How You Should Hire in Today's Market w/Engineering Manager Nate Taylor

All right, so we got that, we got this. Now alerting the troops, alerting the troops. All right, uh, good morning everybody. I say everybody, nobody. Um, happy Monday, Nate. Happy Monday.

That is, uh, I just told a friend of mine that is one of my corporate pet peeves. There's not a lot that gets me. I don't like the happy day of the week.

Yeah, that's fine. So, so we called— so we don't say that. So, so what, what we've started to coin is the word Fri-Tay.

Oh.

So, so once we get past the hump day, it's Thursday and Fri-Tay. So feel free to use that in any of your meetings. Um, but for those of you tuning in, welcome. Please say hey, we'd love to hear from you. Uh, I am— so, uh, Nate, Nate and I were— it's been a minute. I'm, I'm kind of booking like 4, 6 weeks out, not because of popularity, but more just 'cause my travel schedule. And I've also decreased the amount of lives I've done. Nate, Nate's been with me from like the beginning. Like, I, I think Nate's been on my radar. I mean, you've been on my radar for like 4 or 5 years now. It's been a while for sure. So, you know, I, yeah, Monte, there we go. There, it doesn't quite roll off the tongue the same way, but yeah, Monte. So, you know, Nate's been in kind of my, in my circle for a while and, and he booked this and, and, and, and we got on the live today or backstage, I was like, hey man, like, what do you wanna talk about again? So I'm excited for this talk because this is basically like, so I have a conference talk that is basically this topic and I don't really give it because for the most part when I give conference talks, it's mainly for job seekers. But I always have a handful of engineering leaders come up to me after these talks I give around the job search and like, hey, do you have any best practices for engineering managers? I said, hey, do I? And so basically what we're gonna dive into in the next hour here is really that. I'm very excited. Nate's been an engineering manager. I'll get him to introduce himself in a second, but he's been an engineering manager for a long time. And so we're gonna have a great conversation. Shout out to Nate for also being flexible. This was supposed to happen, I think, Wednesday this week, but it's my wife's birthday week, so I'm taking off Wednesday to be with her, and then we're heading out of town Friday. So this is the only day that we could do this. So Nate, I appreciate you being flexible. Want to give kind of a few housekeeping things as always. First and foremost, me and my guy Jason Torres are both Appwrite heroes. Jason is technical. I am not. Um, and so, uh, you know, listen, I love the DevRel team at Appwrite. I, I think they have a cool product. I've never used it. Um, and so, but you should try it out. So just, just take my word for it. Try it out. Tell them if you, if you interact with any of the Appwrite crew, tell them Torque Boys, uh, sent, uh, sent, sent you their way. Um, also, listen, we got a lot going on in the community. Check out torque.community. Um, uh, live streams, Discord of Discord-only events. I mean, we're all over the place, so check us out. We'd love to have you. Um, also too, if you want to be— if you just want to know when I go live, just text LIVE to this. This is actually my number. This is not some AI chatbot. This is actually me. Um, so just text LIVE. Um, I got probably about 70 people who want to be updated when I go live. I'll love to add you to the list. Um, you're not looped in on anything. It's just a text directly to you. So we'd love to have you. Um, what else? Also, yeah, Jumping the Torque Discord. Uh, we have a lot going on. I can't even keep up anymore. Uh, it's, it's basically the best way to describe the, uh, the Torque Discord chat now at this point is just like a huge friend group chat. So, um, all right, we got, we got a lot of people tuning in here. Um, obviously we got Jeff, uh, Michael, um, The Rebel. I refuse to watch, you know, listen, LinkedIn is awful when it comes to streaming, but I just have chose this platform, uh, for my streaming.

So we're just going to be there for the most part.

Chris, it's good to see you. Ricardo, Mark. Uh, Taron, it's good to see you. Kelly. Angelo, you're sick.

Go to bed.

Go to bed. He was on a stand-up this morning.

He's like, I had the flu.

I was like, go to bed, Ange. Ange, go to bed. Uh, Chris, thank you so much. Appreciate it. I'll let her know you said that. Elliot, it's good to see you. All right, enough of me yapping. Uh, again, y'all continue to chime in, say, hey Nate, let's give the people what they want, man. Who are you? What do you do? And, uh, we'll go from there.

Yeah, I'm Nate. I'm Nate Taylor. Um, still, I don't know if anyone saw, posted on LinkedIn last night that This is the 3rd time you've had me. We still have not settled whether Taylor should be a first name or last name. Maybe, maybe a future episode.

Taylor Desseyn and Nate Taylor. Taylor Taylor. It's the Taylor Taylor Show.

Yeah. David Handloss was like, that sounds like a good crime fighting show, Taylor and Taylor. Yeah, I don't know about that. I think you would carry the show if we did that. So I'm an engineering manager at a company called Skillable. We're a platform for hands-on labs. So we don't produce the hands-on labs ourselves, but we sell it to companies who use them. So there's a chance that you have taken one of our labs or used our platform without knowing it. The other engineering manager at Skillable with me, once he got here, he was like, oh, I took some of your labs. I didn't know that. 'Cause they're not, you know, they're not branded with our stuff. We're not the reason you're taking the lab.

Yeah.

But I've been in the engineering management space for a little over 4 years now officially. And then several years before that was doing some manager-like type stuff at another company that was a very flat org. So I started like a coaching program and one-on-ones and all that kind of stuff. Um, done a lot of development over the last 20 years, um, or 25 at this point. So, um, that's a little bit of who I am. I'm in Omaha. Um, I've got a koi pond and a couple dogs and some adult kids and stuff like that, and a wife.

So, uh, you live on some acreage though, right?

No, like, I have acreage in Missouri, but I live on, on just a lot. So, I love it. Yep, family, family property in central Missouri, got like 300 acres.

Uh, yeah, that's it. That's crazy. Yeah, yeah. That's nuts. So, all right, man. So let's, let's, let's start to dive in again. These episodes are longer so we can kind of go about this more organically and get more in depth. Where, where did the thesis of this kind of idea come from for you?

So like I said, I'm, I'm an engineering manager. I've been one for 4 or 5 years now. And, you know, just thinking through what are next steps for me. I could stay engineering manager for a while and just like I've had anywhere between 2 and 7 teams and I could keep doing that. It's, I enjoy it. That's why I'm doing it now. But I also recognize I have, I don't know, 15 or so years left in my career. And so like at some point I'd probably wanna manage managers. And so then I was starting to think, okay, if I was managing managers, what are some of the things I would want them to know? Yes. Like what are some of the experiences I've got? And so one that hit close to home because we're hiring or we were hiring, I guess we still have one position left, was if I had a team of managers, I would wanna run them through, here's how I expect you to be doing your hiring.

Yeah.

And not just the interview process, but like the entire process. And so that kind of got me thinking, what does that even look like? And as I started reflecting on my career, 25 years now, I've had one interview training. It was like 2001.

That's crazy. 2001 interview training. Yeah.

So it was at Caterpillar. They had a very defined process, as you might imagine, with 60-some thousand employees at the time. My job in the interview process was to drive the candidate between the various plants and have lunch with them. And so I was like, they called him a host. So I still had to know things like, don't ask about religion, don't ask about, you know, here's the questions you can't ask. So don't say, do you have any dietary restrictions? Say, what would you like to eat? Right? Those kind of things so that you're not biasing and you're not, you know, I'm sure from Caterpillar's perspective, not providing any legal ammunition to the candidate if they don't get the job right. That's it. That's been my, my interview training. Um, I've done reading, I've done, you know, talking to other people, but in terms of official training, um, I got the don't ask these types of questions.

Sure. So sure.

Yeah. And that's been 25 years.

That's crazy. Yeah. Before the internet existed. Um, so talk. All right. So where, where do we want to unpack this thing, man? Because, because there's a lot. How about, do we just want to like kind of guide through like the job seeker journey? Right. So I think the most tip of the spear would be job descriptions. Yeah.

And I think that's, I think you're spot on. I think where a lot of us get hung up is actually at the other end, right? We think about the final round. We think about making that decision of, do I want Nate or do I want Taylor? You know, Taylor did this, but Nate did that, you know, that kind of thing. And I've found over the years that if you move more towards the job description, that makes it easier. It doesn't make it easy. Like, you still have hard decisions to make.

Sure.

But it makes it easier if you define that stuff up front. And I would actually go one step further to the left, and that is figuring out what your team needs.

Oh yeah, that would be great. Yeah, that'd be great.

So I, like I said, I've had at one time, I've had 7 teams and as many as 7, as few as 2. And there was one, you know, 2021, 2022, everyone was like, flying around, changing jobs all the time. So I had tons of recs and for a while it was like the same job description and then it became hard to like figure out what are we hiring for, right? Like, Yeah. Is this person gonna be a good fit or whatever? I read a book actually, it was called The End of Average, which that was kind of maybe the spark to this. And the goal is, or the thesis of the book is there's no such thing as average. There's no such thing as an average person. If we say the average height is 5'8 in the US, well, there's people that have longer legs, there's people have longer torsos, or people have longer arms, shorter arms, all that kind of stuff. Like they might still be 5'8, but their body composition is gonna be different, right? And so I started thinking through like, okay, well, what does that mean for jobs? There's no such thing as an average developer or a developer, right? Like each position should be somewhat unique because this team is different even than the last time you hired, even if that was 2 weeks ago, right? And so I sat down with my team. We were gonna hire a senior engineer, a level 4, and we just had somebody leave. I got the job rec or the backfill approved, and I sat down with my leads and I was like, what do we need? Brainstorming session. What do we need? And they're throwing out things. Oh, we need someone good with React. We need someone good with TypeScript. We need this, we need that. And I said, well, hey, wasn't the guy that just left, wasn't he our Kafka expert? And they were like, yeah, like he really knew Kafka. Okay, cool. How's everyone else feel? comfort-wise with Kafka.

And they're like, yes, the main guy who knew all that is gone. Maybe we should look at that potentially.

So, so we started, we started with that and with that we said, okay, Kafka is number one. We need Kafka and, and/or large datasets. We were willing to trade off one of those, one first, the other, right? And then through that process, through that hour meeting or whatever it was over the next week, the leads were like, you know what, we're good with TypeScript. If they know JavaScript, we're good 'cause we can teach 'em TypeScript. We're good with React. You know, we, we have enough people that can do React. And so we put the job description together. So that's why that starts first, right? What's the hole on your team that you're trying to fill? Do you— go ahead.

Do you feel like companies— listen, I, I've had experiences. I remember I had to hire a data stage engineer. First off, that's a big problem. Data stage. Next off, I remember I be physically— this is when I started to mature in like my recruiting and like understanding how organizations should hire. And I'll never forget, I, I was on the call with the hiring manager and I asked the hiring manager, I was like, hey, what is this person going to be doing? And literally out of the hiring manager's mouth goes, we don't know yet.

Yeah.

What are we doing?

Right. Well, in that case, they got a rec and they were worried about losing the, the money.

Exactly.

So they were like, let's hire somebody, uh, before the VP or whoever takes away my rec and then I don't have it. Right. But no, it's spot on, right? Like, I— the team I was talking about, I had 2 teams. They were both like 4 to 5 people. So smaller teams, which means that the person we're hiring has an even more of an impact, right? It's not a 10-person team, 15-person team. It's a 4-person team. So if out of these 4 or 5 people, no one knows Kafka, we're gonna be kind of hosed if something blows up with Kafka, which we were using across all of our services.

Sure.

So then I took that, wrote the job description, and really pared down the job description. I have a, Sometimes it's outside of my control, or sometimes it has been outside of my control. But when it's in my control, I like a very pared-down job description of—

Talk about it.

Here's the 3 things I need, right? I don't need these 30 things because one, maybe I can teach those things. Maybe they're a thing that you do once every 6 months.

Yep.

But then it also, you know what, it makes it harder on me too, because now I've got someone's like, well, there's 30 things, I have 15 of them. I'll apply and then I look at 'em and I'm like, well, they don't have the one thing I really need. So now I'm reading a resume and going, ah, I don't need this. It doesn't stop it forever, right? Like you might say must have Kafka and you might still get 50% of your resumes don't have Kafka experience, right? But at least then it's easier 'cause you're like, doesn't have Kafka, reject, right? Gone. So I try to be deliberate in like, here's what I actually need, right?

Well, yeah. And then, so I wanna point out something. You're writing the job descriptions.

Yeah.

I feel like this is just how I feel. Doesn't mean I'm right, that a lot of times like IT goes or, or engineering managers go, hey, I need blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Send it off to HR and then HR creates this like, yeah. So shout out to you for writing the, the, the job descriptions.

So this is part of like what I would want to tell my managers. I'll have to, have to take a quick diversion. Please. Because I, we got time. One thing I didn't say was I trained judo and jiu-jitsu, so I enjoy that.

Never fighting you.

I like Tool. Maynard Keenan is a black belt in jiu-jitsu, knows his stuff, has been around forever. There is an incident from the '90s that's called the Tool Incident. If you look it up on YouTube, fan gets up on stage and he's like, yeah, I'm up on stage. And he goes in to hug Maynard. Maynard gets his arm underneath him, hip throws him, takes his back, controls him for the rest of the song, which was like a 10-minute song. And he just does not let this dude get up. He's just sitting on his back singing the rest of the song, making sure he's locked down. Years later, it was on a podcast and someone was asking him about that incident and Maynard was like, it's my stage. And the guy was like, yeah, you know, with Dimebag Darrell, you never know what, you know, what kind of crazy person he's like. No, no, no, it's my stage. You came to see me. This is my stage, right? And it was just like, I'm gonna control my stage.

Yes.

And I, I think the same thing as an engineering manager. You need to control your job search. I read my resumes. My recruiter has more than enough going on in their life to not have to read my resumes and sales resumes and design resumes and all this kind of stuff, right?

Yeah.

And there might be— and it's really hard if you've ever tried to tell someone how to filter something out because you might say it this way and they look exactly for that. And then there's like this adjacent term that, you know, you got 20-some years of experience is the same thing. And someone that's just doing like a strict search doesn't know and they reject that person, right? It's not fair to them. It gives me fewer candidates. So I read my resumes as, unless there's like a corporate policy, I wanna be writing my job description because again, we think the people closest to the problem, the developers should be the experts. Well, I'm the closest person to this problem, right? I'm the one running this team. I'm gonna be the one handling performance issues. I'm gonna be the one giving out raises. So as much as possible, and again, not every company makes it possible, but as much as possible, I should be writing the job description and I should be reading reading the resumes, um, because it's gonna make the whole process easier. Yeah, in my opinion. Um, my unbiased, my completely biased, unscientific opinion, right?

So, well, because, but I want to talk about job descriptions though too, because, because I wrote, because I talked about this in, in, in my talk. I think the only time I've given this talk was actually at that conference in Austin like a few years back, where I think too you have to write job descriptions. Like, I think there is an overarching, like, what the company does, what you're wanting to do. I think there needs to be a mission statement. There is, there's actual scientific fact that Gen Z, millennials, Millennials are very mission-driven. Yeah. Right. So if, if, if there's not a specific mission in what you're trying to do, that's not necessarily gonna resonate with the people. Right. And then you break down the nice-to-haves and must-haves.

Yeah.

Any thoughts on all that?

No, I mean, I, when I, um, here where I'm at now, it's a little bit more, um, teams are a little bit more fluid than where they've been in the past, meaning we might have someone on team for a while and then they might shift to another team, that kind of thing. My first leadership job was very much, this is your team. If I wanted to move them to another team, I could, but otherwise no one was gonna come in and do that. And so I would do that. It was like, here's the company mission and here's how this team specifically helps fulfill that mission. Here's what you would be doing, right? So one company was like, do you wanna help external contractors find jobs? 'Cause that's the job of this team. We had a job board basically, right? That kind of stuff. Do you wanna help us make sure that we've got our content library categorized correctly? That's the tool that this team builds. So I think that's very helpful because we've all done applications to like, like I, you know, some big company, a Stripe or a Microsoft or whatever. And you're just like, I don't, they could be doing a million things, right? It could be DevRel, it could be the API, it could be internal tooling. You gotta, you gotta help us out as candidates, right? To be like, What is— what am I actually interviewing for? Because that goes a long way too, right? Like, at the end of the day, it's cliché, but at the end of the day, you're trying to find someone that fits your team, that makes sense for them, right? It sucks as a job candidate to know that, like, you got rejected because they're just, like, not the right fit. But it doesn't mean you're a bad candidate. Just like my— going back to my example, if you don't have Kafka, I'm gonna reject you in that situation.

Sure.

I bet you're probably a better developer than me still, right? But you don't have the one skill that I need. And so that's not gonna work out. Or if you're a place that is very, um, a lot of red tape and your job description is written as if it's like a fast-paced, lots of change, well, you hire someone, they're gonna, they're gonna be frustrated because they're like, well, there's a lot of red tape and the job description made it sound like fast-moving, exciting, right?

That is true. Again, it's, it's, it's the, you know, I'm big on brand and marketing and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, I truly think one of the things that is not talked about enough is the way you write your job description and the jargon and the tone and how you craft it is the, is like the first initial way somebody interacts with your brand.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's spot on. And then it helps you understand. So I was at a company that was doing their like ideal candidate profile and they called out some, like they were trying to be really honest and they were like, if you don't like frequent change, you're not gonna do well here. That doesn't mean you're a bad employee.

And I would write that, I would write that in there.

Yeah, right. And I think they did. I might've left before they finished the ideal profile, but they were something they were working on. And at first I was like, I don't know, do we wanna say that? And then I started thinking about it. I was like, well, yeah, we do. 'Cause I'm a manager. And if someone's like, oh my gosh, the direction changed from last month. Like, yeah, get used to it, buddy. I don't wanna have that conversation 12 times a year, right? Yeah. You don't wanna have that conversation as a candidate 'cause you're like, oh my gosh, I thought I was doing this and now I'm doing this. I don't like that. Right. So understanding what your, what your team actually needs and try to, try to not have it be 30 things. 'Cause I, I look at it, I started looking at it as, as spider charts, right? Those took me forever to understand what a spider chart was. But the round charts, we have a lot of different vertices, right? No employee is gonna be a round spider chart. No, no employee's gonna be a circle. Your goal though is to get your team to be as close to a circle as possible.

Ooh, I like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you have someone that is a 9 outta 10 on C#, probably don't need another C# person. You've probably got that covered, right? But maybe you have someone that's not great on, you know, maybe you don't have someone that's great on, on the front end, TypeScript, JavaScript. Okay, well, let's, let's hire a 10 out of 10 there, 8 out of 10, and we don't care as long as they can like read C#. We don't really care about them, right?

I love where you're going with this.

Yep. Right. So you start stacking those on top and you shouldn't have holes. So that's one process that I looked was like, okay, well, where are we at? Okay, we got a lot of React people, a lot of front end people. We've got a database skills are okay. Kafka is a 0, or maybe it's like a 1, right? And so it's like, okay, well, that's important. That's important. And what I want is to try and find someone that has those, those skills that make up the gaps for the rest of my team because I want my team to be high performing. And so I'm okay if you don't know React, but you know this thing over here that we desperately need. Yeah, right.

Yeah.

We'll just make sure you don't take on React stories or we'll make sure you take on low priority ones if that's something you want to learn. you know, we'll let you do that, but like, we've got, we've got that covered.

Yep. Right.

And so, um, I give the illustration. I've got a friend, Ryan. We worked together for, I don't know, 10, 12 years at 2 different companies. And after about a year and a half, we stopped doing interviews together because we never once disagreed on a candidate. Either we were both yes or we were both no. And we're like, well, what's the point of both of us being in the interview? Yeah. Right. One, we can scale because now you can do Ryan interviewing a candidate and me interviewing a candidate at the same time. Sure.

Sure.

And 2, if we don't have that number of candidates, well, you can— we're at a billable company. I mean, let Ryan go build a client some work, right?

Yeah.

Or let me. And it was like, you can actually do more interviews. It's not Nate doing 5 in a week, it's Nate doing 3 and Ryan doing 2. You know, that makes it easier. So, you know, I don't need 2 of anyone on a team, right? And so trying to use that spider chart and figure out where your gaps are and then use that to write your job description for the gaps.

Yep.

And then the other part of that too is also as you're writing the job description, don't just focus on the objective skills, right? Like, can they write SQL? Can they, you know, do they understand IaC? Like that kind of stuff. Also be thinking about the harder to detect skills, right? What are your principles for your team? What are the things that you need? So if you're in a company that is very, very like top-down, the product defines everything. Okay, cool. Like you don't necessarily need someone that is innovative and has high ownership, but if you're in a more collaborative environment, you definitely need that, right? You don't want someone that's just gonna sit back and be like, I'll wait till Taylor tells me what to do and then I'll go do it.

Yeah.

And so trying to work that in as well, right? 'Cause some people want to be at a company that has high ownership and accountability and other people don't. And that's okay, right?

Yeah.

But it's all about finding who's gonna, who's gonna thrive at this job. And on the candidate side, what job am I gonna thrive at?

Yep, absolutely. So I, another, another way I think about how I've staffed up my teams is I, I'm a big football guy, right? Uh, SEC football, um, South Carolina looking to have a good year. There's some Heisman hype with Lenore Sellers. So like, like, like, like one of the things that I've been, I, I, that I view teams on is, is putting people in best position to succeed and then building depth around them, right?

Yeah.

So like, so like for example, like one of the things that when, when Shane Beamer came in and took over Will Muschamp from, from South Carolina is the team was kind of in disarray, right? So he was moving like running backs to tight ends and he was moving the internal tackles to ends. And I mean, he was revamping everything. Right. And so for me, it's like, like, what does a person want to do? And I think this may, may be a little further conversation or interview, but like, hey, if somebody's not really liking what they're doing and they have a skill that they can add in the organization, let's get them over there.

Yeah.

But then I think one of the things that, that a lot of companies don't talk about, and I've talked about internally with, with my team, is like, if— let's just use the wins the lottery analogy, not gets hit by a bus analogy. Let's say somebody wins the lottery or gets their dream job and leaves me. We're screwed because there's no redundancy plan. Like, we're a very lean team right now, and if any of my team leaves, like, we're gonna be in trouble.

Yeah, yeah. I think what I've— the way I've approached it is there's still core fundamentals that I want everyone on the team to have, right? And then there's the specialties. So there's a minimum bar that you need to cross. But that's way easier than I think a lot of us want to believe that it is, right?

Right.

I've been a developer 25 years. I got caught up in the trap of like, oh my gosh, they couldn't answer this for loop question. How do they ever write code? I don't think that's true anymore. I'm a little bit more lenient towards that. But it's just kind of like, yeah, there's, there's a minimum bar you've got to cross. You, you have to be, you know, a 5 out of 10 on programming skills to even, you know, enter the chat. Right. But then it's like, well, maybe we— maybe 5 out of 10 is not good enough. Maybe we're hiring the first senior for this team and we need a 7 out of 10.

Okay.

Yeah. Like that's, that's where it's gotta be. Right. And so yeah, I, I'm not looking— while talking about the spider chart, I, I personally, if I found someone that was a 10 out of 10 outta Kafka on— and 0 outta 10 on everything else my team did, I probably still wouldn't hire 'em.

I'd be—

sure. I'd rather have a 7 or 8 out of 10 on Kafka with some other ancillary skills that my team needs.

Gotcha.

But it's, it's about addressing that hole. Right. It's like, okay, if I hire someone that's a 2 outta 10 on Kafka, then I've got a 5th copy of the engineering team that I already have, which doesn't do me that much good, right?

All right, so I think we've beaten the job description with a dead horse, or I mean, actually not really, there's still more to talk about, but I definitely wanna continue to move through kind of the flow, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So now you've posted the job description, you're starting to get applications. This is where it pays off for the engineering manager because now reading resumes becomes easier. Again, not easy, but easier. Right? Do they have the skills that I need? If not, reject them, right? Now, that falls back on you of making sure that you're defining the actual required skills, right? And so if it's a case where, you know, sometimes you absolutely do need Java knowledge or C# knowledge, other times it's like, hey, you need object-oriented programming knowledge and we'll worry about the language later, right?

Yep.

So you gotta be careful how you define it, but then that's the screening process, right? Like, okay, This is the job description that I've agreed on. Resume doesn't meet that. Let's move on, right? It makes it easier. I struggle still at times because like I said, I have some adult kids. My daughter has her first like job in her career and my son's still kind of finishing school or whatever. But there's like that soft spot of me of like sometimes when I'm reading resumes, I'm like, oh, I know they're excited for this. Like they applied, right?

Yeah.

And I have to be the guy that rejects them. And so that sucks, but it, by, by focusing in on what do I actually need, it, it makes it easier for me. Probably doesn't make it easier for them, especially in the resume rejection phase, cuz they don't get feedback normally other than it wasn't a match.

How do you, let me ask you this, as an engineering leader where you're, cuz this is another thing, messaging with rejection. You know, I, I've talked to so many engineers that it's like, listen, even if I get a respectful response from a company, I'm still gonna be willing to maybe refer my friends into an open role if they have it. How have you addressed messaging, outbound messaging for rejection?

So all of that and all of my jobs has been handled by the talent team, the talent acquisition team or recruiters, right? Which I'm totally on board with because then it's at least consistent across roles and all that kind of stuff. But I always try to make sure like, let's not, I don't wanna leave 'em hanging, right? No ghosting. And so I have those conversations with my recruiters or my talent acquisition people like, hey, when we reject these, I don't know if, I don't care if you do it individually or one a day, but like let's have a respectful, hey, at this time it wasn't a fit or whatever. I mean, I've been at this job for like 14 months and I think like 6 months ago I got a rejection for a job that I applied to a year ago, right? And you're just like, what is going on?

It's such a bad look.

It is. And then there's still countless jobs that I still have not gotten a rejection from spring of '24. So fingers crossed, right? No, but I think it's important because I had a, I had a I mentioned earlier I started some one-on-ones, a one-on-one program, and one of my one-on-one people, we called them coachees, coach and coachee. She was really big on, on helping us overhaul the brand. And at the time, I didn't really understand branding. And she made the point that like, if someone comes in and does an interview and doesn't get the job, they should still leave going like, well, at least they treated me respectfully. And, you know, all this kind of stuff. That's part of your brand.

Correct.

If it's like boot to the butt, out the door, never hear from us again, that's also part of your brand. And that's gonna get around, especially. So this was, we were all in office in Omaha. Omaha's a, I don't know, a million-ish people, but it's a small enough tech town that word gets around.

People talk, right?

People talk.

Yeah.

So I think it's really important. I think that's, you know, again, it's, that's a, that's a part that's owned by the talent team. But I think, you know, you should be looking at that relationship as a partnership so that it's not just like, well, whatever you guys wanna do, cool with me. Right. You should be advocating for your people. And, and in this case, your people are people that don't even work there. Right. The, the people you're interacting with.

Yeah.

So then I guess technically in between the job description and the resume, we skipped a step. So we'll go back and then we'll jump ahead. You need to understand based on your job description, what are you actually hiring for? And then you need to construct questions that find out if that person has that skill.

Amazing. It's novel idea, right?

So the way, the way Skillable works, we have a hiring manager interview. Where for the most part it's more of the like, do you align to the values? I try really hard to not say cultural alignment because culture could be like we play foosball over lunch and you might not like foosball and that's okay as long as you align to our values, right? The culture should come from your values. If you align to the same values, cool. Like you could be a culture add. Oh, you know, Taylor came in and introduced darts over lunch. That's awesome, right? Whatever it is.

Glue guy. Glue guy.

Yeah. So figure out, like, the hiring manager typically does the values, the principles, that kind of stuff. Like, are you the kind of employee that we want? Do you show the traits? Are you able to resolve conflict? Are you honest? Are you hardworking? You know, do you do innovation? Those kind of things. And then we give it to some of our more seasoned engineers to do like a technical assessment, assuming that they pass the first round. Those questions that we ask in the interview, questions I ask in the interview, because right now I've been the one leading the interviews because it's my team, they're the same for every candidate. They're written ahead of time before we talk to a single candidate.

Crazy idea.

And then not only are the questions written ahead of time, but examples of a good answer and a bad answer, or if you wanna take it a step further, a great answer, a good answer, and a bad answer are, are also included, right? So here's question number 1. I'll just give— I'll give away some secrets here. So, you know, tell me about a time you had conflict with someone, right? Bad answer: they can't think of it. That'd be a bad answer. They've never had a conflict because that's— I don't believe it. 2, they have too many to think of. Also a bad answer because now you're the problem maker. Generic on details, can't think of a specific situation, so they talk hypothetical. Like, these are examples of Bad answers. And it's not that they're a— again, not that they're a bad person. This interview, which is a separate skill, is not going well because I don't know if you just have read all the books on conflict resolution and you know what you should do versus do you have an example of what you've actually done, right? So a good answer would be, can think of a specific situation. The situation got resolved. They initiated the resolution. So Taylor and I are fighting. I go to Taylor and go, hey man, we need to squash this beef. Let's figure it out. That's a better answer than Taylor coming to me. If it gets resolved and you're okay with the answer, I'll take it as a good answer either way. But to go from good to great, I'm leading it. And to really go from good to great, I led it and we wound up with Taylor's solution, right? Like that's telling me like, oh my gosh, this person knows how to handle conflict. They're not egotistical. They're willing to accept someone else's idea. Great, right? So maybe that's a— maybe that's a 5 out of 5, maybe it's a great, however you want to rate it.

Um, how do you guys do ratings? I've heard 1 to 5 for each question. I've heard 1, like, 1 to 3, basically yes, maybe, no. Like, how do you guys do it?

Um, I've done the 1 to 5. I would prefer 1 to 3 because I think too many— like, what's the difference between a 4 and a 5?

Yeah, right.

Like, yeah, I think I may No, I will fight you. We are not hiring this person. I am a yes, I will fight you. I am— we are hiring this person. And I'm a, I could go either way. Why don't you tell me where you're at? Like, that's to me the ideal scale. That makes sense.

Yeah.

We don't have an official scale here. So it's more of that. It's more of that last situation, but it's collaborative. Like we debrief after the fact and we're like, hey, I thought this and this and this were strong and that's why I am a whatever. Or I thought this and this and this is weak and that's why I'm a no. And then that gives someone else to go like, yeah, that was a no, but Don't forget these things, right?

Right.

Excuse me. And so it's important to have those questions and then those questions should tie back to your values, to your principles, to your ways of working, right? So you should have a reason for asking every single question you ask. That's my opinion, right? Like, don't just ask a question to ask a question, ask a question that tells you something. So I once had someone on the conflict question tell us about a PR, which is the most common in developers, right? Yeah, we had a disagreement on a PR.

Cool.

Love it. Let's talk about it. The final question that my, my other interviewer asked was like, so how did that get resolved? And he's like, oh, it's still going on. And we're like, okay, this was something you told us started a month ago. And you guys haven't resolved a PR conflict in a month, right? There's a reason we asked that question. Because I'm not bringing you onto my team and letting these kinds of things hang on my team forever.

Yeah.

Right. So each question needs to have an— not, not an answer, 'Cause I don't believe on most of these, there's most of these, I believe there's wrong answers, not really right answers, but there needs to be, what information are you getting from this? Oh, they're creative. They solved a problem. They found a new way of working. They timebox, whatever it is, right? Those have to tie back to your principles and the values of your organization. So I was reading this really good book, Engineering Executive's Primer by Will Larson. He was at Stripe and Calm and Uber and I don't know, some other big names. And one example he gave was Uber has a value or had a value that was like, we make magic. And what they meant was we won't ship something until we're 1,000% sure it's a good thing to ship. Yeah, that's a perfectly fine value. Someone else could have a perfectly fine value. That is, we ship at the first possible second.

Right. That's me. I ship always, whether it's fully baked or not.

Right. Those are 2 legit values. It just is dependent on what is your culture wanting to do, right? So if Correct. If your questions are like, hey, when was the earliest you've ever shipped? That doesn't really tell you that you'd be a good fit at Uber unless they go into a very elaborate answer about how like, I don't ship until it's perfect, right? So you wanna ask these questions that are getting to what are the things that your team values? And similarly, I just have been working through this exercise at Skillable with my leaders defining not only what are our principles, but like our principle, we're not, We're not creating them, we're naming them and we're saying the people that succeed at Skillable do these things, right? And then our questions in the interview process are, is this person gonna behave like the other successful engineers at Skillable? If so, let's bring them on, right? If not, not a match, right?

Right.

So understanding the questions that you've got, defining 'em ahead of time, because then again, we're trying to, trying to get to the ultimate answer, which is should we hire this person, right? If you're changing your questions frequently, or between interviews. Like, I get it. As an engineering manager, it can get really boring to ask the same question 3 times in a day, the same 5 questions, 7 questions. I, you know, last week, a couple weeks ago, I did 3 interviews on Tuesday. By the third one, it was— it's hard. It's hard because I'm just like, oh, I've already asked this question, right?

Yeah.

But it's the first time this candidate's heard it, right? But if I don't do that, then suddenly it's like, well, Nate was really good at conflict resolution, but Taylor was really good at ownership. Like, well, how do those compare, right? It's like, Oh, Nate's, Nate's 5 stars and Taylor's 2 thumbs up. You're like, what? Those don't translate, right?

Yeah.

And so it's, it's, it's nailing that down. And you do that before the resumes come in because what I found is once resumes start coming in, the interviews start happening quickly.

Right.

And so now we've figured out what we need. We've got our job description, we've got our questions, we've got some amount of resumes that have passed our screen. Real quick, real quick.

Do you set certain people to do certain parts of the questions? Because like, do you have a team, like, do you have certain people who just does like the non-technical stuff and you have a certain team that does the technical stuff? And then we'll get to Gaston's questions here in a second. But like, do you, how do you guys structure those interviews?

Yeah, so we're, we're still a pretty small, scrappy engineering org. Okay. So there are 3 of us that will do a hiring manager interview. 2 of the 3 will do it. So whoever's hired, whoever the team is. So there's me and another engineering manager. We have teams. When it's my team, I will be one of the 3 100% of the time.

And that makes sense.

Then the other one would be the engineering manager or my boss. Whoever's available will dive in with that interview with me, right? So that's the hiring manager round. That's when we're trying to figure out values and core and principles and then like some real base layer engineering stuff. We're not getting into coding at that round, but we will talk technical.

Sure.

The next round is our, is our principal engineers. We have 3 principal engineers, same kind of thing. They each have their own kind of space. So if it's their space, that principal has to interview them.

I like that.

If it's— and then it's one of the other 2 principals or our architect, whoever's available will kind of go through. That also means there's some consistency, right? So if it's me and the other engineering manager, one interview, and me and my boss, another interview, that's okay because at least there's consistency. We also— I'm also not a fan of Uh, not, not comparing candidates until you absolutely have to, right? So if I, if I have an interview today and an interview tomorrow, I'm not holding on to this guy today or this, this candidate today until I talk to the guy, the person tomorrow. I'm moving them forward or I'm not. They either pass the mark or they do not. Love that.

Love that. Yeah. You can't, I feel like everybody's like, let's just gather like 6 people in the same area, then compare, then move 3 on. It's like, well then what happens is, is that everybody takes other offers or then, right? Nobody likes them and then you're stuck with zero.

Right. So recently I've gotten a few folks asking me like, hey, when's your time to make this decision? And I'm like, as soon as we find someone, right? Like, I'm not, I'm not waiting for like, if you're the person, you'll find out, we'll make an offer. Like, so our process is hiring managers interview, give a response to the recruiter. Let's say the candidate moves forward, then they meet with the principals. That's a longer interview because we're doing coding, not LeetCode, but we're doing some, you know, trying to make it realistic coding. And then we do a debrief between the principals and between everyone that interviewed. And obviously by the time they make it to the principals, the early interviews have already given a thumbs up. We should hire this person, otherwise we're not moving them on. So then it really is principals, you tell us, should we hire this person? And if the answer is, it's kind of a sliding scale. So on seniors, if it's not an enthusiastic yes, it's a no. On juniors, it's, we're willing to, you know, have a little bit more wiggle room because we expect to mentor you and train you and things like that, right?

Yeah.

But if they say yes, then they drop off the phone and the managers stay on with the recruiter. We nail down salary and we make an offer, and if they accept it, we close the job posting. And now maybe we haven't actually run into the situation, but let's say we interviewed someone today, got the thumbs up. Yes, we want to hire them. And tomorrow there's another candidate. We haven't run into that situation. I think I would push on my boss to be like, hey, can I hire 2 if they're really good? Right. But I think that's, that's the only time, like, maybe you do have to ultimately compare if that person excels at their interview as well, but cut them loose or move them forward. Right. So we want quick turnaround. I think it respects the candidate's time. It goes back to the brand.

100%.

Right. I didn't have to wait.

I think, I think a candidate would actually prefer to be rejected early in the process than later in the process and have you drag it along. I mean, I was talking to 2 gentlemen out of Raleigh on Friday. They came to my talk at All Things Open in Raleigh. They were kind of lamenting about the job search right now, and they're like, you know, I went 5 rounds and finally got rejected by saying I'm not a fit. But they were like, but I'm a fit to go 5 rounds, right?

So I have a, I have a former boss, um, and, and she, um, took a, a sabbatical and was coming back into the workforce, and she was interviewing with 2 companies. And, um, and it was for a senior position, it was like an SVP-type position. And one of them, she had done 10 rounds. She found out there were 4 people, 4 candidates that did 10 rounds. We're talking 40 interviews.

Shoot.

And there was at least one more round with the CTO and she took the other job, right? 'Cause she was just like, you know what that told her? When I wanna make a change, I'm gonna have to go 4 rounds or 10 rounds with the leaders to make a change, right? And it's just like, it's wasting her time. It's exposing her to like how the company works. But yeah, I've had candidates that I've rejected and rejected quickly and I've got a message on LinkedIn. It was like, yeah, I totally get it. You know, I wasn't prepared or I get that we weren't aligned, but, you know, I appreciate the fact that you didn't waste my time. Like, yeah, I'm not going to. I don't want to have my time wasted. Not as an engineering manager. I'm, you know, I'm willing to waste my own time at work, but I don't want my time as a person to be wasted, right?

No.

Comes back to how do I wanna be treated? And that's how I try to run management.

So I should, yeah, I think that's a general life principle if we're being honest. Right. So talk real quick, when it, when, how do you like to structure your interviews? Is it an initial intake, technical round? Like, is it 3 rounds, 4 rounds?

Like, what is your ideal cadence for that? Mine's 3. I can be convinced of 4. I also like to limit the number of people. I don't want, you know, I don't want a candidate walking into a 4-person panel interview if they don't know what's a 4-person panel interview.

No, that's terrifying for anybody, even, yeah, even us.

And even if they do know, I don't really want them walking into a 4-person interview. I had that happen. I took the job, but it was like, I thought I was interviewing with one guy, came in with 3. So my ideal flow is I like the talent team to talk to the candidate.

Yeah.

You know, initial value screen. Yeah. Nail down benefits, answer generic questions, general questions, not generic questions, answer general questions, et cetera. If they pass that, and not all of them do, we've had, for some reason, we've had more than a few be just absolute jerks to the talent team. I had one, I was on an interview with our talent person one time and the candidate, no joke, this is a tip for candidates, don't do this. At the end of the interview they go, I thought this was just with HR, so I would've dressed up better. He was wearing a t-shirt and I was like, he didn't know I was gonna be on the interview. And I was like, why would you say that? Right? Like, he wasn't moving forward anyway for other reasons, but like afterwards you're like, you just insulted this team member of mine. Why, why would he move forward? Um, read the room. Uncanny number of people do that, so don't do that to the recruiter. Uh, then it moves to the hiring manager interview. I like to go first because again, I'm more willing to spend my time screening candidates out than pulling engineers off of work.

So good. So good.

So I look at it as a funnel too. The, the The resume process should eliminate some, the hiring or the talent management should eliminate some, the engineering manager should eliminate some, and the principal should eliminate some. If at any point in time the next round just passes on the person that you passed on, it's a worthless round, right? It should be a filter. It should get smaller and smaller. So I don't know, I don't keep track of statistics and things like that. So I don't know, we can say I've interviewed 100 people and of those 100, 30 made it to the principals maybe over the last 14 months. Something along those lines. That's the, you know, 15, 10 to 30% would be where I'd wanna pass it along. And so that's how I like to do it is have that technical round last. Because at the end of the day, if you're an amazing developer, but you're a jerk, I still don't want you.

Yeah.

So why not eliminate the easy things first and eliminate the things that don't pull someone off of writing production code or fixing an incident or whatever else is going on? Let's address those things first. If you pass the hiring manager, then like, yeah, you would be a good employee here. Now we just gotta figure out, do you have the technical skills that we need?

So let's, for poops and laughs, let's, let's, let's do it. If you were to do percentage to reject, what would you say the stages are? So first round internal recruiter screen, probably what, 20% rejection?

Um, yeah. So I mean, the biggest rejection is at resume, right? So that's 80% right off the bat, probably.

Um, yeah. Okay.

So yeah, so, so keep in mind, you're, you're trying to define a specific job, so Your rejection of resumes should go up if you're doing this because not enough, you know, you're very clear on what you want. So then of those people that get through to the recruiter, yeah, something like 20% reject at the recruiter level. Then it flips. It's like 60, 70% reject at the hiring manager level. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the principals, it's maybe 50/50, something like that.

So it's almost like a bell curve, almost like—

It is, right? And some of it too is, so like our process is recruiter is like 30 minutes at most. A lot of that is just getting basic information. If they don't have questions, it ends earlier, 15, 20 minutes. Hiring manager interview is like 45 minutes. We always have our set of questions that we ask and we always leave time for the candidates to ask questions at that point. And then the principals is like is like 90 minutes, I think. Because again, they're gonna, they're gonna do some coding and that'll get them into, you know, okay, well, how did you handle this situation? What would you do with this requirement? That kind of thing. So all told, what is that? 2 and a half hours, something like that? 3 hours total?

Yeah. I love it. What else? I mean, we're already at, you know, kind of 15 minutes left. I do got some rapid fire. What, what are some key things that maybe we have missed?

Yeah, so I'll just— so let's say we've gone through that entire process and we're down to, you know, maybe you Maybe you are someone that's comparing candidates, right?

Yeah.

So we'll finish with this, then we can take it however you want. But several years ago I was talking in a group of friends and they said, hey, we're trying to hire, I don't remember what the position was. I don't think it was technical, but we're trying to hire a VP of whatever. We've got 3 candidates. It's 2 guys and a woman and we want to have a more diverse team and we have a lot of dudes already on the team, but the woman is the worst candidate of the 3, like objectively the worst. Like, what would you guys do? This is what the friend was asking us. And the other friends were like, you don't hire the woman, right? Like, if she's objectively worst, the worst of the 3, then you hire the one that's the best fit for the team.

Sure.

And if you're worried about the diversity, the diversity problem starts back when we're pooling candidates, right? If you don't have— if you have one woman through the entire process, you don't actually have a diverse process. You have a token, right? You have—

Amen.

we're doing diversity person. If you have a mix of like, hey, this week we interviewed 3 women, next week we interviewed 3 men, we've interviewed different ethnicities, like all that kind of stuff, then you can just hire the best person because it's like we did the work at the beginning of like, we've got men, women, we've got, you know, different ethnicities, we've got different backgrounds, different nationalities, all this kind of stuff. And we're just like, yeah, like this person cleared the bar right now. I would say at the end, if all— if consistently the only people clearing your bar are the same person, then okay, let's go back and look at the bar. But if your pool is well funded, well populated, I guess, then it makes the easier— the decisions easier at the end. And I think that's, you know, from a diversity standpoint, that's what we're trying to do. But also from just a general hiring standpoint, what are you trying to do, right?

Yeah.

So like, again, we're trying to find the best person. And so let's get as big of a pool as we can that meets our that clears our bar and then go from there.

Yeah, absolutely. Um, uh, uh, Emre, if you were paying attention and not talking junk the whole time, uh, no, this is where you write good job descriptions, right? Again, is it— I think I've always had some of the best diversity on my teams.

Why?

I've always hired remote, right? And I've pulled from my communities, right? I think that's incredibly important. But I think the way you write job descriptions to have an inclusive not an exclusive mindset, right? I think there's ways to write job descriptions and we've talked about it briefly at the beginning, but that really, really helps as well.

I do wanna— Yeah, we had a tool at my last job. I can't remember what it was called, but now you can use an LLM for it.

Sure.

And that's like, do a sentiment analysis on this and it'll flag like, hey, this is like, this language is definitely leaning towards mid-40-year-old white dude. Like, well, 'cause that's the guy that wrote it, right? So then it'll say like, hey, if you, If you wanna, if you wanna make this more inclusive, change this language to that language. It's, it's that part of the, the job description. The other thing I'll say too that I, I learned by hanging around conference organizers is you have to do some outreach, right? It's not, and, and maybe this isn't, maybe this is the engineering manager, maybe it's the talent team, maybe it's both. But proactively reaching out to people as well, encouraging them to apply, asking them to apply. Whenever I do that personally, I always tell people, yes, I am the hiring manager, but I I'm not offering you this job. I'm asking you to go through the process and you might get it, you might get rejected. But if you just wait for the people that only apply, then you are reducing the amount of diversity in your pool. So reach out proactively, user groups, you know, there's like my friend, your friend, Jennifer Wadella, Kansas City Women in Tech, right? If you reach out to Jennifer Wadella, she's like, I can send you some great women that will you know, rock your job description if you reach out to different people, um, things like that.

So yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Um, I do want to get, uh, uh, Gaston, I want to get to your— I mean, listen, I think this is a whole other conversation as well. When you have 10 recruiters look over your profile but there aren't serious interactions, seems like recruitment farming. Here's— this is a whole nother talk around recruiting, but I will tell you this, that Recruiters are only incentivized to talk to the people that are a one-to-one fit. So that means in my mind that at least your profile is good enough where you are getting the looks, but there are things in your profile that for whatever reason the recruiters aren't looking at or, or, or wanting to see. So again, like, it's not recruitment farming. That's just the way recruiting works. Let's see here. I'm gonna go—

Let's look at Elliot's comment at 10:19. So this was a question that was asked of me when I was interviewing at my former place. And it was about like, what does diversity mean to you? And I tripped all over myself and I actually finished the interview, hung up, and I was like, if I don't get this job, that's the answer. I ended up getting it. I followed up with my boss, like one of our first one-on-ones. And I was like, I absolutely bombed the diversity question. Because what I was trying to say was that it's multifaceted and it shouldn't be just gender or shouldn't just be race or shouldn't just be economic prosperity or any of that kind of stuff. It's not what I said. And it basically came very close to saying like, oh, there's diversity in thought, which is absolutely true. But it was also often a cop-out, like, oh, well, we think differently. And I was comforted by her answer, which was, Nate, everyone trips over that answer. It's a difficult question, right? But it is very multifaceted. And I will also point out that, you know, one of my favorite sayings that I learned within the last decade was like, no single person is diverse, right?

Yeah.

Diversity is literally the combination of people. So you get someone that, you know, went to Stanford and you get to someone that went to a community college, right? Pretty good chance there's some diversity there, economic or connections or whatever. You get gender, you get ethnicity, nationality, background, like all this kind of stuff. And then you build that altogether. I'll also say as a company that— or not as a company, but if a company has a— has had a, like, a stable, like, kind of plateau area and now they're starting to grow, it's another chance to bring in diversity because you're bringing in people from the industry that maybe have done things differently. And that gives you some injection of new ways of doing things and people have seen things before. So it is multifaceted. And yeah, you've got to reach out. Because otherwise, whether you intend to or not, you'll kind of just wind up with your own circle if you're not careful.

I love it. Yep, 100%. All right. So also, Nate, just download this YouTube, throw it into ChatGPT, create some slides, and now you got your presentation for future conferences. So there you go.

Yeah, that's a whole other topic that I'm a contrarian on. I'm sure that's being I'm sure that's news to you that I'd be contrarian on something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course, of course. All right, so I wanna get kind of the rapid fire here. And again, thanks for everybody who tuned in. We tried the real-time chat. I kind of liked it. So let me know your thoughts if you like that. But wanna get into kind of final round rapid fire here. Nate, what is one tech tool, app, something you can't live without right now?

My, my, my traveler's notebook and my fountain pens.

Alrighty, old school.

I'm a manual writer.

We are, we are man of the people here. Um, let me ask you this. What's, what's the first tech job that you have had? No, not tech job. What's the first job you ever held that you got paid to do?

Um, my first W-2 was Wendy's. My first job before that, um, I I did. I was like a general contractor's assistant, made like $2 an hour to like pick up the shingles after he threw them off the roof. Came home covered, like literally like covered, you know, you pull my sock down and you're like, oh my gosh, you're really white because my skin was so dark from the shingle dust. Yeah.

So I love it. Yeah. That's awesome. Let me ask you this, you know, especially as an engineering leader, are you guys fully remote at Skillable? Yes.

We've never, never had an office. So—

If you could make it like, like, like, like if you could dictate your ideal cadence of onsite versus remote, and these are only your views, I understand that. But as a leader, what, what type of setup would you like to have the best?

I really enjoy remote right now. 2004 to '07, I worked from home and I said I would never do it again. And a lot of things changed to make that not be the case. And now I'm kind of at the point where like, I've learned from my mistake and I will never say, I won't say never in office again, but like for the foreseeable future, I don't wanna be in the office. But I would say 2 to 3 times a year as a minimum, as just like a team get-together. 2 to 3 times a year for, you know, 3 days-ish.

Yeah.

Not including, not including travel. So. Yep.

I love it. I love it. What is, when, when you were growing up, when you were a kid, what did you like wanna be when you grew up originally?

I mean, engineering was one of 'em. So my dad was an electrical engineer. Oh really?

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay. Nerd at heart. I love it.

Yeah. His brother was a, was a computer programmer for Rockwell Collins in Texas. And so I, I just kind of grew up around that. Um, you know, after Top Gun, I wanted to be a fighter pilot for a little bit of time.

Who doesn't? Who, who didn't after watching that movie?

I did debate in high school. That's the coolest military ever.

Yeah.

Oh, it got a lot of people. Um, there's some great stories about like the director, you know, being cussed out by people who are like, I joined the Navy and it's not at all like what you said. Yeah. Um, uh, I did debate in high school, so there was a period where I thought maybe law. Uh, nice. But yeah, uh, mostly just engineering.

I love it. I love it. Um, what is, uh, what is one career mistake career mistake that you are oddly grateful for?

Hmm.

Um, I mean, I know they always all work out in the end, but—

So, so I guess this could be maybe, maybe kind of the, um, same, same in, in the same light. But, um, in 2004, the reason I was working remote was I left my, my job at Caterpillar and attended seminary for 3 years. Um, and I actually went to seminary, or I went remote with Caterpillar. I was there for that team. It was the first person to do remote. So I could, 'cause I was like, hey, listen, we're writing Windows software. I feel like I can do that anywhere. I gave a 6-week notice 'cause I was like, if I give you 2 weeks, there's no way this works out. I was able to do that for 3 years, like between 25 and 30 hours a week while attending school. It worked out. But you know, it, if I had stayed and just done full-time development, I probably would have gotten better at development faster.

Sure.

That said, we'd probably still be in central Illinois. So it would have changed a lot of my career trajectory because there was like, I'm sure there was more than one employer, but there was basically one employer in Peoria and that was Caterpillar.

Probably not a ton.

Not a ton. And the people that weren't Caterpillar were contracting back to Caterpillar. So I loved my time at Caterpillar. I worked for them for 7 years as FTE and contractor. But by doing that, I moved into .NET, I moved into web development later. I moved into JavaScript after that. And, you know, started speaking at conferences, which allowed me to get to Pluralsight as an author and just kind of advance my career. So, yeah, it's hard for me to say there was a mistake. That would be the one maybe. I wouldn't advise someone to, like, take a 3-year sabbatical and attend seminary unless they, you know, really feel called to. Sure.

Yeah.

But, yeah, that was the one.

I love it. I love it. Second last question. If I were to tell you tomorrow that you couldn't do anything in tech anymore, but the money's the same, if not better, what's like a hobby you'd pursue?

Yeah, I had a boss ask me this once when, well, the one that took her sabbatical, 'cause she was gonna take a sabbatical. I think I would be, I think I would have a series of small businesses and I don't mean like a serial entrepreneur, but like, yeah, I would love to do water features, like the kind that require big heavy equipment, you know, like building the waterfalls and all that kind of stuff. It's fun.

I've never had anybody say that on my show before.

So I built— I mean, I built the— I built a koi pond, and then I expanded the koi pond, and I dug it all by hand, and it's—

Dang, dude.

All this stuff now. But, um, that would be fun, right? It's just like you get to go do like landscaping architecture kind of stuff, but I don't want to break my back, so heavy equipment kind. And then I don't know, I would move on from there. Like, that would be fun for a few years. Yeah, years, 5 years. And then I'd move on to something else that catches my eye. Um, maybe a bookstore owner. Um, I don't know, something like that.

I love it. That's awesome. All right, man, last question as we wrap up here. Again, thank y'all for tuning in. I really like these hour conversations where we're just able to dive into so much more, and I feel like the interactions have been great the last, last 2 or 3 episodes I've done. Um, so last question, because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school, now adults, we don't really have them. That's why the show is called Guidance Counselor 2.0. If you can go back in time, one piece of advice for young Nate?

Um, Yeah, I think you'll like this one is I would give some very clear advice about what networking is and isn't because there was always this talk of networking. And I grew up, like I said, my dad was an engineer. Dad did not believe in networking. And he worked at one company for 30 years. He worked at 2 companies in his career. And then I think once I started hearing about networking, it sounded like, you know, go to the happy hours and all that kind of garbage. And I mean, I'm only on this show because we were on a— at a conference together.

Yeah.

Um, right. And I hung out in the speaker's room and talked to people about code and things that were nerdy and I liked it. And then after the fact you realize like, oh, that was networking.

Yeah.

Right. And so networking doesn't have to be a big scary thing. And I would tell myself that earlier because I probably didn't start that. Um, I was just at KCDC a couple weeks ago as an attendee and I was talking to some people. The first 2 years I went to KCDC, I didn't go to the speaker's dinner. I didn't go to the attendee party. I went to my hotel room. And it was like year 3, I finally realized like, oh, I should go do that stuff. They're already paying for it. And that's when like the networking started happening and I started meeting more people. So that was 2016. So was that 9 years ago? I was 38 when I finally learned that lesson. 39. Yeah. So I think that's what I would go back and tell people about. I love it. Or tell myself about.

I love it. That's awesome. All right, y'all, thanks again for hanging out. I gotta bounce to another meeting. Nate, stay on real quick backstage so I can say bye to you, but y'all have a great one. Go connect with Nate. He is a wealth of knowledge. And we will be live tomorrow. I have the founder and CEO, his name's Ken, in charge of Ropes AI, which is an assessment platform that we actually use at Torque. We're gonna talk about what skills he's seeing that's in demand right now, what skills you need to kind of future-proof yourself for. He has the real tangible data of what companies are asking for in terms of assessments. So it's gonna be a great conversation. So have a great one. We'll see y'all tomorrow morning, 9:30 AM Central. Peace.

See ya.