How to Hire Properly w/Brian Holt, Staff PM @ Neon.tech

much fun as well. I mean, I've been down there. I know Gabe really, really well.

I mean, they're all lovely people. It's kind of a bucket list conference for me to speak at. And now, like, it just coincided with, you know, the birth of my child.

Life, you know, life. What can you do? But yeah, I've met— I mean, even some of my best relationships came from me going 5 years ago. I may try to get down there, TBD. Just maybe fly in, fly out just to see Gabe and the crew.

So Yeah, hit me up.

But, uh, but good morning, y'all. Happy Thursday. No one's here quite yet. No one's here quite yet. Um, but if you are, please say hey. We'd love to hear from you. I am losing my voice. I've now been sick for 3 weeks. Uh, the joys of travel and parenting, as Brian and I were just talking about before we went live. Um, and, uh, uh, so if, if I find— if I sound different, um, it's because, uh, I'm I'm battling cold. I'm battling cold forever, it feels like. But for those of you who I met at All Things Open over the last 3 days, welcome. It was wonderful to meet everybody again. Shout out Todd Lewis and the All Things Open crew out in Raleigh for throwing a great event. I'm partial to Todd. He's a South Carolina grad, so obviously got to support him. Got to support a fellow Gamecock. But it was a great time to tour team. Had a great time, made a lot of great connections, and just had a lot of great conversations around AI from super high level to super in detail, which I never— I didn't know half of it. So it was great nonetheless, but excited for this morning. Only live for this week. Excited to have Brian on the show. I've been a fan of Brian for a long, long time and super pumped to have him. So if you are watching, please say hey. The reason why I tell people to say hey, and I was telling Brian, I've been doing this for 5 years and What I've realized is this kind of is a new way to network. I mean, it really is. You kind of hop on your stream, say hey, drop a comment, network with people. You know, I always tell people, if you have shot every single guest I've had on the show just a quick DM, say hey, it was good to see you on Taylor's show, stay in touch with them. Obviously message everybody in the chat, say hey, it was good to see you on Guidance Counselor 2.0. Um, you would have a pretty amazing network because I've been doing this for 5 years now. So, um, that's what I want. I basically want my network to be your network. And so please say hey. We'd love to hear from you. We got some people tuning in this morning. Daniel, Ricardo, Chris, Taya, Angelos, Jason, Devon, Chris, Jeff. It's good to see y'all. For those of you in Nashville, Chris and Jeff, I am hosting a Dads and Tech meetup today. I'm going to a lunch. I don't stop. It's probably why I'm sick. But we're going to Peg Leg Porker, probably the best mac and cheese in Nashville.

Oh, damn.

But we're going today at 11:30, and I'm giving away Torque keycaps. So I will have those with me. So if you wanna show up, we'll give those out. It'll be a great, great time.

Yeah. Is there a flight to Nashville? Can I get there?

Come on, man. Dude, I'm telling you, it's shell macaroni and cheese, right? So I think the shells just add a different vibe to the mac and cheese, which I would love.

I like it. I'm into it.

Yeah. Shout out Appwrite. I'm Appwrite Hero, probably the only hero in a technical program that doesn't know how to code. But shout out Appwrite. Love the crew out there. So go check them out. Also too, I'm heading out to— I'm emceeing Kent C. Dodds' conference, Epic Web Dev, next week in Salt Lake. I would love to see you there. It's gonna be a great time. I'm gonna be honest with you, it's gonna be a very intimate setting with a lot of high-caliber people. If you can get there, I would highly recommend you getting there. If it's a little too expensive but it's on your list and you can get there, please message me. I will work with Kent to make sure to get you a ticket, at least at a discounted price. So let me know. If you wanna check out all the things we're doing at Torque Community, listen, we're having a ball. Young team, new team. We've only been around for about 5 months, but I honestly think we're helping people find jobs not even through us. Lily had somebody message us the other day. They're like, hey, I hopped on one of your resume streams. I edited my resume. 2 weeks later, I got a job offer because of the things that you talked about. So that's what we love doing. So please check us out. If you wanna get texts when I go live with great guys and gals, great guys like Brian and gals, please text this. This is actually my number. It's a pretty cool little software I use. It's called Community, but this goes directly to me. And then we got a lot of other people tuned in this morning too. Mazin, my guy from Infinite Red, it's good to see you, buddy. Daniel, it's good to see you. Jordan from Ronstadt. Nick, what's up, buddy? It's good to see you. It's good to see all the folks I was just hanging out with at All Things Open. Jordan, Chris, great to see y'all. All right, so let's get started, Brian. Let's give the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do? Where have you been to? 'Cause you're a little bit of a journeyman, and then we'll dive in.

Yeah, yeah. God, where to start? So hi, I'm Brian. Very happy to be here. I was just telling Taylor that like, I just, I enjoy the vibes that he puts out on the internet. I'm usually kind of anti-social media, which is hilarious given that 2 of the companies I've worked at are social media companies. But I enjoy what he's putting out here. So I was pretty excited when I got asked to come on. Uh, I am a staff product manager at, uh, neon.tech, uh, which is a serverless Postgres company. I think it's a pretty cool one if you're looking for, for Postgres stuff. Um, I work on AI, I work on, um, backend developer services, I work on workflows, Vercel, GitHub integrations, all that kind of fun stuff at, at, at Neon these days. Um, my, my resume is, is long.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're, we're gonna talk about hiring. So let's, let's set the stage. What have you done in the hiring space in your career? Because I said, I know you have an expansive career.

Yeah. Well, my— I'm a college dropout. You're going to Epic Web Conf. That's in Utah. I went to college in Utah as well. And then I ended up kind of accidentally dropping out of college when I got my first job. So, man, hiring back then was a strange time. Basically, if you had a pulse and you could identify a semicolon, they'd give you a job.

Isn't it crazy? If you could spell React, you could get a job.

Yeah. Oh, man, this was jQuery. You had to get the capitalization right, but other than that, it's about the same thing.

Yeah, you're good. Yeah.

So when people ask, like, how do you get your first dev job? It's like, I don't know, man. They just gave it to me because, like, I walked in and said hi, right? So don't, don't value, like, carry much weight with my opinion here. So I did that. I went to another startup called Needle for a little bit. Yeah, College Dropouts Unite, Jordan. Absolutely. And then when I got to Reddit, that's when I kind of like— Reddit was such a small team. I was employee number 29 at Reddit.

Crazy.

Yeah, no, like, it's an exercise in like firefighting, really. But I was a kid, man. I was like 26 or something like that. And they're like, hey, you need to hire a bunch of people. I'm like, I don't know how to hire myself. Let alone how to hire a bunch of other people. And so we, I kind of just learned really quickly a lot of stuff about hiring. One of them I was observing Taylor earlier, which is just like making costly mistakes is way more like, and this is probably hard to hear from people online, but like it's way worse to hire someone that's like not a good fit than it is to like miss out on someone that's good, right? You'd rather actually go slower and be more cautious and make sure you get the right person.

Yep.

And so, um, I like— I learned a ton of these lessons. Like, another lesson I learned really quickly was that, um, it's really hard to get negative signal. And when I say signal, there's like positive signal, like this person would be a really good fit here, and the negative signal is like—

Vibes. There's vibes. Let's go with it.

Yeah, vibes. Okay, I like that. Like, we're, we're on— we're in the vibe era these days. So the negative vibes, the negative vibes are hard to catch, um, because a lot of times it's just people being nervous. It's just people like not like you didn't set up a good climate for them to come into. And like, there's lots of people that come in and like are nervous and sheepish and then come and just like crush a job, right?

Yeah.

So, um, I really try and set it up so like, um, people have like this like garden to, to show off, like to, to, to emit all of their positive vibes. Um, like one good strategy I found for this over time is like you give people several prompts instead of saying like, hey, I want you to come in and do this thing. It's like, all right, here's 3 different things. Pick the one that's like on your level. So that helped me quite a bit to pick the right people, right? And give people the best opportunity to shine. And certainly, God, I don't know if I can admit this on stream, but I'm just going to. So no one turned me in for this one. One of the best things that we did is right after we were done with our interview at Reddit, it was like, hey, there's a bar downstairs. We're gonna go grab a beer. You are welcome to come. I will buy you a beer. I got lots of— the negative vibes came out in the bar, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. Hey, Maria. Good to see her as well. Yeah. So people would start admitting misogyny or even casual racism a little bit when we were just down having a beer. I got told by HR very soon after that, you cannot take our candidates to You can't do that. And so unfortunately I had to stop.

Okay, so I'm gonna interrupt you because I think this is a whole nother tangent here, but I do feel like it's so hard to judge a person during the interview process the way it is right now. Yeah, well, just in general, not the way it is right now, just in general.

Absolutely. Like you— like I said, you're looking for this like positive signal that these people are like trying to admit out to you.

Yeah.

And, um, yeah, no, it's particularly like with all this like remote interviewing that you do now. And like, believe me, as you can see, I, I very much enjoy working from home. I get to go like walk out and go see my son. But like, there's, there's something about like a handshake and looking someone in the eyes that like, it, it really does help that process, right? Like, it's just that like inherent judgment that you have.

Yep.

That, that, I don't know.

How do you— okay, there's so many questions. And you did some stuff at Netflix, so can you talk about what you did at Netflix too? Because I do want to know. Yeah, sorry, I got, I got I derailed. No, dude, you're good. You're good. You're good. No, this is what I love. I don't prep. There's no questions. It's just 2 dudes or a guy to go hang out every morning. That's it.

It's vibes.

Vibes.

There you go. So I was at Reddit for about 2 years. They moved me to San Francisco. Reddit, that's when we had 3 CEOs in like 6 months. It was a wild time at Reddit. I got reached out to by Netflix. And I was like, yeah, sure, I've heard of them. Um, so that's when I joined, uh, Netflix, um, and had a great time, really enjoyed the people I worked with. But the one thing I didn't really like— the interview process was very much what you think of with like a FAANG interview process of like, here is— it's not like how many marbles can you fit in a stadium kind of bad. I think that's the worst kind because it's just irrelevant.

Yep.

But it was very much like, here's a very difficult computer science question. Can you write a pathfinding algorithm in 45 minutes or something like that?

Right.

Which I didn't like, right? Like, I did okay in the interview because, like, I prepped for it. But at the end, I was like, I don't think this chooses good engineers, right? Or maybe incidentally, it chooses good engineers. One of the things that they asked me to do, they asked me to code in a Google Doc. And I was like, this makes no sense. No one codes in a Google Doc. Why would I— why was this any sort of signal for anybody? So I pushed pretty hard, at least from my section of the team. 5 large marbles. At least from my section of the team, we rewrote a good part of the interview process for a lot of these learnings that I got at Reddit. Like, let's give them multiple prompts.

Yeah.

Let's let them use a goddamn code editor. Geez.

Yeah, seriously.

Let's let them Google things because, I mean, everyone, every engineer knows that half of engineering is just Googling things correctly.

Correct.

And we do it now at Neon. Like, half, like, a lot of what good engineers do now is use AI. And if they can use it really well, then why wouldn't we let them in their interview process? Right?

Right.

Yeah. So, and then we kind of refined the questions to be less like these trick questions. Um, and more towards like, hey, you have to do like a dropdown that governs 2 other dropdowns. How do you make this like efficient and not jank? And I was like, cool, because we actually implement things like that on the front end, right?

So there's so, there's so many things to unpack here. I don't have, I only have time for, I only have you for like, you know, again, like 22 minutes, um, which I feel like all of these things could probably be unpacked for hours at a time. Let's, let's, let's start, let's start at the job seeker level right now. A lot of people in tech are trying to find jobs. You've obviously hired a ton. What are just some signals, some vibes people can do from the get-go that you think really makes people stand out? At least that what you've seen or what you like to see.

Yep. It's a big red flag. Um, talk about like some negative, uh, signal that I get. If you walk in and you know nothing about the company that you're—

Isn't that crazy? Isn't that crazy? Like, I get people interviewing a lot, but damn.

Um, you need to come in there. You need to have some opinions about the product. Like, man, I should show you this one that I did for Cloudflare forever again.

I don't know what the fuck— So you want opinions? Like you want people to push back maybe?

Absolutely. I was like, I want you to tell me that this is bad. That means that you, you evaluated this and you said like, I have a better idea about this. I love that stuff, man. I absolutely love it. Um, when I walked into my Cloudflare interview, I walked in with a Google Doc that was probably like 10 pages long. It was like, here's everything that I found that I just don't like about your product. Here's docs to fix. Here, I have some pull requests on your repos. And like, honestly, it didn't take me that long. I probably, probably 45 minutes of just sitting there and playing with the product that they had me interviewing for.

Yeah.

Which is just like due diligence on my side, right? Make sure I wanna work on what they're doing, right?

Yeah.

But just like write a friction log. A friction log is literally just like writing down things that you think while you, like, it's just stream of consciousness. Don't edit it and you just hand it to 'em. They loved it, right? They absolutely loved that I did that for them.

Do you— so I had a buddy of mine who's a staff engineer on the job search right now. He messaged me and he goes, dude, look at this. He goes, I got an interview for a company because all I did was I demoed the product. I think he did like a quick Loom video and like, um, it was like a, um, what was it? It was like a live streaming service and he tied it into his like kids softball or baseball or something. He was like, hey, like this product, blah, blah, blah. Do you like to see that? Like it kind of goes along the same lines of like using the product before you interview.

Man, if you ship me something that's like, hey, I built this with one of Neon's niche features, I'm just gonna trip over myself to make sure that you get in the door to get a deal.

Yep, you heard it here. You heard it here.

How do you—

what are some other things maybe that you're seeing right now outside of not knowing the company? What are some other things you're seeing right now that people are just really missing the mark that I think are pretty easy layups to you?

I mean, like, the good and bad news of all of this, of interviewing processes, is it's what the opinions of the person is that's interviewing you when they walk out that door. Like, this is a very squishy, imperfect process, and you can come in and have like a really good interview. But if the person doesn't like you, and like, I wish this wasn't true, and I wish I could say like, well, I'm above this, but like, I'll be real, I'm just not, right? I have to interview too many people.

Sure.

So making it a conversation rather than just like this person lectures for 5 minutes, this person lectures for 5 minutes, that just comes off really cold. Like a lot of this, what we're also evaluating is like, I have to spend a lot of time with you.

A lot, like more time than with my wife.

Yeah, exactly.

Let's just call a spade a spade. I gotta spend more time with you than my wife. Exactly.

Right, and I don't necessarily need to be your bestie. In fact, I'm not even trying to hire my besties. But I do need to like tolerate you, I guess, is like the minimum bar there. So if you don't come in there and like, I don't know, have a little, you know, energy, basic small— yeah, energy, small talk, like all the above, just like making sure like, hey, we need to get like on the same wavelength together and we need to get on the same vibe together and have a chat, right?

Yeah.

So like, I try and make sure that the interviewer is doing a good amount of talking, talking about themselves, asking like, what's it going like? What are you working on? What do you like working on? you know, what's your team like? How are you doing with all this kind of stuff? Because people love to talk about themselves, right? And again, present company included.

Yeah, absolutely. I got a question here from Devon. In your opinion, when should frontend developers start applying for jobs? I would say let's just take out frontend. Let's just do all developers. And Devon, if you wanna expound on this a little bit, just 'cause I'd love to know where you're coming from. I have thoughts on this, but Before I get Brian to answer this, expound on this a little bit more and kind of where your thoughts are on that, and then we will come back to that. So, Devon, please ask some more questions on that. So, Brian, what are the— let me ask you this. How have you cultivated an interview? Because this is kind of going to the hiring manager side, right? Because again, I think I told you backstage, a lot of hiring managers watch this just behind the scenes. What's your best recommendations for hiring managers to develop a really kind of a safe place to really get the actual person out of the interview?

I mean, I, when they come into my actual interview, I just, I kind of give them like the same, like kind of 3-minute spiel of like, look, I'm looking for process. I'm not looking for answers, right?

Ooh, I love that.

So I want to hear how you're thinking about this, how you're breaking it down, what resources you're looking for, who you're talking to, because like, that's the stuff that's important. Like, I'm not in, like, if I'm asking you too easy of questions, then like, this doesn't make any sense, right? Like, what's— okay, what they ask you at Stripe, you're the Google Maps PM and you want more small business owner engagement.

Yes.

What's your process, right? That's a very PM-y type question for an interview process.

Yeah.

And like, I don't expect you at the end of this to like, cool, you've devised this perfect product spec that then allows, you know, Google Maps to go do this. Like, what I care about is like, your entire breakdown of the process, like putting this into smaller milestones, like all those like PM kind of core skills, like what your product sense is of like, how am I trading off this versus the other thing?

Yeah.

That's the stuff that tells me like, look, I don't care what you can do in 45 minutes. I care what you can do in like a quarter. So yeah, it certainly helps if you have a good idea, right? Like if someone has a total shit idea, I might have some questions, but even honestly, It's not even that, right? Like, if you come up to me with a shit idea but with great process, I'll probably still hire you, to be honest with you. There you go.

Yeah, I mean, listen, if you can break down a bad— if you have a bad idea and you can break down why it's a bad idea, I'd probably think that's even better because you have more thought process around it and can go to bat for it, which is super.

Exactly. I try and tell people that it's okay to pause and think.

Yes.

In fact, it's preferable.

Yes.

Silence is a good thing, not a bad thing. Um, that, that's usually pretty helpful. And the other one is, um, I've had it top of my mind here for just a second. I don't know, it'll come back to me.

You're good. Yeah, I feel like a lot of people walk into interviews and they're like, I gotta have it all figured, like, I gotta like just recite off everything, like, off the cuff. And you're saying, hey, listen, if you need a moment, scratch some ideas down on paper or whatever, like, you're cool with that.

Yeah, Google it. Like, again, this— the— we're open internet, open, open AI. Like, if you're reading it from ChatGPT, I can tell because I read a lot.

Please don't do that. Please don't, please don't do that.

Please, please don't do that. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. The other thing is that, like, it's okay to contradict yourself, right? Like, you can get down further down this pathway and realize, like, oh, actually, I have a better idea. By all means, let's, let's drop the, the bad idea and, and follow the good idea. Like, that's, that's part of the process here.

One of the things I'm curious too, how do you— so you've done a lot of hiring at Reddit, you've done a lot of hiring at Netflix, obviously very 2 hot companies. You've probably dealt with a ton of individuals, a ton of resumes. How can people separate themselves even just in the application phase? Do you like people— because like I've had Kelly Vaughn on the show, she and I are dear friends, like we've—

Yeah.

She does a ton of hiring, we've kind of broken that down, and I'm always curious Especially guys and gals like yourself. How can somebody reach out to you, or how can somebody get to the top of the resume pile outside of just a submission of a resume?

Yeah, that's a good question. One, listen to Kelly over me. That's my first piece of advice.

Kelly's great.

Yeah, Kelly's great. She's very smart. So if I get like a cold resume, It's, it's, it's hard. I don't— I, I actually don't know if I have really good advice for you. Um, I guess my best advice for just like straight up resumes is like, I need to be able to like tell at a glance in like 4 seconds the most important things about you.

Come on, say that, say that, say that one more time. Say it one more time.

I need to be able to tell at a glance in like 4 seconds the most important things.

It's not just me saying it, folks. People get so mad on social media when I put it on that it takes like 6 seconds and everyone's like, That's not fair. You're being lazy. And it's like, no, I'm not. I have hundreds of thousands of resumes to get through. I only have like 4 seconds.

Um, if I spent any more than that, it would be my entire job.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

So, or actually, and maybe stated differently, most of my candidates that I end up putting into the interview process aren't from resumes.

Where, where are they coming from?

A lot of it we do from outreach in terms of just like, we see you contributing to our repos, we see you contributing to our docs, we see you posting cool stuff on dev.to, on Twitter, we see you at conferences, we see you giving talks. Like, if you're working Neon into your stuff or, you know, or my previous companies, we're gonna reach out. But we've done a decent amount of hiring just that way, right?

So you're— I also asked Kelly this too, because we talked about having a portfolio versus putting stuff out online. I hate saying build in public because people think like, I gotta have a blog and all this stuff. No, just like you're out there, you're building, you're speaking versus the portfolio. And Kelly was like, I'd much rather look at— because she was like, if I'm hiring an engineer that's like heavy API work, and she goes, I go to your LinkedIn. and on your feature section on your LinkedIn, you have an API blog or an API post, she goes, I'm gonna go read that. So you're saying too right there, kind of that social validation, the online building, the online posting is something that you really look at.

Absolutely. Again, yeah, we're hiring API people right now, so this is actually very apropos. If you have like a, I don't know, a library for logging for Fastify.js, or if you have a long blog post about trade-offs of doing like gRPC versus something else, right? Like, I'm into it. Like, I'm gonna go read it. I'm gonna— I'm very interested in kind of content like that. Like, I am not looking to hire deaf famous people. Like, that is a trap that some hiring managers fall into. Like, oh, how many Twitter followers do you have? It's not a good metric for, like, there's plenty of developers that have, like, don't have any online presence that are amazing. And there's plenty of people that have lots of followers that wouldn't be good fits at your company.

Yep, yep. All right, so here's one question from Ivanka. Heard if you meet 50% of the requirements for a position, then apply. What are your thoughts on this?

I mean, we, I try and vagify, there's probably a better term for that, but it is not for me.

I think it's perfect.

My requirements so that, like, it's, it's like, doesn't seem like, you know, tent rules. It's like, hey, here's like someone that's gonna do well here would fit these like into these boxes.

Yeah.

Boxes or something like that. So, um, I do know like if you go look at like a Microsoft post, it's like they require 2 years of this and 3 years of this experience and, you know, 5 years of ChatGPT. Um, so I, I, I, I generally kind of ignore requirements because for the most part you can get in there and they're like, oh, you, you know, this was for a Staff-level position, but like, we could definitely hire you as senior.

So cool.

Yeah, let's get you through the interview process. I, I, I kind of ignore requirements for the most part.

Yep, yep. And, and, and you're not the first engineering leader I've spoken to that says that too. I, I think, again, I think if you're, if you're in the ballpark, Devon, if you want a specific number, sure, 50%.

Sounds good.

Yeah, sounds good. To be honest, Elliot comes in here. It's a little bit of a sidebar, but I think it's a good highlight. What's your story behind your journey into teaching Frontend Masters? What inspired that path? I feel like Elliot's already kind of getting in. I feel like he's interviewing with you. I feel like he's done some research.

Hell yeah. I like that, right? We were just talking about that. Let's keep this succinct. I met Mark at FluentConf 2012.

Again, conference.

2013. Yeah, at a conference. It was my first workshop at a conference. I walked out and gave it. I had no idea how I did. I did 3 frameworks. I did Ember, Angular, and Backbone in 90 minutes, like an entire workshop on all 3 of those, which is a terrible idea, but that's what I did. I met Mark, the CEO of Freedom Masters, backstage. He's like, this is cool. I'm hiring other people, or like, I'm, you know, getting other people on the platform to come do this. Do you wanna come try? So that's— and then now Mark is like one of my lifelong friends. I was literally texting him yesterday.

That's awesome. Again, you gotta get out there, right? Talk maybe about that, the importance of just getting out there right now. Obviously we're all remote, most of us are remote. Let's talk about the importance of that handshake and just really getting out there.

I mean, almost all of my relationships have come out of this like speaker circuit. Um, I don't— it's not scalable for everyone to go try and beat and do that. Like, I really enjoy public speaking, I enjoy teaching. But I think all of you are going to enjoy something, right? Like, you can enjoy really— like, let's take like an open source contributor. I haven't contributed a ton to open source over the years, but like, I talked to other developers, like one that we just hired, and like his entire career has come from just contributing to open source, right? And could he really lean into something that he loved?

Yeah. Wow. Okay.

Well, he's a core contributor, like a major framework now, right? Which gives him a lot of cachet that like I don't have, right?

Sure.

So finding like your overlap of like what you're interested in, like what you're driven to do. For me, that was public speaking and like teaching because I loved it. I would be a teacher if it paid better, right? Like, that's how I love teaching.

Yeah.

Finding that like overlap between like what gets you excited about the industry and keeps you working on stuff when you could be watching Netflix and what gets you out there meeting people in Encountering people in positive lights, like you will, you'll find your tribe essentially that way. And like that network will then drive the rest of your career, which is exactly what's happened to me. Like I got a job at Microsoft because Sarah Drasner reached out to me. She's like, you would be a good fit for this. You should come. You should come here.

There you go. Yeah. I mean, again, I mean, you and I were chit-chatting about React Miami backstage. Again, shout out Gabe and Michelle and the crew. I'm actually hanging out with Patrick Sieber, uh, GTUI guy, tomorrow for breakfast. Um, he's in Nashville. But, um, you know, like Hank Taylor, prime example, who heads up marketing at Laravel now. He and I met 5 years ago, and he and I've stayed in touch, brought him onto the show. If I need anything, I could hit up Hank. I email him all the time about his podcast. So, and I think just engaging with people, like a lot of people in tech put out a lot of content.

Absolutely.

And so even if you don't want to put anything out, Literally, I try to email. Like, I'm, I'm, I, I pull— actually, a lot of my followers aren't even in tech. They're like in the D2C space, follow all these amazing marketers. And if they ask on their email newsletter, hey, would love to hear your thoughts about this, or hey, would love to hear your thoughts about the newsletter, I always email back because I think people generally want to build connections in today's world. Thoughts on that?

Yeah, absolutely. Um, Like, if there's some tech, like, again, I'll talk about Neon just because that's where I'm at. But like, if you love Neon and you're interested in like, and if you're interested in work there, like hop in the Discord, right? Like hop in the Discord, start chatting, start answering other people's questions.

Yes.

I watch that stuff like a hawk. Like if I see— Everybody does.

Yeah.

Yeah. Like you are, you're, you're useful even before you even like knock on the door. Like it's, it's so easy for me to just say like, yeah, okay, this person's gonna do well here.

Yep, absolutely. I mean, again, I bring it up all the time. I hired Jason Torres. I hired Jason Torres because he threw a 2-day virtual conference to raise a few thousand dollars for a buddy's friend— buddy's wife who got cancer unexpectedly.

Like, oh yeah, like, what a cool story.

Yeah, like, I haven't done that, right? And he hadn't— he didn't have a job yet, but I saw him and I was like, once I got the budget high, I was like, I'm hiring Jason. Another example, Brianna Holmes. She runs marketing for Render. I'm one of the Render MC hosts. I've worked with Brianna for 3, 4 years now. When I had the budget to go out and hire basically a right-hand person, I needed somebody who complemented my skill sets. I'm a little weak in kind of traditional marketing activities, but I know what it's supposed to look like. So I went and hired Brianna. Why? Because I was engaged with her, right? I, I've worked with her. So again, like everybody I've hired, I've not had a resume. Um, Ximena on my team, in Mexico, our ambassador, kind of community evangelist in Mexico. I met her at a conference, JSConf MX in Guadalajara. I literally met her. I was hiring in Mexico. I hit up a few other conference organizers I knew in Mexico, said, who do you know? Everybody pointed back to Ximena. I had a 15-minute conversation with her, hired her.

Awesome.

It's not hard. You just gotta get engaged. You just gotta get engaged.

Yeah, those warm referrals are everything.

Everything. Brian, we're at time already. I knew this would happen. Any final words of wisdom for job seekers right now?

Um, I mean, this is, it's a really discouraging process and like, I wish it was different, but it's, it's a game of perseverance. Um, like I, I, I tell this to like all my new job seekers, like your performance and like what they had for breakfast can be almost like the same weight in an interview process.

Dude, that's a whole nother conversation. I totally agree with that. I think sometimes the more out of technical stuff you can get, the better.

It's, it's just, it's, it's not, it's not a fair process. And recognizing that like you can walk out of an interview, you could have crushed it and the person just didn't feel good that day. And so that, that weighed on their opinion of whether or not they're gonna hire you. Like you, you need to like learn during this process, but not get discouraged. Like, and it's really, really hard there, but just like keep your head up and, and persevere. It's a numbers game. You got, you gotta get out there. You gotta talk to a lot of people. You gotta be smiling on every single call, right? And, uh, you'll get there. Yeah, it's hard, but you'll get there.

Absolutely. Absolutely. All right, Brian, I, I have a bunch of kind of rapid fire I wanna ask real quick. First off, if I were to tell you tomorrow morning you could not wake up and do anything in tech, what is the one hobby you would pursue for your job?

Um, I mean, I alluded to it earlier. I think, I think I'd be a teacher. I really, I really enjoy seeing the light bulb moment in people's eyes, and I, I like breaking down knowledge that I have into terms that I, that someone that doesn't have the same knowledge can use to build the pieces and get to where I am. I really love it.

Absolutely. Um, second question, um, is there anybody in the community you want to give, uh, some flowers to, shout out to right now that you respect and admire?

Oh man, we have another 30 minutes for this? Seriously? Um, that's a good question. Um, God, Paralyzed here. Yeah, give me— let's keep going and then I'll come back to this one.

Next question. Is there any tools, technologies, frameworks you're tinkering with, your team's tinkering with, that you're like, oh, this is pretty cool, I want to give a shout out to?

You know, the one that I am focused on, you know, frankly, this might be my dual shout out plus technology I'm interested is So this is Tanner Lindsley from TanStack.

Okay.

It's this really amazing piece of technology. Like, if you're building like Next.js apps or Remix apps, like TanStack's kind of the third option in those kind of— that kind of space.

Okay.

And I'll give Tanner some flowers just from like, the guy is hyper-focused on building like really cool experiences and Like, not on just like making a ton of money, right? Like, and I respect the hell out of that. Like, because I'm sure he could have sold out by now if he wanted to, and he just, he just never has. So yeah, absolutely. That, that's my, my, my shout out right now.

I love it. Um, last question. Um, this show is called Guidance Counselor 2.0 because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school, and college, but now as adults, we don't really have a guidance counselor to turn to and ask for general career advice. That's why the show is called what it is. What would be your biggest piece if you go back in time and tell young Brian something, best piece of career advice you would tell him, what would it be?

I learned this in business school and I think I kind of intuitively got it, but when I went to business school, I really concretely understood this is I always thought that I needed to have this 5-year well laid out. I'm going to do this, then I'm going to do this, and then I'm going to do this. And I think that line of thinking is helpful as well. So I think you do need to do that line of thinking. But the way that they stated it in my business school was always be on the first year of your 5-year plan. And like that made a ton of sense to me of like rather than trying like, because if you're hyper-focused on like, I'm definitely gonna get there, you'll miss a bunch of opportunities on the way because you'll get really cool opportunities in front of you that take you off in totally different directions, right? Like I had no plans to be a PM ever, right? In fact, I didn't like it. Lots of my PMs, maybe, hopefully they're not listening. But like, I ended up in a space where I like ended up in DevRel and then I ended up becoming a PM on VS Code and like, I could have never seen that coming. But like, the fact that I was like, all right, well, this is the new place that we're pivoting, that would have like de-stressed me a little bit. 'Cause like, I was like, I need to be a VP of engineering. Like, that was my goal as a youngster.

Right.

And now that I have all the gray hair, I'm much happier when I am, but I could have never predicted how I was gonna get here.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. Any other people popped in your brain?

Um, man, like, it's, it's just really tempting for me to shout out my Neon team, but I, I guess I'm gonna do it.

Yeah.

So, um, David Gomes, he'll be at React Miami. So if you, if you hit— see him, please hit him up. Um, Pedro— Pedro, I struggle saying your last name— Figureta. Jakub, I'm not gonna try and say it. He's one of my Polish employees. I will not try and say his last name. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I could just go on. Luis Tavares. Yeah, like all of them. Gustavo, Salomão. That's awesome.

Awesome team. All right, y'all. Well, we're at time. Brian, thank you, my friend. Stay on real quick so I can say bye to you backstage, but y'all have a great one. Go connect with Brian, send him a note, say, hey, it was good to see you on Guidance Counselor 2.0. Again, if you need a job search community, highly recommend joining our Discord. We have a lot of events going. We have streams going every day. We have a bunch of one-pagers on how to interview better. We'll literally take this interview, we'll turn it into a blog post. We'll do a one-pager with this on how to separate yourself in the interview process. So again, if you want to be part of it, join us. torque.community is the site and check everything we've got going on. We got ambassador program. The application is still open to the end of the month. So if you want to be ambassador for the Torque program, love to have you. Um, but again, Brian, thank you, my friend. I appreciate it. This was a great chat. Um, y'all have a great one and, uh, see y'all next week.

Thanks, everyone. Peace.