speaker-0 (00:07.906)
Welcome back to Adventures in DevOps. A prevailing opinion in the tech world is that it has been hard to hire technology leaders, especially principal and staff engineers, heads of engineering, and tech leaders. So all of you listening to this episode, hopefully. Personally for me, it has never been easier as a hiring manager to find candidates. Most of my inbox is filling up with thousands of candidates, which means we have way more to choose from. Never mind that most of those are probably state actors, bots, or people who don't even exist.

I'm very thankful for the size of the pile though, because we all know size matters. To help us cut through all the theory on what's happening and focus on their real world experiences with interviewing and hiring, we've brought in the previous head of developer ecosystem at Splunk and now the head of AI R<unk>D at Cribble and a longtime software engineer. I want to introduce Nicole Mungle to the show. Welcome.

speaker-1 (01:00.312)
Thank you, Warren. Appreciate appreciate you having me on.

speaker-0 (01:03.352)
Well, you know, I feel like we sort of touched on hiring in almost every single episode to date. There's always someone who wants to talk about AI or talk about the imp impacts to inexperienced engineers or the challenges of actually hiring. And I didn't think that anyone was in the perfect position to actually talk about that. So I'm actually really excited for getting your perspectives on real world experiences in trying to go through that. Maybe if you could just quickly share what you had seen historically and

Maybe now what's changed and what you're doing about it.

speaker-1 (01:34.542)
I'll I'll just leave with that, right? I mean, I'm I'm seeing a lot more poor quality applications, you know, in in in the last couple of years than I did it previously, right? So like before LLMs took off in a really big way, most of the applications, most of the interviews felt a lot more genuine and you know higher quality applications. And now I feel like there's been an increase in the volume of applications, but there's been a drop in the average quality of applications.

and you know, I mean I we we can we can theorize, you know, why that's the case. you know, people are obviously, you know, using AI to help apply for jobs, you know, create resumes and, you know, even quickly come up to speed on certain topics that they previously were not up to speed on, but then advertising that as a cool, like this is the expertise that, you know, they're bringing in, which sometimes doesn't line up you know, in the interview process, right? So you have a lot more people falling off in in the hiring pipeline when we

go through the different interview stages.

speaker-0 (02:35.128)
Okay. I mean, I think that's a good a pretty good summary of what what we're seeing here. One of the interesting things that I've I've sort of noticed is that historically a lot of companies were able to get by with either not doing that rigorous of a review of the interviewing process or having a high attention to how to even do things like phone screenings or those first stages of interviews and have historically really relied on the resumes. And now we're basically seeing that the resumes either are

too large a number to basically do have that sort of attention to. A lot of them are, as you put, like low quality. And so even reviewing them aren't so great. My historical perspective has always been the resume is written by a candidate, which tells me what they want us to know rather than what we want to know. And so I always looked at it as like a preference, right? If you write, you have 10 years of JavaScript experience, I'm going to assume you love JavaScript. If you tell me you have 10 years of PHP experience, I'm going to assume you love PHP.

Even if the even if the job we're hiring for is for Rust or TypeScript, I'm going to assume that about you because you could put anything in there. And I we we historically haven't done huge background checks. Like we don't go to every single company you list and say, you know, what technology choices were you using at this time? And was this person working on that specific tech? Like, who's gonna do that? It doesn't really offer a huge amount of value. And I feel like now it sort of really is outshine. There's very low opportunity to get that

feeling from the resume you're looking at because it as you pointed out, it's often f completely fabricated.

speaker-1 (04:06.446)
Mm-hmm. Yes, fabricated. And you th that's that's definitely amounted to some loss of trust in the hiring process. You know, just because I mean, I'm I'm sure you have gone through this as well. You know, when you're interviewing somebody and you see their eyes darting all around, and you know, sometimes, you know, you can even hear a little voice assistant. You that happened to me once, which is kind of weird. and I feel, you know, it's it's a it's a shame because I feel like as an industry we were doing really well when it came to

remote work and you know, just trusting people to do the right thing. And now I feel like there's I can't help but think about there's gonna be a regression in that, right? I mean you're gonna look back in person interviews with a you know a couple of people sitting in a room with a whiteboard, no technology. I mean some companies are already doing that. You know, when I talk to my network, you know, working at other companies, a lot of companies have reverted to that and, you know, there there's no longer I mean remote work is unfortunately suffering as a result of

this loss in societal trust. And it kind of, you know, pains me to say this is because I mean I've I've been, you know, in this in this industry like on the on the AI side of things for like the last seven or eight years at this point. And it's it's a phenomenal technology, but then it also has gives people a way to like game the system or you know, just not be authentic. So that's that's I feel like the thing that I miss the most is the authenticity that, you know, I used to experience with candidates three LNs and the experience that you ga you have today.

Which is just it just feels less authentic, you know, like you never know if you're really getting an insight from a candidate that's, you know, coming from their own experiences. Or is it just some, you know, like slop that's being generated on the site that they're, you know, reading on the fly or you know, just that's that's been that's been a challenging, challenging aspect of, you know, hiring. And I've, you know, like I I feel like we have developed antibodies as a as a as an interview panel as a company as well, like and I'm sure you have, I'm sure everyone

Every hiring manager has, you know, developed their own system of you know filtering out the the the noise and sticking with like high quality signal. So I've been fortunate that I've been able to actually hire solid people in the last year. It's just it's just it's it's taken more work. It's taken more effort to like, you know, find good quality.

speaker-0 (06:22.808)
people. Yeah. So I I think there's a huge aspect there realistically where it does feel like we've regressed in what we're we're doing. And I don't think it's just on the hiring side. I I've sort of noticed this as a trend in decades of software engineering that what was old is new again. We see just as similarly in hard technology organizational structures such as QA and platform engineering sort of pop up again.

And there was a huge time where with a focus on DevOps, we said we don't need these things. Everyone is s responsible for everything. if you build it, you run it, you ship it, you manage it, you talk to customers. And now I feel like we're seeing these organizations pop up that do revert to an earlier time where they're like, Well, you know what? We need to have huge org structures dedicated to everything around software engineering, completely defeating the whole movement that was there and ship also shifting away from agile. And I feel like the same thing is happening.

with hiring as well. We see that historically it was who you know, your network, sometimes nepotism, getting in a room with people, handshake deals to find the best candidates who you wanted to work with to hire. And then we're like, you know what? This isn't the whole pool to choose from. There is lots of people in many countries that can offer just as high value to us, maybe even better, bring in increased diversity, which all the research says is incredibly critical. But now

we're shifting sort of a back away from that and saying, who do you know? Let's hire your your friends or colleagues or acquaintances that you know. And so I totally agree with you. There is a huge regression here. how have you been dealing with this problem?

speaker-1 (07:55.948)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Before I do that, I just want to validate what he just said. You you know, and a pretty good insight that he just had, right? I mean, like what's old is new again. You know, there's definitely been a pendulum, like you know, going back and forth between technology, you know, the cloud on-prem. I mean, you know, with with with LLMs, yeah. We like one one, sorry to go on a tangent here, but you know, you're you're you're a technology like I am. And separation of storage and compute was one of like the biggest unlocks, you know, in the last decade. And guess what with LLMs?

It's back to the same thing, right? I mean, like the storage in the compute is just all codified in the LM's weights. So we're just seeing this all across the industry where, you know, we're just going back to, you know, a a world where networking matters, you know, you you want to like people people are looking for that or something that signals authenticity, which and the easiest and the the cheapest way to get that is by your referral, right? I mean, like, I've worked with this person in the past and the downside of that is you know, you're just you're limiting the

pool of candidates to this smaller you know bubble, not not nepotistic, but certainly, you know, getting getting into that direction and you're missing out on the diversity of, you know, just hiring a stranger from the internet where, you know, you you would you would just get, you know, somebody from outside of your industry, somebody from outside of your bubble, and especially here in San Francisco, you know, it's a it's a it's a it's a small, it's a small city, you know, like it's a pretty small set of set of set of engineers and managers and everyone else.

And y you you know, you do wanna bring in fresh talent. You wanna bring in fresh perspectives. one of one of the really cool parts about Kribble is we're a remote first company. So, you know, we hire people from all across the country from, you know, really small towns, really small places as well, which is fantastic because every time, you know, we hire somebody like that, they just teach us how to do things in a radically different way, than what we have been doing. So yeah, let's let's let's get into some of the

the techniques you know that I've been applying to you know filter out authenticity. One thing that jumps to my mind is, okay, so let me let me take a step back and you know talk about coding and you know just technology. And that's just been commoditized rather quickly with, you know, all all agent decoding harnesses and, you know, models, right? So you can you can cloud code can basically do most of what software development used to entail. So

speaker-1 (10:21.432)
The job of a software engineer now has evolved, right? Or a DevOps engineer has evolved. And it's now it's more about judgment as opposed to the executive function of you know going in and typing out code character by character, right? So you're now you're like, hey, can you compare? Can you tell me whether A is better than B? So one one one phrase I really like is now you're now everyone is a judgment worker as opposed to being a knowledge worker, right? So like how will you, as a human being, bring

unique judgment and taste into whatever it is that whatever the problem that the team is solving, right? Like be that a systems problem or an engineering problem or even a business problem, a product problem. And that's really that's really been the key unlock in my mind, right? Like so when I when I evaluate candidates, I'm not looking as much for the latent knowledge that they just have in their heads about, you know, an obscure syntax or something else. It's just about like, hey, can you how how can you judge that

Approach A is better than approach B in a situation, right? So it just comes down to system design type of interviews where you know you're talking about different trade offs, you're talking about it's like hey, if I c show you one and two, like, you know, what's what's better? So that's that's one thing that comes to mind. But I'm I'm curious to know, like, you know, if you've you've experienced similar things in your hiring process.

speaker-0 (11:42.1)
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think we took an approach that migrated to that sort of a long time ago, from the very beginning. I think the roots of where I came from, which was very not s software driven. I worked in technical support for healthcare organizations and you know, hands on the ground, but having to jump in and talk with actual customers and what they were facing forced me into a career path where I was

always thinking about where was the value in what was I I was providing in the last 10 year previous 10 years. And when I shifted into leadership roles, I always was thinking, well, what is the value of software engineering in whatever we're doing in this in this regard? So LMs didn't particularly change that for me, but it was definitely a hard sell for a lot of people because I said, you know what? Is software engineering a competitive advantage for our company? And I think a lot of companies that aren't very technical

jump and say, no, of course not. But ones with lots of engineering departments say, no, software engineering is a, you know, critical capacity that we have. It's the thing that makes us stand out. But if you actually look at the business model and the types of people that they hired, you can you can usually see, no, that actually isn't the case. And now I feel like since technology often wasn't a company's competitive advantage, it's very easy as you pointed out, if software development is commoditized, if or if it's just a utility, then you don't need to hire the

best engineers or use the best LLM models or harnesses to get soft software developed. And then the question is what's left? And I think you're absolutely right. What's left is st making real time business decisions, but closer to the the technology that you're creating.

speaker-1 (13:19.65)
percent, right? I mean like it's just it's just expanding upon you know that that core art of writing code or you know generating systems or you know maintaining systems or scaling systems and adding something else to it. Right. So like the the the most successful developers I have seen thrive in these last couple of years have been developers that have actually moved laterally you know when it comes to expanding their expanding their surface area you're like maybe

maybe gotten a little more product savvy, maybe gotten a little more business savvy where now they are, you know, connecting business outcomes to what they've been doing. When because again, writing code has gotten commoditized, right? And it's not just writing code as well. I mean, it's also maintaining systems. And, you know, there are there are a few dozen companies now that'll sell you a an SRE in a box or DevOps engineer in a box, right? Which leaves to reduce

mean type resolution or you know just make s make sure your system is running all the time because again devs is just a different flavor of engineering and all of that is being short circuited. So like I'll give you an example. The other day I was talking to one of the developers. We had this without going into too much detail, you know, we had this flow in the product where we were deciding whether to implement it in one particular direction or something else. And this person tells me that, well, that's really a product call.

Or just like a business call, you know, that's like I'm I'm just an engineer. I'm like, and I had to coach them. It's like, no, you know what? That answer may have been fine back in twenty eighteen or twenty fifteen, but that's not going to sustain in twenty twenty six. When I when I ask you a question, I expect a holistic answer, you know, something that shows me you have done your research, you have thought about this problem in its whole sense and not just the coding element of it, right? So what

what a great answer would would have looked like in that particular scenario is like, well, if we do approach A, you know, we're gonna we're gonna get this, we're gonna lose that. If we do approach B, we're gonna get this, we're gonna lose that. I don't think we have enough information to make the right decision. Let's go to product or let's go to the business and ask them for this insight or maybe let's pull them into the loop that will help us decide between A and B, or maybe there's something else that we haven't even thought about. Right. And I would love for every engineer and every practitioner to start

speaker-1 (15:38.296)
thinking about the business implications of whatever system they are stewarding or managing or developing as, you know, coming out of that shell of just like, well, I'm just a code monkey sitting here and typing out code in my IDE and just I'm just going to implement it to spec and then call it a day.

speaker-0 (15:55.784)
I mean, you're absolutely right. I I think the the challenge here is that if your company actually doesn't think of technology as your competitive advantage and you are just doing things to spec, you you are literally doing the job that LMs are great at, translation from one set of words to another one. That is the optimal thing that Yeah, right, right, exactly. and so you can't be in that position. I think that's gonna make some people unhappy for for sure. so I think one of the challenges here is that

when you are in an interview as a candidate and you come in and you're trying to describe your stories, I I they're often focused on what happened in the moment. And they may never have actually thought about or been pushed to, like you're pushing your your team to do, to actually think about the business. There was so many times I was hiring a staff engineer or a principal engineer, and they were telling me about some opportunity they had where they were trying to convince whole

parts of their organization to switch technology or into implement implement something new. And it was great. They had a great story about it. They had a PowerPoint about how they convinced everyone to switch to Kubernetes at the time. Whether or not that was the right choice or not was sort of beside the point. But when I probed them on that, they're like, well, you know, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Like, okay, what was the business justification? You know, what even led you to do this in the first place? Did you collect metrics or something about what was wrong with your current process or perform an experiment that allowed you to validate your process? Like,

well, we didn't really do any of that. And I'm like, okay. and that was like almost 10 years ago that we all we saw that problem. And maybe they were getting away with it. You know, they were successfully hired somewhere else. But now today I I feel like that's just not an option. And well, I will say, if your company does have some sort of software or technology as a competitive advantage, you absolutely can get away with just knowing the tech, right? You know, if you are trying to optimize the amount of throughput through some

a low Wi-Fi device or a low battery device for Bluetooth or whatever and y you know, you're you're innovating in this space. You absolutely can be the leader there without understanding the business impact. But I feel like also understanding how it fits into the product and the business is now more critical than ever.

speaker-1 (18:02.23)
Hundred percent, right? I mean you're again, even even optimizing, you know, something as niche as you know, a low bandwidth Wi-Fi connection, I feel like you could you could run plot or you know any agentic harness in a loop and eventually it'll crack it, right? Maybe, maybe not now. Maybe I'm pretty sure it could do it today, but certainly in a couple of years it's gonna do that, right? So like you're you're you you have to start thinking about it as an owner, right? And I think what do you what you put is really well, which is well

You made this you made this decision. Well, what were the business implications of it? Like what were the motivations? And I like to call that an ownership mindset, right? Like so be, you know, think about yourself as a small business owner as opposed to an engineer, right? So like, you know, think about whatever you own. Like maybe it's a component or maybe it's a system or maybe you know, it's a set of a server fleet that you own. Just be like, cool, like I am business owner of this fleet and I'm gonna allocate my time and my resources. And the resources could be, you know, again, you know, working with

more junior engineers on the team, maybe it's tokens, maybe it's something else. But like how do you allocate time and money on the problem that you're solving such that you get the maximum return on investment? Right. And if you if you if you think about that, and that's one of the signals that I try to sus for in an interview as well, right? Hey, are you have you been approaching things as an owner or have you been approaching things as an employee, as a as a line employee who is just doing the things that have been told to them, right? Because again,

If you're if you're simply translating the spec from natural language into TypeScript or you know Terraform or something else, well, there's an expiration date on that, right? I mean that's not gonna sustain for for the next 10 years for sure. I know that for sure. Like it's not gonna it's not gonna sustain for the next 10 years. It may for the next ten months.

speaker-0 (19:47.394)
I I think we'll we'll be in a little bit of disagreement about how far AI will get us in in the future, for for sure. I I so I I don't know. I I'll say my my experiences with getting an arbitrary LLM to solve a problem is suspect at best. But there are for sure things it does. I'll say I'll say what's actually really interesting in this scenario isn't whether or not the LM can solve it today or will solve it, but I think going back to the business perspective, it's how much money will your company be willing to spend

to get that solved, right? You know, if the LLM can solve it today and it costs you $100,000 to do it, you know, is it worth actually running the LLM to make that happen? And that actually becomes the conversation that you need to be having. And so I think from this regard, and you said you suss this out in interviews, my question is, do do you feel like now after like maybe we should start at the top of the funnel, but I'll skip that for a moment. You get into the interview room with a candidate. Do you feel like you are now more so than historically turning down

very deep expertise because they lack the business sense and you're able to say, hey, you know what? Five, ten years ago, I definitely would have hired this person. They're great in understanding the technology and implementing it. But when it comes to the holistic perspective, they just don't have that. D have you seen that more recently or is it still about the same?

speaker-1 (21:05.638)
yeah, first off, you know, thanks for offering that, you know, that other point of view. I feel like this is the new you know, VI versus Emacs or, you know, spaces versus tabs, whether, you know, whether it's gonna be L LMs or gonna be doing it or not, right? So I I absolutely love that. And I'm with you. I feel like human beings you know bring a a more holistic intelligence, at least today, you know, with the technology that we have in front of us when it comes to solving problems. And I absolutely prize candidates who show a very deep

expertise, you know, you know, in a particular field. So I would 100% hire them in a heartbeat. If I if I talk to somebody who's a undisputed, you subject matter expert when it comes to distributed systems or, you know, database technology or you know, somebody who has actually worked in something that can index or retrieve terabytes of data in every single hour or something of that sort. I mean, those are, you know, it's a very rarefied field. I feel like the way it'll manifest is or the way it has manifested for me in the last few months has been

stacking candidates against each other, right? So if you have like really expert level candidates, but one of them brings a better business or you know, seems more business savvy, then I would go with that candidate compared to, you know, somebody who is not quite as business savvy. Or somebody, you know, who just has thought about it. And so I feel like sometimes it also just comes down to being able to express opinions, right? I mean, you're you like that's one of the things that I really look for when I'm interviewing candidates. Like, hey, do you have an opinion on this, right? I mean you you can't so

Cool. Like you you you answered all of the questions, like the technology questions, right? You you did fantastic in your systems design interview and you did well in your coding interview and everything else. But most of the times I'm doing like the final culture fit interview, behavioral interview. And the thing that I'm looking for the most is, hey, can you share some opinions, like in a strong conviction based opinions on any topic, right? And it typically it's AI since you I'm usually hiring AI with all. So I'll I'll ask them a question like, Hey, you know, pick pick an AI lab, you know, and tell me how they're

safety policy differs from somebody else. Or, you know, like there there was there's this whole debate happening last week with open weight models versus closed source models, right? What's your opinion? Like which one will which one is going to come out come out ahead in the next three years, in the next ten years? And even when you ask candidates about it's like, hey, what's what do you think? You know, what's your perspective on this? That gives you an insight into well, how deeply are they willing to venture outside of their technology expertise

speaker-1 (23:30.016)
into like, you know, taking a step back and looking at, well, what's happening here? Like, you what's what are what what are the b business implications of open weight models dominating the market versus, you know, closed source models and, you know, how is how is safety evolving? Or, you know, what's what what what's the right what seems like the right policy? This seems like the right policy to me. And I love those answers, right? I mean, I feel like it's just so much more fun to work with people that have opinions on things as opposed to somebody who's just going to narrowly implement something to spec.

Or you know, just make sure that, you know, they're doing their slice of work really well. So that's that's really one of the things that I look for.

speaker-0 (24:05.078)
No, I I think it's a critical component of the behavioral interview. I think it's an interview that's often left off for a lot of companies where they don't think about how do I actually get this candidate to talk about something core to who they are. And I I mean, I think the opinion in question is great. My flavor is I always ask like what's something you strongly believe that you everyone else disagrees with you about. you know, trying to find those niche areas where you have a unique perspective or you think you have a unique perspective. It's amazing how many times people just

share things that I think is prevalent. You know, maybe there's a whole community out there that you weren't even aware of that actually shared your, you know, perfect ideal. And it gives you an opportunity to actually have that real conversation with with a person rather than talking about those, you know, basic level stuff.

speaker-1 (24:49.878)
Hundred percent. Gosh, I love that question, by the way. I think Peter Thiel popularize that, you know, tell me something most people disagree with you on. I have tried asking that question in interviews in the past and I've yeah, maybe I should bring it back. Like I have

speaker-0 (25:05.75)
I think there are always struggles. yeah. Yeah. I I so I mean I think there's always struggles no matter what what you pick, to try to get to the the right thing to talk about. And I think that's where a lot of interviewers that go into conversations aren't really well trained. They think it's all about the questions you're asking rather than trying to figure out how to suss out the conversation. Like if this line of questioning doesn't yield something interesting to discuss, then you need to pivot or even after an answer, you know, really dig in and dive. You you know, use the five whys perspective.

To get to the root cause of like why they believe that thing or what's going on there. And so I think it's a mistake to just, yeah, I asked the question, I got the answer. My my interviewing recording software captured it. So I can move on to the next thing. Like, no, you're not done yet. you know, really dive into that. Understand, you know, why is that the thing that they're talking about or that they care about or why open weight models actually do matter. Like, why is that important to them? Maybe they'll spill something about their core value system and how they approach certain problems or how they'll make

you know, future business decisions when they when when you're not just, you know, sitting there and evaluating everything that they're doing.

speaker-1 (26:09.07)
Totally, totally. Yeah. I I I love I love it when people, you know, are able to or candidates are able to tie down answers to you know, their values or your their their beliefs, their core beliefs. And I feel like it's just it's that's that's really the thing that makes us human. And, you know, I feel like it's just so much important to lean into that in today's age, you know, than just raw technical expertise, which is, you know, like I'm like I have the privilege of meeting so many smart candidates in the interview process.

And they're all great, right? I mean, like everyone has done deep work on, you know, accumulating years and years of technical expertise and they really know how to operate a system or develop something. But then that's great. But then hey, what what what is something that makes you uniquely human? I was watching this show on Abu TV a few months ago, Pluribus, where you know, it just becomes like the h the whole of humanity is just reduced to like one hive mind, which kind of, you know, feels like an L L It's a it's a pretty it's a pretty good show. And that really

you know, spark something in me. It's like, wow, this is it's it's a really good take on, you know, what makes us all uniquely human, right? It's not just being human. Like you have to be human, that's one thing. But then you also each of us is unique, right? We each each each human being brings a unique perspective and judgment when it comes to seeing the world around them and, you know, influencing the world around them. And that's really becoming so much more important in today's age. And I hear you by the way, you know, it's not perfect. No no large enterprise

is trusting Raw and At first to like directly going to production. Right. I mean there are like lots of safeguards in place. There were human humans in the loop everywhere. If you look at Anthropic and OpenAI, they're hiring people as well, right? So which is which should tell you everything as to what what what it's important, right? In in this industry.

speaker-0 (27:54.252)
Yeah. I maybe we won't get too much into that. I think we'll have a whole dedicated episode on on harnesses where we build something internally and we can get into more of the technology side. so at some point you're going to end up with the resumes in your, I assume applicant tracking system ATS, where you're tracking everything. And at this point, for let's say for a single role that you're trying to fill, I don't know if you're trying to fill multiple at the same time, how many resumes are you looking at about per job?

speaker-1 (28:21.144)
Yeah, so or the tool that we use, the application tracking system, you know, gives us a pretty good way to like look at resumes. One thing I I've come to appreciate about this tool is that it doesn't allow us to, you know, filter out resumes based on you know really broad filters. So I can't be like, hey, only show me candidates who have previously worked at Google or previously worked at Amazon, right? So like which is a a good design, you know, I feel like it just removes a lot of bias from the from the essentially. You have to like look at every resume.

Right. Like it doesn't you you you look at a resume and it'll allow you can either bin it or you can pin it for later on. But a finer point that I would like to put on that is, you know, when we go from a couple of hundred resumes to a single hiring manager screen, there's also another step in between, which is a talent acquisition or the recruiter screen. Right. So like my TA partners screen a few more candidates, right? So like maybe from like two and I'll I'll have to look at the exact numbers, but from two hundred, maybe it's like twenty recruiter screens, which then yield one hiring manager screen, right? So my recruiting partners will

you know, run like the first layer and then we're we're not scheduling one edge end screen from like a pile of two hundred resumes. We were actually, you know, giving or we were actually selecting a few more and then that results in typically one edge end screen.

speaker-0 (29:33.582)
That's like almost I mean, if you say twenty to one there, we're at we're at two thousand resumes per one one candidate that makes it to the hiring manager phone screen, likely, assuming that's your next step. So what what are your sort of the HR representatives looking for at this spot sort of today? Do you know what they're sort of gauging?

speaker-1 (29:54.466)
Yeah, so that's that's really just comes down to logistics, you know, like where are you based? You know, are your comp compensation expectations in line with, you know, what we have advertised, you know, how soon can you start? that sort of stuff. Okay.

speaker-0 (30:08.504)
So now let's get to the actually the interesting part. Of course, after that, there's there's a step where they get to meet with someone. Potentially, if you're a remote company, what does that mean for you and what are you looking for at that stage?

speaker-1 (30:19.746)
Yeah, so then the next the real the first real interview is the hiring manager interview, right? So which is a thirty or forty five minute interview with whoever the hiring manager is. if I'm the hiring manager, maybe it's one of the managers on my team who's hiring a rec. and in that in that in that interview, we really try to understand r dig a little bit deeper into, you know, where this candidate is coming from, you know, like ask them to tell tell their story, you know, like probe into a few few technical details about, you know, like, hey, so tell me, you know, tell me something about interesting that you learned.

During your past experience, or you know, tell me an area where you grew in your last you know, your last role, those sort of questions, just to understand, you know, where they're really coming from. One of my favorite questions to ask during this interview is to I ask candidates, like, hey, tell me what are you looking for in your next role? And it's shocking how many people, you know, they they don't have a good answer for that, right? I mean, like they will like when I say, hey, so what are you looking for in your next role? And they will tell me context about

Why they want to leave their existing job. Right. So like they'll the answer is about like, hey, this is I'm I'm running away from this thing. And that's not what I want to hear. I want to hear why are you running toward this? Like, have you done, have you done your homework about, you know, what this role is? You know, what what am I hiring for? and you know, that's really how great candidates stand out in that process, right? So like being able to really have a good answer when you're asked, hey, what is it that you're looking for in your next role? Because then that's gonna allow me to see how that.

aligns well with what we have to offer in a job. And if you know those two things line up. So that's one of my favorite questions. Then I I just wish we listened to the question and answered the question as opposed to like the question is not why are you leaving your job?

speaker-0 (32:01.782)
yeah, I know for sure. I I think it's very similar to the I I mean, I think it evolved from not a great place, which is why, you know, what we've ended up with is a much better question. But it used to be like, where do you envision yourself in five years? and that was never that help. Yeah. I mean, that was never that helpful. and I I do think that it's also evolved from the question of like, why do you want this job? You know, what do you love about our company? And I'm like

I don't need you to have reviewed all our companies' financials and past products and have strong opinions about that. That's that's sort of orthogonal a lot. And you know what? A lot of people don't have a direct impact on, I mean, well, they have an impact on the business, like on the sort of leadership direction that we're taking or as a product. And I don't necessarily expect you to have a strong opinion there. But you know, maybe there's a whole bunch of area depending on the scope of what you're being hired for, to have an expectation on on that. And I think for sure, when they tell me about the problems that they had at previous jobs, I always say,

No job is going to be perfect. Tell me about what problems you want to solve. And like which which things do you want to be broken at our company? And then it's it's much easier to find a match there. because, you know, historically there are problems everywhere. There is no like you get there and you do nothing the whole day. I think the XKCD Randall Monroe says, you know, when asked what is your perfect job, it says, you know, I want to basically live in retirement and then come out and be told you get to put lightsabers through solid objects.

for and and that's what we use for testing purposes. And they'd be like, yeah, sure, I'll take I'll take that job. but I think most jobs are not that. And but that being said, I think a lot of people do have a preference for solving certain kinds of problems. Like for me, I love you know scaling stuff up. I love reliability challenges or long-term distributed systems with needs. And you know, and so you know everyone has those sorts of things. And I feel like that's really what you're trying to get out of the candidate. And people who have thought about that, especially when you're at five years plus

You sh you've seen some things already. Please have seen some things already and have opinions. As you pointed out, you know, what are your opinions? It goes in, you know, what are the problems that you want to solve?

speaker-1 (33:58.08)
One hundred percent, right? Couldn't agree more. It's it it just signals, you know, a high intention or you know, a a more intentional candidate than a passive candidate, right? I mean, like if you're if you really haven't thought about what do you want in your next role, like if you haven't if you don't know that you prefer working on distributed systems or front end or, you whatever it is, like, you know, hey, this is what I'm, you know, looking to. I wanna I'm I'm an expert in like a good answer would sound something like, Hey, I'm an expert in censor technology and I'm, you know.

I'm looking to apply that technology to solve new and interesting problems in that domain. And, you know, your company is solving those problems and that's why I'm really interested in this role. That sounds like a great answer to me, as opposed to, well, you know, there's like a lot of reorgs happening in my job right now. So I'm just looking around, which is, you know, like it doesn't really inspire confidence, right? I mean, I want I want somebody who's excited to work you know, alongside us just as much as we are excited to have them.

speaker-0 (34:57.824)
Yeah, no, I'm totally with you. And you know what the interesting thing is we do get those candidates. And my qu and my question is, okay, basically you're here to learn something about the market. And I'm like, great, what do you want to learn? And I want to hear it answered. Like, if you're doing research, tell me about how you're doing research. Because if you're like, I don't even know how to do research. Then I'm like, okay, you're here. You don't want a job. You don't know why you're here or what you're trying to find out. Like, are we done?

speaker-1 (35:21.538)
Yeah, exactly. Right. I mean it's a waste of time for everyone. so that's but fortunately, you know, like most most candidates that I speak with do have a good answer. Yeah. You know, they they do know that they want you know, they want to work with a great team, right? I mean that's a fantastic answer, right? It's like, hey, what do you want to in your next role? Well, I want to work with great fa fantastic people. It's like boom, we have that. I w I wanna I wanna work remotely. You know, I I'm not able to commute in or something. Fantastic. I I'll take that. it doesn't have to be about, you know.

the the technology or like, you know, how good you're at a certain thing. It's just like be intentional, be opinionated, and you know, tell what is it that you're looking for in your next role.

speaker-0 (35:58.636)
I think self-awareness is how I would describe a lot of this of like what you like as a person. Cause you know, honestly, even pre-pandemic, we started out as a remote company as well. And one of the challenges we had is a lot of people were like, yeah, remote company, I want to work for them. My first question was Have you ever worked for a remote company before? You know, do you actually know what working for a remote company means? Like, yeah, actually, I have no idea. I've never worked for one. And like, okay. well, number one thing, you may have been substituting work for your social needs.

And your obligations to yourself and you feeling like you are part of something and now you're no longer going to have that. How do you compensate with that? And a lot of them are like, I have no response to that. I have never thought about it. I'm like, you may not be cut out for this because a year or two down the line, you may be like, I love working from anywhere, I love doing this sort of stuff, but you're gonna get burned out if you haven't thought about. So I think the self-awareness angle is really critical here when it comes to the types of companies that you wanna work for, the the specific roles you're going at and

Those things that you're asking for, it's not arbitrary.

speaker-1 (36:59.638)
Yeah, that's a really good point. about, you know, just having your your social your substituting office culture like a social life. Yeah. Yeah.

speaker-0 (37:09.838)
I mean it's the same it's the same thing with the with the other aspect that you spent mentioned. I think a lot of people bring this up. I think the the number one and two lies that inexperienced engineers tell themselves is I want to work with a great team and I wanna solve hard problems. And I think a lot of people don't want to solve hard problems and working with a great team I don't think they know what that is. A lot of them may substitute like working with like maybe people that have been in the industry a while or have interesting stories.

But then you find out, they're super opinionated and they always disagree with me. And it's very difficult to have a real conversation. And maybe you just don't gel well. And I feel like that's not well thought about. So I I feel like really understanding what they want there is part on the candidate, but also really on the interviewer. I mean, you go through hundreds of interviews or thousands and you're like you start to get a good feeling of like when candidates haven't really thought through the what they're saying. They they're repeating something that they heard, which may have sounded good at the time. But when you dive into it, it's like

You know, if someone had asked me I I think I I was one of the these failures early on where I repeated, you know, I I wanna solve diff challenging problems that are interesting and I'm like, I don't actually know what that means.

speaker-1 (38:13.416)
I feel like we have we have all been there, right? I mean we've all all that's I I feel like but you're you're right. I mean, you know, solving hard problems just means banging your head against a wall for, you know, just finding a solution, being being disappointed that you haven't found a solution and just having that tenacity required to, you know, break through, eventually finding something out there, right? So it just requires so much more patience and you know, there's y you you might go days or weeks without a dopamine hit of, you know, having solved something because you you it's a hard problem, right? That's what that's what

speaker-0 (38:43.862)
Yeah. I I think this is what what I'll say is no one no one likes solving hard problems. They like solving problems that are just at the edge of the the solution space that they can solve. yeah. No you you like if it's if it's too easy, it's like that's boring. And if you aren't capable of solving it, then you just get frustrated. You want like a little bit of frustration and then you can and then it's solved. And I think that's what actually people want. and if you don't think about it enough, you don't really realize that's the challenge there.

speaker-1 (39:10.806)
Hundred percent.

speaker-0 (39:11.234)
Before we spend too much time, you know, talking about that, I think the question I have to ask you here is already at this sort of phone screening level with the hiring manager, are you already starting to see L L tools being used, interview assistants that help candidates cheat and how are you sort of detecting that and and handling that scenario?

speaker-1 (39:27.98)
Yeah, I feel like that's more of a more of an art than a science at this point, right? I mean you can you can get really good at this. I mean, you know, there are all kinds of cheating tools available to candidates. I mean, we used to have really billboards here in the city a few months ago. I think they took that down. you could can you know, candidates again, candidates were using a second screen next to their computer, you know, which was, you know, doing things, taking really long pauses. and I feel like when you when you're when you're interviewing

Some let me let me tell you about candidates that, you know, do well. you know, candidates who do well are focused on, you know, talking, right? They're they're they they they don't use a virtual background. You know, they use a real background. It doesn't have to be. You you it doesn't you don't have to be sitting in a beautiful you know office or something like this. You can be in your bedroom, it doesn't matter, right? But it just gives me an extra layer of confidence that you're you know, like it's it's daytime where you are, for example. You know, like just those subtle things.

Something else that comes to mind is they have a high bandwidth connection. You know, like don't have connection problems. Like connection if you have connection problems, if you have like a a a latency or a lag, if you're maybe using a VPN, who knows, right? I mean, like there's there's just all all these subtle things. And if you're having genuine internet problems, just let's let's let's move the call, let's reschedule it to a different time. More than happy to do that. So those are some of the things.

And I you know, we've we've seen somebody was sharing with me yesterday about how a vital video about moving a hand in front of the candidate. Like I haven't ever done that, but that's y it's it's it's it's easy to tell when you're not talking to an actual person and you're talking to an average. I feel like

speaker-0 (41:07.094)
one of those things that you know will get passed around as sort of a a a a solution but it's sort of fake right like it yeah if if they were I mean you I think this is where you have to really evaluate your threat model and whether or not the sort of candidates you're getting are are problematic there. but I I don't know that there's as you said I don't know there's a there's an optimal solution for this otherwise other than just dealing with it as it comes up. I mean if a candidate can fake their whole way through the interview and also multiple years at your job

Either you have a terrible way of evaluating candidates or they're doing a great job and who who cares? So they've done it

speaker-1 (41:41.282)
cares, right I mean like yeah right. Like a different a whole different meaning to fake it till we make it.

speaker-0 (41:48.192)
Yeah, right, exactly. I mean that was always my my perspective here. Yeah. so you know, that's it. I I think there are way worse scenarios there where you hire a real candidate, you validated everything, and then they get to the job and they're just mediocre and constantly need support to stay at that level, otherwise they'll they'll trail off, unfortunately. Okay. So realistically it's an art for evaluating whether or not it's a real person. I I think the other one that I've seen is it is always it is a real person, but they're standing in for someone else.

Or they have a team working behind them. something I started to see now is there'll be like a group of people that are all searching together and now while one person is doing their interview, the other people are all supporting them in some way by helping to figure out answers to questions. I don't know if these are sorts of things that you've you've seen or had to deal with.

speaker-1 (42:32.494)
Yeah, I mean it could have been, you know, it they they could have been looking at another person for guidance as opposed to a screen, right? Maybe I shouldn't just say that they're looking at a screen. But I've definitely experienced people who are not focused on, you know, the screen and, you know, getting information fed into or being put in front of them some by some other means. A hundred percent. I mean, that's I c I can I could see that. Right. And it's it's I don't know. Look, I mean I don't think people it's hard. It's hard to find a job. It's hard to get a job, right? So people are, you know, pe ever everyone's doing the best that they can.

But then again, you know, like you you wanna hire somebody who is genuinely good at their job and you know, who is a genuine, authentic person, and who's gonna help our business move forward in the right way.

speaker-0 (43:13.036)
Yeah, no, I I totally hear you. I mean, this is what we talked about the whole time. Okay, so you sign off on them, you you think that they're a they're a real person, they have good answers to why they want this particular job or what they're specifically looking for and they seem like some sort of fit. And I assume then you s I don't know if you have a I mean, just tell me about what's next.

speaker-1 (43:31.33)
Yeah, so if if they if they do well, then they get advanced to an interview loop. And the interview loop again depends on the role that we are hiring for. If you're hiring for a an AI systems engineer, running a product engineer, or an AI research engineer, it looks a little bit different, but you know, more or less, you know, there's a system design component to it. If you're more senior in your career, there's a couple of system design interviews where, you know, you're talking about a large solution, you know, where you're, you know, whiteboarding using Excalibur, you know, one of the screen sharing tools.

by the way, when it comes to sharing your screen, I love it when candidates share their entire screen. I don't ask them to do it, but sometimes they just do it, like you know, when when we're whiteboarding together. I just I feel I feel nice when they do that. So system design interviews, you know, that are meant to test our systems, you know, talk about scale, just show a level of knowledge and expertise about, you know, the large the broader system as a whole.

We also have a coding interview as a part of the interview process where you're expected to write some code without the help of LLMs, obviously, you know, for because we were not testing this is not an eval on Fable or you know, GPD stall. It's it's a it's an eval on you as a person, right? So like we won't test how well you're doing as a person. there's a coding interview and then there is a behavioral interview. If you're hiring for a manager, if you're hiring if I'm hiring a manager, if I'm hiring a principal engineer.

There's a couple of behavioral interviews because then you have an outsized impact on the rest of the organization. You know, the organization is going look up to you and you just have like more questions that we would like to put in front of you and you know, get a signal on you know how do you think about different situations and how do you behave when you're put in a variety of situations, growing the team, turning around s somebody who's not deforming well, etcetera. Those are more more on the managerial side though.

speaker-0 (45:21.454)
So something interesting that you mentioned is that realistically they're not you're expecting the candidates not to use LLMs during the interview process. And I'm curious how does that match up with how they'll function once they get their you know, let's say you do hire them successfully, or is there an expectation that they can use LLMs there as part of their jobs, or do you have a similar expectation that often the work that they're doing wouldn't match well with using an LLM?

speaker-1 (45:46.028)
No, we use we use LLMs quite bit. You we use agentic coding quite a bit here at the company. You know, we just all sorts of tools, right? People use cursor, people use cloud code, people we also have this custom harness that our CTO wrote himself that it's fantastic. It works really well. so we we lean on agentic coding a lot. But then again, agentic coding is gonna generate code and it's gonna put code in front of you. And then as a human developer, you're responsible. You should be able to look at the code.

speaker-0 (45:58.196)
no.

speaker-1 (46:15.978)
and tell me whether it's good code or bad code, right? You're you're the judgment, you're the judge, right, of what what the output of the agent decoding system is. So in when you're testing in an interview, you do want to test candidates' skills in terms of you know how well they can write code without an NLM. and then obviously, you know, when they when they join, they you know use the same expertise, the same knowledge, but they're not using that to author code. They're using that

U code and obviously authoring it where it makes sense.

speaker-0 (46:48.792)
So where we have them do the part of the coding interview, we actually tell them that we expect them, if they want, to use an LLM, because we want as much to match their say production usage as what they're what they're comfortable with. And I I feel like I don't know, like we don't have an expectation that people use LLMs you know, to do the software development specifically. I feel like there's a there's a weird question there. But I I feel like I don't have a problem with someone that uses LMs all the time to

To do their software development and then come to the interview, I don't necessarily want to take that away, but I do have to say a little bit of a different expectations of what they're going through with that process. And I often wonder when there are companies out there, and maybe you can share a little bit about this that don't allow LMs during the process. Do you think that you would come up with a future interview that specifically tests their capabilities there, maybe with whatever they're used to? Like,

or if they're getting into problems. Like if there's a scenario where and and I don't know what I would do here because like just earlier I was using my my harness that was backed by I don't remember what it was. I think it was Quen and it was incredibly obstinate about doing something and just saying, no, I won't do that. I refuse. I was changing code. It was like one of the L lamp I mean and and that that's one of the maddening things. It was another one where it was try I wanted it to solve fix some unit tests because it had hacked its way through to make the unit test work.

And I specifically wrote some other code that would fail if the code wasn't fixed correctly. And I tried to get to fix the unit test. And instead of fixing it, it just kept going back and undoing the error that I made to force the test to be fixed rather than fixing it. And it was a subagent problem. Like the main agent understood what I wanted, but failed to convey to whatever sub agent it was it was talking to to make the right thing happen. And I feel like there are some of these things which could start interesting conversations.

But I I think there's the question is the surface area. If people are using soft some sort of software development I tool, I mean they're using an IDE or they're using an LLM, and I think that's a sort of another point in their production workloads when they're actually doing software development. I want to sort of see a similar thing early on so I can understand how they engage with that. a good example was a lot of years ago, I took a bunch of software engineering tests to get jobs. this is probably 20 years ago at this point. And the two things that mattered me the most.

speaker-0 (49:07.416)
They're both healthcare companies, actually. The first one wanted me to do software development on a piece of paper. And you learn very early on when you do this, I hope no one ever has to do this ever again. You leave a lot of white space between every single line of code you write because you will have to move variables around. You will have to erase things. And there's nothing more maddening than erasing the same line a hundred times. Be like, No, I wanted to find the variables over here and not there. And you can't copy and paste on a piece of paper. The same thing goes with this other one where they're like,

Your IDE is going to be a text editor. I Google did this to me. A healthcare company did this to me. I'm like, who programs in Word of all things or like a a text pad with no formatting whatsoever? It's it's just it's a right exact well. So it's like no keyword highlighting. Like I click tab all the time for keyword analysis or copy and paste and just find and replace. And those things just don't work for me.

speaker-1 (49:48.712)
In times you're Roman.

speaker-0 (50:01.374)
And I wonder, you know, how many points I got off because I wasn't able to use their ID that they prove provided to me, be it a piece of paper or, you know, a terminal editor. And I I I worry that in some cases we're doing similar things to the candidates today.

speaker-1 (50:16.748)
Yeah. Yeah. I feel like my okay, my take on this is that I l I draw the line between a tool and intelligence, right? So you should have whatever tools, right? So you're you're encouraged to just share your screen and use whatever editor you want. you know, just just show me that you as a human being are capable of writing code without like using your own intelligence or designing a system or whatever it is, right? Using your own intelligence as opposed to using the intelligence provided to you by an LM, right? I you're gonna you you're gonna get to use that in as a part of your job.

But testing how well somebody can operate a harness like clot code. And okay, the other thing is that the harnesses and, you know, the models underneath those harnesses are getting so freakishly good that a lot of times they'll just one shot the right answer for you. Right. So like you you go in and it's like, okay, cool, like hey, you're you're allowed to use an LM for this coding interview, this portion of the coding interview, and you know, they prompt it right and it's like boom, it's it's it's it's done. It's like, okay, cool. I guess the interview is over now.

Or you can ask follow-up questions and again you can, you know, like prompt your way through it, et cetera. You can maybe ask them to like make some modification. You can be like, hey, why do you think this, you know, with the LLM generator, why do you think this is better? Why do you think that's worse? And we'll probably introduce a LLM code review round, you know, down the line. we we have you know, we have we have we have tested some alpha versions of that internally. we haven't just we deployed that into our production hiring pipeline, if you will. But I think I think that's coming. But yeah, that's that's where I really draw the line is like, hey, I want to test.

the intelligence and the judgment that you as a human being are bringing into the process or will be bringing the team as opposed to you know your how how how well you're able to operate a harness. Because guess what? The harnesses are also getting really, really good at what they are doing, right? So th there was a point in time, like you know, two or three years ago where you had to be really good at prompting and you had like prompt in a certain way to get the right answer. And now, you know, because of all all the reinforcement learning that has been going into these models.

even a poor quality prompt will generate the same high quality output as a high quality prompt would generate, right? So like LMs are getting really good at inferring intent and inferring you sort of like what did you really mean even if your prompt was not of the highest quality. And I I expect that to continue. You know, I expect that to continue to, you know, just keep on getting better at inferring poor input and generating high quality output based off of it.

speaker-0 (52:36.198)
I definitely want to stay away from the are the models getting better. because that there are there are there are rants there that we can definitely get into.

speaker-1 (52:43.598)
It's it's yeah, totally, totally. Yeah.

speaker-0 (52:46.578)
yeah. I mean there there's so much on this topic specifically, and I'm trying to think what the what the best thing to particularly add is. I I think that there are some struggles with no matter what the interview practice is that we have in place. And I think if it if a candidate is just prompting a model to get an answer, there is a question of is there a way we can change the interview practice or interview process, the particular round to

better adhere to what we're actually looking for. I I totally get the at the end of the day. Now maybe the the message is fundamentally LLMs suck. They're all wrong. They're terrible. And so if you are if you just jump in an interview and immediately are putting stuff in there, then it's easy for me to see that it's not the right thing. And if as a candidate you disagree with this practice, then maybe it's not a good fit for the role because we expect candidates to be cautious of what comes out of LLMs.

And so there shouldn't be an expectation that it makes sense to use this particular tool when when you're going out and and doing it. No different than if you jumped into a model repository with tons of different functions in place that you have built up over lots of decades, you may know what functions are there, what sort of wrappers exist and using those. And we're not going to test you on your skills of your previous job. that made sense. Where we we need to look at our environment that we have at this moment, whether or not you are able to operate.

in it in I don't know what the time frame is, maybe six months for, you know, value from the cost of the actual interview round for it to make sense. Okay. Okay yeah. So one thing I want to ask is whether or not fundamentally at this time in in the interview process, and maybe this is a good place for to stop, rather than you know continuing on what happens after, is do you have expectations or do you share with candidates a sort of playbook of what they should be expecting when they come to the individual rounds? And what I mean by that is Amazon is sort of

pioneered or made hugely popular this idea of answering in a star format. That's the, you know, the the problem at hand, the action you took, the consequences and the results, basically. And obviously this is helpful, but I worry that not every candidate comes to the table understanding or having been coached in that way. And I I hate to turn down candidates that haven't spent hours and hours practicing interviews before they get on a call or to the interview round. And I'm not sure if you've thought about how to d deal with that or you have you been dealing with that.

speaker-1 (55:05.42)
Yeah, yeah. So we we do educate candidates on the interview process as a part of the that's that's one of the things that happens with the talent acquisition round, you know, that happens early on before the before the manager or even sometimes after the manager HM screen is like, I recommend somebody to go ahead. you know, before before they jump into the interviews, our recruiting team will, you know, share with them what to expect in the interview, you know, how to answer questions, et cetera.

Yeah, the star you know, is a is a pretty I mean i I guess it's a pretty popular pattern for answering behavioral questions, but certainly it doesn't have to be that. I think it just encourages you to be more structured and cohesive as opposed to just keep on rambling about different things and you know, like different years too much. But so I mean I've I've had candidates give me fantastic answers that I was able to understand. Like, you know, they they answered my questions like and you know, they were able to give a really cohesive answer without really just like, well, this was the situation and that this was the task and then this was the result.

You don't have to follow that thing, but

speaker-0 (55:59.34)
Yeah, no, I I I totally agree with you realistically. I I think i if in a way it's too structured isn't necessarily good either or mechanical as I if if I wanted mechanical answers, I would have prepared the whole list for you beforehand and sent it to you so that you could, you know, automatically fill it out and we could read that response and that's not really what it's about either. Plus I don't like penalizing candidates for not having memorized a particular way of doing this. I do agree with you that a huge part of our job is communicating and if you're gonna use an LLM at work, communicating with

Unfortunately, an agentic tool to make it do the right thing is critical. And so if you can't do that in some way that is understandable by every other person that you're trying to communicate with, then that fundamentally is an issue for getting hired into a position. Okay. So I think at this point let's let's move over to picks. So Nikel, what what have you brought for our audience today?

speaker-1 (56:47.106)
Yeah, what I want to share with you today is a book written by Jocko Willing. Jocko is a former Navy SEAL, you know, he's a is an awesome, awesome person, you know, who he's also an author as well. And you know, he writes about leadership and you know, how do you be a really good leader, be be a really good employee, you know, be a really good teammate in his book. It's the book is called Leadership Tactics, Leadership Strategy and Tactics, a field manual.

And you know, we we we all know that, you know, leadership or like modern organizational philosophy really all can be dated back, you know, to the military, to the armed forces, right? I mean, that's where we as a society first started organizing, right? So like this hundreds of years ago, right? So like a lot of leadership principles that we have in modern corporate, you know, corporate America stem from, you know, military practices. And he th that was like one of the really cool things was, you know, just tying that to like you know practical incidents that have happened, you know, on the battlefield, you know, like how do you watch out for your

you know, your your you know, the person next to you. You know, how do you how do you really shine in a team setting? You know, how do you overcome obstacles? How do you, you know, show up for your for your for your team, for your manager, for the business, you know, for the company. just really lay it out and you that's that's really influenced, you know, who I am as a leader. And yeah, I highly recommend people read reading that book.

speaker-0 (58:09.128)
I hadn't heard of that one. So something to definitely check out. I I feel like there's a lot of things coming out of the US Navy, Armed Forces branch compared to the other ones that have a lot of things to say about leadership. I mean, we've got Turn the Ship Around. There's there's another one about that I I totally forgot the name of, which talks about sort of how they build their units. I I know Adam Grant has done things with with the with the Navy about evaluating like how they pick candidates. actually that was also the Marines. And you know, I think it's really interesting to try to

pick and choose, you know, seeing those leadership examples, especially from rigorous attention to how these things are supposed to work rather than the sort of off off firing from the hip, if you if you will, of the the tech world of how we do things may or may not be successful.

speaker-1 (58:56.878)
Hundred percent, right? I mean, like, yeah, the the armed forces really have that dialed down in how how do you lead a really large organization into battle? You know, like you're you're also asking people to, you know, sometimes make the ultimate sacrifice, which is you know, just really is seeps back and backpropagates through the entire leadership philosophy. Make sacrifices to, you know, keep keep your team moving forward, right?

speaker-0 (59:18.124)
Yeah, no. I I I I totally agree. there's there's a lot more at risk for them for sure than whatever we're worried about with whatever product we're we're making.

speaker-1 (59:28.31)
Yeah. Not even close.

speaker-0 (59:30.146)
Yeah. okay, so my pick. I just brought maybe a little bit lame YouTube short, which makes it easy for everyone to watch. no, no high commitment. But the speaker in it is pretty I'll say famous, but you can see him on a bunch of different things and is always a joy to listen to. And then this particular one was when Sony made Walkman players worse to sell more. honestly, it's from the genius of Rory Sutherland. he runs an ad agency Oggle Group, Og Ogle V group.

and the thing from the episode is don't make your product confusing for the market segment you're trying to sell to. In the in the case of the Walkman, I think it was justification to remove the recording button from cassette players because the people they were selling to wouldn't have a need for that particular feature. Without the button, it's clear it plays something. But as soon as you add the record button, well, what does it do? Well, it records sometimes and then plays other times. Is it only for recording?

and then you see a whole bunch of other devices like is it for business or is it for consumers? And it's very difficult. But as soon as you decide no, it's for the masses, it's for most people, consumers to play stuff, then you realize that this isn't necessary. And and I think it was actually maybe even more expensive to have to remove the button. you know, I had to go back to the drawing, had to do more RD on it for sure. But I feel like this is something that a lot of people could learn when they're thinking about what their product should be, and maybe we can tie it back into the interviewing process where as we talked about.

thinking about up front, who is it that we want to hire? What is the purpose?

speaker-1 (01:01:01.314)
percent, yeah, I love that. Make make it simple. Yeah. Absolutely.

speaker-0 (01:01:05.462)
Yeah. because I I think, you know, in in in the world where like, you know, one more certification, one more technology on your resume means you're maybe a little bit better of a candidate. But in the end, if you don't need that, maybe the other areas that person fills in the gap for is is much better. And they won't bring those extra biases for them. Like I love the obscuring previous companies people have worked at. If you don't know they worked at Google or that they did, you no longer use that as a signal positive or negative.

if you will, for a judgment. But you remove it and now you're in a much better position for h hiring the right candidate. Okay. Nikhila, I think we've come to a close here. thanks so much for joining for this for this episode. I've really enjoyed this conversation. I hope that the audience has figured out how they're going to land their next job effectively.

speaker-1 (01:01:39.478)
Hundred percent.

speaker-1 (01:01:53.538)
Awesome, thank you, Warren. Really really great chatting with you this morning.

speaker-0 (01:01:58.06)
Yeah, and thanks for all the viewers for tuning in for this episode and I hope to see everyone back again next week.