How to get hired in DevRel: roundtable with industry leaders

[Music] i wanted to start um because i'm sure there'll be some overlap i wanted to like maybe kind of throw out some of the obvious things um so you don't have to all say yeah me too and then maybe we'll look for some outliers um so and then correct me too if i've maybe missed any critical phases um so i was thinking imagine you guys have job posts maybe in some cases we'll assume uh there aren't job posts yet but you know that you're starting to look in some cases there are companies where you might not necessarily have a job post listed but you know that you have some leeway that if a rock star showed up you would maybe start a conversation so we'll put that on the table let's say some of those rock stars have a pretty good time at getting through the passes so we we won't go through those details but just kind of lay the grounds so for other people who are looking to break in um okay we're going to assume there's job posts there's an application process there are recruiters maybe you get referred through co-workers or friends um are there any other maybe um ways that people might not have thought of that uh capture your interest that you might think that they would be a candidate um maybe i'll start with you grace uh or we can do a raised hand thing too because that might be easier if you you're like happy too mongodb's hiring across the board in many different areas and particularly as well in devrel in education which is the function that i meet up so we're hiring traditional developer advocates those folks that go out to speak write a lot of articles particularly in the mobile space because we have realm and realm synced atlas so we definitely want uh some folks who have that mobile expertise so that is one area we're looking for right now the other is you said rockstar and immediately what came to mind is wait a minute we've got quite heroes and heroines who are writers we've got a lot of hiring going on in our technical writing group too and they may not think of themselves as rock stars but certainly they are the quiet heroes that keep pushing along the documentation we all depend on right so that's really important um and then we also have what's called curriculum engineering so we have this university platform which does a deep dive in learning on mongodb and atlas and we need more engineers who are interested in teaching and doing videos around that on our university platform so let us know we've got all open up on our mongodb careers side you can take me on graceffar on twitter or you can send me an email i'm just grace mongodb.com all right i love you um jeff i saw you nodding any yeah i mean uh i'd say first of all what i always ask people i tend to hire quite a bit um and i will just say in ballpark i probably have roughly i work at microsoft leading a pretty good sized team in deveral but i probably have about 80 positions across my team give or take over that we're hiring for and there's lots of opportunity for folks i just say broadly you know for people when i have this conversation for hiring i ask people what their dream job is and i actually start with that and i'll usually just start with folks i'll say hey take a moment and think about when you're at the pinnacle of your career i learned this from janet measure schmidt at twitter she was a great leader that i worked under and she said if you think about that moment at the pinnacle of your career right and that's that moment like if you when you want to retire and you look back you wow it never got better than that and i'll have to ask people like you know tell me what that job might look at microsoft tell me that what it might look like at another company and actually tell me a third one that's just for fun and i actually usually will say hey and let's go do that in a day or so let me tell you about some of the things are going on here and come back to me because what i want you want to do in some of these things in your career is you know careers are either like ladders or jungle gyms and what our time trying to do is find out what's the experience to bridge there maybe i've got their dream job right and what i'm trying to do is then i can find out and learn about what people are doing we hire on our team and i'll just close with i have openings for engineers service engineers people that are building skilling platforms and cloud services and these are engineering roles within you know azure engineering all up right and those are roles are as important to us because they sort docks and skilling and learning and those are important as i say our serverless or kubernetes stack right that matters docs those those are also that we have roles for writers the ultimate source of empathy james governor right docs accessibility localization right we hire for that all of these roles are developed relations to me skill and training development we all pieces together we focus a lot on advocacy which is like you know profession that i grew up in and we all work on and that's great and we can talk about some of the roles for that but what i'll tell people is a role in developer relations can be so broad based and and it can go from dev to pm to you name it but think about what you want to go do how you want to help and then we can have a conversation with those other roles and just the last bit is maybe think about things as a jungle gym right now in your career right so often we focus is like these ladders and also leave you with is like how do you build up some bridge of experience maybe you want to jump over and be a pm for a bit right i've done that for ownership product and i love it uh maybe you want to do some other roles in engineering and build those skills to kind of jump yet i'll stop there but we have lots of openings follow me dm me you name it twitter but today i want to help the professional up so thank you okay great um have there been any maybe unusual places uh unusual in the sense that where you've found potential candidates that maybe some people may not be thinking about when they're looking for a deveral job yeah and i think uh a lot of us take very different uh career paths and trajectories i remember the talking to the devil con in london where i shared my own journey of how i ended up being in devil and actually had no clue of debris before i ended at google and the work that we are doing before i answer your question uh really quick like uh within google continuing to hire uh uh across multiple different roles as well uh from android to cloud ta roles tech writers developer program engineers and also there's a unique role that i represent uh this is part of my teams the program managers and these are the folks in different regions and markets and really focusing on the ecosystem in those regions uh from developers to startups to partners now now coming to your question uh the best advice i the best advice i give for anyone who's looking for a role is actually to go through a referral if you find someone in that organization in that company if you can go through them your chances of actually having the application reviewed and and getting a response is significantly higher than if you apply through a direct channel and this is where i think there's there's a tremendous support across this panel depending on which company you end up selecting i think you folks will be very very happy to do guide you in direction one of the channels i have been quite successful personally in hiring is actually from the top contributors in the community when you're looking for da roles for tech writer roles for program managers for community managers and and i remember jeff's uh social media post leading up to this panel like are you passionate about helping developers that's actually a clear signal where you are you are able to assess someone and how passionate they are beyond the one day two day interview that you would do and that gives me tremendous confidence that that is a little bit long drawn but that that's a challenge where i have had a lot of success hiring strong candidates excellent um adam if you don't have anything it's fine i don't want to pressurize people to feel like they have to add to a list everybody stole my thunder already it's fantastic i i want to echo the things that um grace who tom and jeff have already mentioned like you know first of all um i do think the community of users is one of the best places to go find um people for devrel um they've already feel acutely the pain that the developers are experiencing with your tools or platform and so um they've got a great sort of sense to bring into the organization and use that to solve problems for the larger audience um i do also agree like yes lots of people deveral like utam said he didn't know deborah existed lots of people that are in adjacent spaces don't think of themselves as building a career in devrel and it's kind of okay to say to them this is a path this is a journey you're on how can i help you get to the place you want to get to um and it's okay to take a tour through devrel to go somewhere else as well like there's plenty of people that i've worked with that have wound up in you know cto style for responsibilities or in program management responsibilities or engineering responsibilities after having spent time in devrel and there are people who have built careers in denver as well that i've worked with so you can as long as you're helping people get to the place they want to go to you're going to have a better chance of having a reasonable conversation with them and then you know there's lots of different parts of devrel it's not all just the you know the glitzy shiny da's uh there's a lot of people behind the scenes that got to do a lot of hard work and making documentation really real for people so um yeah everything that the rest of the panel said already i'm in total agreement with uh hashicorp's hiring still so lots of interesting stuff there so that's my pitch i've always got a pitch yeah and i just had one tactical thing if you're watching on this call and you're looking for a job and we're out here talking hey long term this you're probably going come on for gosh takes i've given 800 resumes oh my gosh how do i actually get in there and reach out to it and then first thing i'm just going to say is like it's about hustling out there right and i'm in in in persistence and i'll be really honest you've probably dm'd me and i probably haven't responded certain times or maybe i did and that's nothing personal like it's like i can you reach out and try and it's often like at different times or maybe other things going on behind the thing that i'll tell you is persistence and it's not about the most shiniest person that's out there we use and i've hired people that may have been called rock stars but some of my best most effective advocates are the people that we build and the people that we develop and great and and that to me is the best part of my job like i've been on stage i've been twenty thousand ten thousand who cares right i don't have to do that anymore my job right now is the next generation and i almost even some things of our advocates look at that it's just so much more fun it's almost like building the next cast of a saturday night live and man the people in the next generation of advocates out there are amazing just keep reaching out to us and and don't feel that you got to be some rock star that stands up a certain way we're looking for people that are lifelong learners people that can synthesize and then finally people that have a connection to a community and so if you're out there and you're active and you care for a community and that's not just speaking like the community folks out there this is a a thing that of a a way of people are that i respect so much the community people are the people that stay till three four in the morning to the last one is taken care of whether it's in a slack room or in person and we look for that and you look for people that want to help and so just the only thing i'll say is like hey how do i get in there you could put a resume in what is what comes in like it's just it's going to be very difficult for that to stand out just through the amount of resumes and the way the system work work your network work someone who knows someone and just keep at it and if you're looking for a job at microsoft i'll just put this here right now or you're looking for all jeff sand at microsoft fastest way send me a note that's all you need to know that's my direct email and i'll get to someone to talk so thank you just keep hustling up there so well i just want to add a quick thing there um to jeff um i worked in a job for a while in the microsoft i did tour of duty through microsoft for eight years and i worked in a couple of different roles i was a d.a what we called him evangelist back then johnny if you remember way back when and i was a program manager so there are many different roles so i want to thank jeff for the opportunity because i grew up through that system that's where i learned a lot of the basics and foundational elements of evangelism so i just want to shout out for jeff uh so thank you for that and also adam sullivan who may or may not be listening on this was also one of my leaders who went on to salesforce as a great leader in evangelism just want to shout out for him um and there there are just so many different touch roles and one of the best people i ever hired uh was someone who went into this pilot program that i created for champions at atlassian and he was one of my best champions and at some point he said hey um i'm kind of interested i mean i love atlassian can i apply and he he worked for me there and he's working for me now so shout out to peter uh you've been great and so i love having champions and community as part of deveral that's great so to kind of summarize and then open up uh it feels okay obviously work your network connect with as many people as possible but networking you know maybe you're not that uh social when you go to a conference and all that some of us are like hugging a lot of people not anymore but um there are many ways to be social through different platforms right like you know maybe you're just really passionate about docs and you're you're helping clean them up and we had actually one of our uncomf speakers earlier talking about how like he just got really excited about a problem that he saw and through solving that problem he was also able to kind of beef up his skills with a particular language and then he decided oh well it appears maybe there's missing tutorials and so we saw kind of a gap and so your way of helping and then um and actually one of the things he shared was um uh he just put a note like hey if if this helps reach out to me or if you want to chat about it reach out to me right so it doesn't mean that he was out there like you know talking with people and getting business cards or what have you but there are other ways to be very social and connected um so maybe we can dig into that a little bit more because my next question was like you know what are the kind of platforms and areas that you look for and of course many roles are very different but you know blog posts youtube videos github page their code sample apps engagement with open source docs you know kind of owning meetup groups um obviously again it's very different per the job title but you know what like for me i'll tell people if you're looking for a dev advocacy role in my case you will be speaking i will be looking for a video sample and if they're like well i've never done it before i'm like you can talk to your phone you can have your friend hold up your phone uh you can go to a local meetup and do a five-minute talk now you know deborah khan we just did an unconf and we recorded everything um and you know hopefully we'll do more of these in the future um that's been a perspective for me but like what have been your essential go-to places if someone's like how do i get started like this is this is what's going to stand out um you know when you share your resume or your links yeah so yeah there's a couple of things i think about here i'm in agreement with you on the advocacy i'm looking for some kind of evidence of where you've been speaking if you haven't got a public profile if you haven't got a video of you from a session you've delivered we always include even when i was at aws we always included during the interview loop a presentation portion where you had to pretend you were talking to a meet-up when we were evaluating your presentation skills so that's an essential part it's one of those things you kind of have to practice it's a skill you can acquire very quickly and there's lots of really great ways to get better at it but you have to you have to have practice there in order to feel like that's a reasonable part of your responsibility and so you know look for opportunities to go do that look for opportunities to engage i can guarantee you 90 of your meet-up leaders are dying for speakers right um they're always that when you run a meet-up program the leaders of your meet-up groups are always asking when can you help me with a speaker what can you do from getting a speaker they're dying for people to speak so you should be have lots of opportunities to deliver some content now i'd also say if you're on the docs and the content side honestly contributing to the open source documentation is a great place that we found like pretty much all of us i think have had docs open sourced in some kind of way or open for contribution in some kind of way the people that go in there and actually correct problems and unidentify issues and point out things those are incredibly useful those are a great place to go find people to super engage with the technical material you can make a very direct assessment of their ability to write that's really good and then when i was at aws we hired the top answerer on stack overflow for aws questions so uh he was great he was all over it turned out um it was just you know it's the fact that he could go get paid to do that as a full-time job he didn't even think existed and so we just went ahead and got uh got him and brought him into the devrel team so there's lots of different places where you can go make a reputation for yourself whether it's through the docs channels through the community forums or whether it's through your local meetup organizers use those places to showcase what you can do and that gives you your advertisement as a potential to be hired by um a company that's got a doverell program adam that's it's really really sharp you know like the first thing that i tend to go look at someone and i think a lot of people will go and you'll get intimidated they'll say wait i don't have any video views or on my videos or i only 23 people and i'm like great you held a 23 person conference and had people over what i go and look at in that stuff is like hey when somebody tells me hey i've done this or i'm blogging or i've done a lot of the of content the first thing i go look at is the blog right and then i go look at the dates and what will frustrate me if they do it is if the first most recent blog post was like the day before the interview and they haven't kept it up right like i'd say you know the thing on this is when you do share and you want to share like think about the context with it and and do but i go through and i go oh they blog oh wow what a great post let me go back a year ago hey is this something new and then and how did they care about it right for us it's about a craft right so i'm looking for someone who's gonna the quality that they're gonna put into it and are they gonna finish it and and what did they how did they convey something to an audience i'm not looking for perfection i'm not going to look for commas but like if they wanted me to share something was that a little bit of a stage or a stunt or is this something that they truly believe in operating in you look at video and so forth and what i will say is i look at a bunch of stuff and i think we have to be careful as an industry sometimes about how much we think about video with how much we're shifting it it's absolutely like we'll go through and blast people have you done a talk and i can we can teach great speakers to be better speakers and we can we can help grow people that way but i think it's people who use in our world we think about who uses the internet as a palette to communicate and you want to have an i look for like some of our best advocates today are hackers and and of course they're engineers in our world like they they are in an engineering pipe but they can hack media right they can sit there and go wait i'm gonna use twitter here and then i'm gonna use some random service that nobody ever did with a bit of duct tape to go tell a story and get somebody started and they have that creativity that's what i'm looking for and i can build that in anyone right i can find somebody who cares about design and i can see a level of quality you know ashley mcnamara right ashley is an amazing advocate in so many ways and it often happens through art right because that creativity happens through what she creates and she's able to connect and communicate with an audience and if i describe that another way in a context people would be like wait is she an advocate or is she a designer no she's an amazing developer advocate and so you're looking for people that can craft that um really neat time and shift in our industry and there's never been a greater time for our profession like uh the writing roles the training roles the world needs us the world needs us and i'd say come work for me but also like come get a role for any of these other people because we gotta help we have a job to do as devrel that's great utah do you have any uh thoughts like do you look at github do you look at for particular roles yeah so so plus one two things that uh adam and jeff just said one thing i wanna this was a sentiment that came out from a previous question i just want to dispel that like yes we want people to go out and network but just the networking itself is is is not the end right like the the folks the thing that folks are mostly looking for is intent and and how your passion in helping developers and contributing so when you're networking with folks on this panel or others it should be with that context and not just the networking for the sake of networking now coming back to the to the question uh looking at videos for a day role and in some cases also having folks to do a presentation as part of our interview should be expected like maybe one of the rounds is when you are asked to do a presentation 20-25 minutes uh similarly if you are interviewing for developer program engineer role expecting more programming uh based questions uh is is reasonable github contributions uh actually matter quite a bit uh folks do look at that as a signal because sometimes individuals are trying to pick signals which are beyond those a few hours that you that they'll be spending with you as an interviewer and that's where going back and looking at your blog posts that you have done the github contribution the youtube videos that you might have published those are those gifts interviewers a lot of confidence uh there is another set of role that i hired quite a bit in my team and these are like looking at overall developer of uh relation strategy uh because there are multiple platform options right now for developers and like what what's the trend what are the insights happening so sometimes i will probe focus on questions like can you describe the landscape of developers in your country so a question like okay what's the population what are the popular platform choices etc and that gives you a sense it's like is this person focused pretty much on the tactical stuff but they're all or they're also building strategic insight on how the platforms are evolving and they're shaping so so that's that's uh that's an additional skill i would try to test in some of the roles that i had in my team i think that's a great point to summarize a little bit um we often hire for someone who's gotten um you know validation within a community and that might be a geographical community it might be a language community it might be you know some kind of user type of community and um that's that's the value that they bring right they they not only are a member and they're active but they also have knowledge and they can articulate this this is how this community speaks and this is what gets them excited and this is what's going to matter um so just wanted to emphasize that um so kind of uh also with these platforms you know i mentioned github blog posts and all that jeff you mentioned a little bit like hey maybe only 23 people viewed your video but great but how much do these numbers matter do you look at a number of twitter followers github stars on their projects i'm sure people wonder that like how much does it matter how much yeah i i mean i mean i always watch vanity metrics right i think in our jobs and things we talk about metrics we talk about metrics and i've actually kind of quit talking about metrics in some ways for my team we talk about okrs that we set all up for our team and what i move more into is you look at the craft and i'll tell you look if i see someone who's an amazing following on twitter or a connection to community and they're doing massive reach like we probably have already talked or and if we're not like call me um and i'll give you my home number but it's not really about that right it's about a connection to a community right and i will tell you because of our platforms and scale if we create forums for people we're going to be able to create the next you know of an advocate that has reach you know i look at the mode that we're in right now and one thing i think about is you know what's happening in the twitch space the streaming space the virtual event space i think that there's going to be a massive sprawl in some port of virtual events and so on this area here where you're saying hey how do the superstars stand out and does that stuff matter i definitely am looking for people that we can go develop that are going to be able to stand out and resonate with an audience and make an emotional connection create content that entertains and informs and that's a rare uh rare skill and craft and so the things that stand out on that are your ability to connect and develop and care for an audience follow through the ability to do different modalities and i think some of the streamers and the things that we saw in the gaming industry right you look at the nitros of the world right who's gonna be the first advocate to hit a hundred thousand viewers right you know who's with the first one hit him a million people following them on streaming right some of these people around ten thousand and so forth if you look back at our build conference right this our engineers who participate in that they changed their sessions and delivery to be more streaming like the exit row for your conference right now is 300 pixels away it's the exit door is like 300 pixels away the click x and leave and so if your ability to hide to retain an audience and not talk long long long like i am and get people moving on you know uh you know our things that we're going to go do and you you will stand out and you will have a career um but i'd say focus on the content and the craft focus on the audience and all great things will happen with your content and you will end up having a great role um it's rare skill [Music] i want to follow up with what jeff's saying about the shift to sort of like streaming um as an engagement platform um i think there's something here that is often overlooked is that it isn't necessarily about video it's about interaction and if you're treating your streaming platform the way you treat your webinar platform then you're doing it wrong right because your webinar platform you just pipe any recorded content you want into it and everybody's going to go consume it in a silent room somewhere and maybe there's a little bit of chat interaction if you can make your streaming content much more engaging a mechanism for taking customer or engagement feedback from the participants directly into what you're doing then that can be a lot more fun when i was at aws we kicked off uh streaming on twitch i mean was it four years ago now was our first twitch stream at aws and one of the funnest things we did um there's a guy randall hunt who worked for me and he did twitch plays the aws console and he allowed what he did is he took the stream of chat from the twitch session and you allowed it to move the cursor and click buttons inside his aws console and so we had people in chat directing what was happening to the cursor and starting servers and opening databases and doing all kinds of stuff that kind of interaction that kind of engagement is something you can't replicate in an in-person event it's something you can't replicate in a webinar there's a room there for innovation and the way that people think about doing things uh with these streaming platforms we haven't even scratched the surface off yet and you see it on the gaming side these guys are doing gaming streamers they've got like custom emojis and they've got like pole mechanisms to say what they're going to go do next we've got a when we think about streaming as a platform there's so much room for innovation um when it comes to devrel there that um people that can go now that they'll have loads and loads of opportunities all i want to say is please for the love of god people don't recreate everything that sucks about events when we go virtual i literally think i had somebody talking to me about how to have like a bag to collect swag and walk around a virtual event and i was like please don't recreate everything that's bad like let's not have exact stuff for seven hours bloviating about like behind a podium four-minute heights and let's move the stuff out of the session the learning and the skilling and the hands-on stuff out of it but like it is the greatest opportunity for industry and it sucks that so many people are hurting around the world but we have a job here to go do so thank you that adam is so spot on absolutely that reminds me of a company uh that was using second life and i asked the person they had artists making their avatar and i said oh what cool thing did the artist make you oh they put me as a person behind a desk i was like you're in second life and they made you a person behind the desk i need to talk to seven like second life long time grace probably even helped me with them and all that ever happened is people came flying around and flew into me and smashed into me on stage because there was this new thing it was like it was really really disruptive and a long time ago but wherever the modality is we're developing our we got to be there so it's animal crossing yeah i just want to echo some of the comments that jeff and adam made here and you know we talk about developer relations and i tell this story a lot right now which is a long time ago when i was still at microsoft actually i was working on open source initiatives and i had spoken at one of these open source conferences was walking around after my talk and one of these developers walked up to me and said so um are you relating it and i looked at him like oh oh he's talking about the relations part of my title yes and yet right now that is the most difficult thing to do in this virtual landscape we're all operating in so at this point i think there is a a an opportunity for us to level that up and innovate around how we engage to both your points but also just relate right that empathy that everyone really needs deeply right now and connecting and finding a way to like really connect because in this format like we're missing half the communication body language is a big part of communication right and the other is eye to eye contact one of the things that is so wearing for a lot of us and these day you know hour-by-hour zoom calls is that we're not making that eye connection so it feels like you're not relating and it's really hard work now to relate so i think there's definitely a ton of opportunity there for us to figure that out one of my dev advocates actually participated in a virtualized conference that was put in animal crossings which is a really popular gaming platform and i thought now there see and gaming is a perfect platform for us to experiment on because those guys in roblox was with the company i was in last they understand how to scale things up right and they're always they've always been data oriented they eat up data every single day to make sure all the servers are up and that all the players are engaged so that's where we really should be looking to make sure that we're engaging and relating with developers so just a shout out for that yeah the item devops was fantastic i really enjoyed it we had somebody from the hashicorp team was involved in that as well and uh that's the kind of that's kind of opportunity there is right now to go do something a little different yes and a plug to austin who spoke about that um in the early days of i think of the first week of deborah con earth so that's a perfect segue so i was looking for so when you're looking at these materials and then i'm going to assume during the interview phase or maybe the early conversation phase um what kind of like personal qualities or yeah what kind of qualities are you looking for outside of let's say presentation skills and maybe they have a lot of output but like um you know are you are you how do you see empathy through their work or through the interview process or sense of humor or creativity i've often talked about how you can create a sample app that's a hotel booking app but you can say it's a hotel booking app for unicorns and then you know suddenly you just kind of you just added something to it but it just makes it kind of funny and those types of things are small things but they you know they they add value so um maybe you time you've been a little quiet um are there things that you yeah you notice like as grace was just talking about um you know how people make eye contact or maybe they have very empathetic tone when they help people in slack or in their docs um what are things that you're looking for that you think this is a potential candidate yeah so so that's actually a great point like you can look at the course consent the person brings uh but for me my experience with the ones who are more successful are the ones who are able to to have the strong level of empathy with the developers this is a tough role like uh developed relations and there is a lot of strain that comes because we're kind of sitting in the middle we are working and then sharing a lot of resources to developers but at the same time also working with the product teams and it's our job to make sure that we are we are the advocates on both the sides that's the reason google we started using the term developer advocates from from right at the beginning this is this in a way represents what the role is when you go out you need to advocate on behalf of course the platform that you're representing but when you come back in the organization then you are advocating on behalf of the developers uh so strong element of empathy that if it's visible through the work that you are doing if you are a community manager uh how much how much how is your community doing if i would go and talk to one of your community members how are they speaking about that about you that that's a that's a strong signal uh your contribution to docs in some of those areas and how is that that that's a strong a signal as well uh the other elements i would test and it's it's again it's important in some of the roles that we put folks in where you are working with cross teams multiple product teams is how would you how would you share a difficult feedback so so the question is uh a team is launching an api the api is not ready and your developers are telling you it's not ready how would you handle that situation uh and and the thing that i'm trying to test in each of those cases are you putting the developer first are you putting the community first is it coming up in the actions that you have you have done in the past is it coming up as a team in the interview because if that's not happening it's very it takes a lot of time to build trust with your developer community but few wrong actions you can lose that trust and and that's an element uh i look very strongly when we are hiring anyone on the team like we need we need to put the trust uh with the developer community and so that's that's respected so like in addition to all the core skill sets great speaker stop contributor all of the other stuff but are you are you putting the developers interest fast you know you said something that i thought was so good and i know it uh first of all just say you know google did uh you know there's vikandotra back in the time and different people went and said hey we're gonna go with advocacy as a name uh when we rebooted our work we picked that up too and i think it was a very important moment for us in the industry and profession because i think that some of that consistency and what the roles need to be is really important i think we can all do some good for profession and people as we work to develop that saying that you met one developer advocate congratulations you've met a developer advocate because they're as unique as the individuals in the world and as many developers the in our company and and we really do think of it as an engineering role and you have to be able to live in an engineering environment and we can grow and help you that but it's scrum sprint you name it part of engineering milestones contributing to a release and working that way and product feedback the ability to synthesize product feedback if i can have someone that can actually truly help me understand for the node community like why we're broken and why we need to be better you know we did that there and being able to operate the environment pure gold right to do things and connect with a customer creatively and then you can synthesize that and bring it back to the engineers feedback from advocates is completely different than anything you'll get from an enterprise customer i promise you you know why it's about five minutes to wow to start right how do you get somebody started there's no point whatsoever of doing anything on stage if it unless a customer can start doing it and if you can do that type of work and and you don't have to be a writer as a profession but you could be great at it and you can help and if you can do that if you can be the helper and bridge these things as an advocate your career is set for life because no matter whatever the environment is you're going to have valuable skills for an engineering team and a product company engineering part of this has changed a lot in our world um and our advocates sit down with the most senior people in our company distinguished engineers and technical roles and that's sought after and valued incredibly solar company really important the engineering part of it that's a great segway well can i i just want to talk for a second about interview process um that's my question so um push can we just assume uh is there there's an initial there's a technical and um there's a presentation for a lot of dev advocates or is there another aspect that you guys add to your let me talk a little bit more generally first right there are different ways to run um interview processes and a lot of them are dependent upon the company you're interviewing with yes and so um the last um pretty much the last decade i've been working for companies that have taken um a behavioral-based approach to interviewing and that's the way that we did things at aws it's the way we do things at hashicorp um and i find it a very very effective means for finding out about these things that we're talking about whether it's empathy or customer awareness or how you operate uh in engaging with other teams how you share deliverables and those sorts of things are the things that are trying to be uncovered using behavioral based interviewing so if you're looking at companies like hashicorp where we publish our leadership principles very very clearly or aws where you publish your leadership principles what the interview process is there the job of that interview process is to have you find places in your work experience that you can express as examples of those principles so for hashicorp whether it is pragmatism or integrity or execution or vision or beauty works better those principles are things that you should feel like do i have a representative example for my work history that matches up with one of those principles if you don't then you may not be a good match for the company you may be excellent at what you do you might be a much better match for a different company but for the companies that do think about their principles as the guiding responsibility for having a good match for their employees and how they do hiring then that's the way to sort of approach those problems i've found behavior based interviewing incredibly valuable it's helped me level set across different roles and different responsibilities it's helped me become repeatable and more accurate and it's one of the things i think is super important and so it's like a it's a style or technique you need to recognize if you're interviewing with that company that's the way i'm going to need to prepare for it if you're going to interview for another company maybe you need to practice hypotheticals or coding examples or go through algorithmic tests or whatever it is but like for other companies they've got different responsibilities different ways they evaluate candidates for me in my experience by the time you've gone to the in-person part of the interview process we've already decided you're a functional fit you already know that you have the skills to do the job we're spending most of the rest of the time at least 75 percent of our time is spent working out whether you'll be a cultural fit for our organization and that is something that's really a matter of are you the are you the right person for the organization not can you do the job right grace do you guys have specifics on your interview process that would help the audience yeah actually i was going to add even before you get to the interview process i think making sure the job discretion that you post for any of your roles in deveral are inviting to a whole diverse audience of folks so the rockstar thing caught me because that's one of the things i always eliminate from our job descriptions because women in particular often don't relate to that and that they will automatically eliminate themselves from the process if they see things like expert or rockstar but when you use the words have experience in or have done speaking they'll apply so just want to like shout out for like diversity and making sure your job descriptions from the very beginning are inviting to a wide range of uh recruits so that's one is where it's starting from the very beginning and setting the right job description that's inviting um for us we always do uh the presentations i think that's a really important part for our developer advocate role in particular because it's not just about the presentation i'm looking for are they relating are they empathizing how do they do under stress with three or four different panelists who are asking them questions during that presentation and so really being prepared and understanding it's not just a broadcast it's a conversation right and making sure that you can have those conversations on demand in person i think is a very important skill to have for our other roles it really depends we have program managers as well we have engineers so we craft the interview panel based on that specialized skill set that we're looking for but to adam's point it's also super important for us to make sure there's a cultural fit so we are looking at behavior as well there i wonder if some kid people wonder like you know like you know i've interviewed a lot of candidates we all have had on here i think i give a little advice about the process right one uh you're a company and i'll even joke you know if you're on my team hey don't listen to this advice um i want you to be on our team forever but you probably should listen like know your market value out there right and and make sure you're aligned to that i i sometimes meet people that are just like have no idea how amazing they are and how incredibly well they would be treated at any of the any other different company and you start talking and they just have no idea or i find some people that it's completely out of bounds they just like they come in they think they're amazing and you get talking to them through an interview process and they maybe realize wow i have this to learn but i'd say you know that process is valuable for that i will say it can be very invigorating it can be incredibly destructive here right i know different times i left microsoft one time to go to twitter right um and i sometimes will get phone calls from other competitors and i'm not going and i'm not interviewing but like my wife go please like you're not looking i said no no no no i'm so happy that can be disruptive and i would say the thing on the advice i would give you is momentum is everything here this is the only bit i will talk to you is like when if you're looking at another role look at a perspective is this going to advance that journey and dream that i've got am i going to build skills but then also understand is this a season where i want to be doing this and then i i the thing that i ask candidates i'd say are you packing a parachute or are you trying to get a career because if you're packing a parachute you need to get out like let's go find some things and let's go help you with that because you're in some environment let's have one conversation two if you're looking for career opportunity let's spend a longer term and some of these conversations are 12 to 18 months conversations that i'm having with people there are people that are coming come onto my team you know i hired some different people from google i was probably a year and a half so just think about establishing that relationship and i'd say decide when you want to go looking at stuff and don't feel bad about it the only other thing i'll say is be upfront you know talk to when you're talking to us and you want to talk salary don't lie be open you know work those things like this and and stand and be open and look for what you should be wanting for salary and take care of yourself and then the last thing is um when you go back to your employer and you are looking to move on to a new role and this is the part that's also scary because i'm over there trying to hire you if you're talking to me hey please come and i'm trying to guide you through the process do not feel bad i'll tell you exactly what i tell every single employee that i end up in that moment when one of adam or grace or anybody is going off and trying to get them there i say wow congratulations you got to feel great you know they've seen you what we see in you you're awesome how do we you know are you thinking about going and have that conversation please do not feel bad about looking after your career and your livelihood and your family and all your people by growing and taking care of yourself and investing don't feel bad don't feel but also communicate um really into it thank you that's awesome sorry we are at time we need to break to our um to our uncommon speakers but thank you so much to all of you and yeah i'll add that um i talked to someone probably for a year and we would not we just didn't have the ability to hire in a certain geography and then at a certain point our business model shifted and suddenly i was like great you know i can have a distributed team and so that long conversation turned into a fantastic fantastic member of our team so i'm sure you all have similar experiences for that thank you so much for your time um i hope that everybody can take away from this the video will be posted and uh you gave such great advice so we will grow continue to grow this debris community as it is growing as well so thank you so much again it's great seeing you thank you you

Channel: Dev Rel

Views: 186

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: VbM-Ii2HLoA

Length: 46min 16sec (2776 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 23 2021