 Hey friends, I'm Scott Hanselman and welcome to OpenJS World. I was told to give a keynote, but rather than me talking for a long time with evocative stock photography and inspirational stories, I thought a better idea would be to bring people who are much more interesting and much more competent than I to the stage. So I'm going to be thrilled to introduce our panelists for this wonderful panel getting hired. So again, I am Scott Hanselman. To my left, we have Jerome Hardaway from Vets Who Code. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me, Scott. In the lower corner here, down here, we have Zainab Ebrahimi, CEO at Flourish. Hello. Hey, thanks for having me. And then right down here, we've got Seran Yitbarik, founder of Code Newby as well as other ventures and just general positive enabler on the internet. How are you? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Cool. So this panel wants to kind of talk about getting hired to code a little bit about it. We're in the middle of, you know, in the middle of a Panera bread in the middle of a panini. Some people find that an offensive joke. I find it funny every single time. I don't care whether you think it's a bad thing or not. We're in a really difficult time right now, both in tech. We're having growing pains as a war as a world. We're separated and not all in person at OpenJS World right now. And getting hired is really hard. Every time I hear about someone losing their job in the middle of this pandemic, I think to myself, wow, this is a really rough, a rough time to be doing that. Zainab, have people been coming to Flourish for coaching and being better at getting hired during this time? Yeah, what you're saying is absolutely right. It is a lot harder doing this time. We've been seeing a lot of people struggling to get jobs a lot more than we had in last year. I think things are going to get better. I'm feeling very hopeful that come the summer and the trends, especially here in the U.S., is going. Like, things are going to get better, but yeah, it's been a struggle. And mostly it has to do with the hesitancy of a lot of companies to hire more junior engineers or more entry-level engineers and setting a bar extremely high. There's one anecdote that I'll share. I saw a job posting, and actually this happened a lot, where there's a job description for an entry-level position asking for five years of experience. And so it's a little rough out there for sure. Yeah, Seran, you've dedicated a lot of your career to help people who are early in career be successful. It seems like there's a bit of a haves and have-nots between there's like people who have 20 years experience and they may have trouble finding jobs because of ageism, and people who are just getting started who can't get anyone to take a chance on them. Yeah, absolutely. And I think one thing that's been really encouraging in recent years is moving away from calling them junior developers to early career developers. I think that slowly we're becoming a little bit more open-minded as to the different skill levels we're willing to accept in developer positions. And I think just starting with naming is a good sign that we're moving in the right direction. I've also seen titles like Associate Developer, which is also encouraging because it kind of establishes the career ladder a little bit sooner, a little bit earlier in someone's career, and I find that really encouraging. So I think that we are, I think we're very, very far away from getting to where we want to be, but I can see kind of baby steps in incorporating and introducing people with just one or zero years of experience into the official ladder at a tech company and at an engineering team. One of my bosses has said that when you're putting together a basketball team, you can't teach height, but everything else can be taught ball handling rules of the game and all those kind of things. And he is consistently surprised that we don't hire for height because honestly, you know, oh, you don't know Ruby. That's fine. We'll teach you Ruby. You don't know C-Sharp. We'll teach you C-Sharp. Jerome, you work with veterans and upskilling those veterans. Why don't people teach, why don't people hire like that? I think, especially when I'm sitting in the market right now, I just think it's, if I'm being 100% honest, I'm thinking it's a little bit of trying to hedge the bets in their favor and, you know, just laziness, right? I've been on this remote journey of being able to educate enough skilled people remotely for six, seven years, right? So I have that experience. A lot of people, especially we're not truly doing it remote first or doing it, you know, in a pandemic. So it's not like real remote work where you, you know, you can work from home and then you like, you know, go to the beach and then everybody's happy and stuff. It's like, oh, you know, I'm going to put on a mask and wash my hands like 45 seconds because, you know, I don't want to get sick. So it's a different mindset and people are just not thinking from it like in that aspect when it comes to hiring and like working with remote workers. I spoke last week to a company that had 200 entry level jobs just on backfield. I was like, you know, we're just going to wait till the world opens up when my senior software engineers, my alumni who are getting going for their second jobs when they come to me and they ask me to like help them with it. They're getting hired within weeks and they're getting upwards to like the salary plus like 20, 30, 50% more than what they asked for. I have a veteran who just came. He's in, he's in Seattle, but he just got a job in Nashville. He's getting paid 50% above the average salary of a senior front engineer there. So it's a real, like it's a really crazy market right now, particularly for those who are senior. They're able to get, you know, they're getting snatched away hotcakes and they're getting a lot more money than they're asking for. While juniors, they're having to almost be like small versions of DevRel and they're having to really showcase those skills to instill that social equity to, you know, get companies to, you know, take a chance on them. Yeah, it feels like the bell curve, the standard bell curve is kind of inverted right now. And we're seeing very, very early in career and very, very senior people and everyone is having a challenge right now getting someone to take a chance on them. And to your point, we're all remote. So I guess we won't hire a junior, excuse me, pardon me, an early in career or an emerging developer because we don't have the time the patients perhaps were too lazy to really invest in them. I can't sit with that person and give them that love that they need that. And honestly, the ability to fail. I think that we don't give early in career developers a safe place to fail fast and often without judgment. We call it grace and like my community, like you have to be able to give people grace. Like we demand, we demand a level of perfection that we can obtain from the juniors that we didn't have. And as particularly when you go to like middle and senior engineers, they are, I've seen it in my community a lot where people are demanding a level of capabilities. I'm like, do you not remember how like when we first got in this community, how easy it was to get in? Like all you had to do was know bootstrap and jQuery. Like now is a front end. You can't even like you need to know our front end framework. You need to understand APIs. You need to like be able to tell the difference between several front end CSS frameworks from bootstrap to foundation to tell when it's not the same. So we have to give people grace. If I may, that's an excellent segue. Let me ask you this, Zainab, that list of skills that Jerome just rattled off, which is large. What do early in career developers feel when they see that like this is the stack you need to make a web page? Yeah, it's pretty overwhelming. I think what we've been seeing a lot with the people that we've been talking about is like a lot of anxiety and feeling like they're not good enough, right? And I find that that mentality sometimes even hinders their ability to really get through the interview process, right? Because when you're going, the interview process in itself is already extremely hard, right? You're like put on the spot. You have to talk to people. It's really anxiety inducing in it itself. If on top of that, you feel like, you know, there's so much to learn. There's so much to know. And I'm expected to know all of these things all at once in order to prove myself in order to get this job that I really want. And I like to reframe that a little bit in the sense that if you can code, you can learn. And this industry, it's all about learning. Nobody is perfect. Nobody knows it all, right? Like I've been in the industry for 10 years, almost 10 years. And there are so many things that I don't know. And it's like more about being comfortable with the idea that you will not know, but that you can convince someone. And first of all, convince yourself that you can pick up any framework that comes around. You know what I mean? Like you can learn and that is this type of stuff that gets you hired, right? Being able to demonstrate that you're resourceful, that you can learn, that you're driven. And I think that that's the focus that we should be having really because the amount of frameworks and technologies and tools that are going to come up are going to continue to grow, right? And that should not be the focus. If you can code, you can pretty much pick up any of those things along the way. So Ron, in your career, you have been very much someone who empowers and wants people to think about the system as opposed to thinking about the individual line of code. Is that important? What Zaneva is saying? To like learn how to learn is the most important skill that people have to have right now in today's job market? I think so. I think the other thing is to learn how to focus. I spent a lot of time talking to all kinds of strangers all over the world. And just, you know, offering my descents and trying to be helpful and giving feedback and perspective on their, you know, job hunts and their learn to code journeys. And one of the things that shows up over and over again is just people just bouncing around and being all over the place. And their inability to, you know, to lower their inability, but their struggle to learn isn't because they literally can't learn. It's because they feel, as Z said, overwhelmed and they feel all over the place. And they feel like, oh, you know, I hear about this new framework. Okay, let me jump to this real quick. Oh, two weeks past. Oh, no, there's another frame. Okay, let me go to this. And they're jumping around so much and so frequently that they get nothing done. And then feeling like they get nothing done makes them feel stupid and that they can't learn. And then this is vicious cycle. So I feel like, you know, it's not just learning how to learn, but learning how, as Jerome just put it in the chat, learning how to plan and learning how to stick to a plan and believe in the plan, kind of trusting the process. I think is something that is understandably very, very difficult for something that's as hard as coding. But I think that's a really big problem that I've seen. And I really like what I'm seeing in social media with younger people. And I mean, literally younger in age using technology in a way that is creative so that they can have accountability partners. There's a young woman on TikTok named Medical Cat with a K. She streams herself studying so that others might normalize studying for three or four hours at a time. So she puts her phone there and she studies, she plays music, she has Pomodoro's. And then every 25 minutes she takes a break and she addresses the live audience. And it's mostly just chill and vibe and learn with Cat. And I think to myself like, wow, I would never have that ability to be that organized to be that disciplined to be that planned. But what's cool about it is that you're watching her be dedicated to a thing. And it's like, well, if this internet stranger is being open and positive and empowering, then maybe I'll plan my study and we'll do it together. We'll study together. And having those partnerships as opposed to traditional mentorships, which is just old person, lecturers, young person, I think is a new way to think about studying and planning, especially in public. Jerome, now you have put together vets who code for many years now and it's not necessarily a mentorship program. There's a lot of peer, you know, people mentoring each other kind of work as well. How do you make sure that it's not just you hold court, you know, regularly and tell them what you know? How do I make sure? Well, just how the world is best with this? I feel like I have an unfair disadvantage in the education place, right? I am my people, right? The people that come through vets who code, they're usually people who, you know, they were on the front lines and battlefields and stuff. And that's who I was. So in the military, they would call us like first term troops like the E4 mafia. So the lower ranking people and I'm one of them. So it's like, I know where they come from. So I'm a part of the gang and I'm able to talk to them in their language and be able to come from a fire team format of like, yeah, this is how we're going to do this. Like, all right. You speak their language. Yes, exactly, right? I can come in talking to them the way they've already been trained. And it just resonates, right? And they understand because from my background, I have, you know, I have enough experience to where most of the guys and girls who are in infantry are like Erin, who she was an EOD or just explosive originate disposal because she did want to jump out of planes. So she shows bombs over planes that swallowed me. What I'm hearing you, though, is that what you're saying is because you are a time shifted version of them, you're them in the future. Yes. That proves that it's possible and then they can run in the direction that you're running. And I think that's the biggest, like, yeah, I think that's the biggest secret. Like, you know, I'm, I think I'm the only code school guy that's not like, you know, I don't have fancy masters or anything like that. And I was like, hey, yo, I was out there. I switched to M4 for a MacBook Pro. I never looked back just like, yo, so, you know, if I could do it, you can do it. And then let me, you know, let me put you guys in a team and then we're going to work together in a team and we're going to hurry up and assess each other's strengths and weaknesses. And then based upon your strengths and weaknesses, we can bring in other mentors and based upon the things that you love and enjoy up that will bring in people that can talk to you and just keep that type of communal ecosystem in, right? So I like, you know, we have people who are who love CSS and love UX and people who love just, you know, doing API serverless. And I try to, you know, see, I try to quickly identify, it's almost like, you know, the 360 of a battlefield. I'm always trying to, um, perpendicularly, like cyclically, in a cyclical manner, identify what they love and what they have problems with and try to, like, fill the gaps of those. So that's, like I said, I have, I have an unfair advantage because I think move and communicate like them, right? So a lot of places don't have that. So let me ask this then, Zainab, how important is it that people who are into tech and beginning see people who are their people? Because Jerome has just described a really welcoming environment that, you know, and I'll be honest with you, Jerome, doesn't speak to me, right? Because I never served and thank you for your service. But I'm hearing that that's what they need. How important is it, Zainab, for people to see people that look like them in tech? Thank you. Maybe muted. My bad. Yep. Um, it's absolutely important. Um, I think the idea of belonging goes such a long way, right? Because this industry and just coding in general is seen as something that's very hard that takes a lot of focus, it takes a lot of energy. And sometimes we struggle with a lot of imposter syndrome, right? Like knowing that someone like me can do it is such a huge boost, right? Specifically because of that anxiety that comes with, you know, doing something that's really hard. I kind of, you know, sharing like an example when I got started to learn how to code, it was extremely intimidating because I was the only woman and woman of color in my classes, right? I did not see any people like me that had my interest in the industry either. And so I, you know, tiptoed around it and I had a lot of mental blocks. And I think that a lot of times it has to do with that mental block that doesn't allow us to like either do well in the interview process or doesn't allow us to like get our energy and focus to start a project. Because I remember when I was early on in my career, I would hear a lot of advice about like, oh, you need to build, you know, build some projects on the side and that's going to boost your resume or you should be studying two hours a day and I couldn't do it. I struggled so much with it because I just felt like I was, I just didn't have the capacity, right? And it wasn't until I started feeling more comfortable in my skin that those things started to come so easily. And so a lot of the belonging is so important because it gives you a safe place to start. And so I think that's why representation is so important because it gives you a safety pad. Like, oh, this person did it, then maybe I can do it too, right? And you don't have to feel that anxiety that you have to always be performing or you have to convince yourself and others that you belong in this place. That statement that you made that someone says, you know, she did it, I can do it. And if I see that person, I can do it. I don't want me doing it to make someone feel like they explicitly can't. For example, when I go to family get-togethers, I'm the computer person. And there's something about me or my style or whatever because I'm more of a classic nerd thing with the Star Wars and the whatnot and the LEDs and the video games. They go, oh, he's a computer person, you know, he's a computer person. But very early we get split into computer people and not computer people. And I don't like that. I want to normalize normal people coding. And whenever someone, you know, I say, I'm a computer person and then that immediately frames our relationship such that they go and flip the, I'm not a techie. But you are. You use Excel and you do great things with Word and you, you know, do macros and Photoshop. Like maybe you're more technical than you give yourself credit for. You know, what can we do in the community to be more welcoming to those people? Jerome, you look like you have something that you want to add. Yeah, I've been thinking about that a lot. My solution to this is normalizing people bringing their entire self to work and not just when it like benefits the company. All right. You've had a lot, especially past two years being a minority. We've had a lot of conversations around Black Lives Matter and being able to bring your whole self to work. But as you've been seeing, of course, past year companies have started to take that back because it's a lot harder than, you know, throwing a black swear on Instagram or a black banner. So the first thing that we have to do is just allow people to be their whole self. Like, you know, if you see me on Twitter twice a day, I'm talking about cooking recipes, right? Because that's what I like to think about when that helps me get my brain working better than thinking about code, right? But, you know, oh, I wonder how Kevvie our fried rice would go. And you get people like saying like, stay in your lane, Jerome, I came here for the tech. I don't want to hear about your recipe. Well, I think like I said, it's very hard because of my background. No one really tries to gatekeep me because they're like, this dude has a purple heart. Who am I going to like tell this dude what he can and can't do? So it's very, it's very weird, right? So, but I think as a community, we just got to let people bring their whole selves to work. Like, I love going on Twitter and finding all the other random things out about people. Like, you know, air fryer nation, right? Well, Angie, right? That's amazing. Like all these people, of course, is a very famous developer and a tester and international speaker who also has a cult of people who love air frying. And they've even made t-shirts, right? And that's a really great example, though, that we as a community need to be welcoming to people and all of their diverse, diverse interests. I know, Saran, that when you founded Code Newbies, that was really, really important to make it so everyone could be interested in all the things that they're interested in. You are normalizing normal people coding. Yeah, exactly. And, Jerome, I totally love your point about seeing different people and bringing them their whole selves. One of my favorite people to follow on Instagram is April. I can't remember her last name right now. But she's Vogue and Code on the Internet. She works for Microsoft. And she, I just love her Instagram because she's, I think she's a developer relations person, I think. She does. Where's your reality now? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And she's talking about her, you know, her plants and her fashion. She sews her own clothes, these beautiful designs and how she organizes her office. And I think she just moved to a new house. And it's just so much fun seeing someone who's highly technical, written books about Python, you know, does so many great, you know, hardcore, quote, unquote, code things being just a normal person. And for us at Code Newbie, for us where that really, we've tried to kind of emphasize that is in the podcast. We have a show called the Code Newbie podcast. We've done hundreds of episodes over the last six, seven years now. And when we pick the guest, when we pick who we want to showcase on the show, we go for people who are normal, people who represent all different walks of life, all different backgrounds, people who started as babysitters and teachers. And, you know, one of our most popular episodes was the truck driver who learned how to, how to code, you know, in between, you know, driving trucks and on little breaks and late at night. And just saying that, you know, normal people, people with regular jobs with, you know, maybe a little bit more humble beginnings can get started. And by showcasing such a wide range of people, you know, a nice array of people, you're able to send home the message that, hey, there is no archetype. There is no one right way to do it. There is no single path. Everyone is different. And this place is welcoming to all. So for us, it's been storytelling. That's been our primary tool. That's great. Doesn't it seem like that, that open source and Linux and JavaScript and open code is really like should be the place where people go to get involved in tech. Like it is on the open source community to be like, hey, like the whole point of all of this was free code and free, you know, free knowledge and all these kinds of things. This should be the community that people go to, to get involved in technology saying that when you are coaching people to be to, you know, to go and get jobs to go and do interviews and things like that. Does open source matter on their resumes? 100%. I actually think that that is a great opportunity to showcase your, your skills, but also your drive. Right. It shows that you care about someone else's project or that you care about a community and to build it. And it is a huge booster in someone's resume, especially if you're just getting started with your career. So that is definitely somewhere that I try to like point people towards, but I will say that a lot of people kind of feel intimidated by that as well. You know, and I think it has to do with the fact that we are probably scared of like making mistakes, right? Like if I open a pull request on some, you know, open source project, what if I get, you know, rejected? What if someone, you know, is criticizing the way that I'm approaching this? And so I think there's definitely a need for creating a little bit more of an incentive for people to feel okay with like, you don't have to get everything right. You know, you don't have to get everything perfect. And it's about the intention and just getting ourselves out there. Yeah. That's a callback a little bit to that, that statement that I made a little bit ago where I said people need a welcoming place to fail. That's the number one thing at Microsoft where I work that we feel that the early incorribe will say that they don't feel comfortable failing because they think they have to be perfect. They were perfect their whole lives to get to this place. And now they're at this big scary company and they need to do just the right thing. And I would really like them to be able to fail quickly, you know, hopefully without costing billions of dollars as fast as possible. And they always like, how do you know this? God, how do you know this obscure thing? Well, many years ago when I failed very, very quickly, I learned this thing, this semicolon that just spent six hours debugging. And now you two know this stuff. Like that's how we get these stories, right? If stories of failure. That's my favorite thing. Like they just put me in a project at Microsoft and I was like, oh, I'm going to mess this up. I'm going to let y'all know that right now. And everybody was like, well, at least you're honest. I was like, yeah, I'm a, you know, you have to, like I said, the whole idea of grace, like, but it starts with yourself, right? People, they get in their own heads, right? And they are trying to live up to an unrealistic viewpoint of themselves. I'm like, you know, I try to, I tell my veterans that all the time. I'm like, did you forget how crazy it was going through basic? You were not you before you were in a basic. You were to the military, a horrible version of civilian that had to get molded into who you currently are now. So don't think about it in that, in the scope that you have to be perfect. I was like, no, they literally trained you and taught you how to do things. That's how it's going to be. Now we apply that to a community. Like one thing that I love the best that I learned from the military is, you know, I call it, I, you know, two things. Crawl walk run and buddy system. So when I, when I'm in open source and I'm helping my veterans, it's always first thing I do is I connect them to someone who has more experience in this than them. And I try to make projects that can help them grow in open source as well as, you know, not intimidate them. Yeah, I've, I've learned a lot about onboarding open source over the past six years because of, you know, I, you know, I've seen it all the bad things. I've seen all the good things. I'm like, you know what, you know, these are things that you need to, you need to find when you're going to open source, like community, just find a first find something that you actually enjoy. And then turn around and see, you know, where can I help and just start talking to people. You'd be amazed how much, you know, you will learn just doing that. And a lot of people don't think about that. You know, coding is a social game and you have to get in there and start thinking and aspects of these are people behind code, right? Companies, they don't think like that for the most part. But, you know, when it comes to open source, you can do that, particularly in JavaScript, where, you know, because of, you know, React and the VA engine. We kind of democratize coding because we went from the toy language and like flipped into like, oh, this is one of the fastest growing production level languages on the planet. Like, how did that happen? Right? It was something made in two weeks. How on earth, like, who wrote, like, who would have said that this is going to be a thing? Like, Not the language we deserve, but it is the language that we have. Yeah. Like, who had this, like, ego card. So, like, you know, and that's the idea that we have to have, right? I appreciate that. Sorry, please. In the remaining two minutes, if we could have Zainab, maybe you could offer your last minute as we head out. I almost feel like I'm just going to open a whole different tangent. I just want to point out that we've been talking about being able to fail and not necessarily not needing to be perfect, right? And being okay with not being perfect. And I feel like there's a huge failure in how we evaluate technical skills in the interview process, right? The technical interview process does not allow for any margin of error, right? So here we are talking about what it takes to be a good developer, and it's all about, you know, embracing those failures and learning. Yet, for some, for some reason, we've standardized an interview process and a technical assessment that does not allow for that. It does not allow for people to show their true colors to be able to bring their whole self to show of other skills, you know, and to show that they actually can learn and that they can actually build on previous knowledge, right? And so I think that that's a huge thing that as a tech industry, we still need to get right. And it's like the interview process itself, how we interview for tech skills. Soran, any parting thoughts as we head out to the end of our half an hour? Sure. I think that, you know, my parting thoughts are that even though we have a long way to go in terms of where we are in the tech industry and being more inclusive and being kinder and just a better place to work, I think we're definitely headed in the right direction. I've been really optimistic, especially in the last couple of years of seeing, as I mentioned, the early career developer, you know, name, change, this idea of, you know, pushing back against burnout and really embracing self care and mental health. And I feel like we are getting to a place where we are including more people and we are bringing people in. And that is because of individuals. That's because of individual people who decided to be kind, decided to be open, decided to be welcoming. So I hope each of you feel empowered to take on a little bit of that responsibility and making coding a better place to me. Fantastic. Well, I appreciate you all. I'm a founder of Serenia Barak, founder of Code Newbies, Jerome Hardaway from Vets Who Code, Zaynab Ebrahimi from Flourish, and I have been your host, Scott Hanselman, also the host of the Hanselman Itz podcast. And we've appreciated you hanging out with us here and we hope you have a great conference at OpenJS World 2021. Goodbye.