The Perfect Engineering Team | Jeanine Jue

Okay, so the perfect engineering team. Yeah, right, there's no such thing. And come on, as a developer, I'm working really hard to resolve this issue. As developers, we can kind of get away with that. Kind of be like, in order to kind of, if you're talking to somebody non-tech, if you throw out as many technical terms as possible, they'll believe you, and they'll be like, all right, I'll stay away now. It sounds like you're really on top of things. But again, you need to be aware of the tricks that developers will play, in terms of the startups. Okay, and for recruitment efforts, okay, I love recruiters. I have good friends of mine that are recruiters, but you can do it yourself. Now, but bear in mind, as a developer, like I got this email last week, okay? So, and we get emails. I literally get 1 to 2 emails a day for engineering jobs. And look at this, right? Seeking Python or Ruby developer with cloud experience, project work. Okay, this is not exciting at all. So think about it. This is your competition, which are the recruiters who are just scanning through my LinkedIn profile to see what's a good fit. So if you can excite me, then this will actually stand out. So again, it's just really, you have to bear in mind that that's what you're up against. So be your own recruiter. What are recruiters doing? They're going to GitHub, LinkedIn, Stack Overflow, hackathons, meetups. That's why I have so many recruiter friends, because I go to all of these too. So you can actually get it yourself. And remember, it's just you're selling to a developer. Here you're thinking, oh God, I only have a couple hundred thousand dollars of funding, or I could only pay them $3,000 a month. I actually took a startup job, $3,000 a month years ago, because I was super passionate about the idea. Somebody got me excited, interested. It was a flop, and that's another story. But think about it. You have that same opportunity to give to a developer who's working at such a big company. They'll leave if they truly believe in your product. And I thought this statistic was interesting. Only 15% of developers are actively looking for a job, but 78% of developers are interested in hearing about new opportunities. Again, you can do your own recruiting, and you certainly can hire the right people. Just get them excited. So what to look for in a candidate? Again, junior to advanced. Junior, I can bring on junior people, right? Because let's say I have a startup and I'm at Series C or something like that. I'll have the time to mentor them and work with them. But you're in the startup phase. And just to be cautious, kind of think about, well, maybe you wanna have 1, 2 years experience. Because as an engineer, this takes years to develop. It doesn't take 3 months, 6 months. I mean, goodness, I'm like over 20 years experience. I'm still learning every day, especially with the technologies changing. So just keep that in mind, especially when you're building up your startup. The education background. The benefit of a bachelor's and master's degree, even though I look at it now and I'm like, God, I wasted all that money, it actually wasn't. When people look at my education background, they're like, wow, Jeanine contributed, she committed to a bachelor's or master's program for this many years, and she wasn't getting paid. Now that's true commitment. And also a basic API understanding. You don't want your developers building everything from scratch. Utilize some of the APIs. Ask them, what are your most popular APIs out there that you're really excited about? And see if they understand what the difference is between REST and SOAP in terms of APIs. It's really important. But again, going back to building up, becoming a good software developer takes more than 3 months. And trust me, I know companies who do hire developers who have that 3-month experience, and there's a lot of mentorship. But think about it at your stage, what your focus wants to be. Okay, so have you seen this movie? Have you seen The Internship?

Yeah.

No.

OK, you haven't seen this? OK, wait, I got to play this video. See those homeless men? Those are the pictures that Jason Pickler took.

We can see you guys. OK, good. You got us? Hi, my name is Billy.

We can hear you fine.

OK, so this is the Google interview. And this is what I got to take out of it.

I'm Benjamin.

Alice, we're going to ask you a few questions that some of our candidates find a little bit odd.

Let's go.

No judgment. Shoot. You're shrunk down to the size of Nicholas and dropped to the bottom of a lake. What do you do? You take her flat on your back and you raise her to lay back.

Okay, really? I don't care if the developer doesn't know. If I'm shrunk to the size of a nickel, how the heck do I get out of the blender?

Once this blender's on, it's on forever.

Okay, again, this is what some of the companies do in terms— I know it's hard to hear, but definitely Google that. That's just a really great video. And if you can, watch the movie because it really gives you a better idea in terms of screening for people. And that's something that you certainly don't want to to focus on. The funny thing about it is that Google was using this as their process. What ended up happening a couple of years ago? Oh, I guess that's not a good indicator for performance. Obviously. Behavioral. Situational. So they actually changed their interview process. When going through the whole screening process of what to get out of a developer, what you're looking for, You also want to see if they're honest, if they have the basic API understanding, overall strengths and weaknesses, and overall honesty. Can you do this job? When I've interviewed at jobs in the past, they'll be like, oh, you have some Python experience. I have a little. And so there's this one company, they were really excited. They were like, oh, well, you can learn it. And I just said, listen, you're like 4 months, you're going to launch in a few months. I'm not going to be able to jump right in and help you. And I actually told them, I'm like, don't hire me. I'm like, I'm gonna drop out 'cause I'm saving you time and you need somebody in this particular experience. They were so excited. They emailed me back a couple of weeks later, the CEO, and they were just like, we wanna make a job for you, because they appreciate that level of honesty. And so you're probably not gonna get that during interviewing 'cause people are still kind of afraid what the hell they should say and if they should mention weaknesses or anything. But again, you can do this without being tech. You can actually break down their, their resume. Okay, so does the developer need CPR? This is something you really need to pay attention to when screening out CPR. I mean, when screening out developers. And again, CPR, copy, paste, and run. Don't get me wrong, I'm a developer, I do that. But have you ever had a developer who they would copy and paste it, and then all of a sudden they build it and it doesn't work? And then you try to explain to them what is the code doing, and they can't even explain it. Oh, I don't know, I copy and pasted it without understanding. You need to really be careful about that and see if you can get a feel for what their development style is. And how can you do that if you're not technical? Well, let's do some screening of the resume. Number of years experience. You can throw— a developer can throw out so many technical skills like PHP, Node, everything like that. They haven't even touched any of them in years. They probably did like a 1-hour tutorial and then they'll put it on their resume. Not all of them, but some do. It's true. And then I love this one. Built such and such a program for such and such a company. Really? Did you build the whole thing? Or what, did you just add a button or something like in Xcode and just updated it there? But these are the enhancements they'll put in their resume in order for it to stand out. Contributed to this app. I swear this has happened to me so many times. I'll get like a list of 10 things they contributed to. 10 iPhone apps. I'm like, really? And it's really hard to prove. Like, I could tell you, I built out the UI for Instagram. How can you prove that? Especially when you're a contractor. So, you know, in body language, I had some people, when they were answering some of the questions, they just couldn't look at me because they knew that, you know, they were in trouble there. Yeah, so going through, Joe Navarro, if you've ever heard of him, he wrote, I took a class with him when I was training to be a poker player. He actually wrote a book on body language. Highly recommend you check that out. And it's also helpful when you're working with customers and investors too. In a rush on decision, I always get this. Oh yeah, they have a pending offer. They have to know right away. This one guy that I interviewed couldn't look me in the eye and stuff, and he was interviewing for a company, and then he said he had a rush offer. It was nothing, nothing at all. So just remember, when putting together your team, when hiring, it is like dating. So you've got to watch out for the red flags. You also have to get a feel for, hmm, do I really want to work with these people? So, okay, this is what I love. So sample pieces of resumes. I had to block out some. Worked with a small team of developers to brainstorm and implement ideas for shipping receiving software. Okay. What, you all got in a room and you were hanging out and you were just chilling, having a couple of beers? and who implemented the ideas, what language. See what I'm saying? Everything is just so, it doesn't make any sense. And then I love this one. Planned and initiated redesign of existing standalone application utilizing object-oriented design programming and Java. Well, Java's an OO programming language, so why the hell would you put that? And collaborated with marketing director and strategies to further business growth, including website enhancement that drove 65% increase. What do they do, add a couple of HTML tags? You know what I mean? It's just, it's not enough. And again, you don't want to accuse them. So it could be one of two things. They're just poor resume writers, or they're kind of fabricating stuff on their resume. And sometimes they'll put college stuff on here, and this was kind of a little concerning because project involving development of software for actual implementation. They determined requirements, created look and feel for user interface, and maintained written documentation. This shows me nothing. about their development abilities. So again, it may just be a bad resume writer, but that's where you need to do further investigation when breaking down. Want to know what language. Want to know if you're doing the front end, did you integrate with the back end? Certain things like that. But just bear in mind, every hire you have is critical to the success of your team, and it doesn't require having to pay them a load of money to get a quality developer. Again, you can offer equity, and I've done that before. I've done startups and worked just for equity. So I was really passionate about the idea. So choose wisely and don't settle.