throw it up in the banner. People can check it out when it comes to, so, so you talked about LeetCode, right? And I know, again, I'm not a coder, but I also know that's kind of a dreaded word for a lot of people. Do you think everybody should do it? Do you think some people should do it? Should it be a nice to have, like, Like if, if they're a junior developer, do they need to be doing like, you know, live, live streams with LeetCode questions? Like what, what's your general thought on, on, on all of that? And again, there's no, there's no wrong answers here.

I think the general thought is you're gonna get asked some style of generic programming question that will probably use the skills that LeetCode will teach you. You don't, I, I don't think you need to know data structures and algorithms. Like it ain't that complicated. Companies nowadays are just seeing if you can Get through like a thinking exercise. Yeah, it doesn't have to be— well, recursion can be helpful, but like you don't have to know depth-first and breadth-first search on a tree and how to implement that and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Sure, you might get a rogue company that asks something like that, but then my take is like, meh, then they're only gonna get a certain type of engineer and maybe I didn't wanna work there in the first place.

Sure.

Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.

Yeah, no, go ahead.

I was like, I was like, I don't know if I could say it. I think I signed an NDA, but like, okay. One company asked that question and that company wasn't necessarily the most tech-forward company. It was like a different line of business that was like hiring engineers. And they're asking these questions that are like, do data structures and algorithms. And it's like, y'all must not, like, you're not connecting the dots well enough here. You know, you're, you're not filtering in the right way. So.

That makes sense.

Just be prepared with the generic stuff at the end of the day.

Okay, let me— I, I, again, I still huge shout out what Brad said. I think practicing talking while coding, the more I talk to folks in the engineering space, the more that is a skill, right? If you remember Anna McDougall, I had her on, we talked about AI. She still said even with these AI tools, I still want to know how somebody thinks and talks and solves a problem. So again, I just, I want to call that out again. I think that's, I think that's a wonderful suggestion. Let me ask you this. You, you, you could say, I think in, in the traditional mindset, if I'm Cloudflare, hey, you've bounced around twice in the last year or so. Did you get any pushback with that?

Um, In most cases, nobody ever even said anything.

Yeah. Isn't that wild? Isn't that wild?

And, and it's, it's a really awkward thing to say. I also, I also can't talk about it given like the circumstances. Sure. Companies make you sign things. Sure. Um, but it is one of those things where people go, yeah, people move in tech. There was a lot of layoffs lately, you know, like they just kind of assume and then they go, it's fine. You know, this guy's had a history of pretty good jobs for 3 to 7 years. there's a blip, you know, who cares?

Yeah. So, so, so you feel like that stigma kind of bouncing around just is not quite there anymore? Because it used to— I mean, like, listen, back when I started recruiting in 2011, dude, if I saw you on, on, in front of me, I'd be like, oh, this guy's a red flag. But really? Oh yeah, dude.

Yeah.

Back in 2011, back when I was recruiting .NET Web Forms and MVC. Yeah, dude. If, like, literally we were told my— we were, we were told by hiring managers I don't wanna see anybody that's had more than like 2 jobs in the last 5 years.

Wow.

Like I would actually be specifically said that, but I feel like now it's just not the case anymore. I feel like everybody understands that the market's very, not hostile, but just fragile, I guess you could say. And people move around.

Well, I just read this thing on LinkedIn this morning that DoorDash changed their, what is it? They're like, pay structure, their stock structure to grant faster in the first 2 years. Like they frontload it.

I think that's smart. I think that's smart.

And it's like, what do you think that's going to attract at the end of the day? Google has the same model. It's going to attract people who want to stay for 2 to 3 years and not the full 4 to 5. Correct. Because at the end you're only getting like 10%. So it's like, yeah, get your 50 and then do something else. Well, engineers are smart people. We're going to maximize.

Yeah, I mean, listen, I, you know, when I, when I spoke in, in, in Barcelona, you know, because I had my whole talk around like, um, the job search, but I have a whole nother talk that I don't really give a ton because usually code conferences are usually more like ICs. But like, I had a few engineering managers go like, well, do you have this same talk for hiring managers? Like, what can we do to like interview better and retain talent? And I'm like, I have a whole slew of options or slew of Uh, thoughts. But I think what you said, I think companies need to understand, and most of them don't, that listen, your folks, you best, you'll probably get 3 years out of them best. And we're probably looking at 2 years right now, which is, you know, again, it's just the nature of it.

Depends how big the company is. It depends on how exciting it is to work there. I think that's one of my favorite things about Cloudflare is that it's 4,000 people and I feel like every day We're shipping some stuff that's like a big deal. Yeah. Like this whole AI pay-per-crawl thing. Cloudflare like kind of invented a new internet economy where— oh, really? Now, oh my God, my camera's like falling right now. It's gonna just be staring at my coffee.

We're having a great, great dialogue.

It's awesome. Yeah, it's great. Yeah. So like now, like anytime an AI bot goes to crawl a website, Cloudflare's gonna respond with an HTTP code that says payment required. And like, maybe one day the browser builds something in to like handle that. And so, like really cool big things the company's shipping. And I feel like Cloudflare's been doing that for like a couple years now. And so, you know, you might have a longer tail at a company like that that's fun to work for, that's innovating.

Sure.

The bigger and slower they go, you go, yeah, let me grab my stocks and like go find something else.

Yep. Yep, absolutely. Um, somebody asks, is that cold brew? That is cold brew. That is cold brew. Um, I'm, I'm always drinking cold brew. Um, uh, as we kind of wrap up here, Brad, I, I, I want to, um, you know, again, just, just, just ask you around anything else that maybe you've thought of that we didn't touch, just for advice for folks right now who may be on the job search here soon.

Uh, here's one. Do not ever apply on LinkedIn. Apply directly on the job website.

Yes.

Yes.

I literally have talked about this recently. I have a, uh, about fi— I have a, I have a group text about 15 engineering leaders, mainly here in Nashville. And I've texted them. I said, hey, when you post jobs as an org, where do you go first? Almost all of them said, we just mainly post to the career page. We don't really try because, because of all the AI slop and fake resumes and all this stuff. They're like, we all— so I love that you said that. Love that you said that.

You have to. It's just, you're gonna have a much higher chance of getting called in. LinkedIn, it's, it's, everybody can press one button. One button, easy apply. Everybody does it. Everybody. Yep. Yep.

Most companies stay away from that. Um, 2, 2 more things as we wrap up here. First off, we didn't talk a ton about your network and networking. I'm assuming that does play a part. Thoughts on that? General thoughts?

Um, I think it plays a part in getting more information, like inside information about a company, if it's a good place to work. I had one-on-ones with a couple friends who were working at companies that I was considering, sitting down, just asking them, is it what I think it is? Does it feel like this? And, and they could, you know, confirm or deny that. And so you can have those conversations and know, you know, it's giving you the information that the interviewers won't tell you.

That's it. And I think it's huge. And again, again, give a shout out to you. That's another thing that most people don't do. Like, listen, if you're interviewing somewhere and you know folks there, like, you know, again, Brad and I were talking about how do you, how do you get a good picture of what you're about to step into? Talk to other people. Honestly, looking back on it, there, there's some place— I haven't interviewed many places, you can probably figure out where, um, but I wish I did some more digging on the side. Hey, what's this place like? Like, what's really going on?

Right.

So again, shout out to you for doing that.

You gotta be careful too though. I actually had an offer pulled one time when, uh, I like, you know, like they were telling me like, oh yeah, feel free to reach out, like whatever. And so I like DM'd an employee and I was like, yo, like tell me about what it's like. And they're like, yeah, we're pulling the offer. You like, you know, backdoored the process. No, like freaking told me like what it was. Very, very, very, very small startup. Like whatever, like 20 or 30 people. And I think it was like they're very protective. We need people to—

But even after giving you the ability to do it, they still pulled it.

That's weird. That's really weird.

You dodged a bullet. Let's just be honest. Yeah, you dodged a bullet if that's the culture. Next and final question before I do a little rapid fire here. I use ChatGPT for rapid fire, and I really like the questions. We'll get there in a second.

AI.

I gotta talk about it. We gotta talk about it. It's kind of the elephant in the room. Are you, are you using it? Was it talked about in the interview process? I'm talking to a lot of folks in the interview. It's not really brought up a ton. What are your thoughts? Just general thoughts on AI right now in interviewing and coding.

So generally, uh, I use GitHub Copilot for my AI stuff. I'm about to start experimenting a lot with Claude Code.

Interesting.

Uh, I'll say, I'll say, I'll say windsurf, boo. Like VS Code is—

What is, what is, I've seen that a lot on Twitter. Can someone educate me on windsurf? What is that?

It's an editor, right? It's an editor like VS Code, but it's like AI is built in. They forked VS Code and put AI in there.

Gotcha. Okay.

It's going to lose. Anything that's not coming from Microsoft is going to lose.

You really think so?

Like, yeah. And the, like, Microsoft has everything and they're, they've got the power to back it all. Yes. Will, will they deliver a little bit slower? Yes. But all these companies, they're trying to get acquired. Look what just happened to the Windsurf deal like 2 days ago. They're trying to get acquired. They're trying to make money. They're not trying to be the AI play for the absolute future. So I also think like these terminal-based editors, Claude Code, I think one just came out called Klein or something from Amazon. I don't know who just released it, but it's all over the place. They're, they're, they're going to be very useful as well. So experiment there. But, uh, how I use it in interviews, I'll leave GitHub Copilot autocompletions turned on.

Okay.

And I won't use the chat.

Okay.

And I'll just kind of say like, I'm coding along and I'll go, oh, hey, thanks GitHub Copilot. And I'll go, oh, by the way, like, is it cool if I like leave my tools on or you, what do you want me to do? But I kind of like acknowledge that like I am skilled in using these tools, but also I respect the process.

Yep. I get that. I love that. All right. Last rapid fire here. And again, please connect with Brad. He's a wealth of, uh, wealth of information, obviously, as you can tell. Um, all right, so based off the tooling conversation, first question: what's one tech tool or app you can't live without right now? It doesn't have to be code, by the way. It can be something completely different.

I, I still love Raycast. I operate my entire computer off of Raycast. It's the best. Yeah, yeah.

Um, first job you ever had, ever had, that you were paid for?

I mowed lawns out of the back of my Ford Ranger pickup truck.

Nice. That's hard work.

And then I got a job at CVS after that.

So nice, nice.

I love it.

Um, if you know, if, if I've been talking to my wife about this, there, there's like a lot of cool like offices spinning up in Nashville, a lot of cool swanky places obviously to get people back in the office. And then we were driving past something the other day, I was like, man, like I would like to go like into the office sometimes. Let me ask you this, if you could have your ideal setup, what would it be? One day on site, one day a month? Like, what? Or, or, or is it just fully remote? You like fully remote and, and, and, but like your ideal situation?

I, uh, I was looking for a hybrid role this time and Cloudflare was perfect because they want 2 days in the office and I, I wanted to have more conversations with people. I wanted to—

Yeah, I miss it a little bit.

Network and do that. And like, yeah, yeah, back at Adobe we would run like front-end guild meetings where all the people who did front-end would like get together and hang out and Cloudflare's been great about that. So 2 days a week, I think it's good. The drive is a little long. It's like 40 minutes away. I wish I could like, a little long, like 10 to 15 away would be my ideal. Yeah. And I want my desk set up in both places, you know, minus this camera, but like, yeah.

Minus that camera. Definitely not that camera.

In the office, they, they just don't have as good of stuff as you have at your house.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, and again, like I'm not going to the office to have fucking Zoom meetings.

Yeah, that still happens. I know. I know.

That was why I—

go ahead. I wish all of the company was in that office or all of your team, but I go to the office with 2 or 3 teammates and then we still have people in London, Lisbon, different places. Yeah.

Sebastian goes, Brad, are you a gamer? I'm gonna guess the next question is, what do you play?

Yes, I am currently looking for a Switch 2. Really wanna find one of those. Okay. Um, what else? Oh, I've been playing World of Warcraft lately again too.

That's been a lot of fun.

I love it. Yeah, yeah, I love that.

I love that. Yeah, I, I think, um, the last company I worked at, I like what they did. They brought in divisions for a week once a quarter. So like marketing would come in for a week, sales would come in for a week, and I actually like that. I like that.

Yeah, we, uh, do It's like once a year, like a team gets together and it typically happens in Austin. Yeah. Yeah.

Let me ask you this. Do you have a career mistake that you're oddly grateful for? Anything off top of your brain? Maybe a wrong step that in hindsight worked out, or you took a job that in hindsight was a fail, but you learned a lot or something.

I'll say this. I don't think Stripe was for me. And I think under all the circumstances, I am so happy to be where I'm at right now. I love it. I love it. Love that. Love that.

We'll just leave it at that. Next question. If you weren't in tech, what totally different career would you try? Dude, honestly, let's just say money's the same. Let's just, for conversational purposes, let's just say money's the same.

I think I would do something like, Physical, like, like a man, like, like a situation, like construction.

Okay, construction.

Or like, just like, just do something.

That's not me at all. That's my wife. My wife knows how to use a hammer. I don't.

I love that.

Um, last question as we wrap up here, and again, thanks for all tuning in this morning. Brad, again, appreciate you, man. Um, uh, the show's called Guidance Counselor 2.0 because you 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 Brad if you can go back in time?

I think it would be, don't stay at your first job too long.

Yes. Yep.

Yep. Like, it's easy to get comfortable when you're like, let's say you're finding your partner, getting married, going through all stages of life. Like a lot of things happen right after college and throughout that time. And I stayed at that first job for probably too long, but I didn't push, like I didn't push until like 5, 6 years in. I was like, I need to learn something different. I need to do something more. There's more out there.

Yep.

Like, get involved in the tech community. There's a lot of stuff going on.

A lot of stuff.

It'll excite you and you'll want to go explore different companies and touch different technologies.

Yep. I love that. Awesome. All right, y'all. Well, thanks again for tuning in this morning. Appreciate it. Tomorrow, um, I'm going live with the founder of Mail, uh, let's see here, Mail, Mail.0. mail.com, mail, mailzero.com. Nizzy on Twitter, um, founder out in the Bay Area. He tweeted the other day about, as a founder, how he likes people to stand out. So I just slid into his DMs and I go, yo, would love to chat. So, uh, we're chatting tomorrow, 9:30 AM Central. So y'all have a good one. Go connect with Brad. Brad, thank you, my friend. Stay on so I can say bye to you backstage. We'll see y'all tomorrow morning, 9:30 AM Central. Peace.