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Michael:
I’m Michael, he’s Abdul here we are running your sass business, what to look for when hiring developers. That’s what we’re covering today. Today is June 19 2020,
I’m sure by June of 21 will have completely different thoughts on this. But this is what we’re doing right now. And what we’re looking for, what do we hire developers? And it’s interesting, you know, so we create these agendas, we quickly look at them before we jump on the phone or jump on the video here. And the first statement here that we have, and it’s a little bit of a disagreement now, we’ll probably agree at the end of this. All right. Well, because we’ll both explain where we’re coming from. But I think he I think Abdul purposely wrote this knowing it would get a rise out of me, right. So his statement was is overrated work ethic is key. Okay, so I’ll let you go ahead and talk a little bit first what you made of what you
Abdul:
meant about that. Okay, so yep, that was added on purpose. You’re right on that, that I did I make it the first statement. And I added that. But I think what’s I just, the reason I worded it like that is just to make, like, put a point across. Like, I do agree on passion. I do know, it’s very important. And like, just like for us as well, like both of us are really passionate about what we do. And that’s the only reason why we can do so many things. And I think work ethic also is dependent on passion. You cannot have a good work ethic, if you don’t if you’re not passionate. But the problem is I see a lot of people nowadays just talking about passion. They just keep saying who do I have to be passionate to I’m very passionate. If you if you seeing your passion, and you’re not doing any any work ethic is not like translated like if you say you’re very passionate about code, but you cannot code for more than one hour a time one hour a day. Right, then you’re not passionate, you’re you’re just using that, you know, like an added factor. Like you because nowadays passionate school, right? So everyone is passionate about something, but your actions should also justify it. Your work ethic should also justify you being okay, you’re saying you’re passionate. So I should, we should see that in your work ethic, right? You shouldn’t be like, the first one to kind of the last one to come. And the first one to leave if you’re passionate about something. If you’re saying that, if you think you’re passionate, but you’re not working, you’re like your work ethic doesn’t like support that, that you’re not passionate at all. There was such I think, where I kind of stand with this. It’s not just all passion, because you can find a lot of people that just say they’re passionate about everything, but you don’t see them going anywhere with it.
Michael:
That makes a little more sense. And I agree with the fact that words are cheap, and action speak words, right? That’s, that’s, that’s how I look at it. And when you’re passionate, the work ethic follows I feel like and that’s kind of how I view it right. So Yes, you can’t just say you’re passionate about something and never go do anything, right that doesn’t. But if I think if you work hard at something, there is some chance that you are passionate about it. Now there are those few people that can work at something and they’re not very passionate about it. Like, I don’t know if you know, the tennis player, Craig Christos. He’s from Australia. He’s on the tour. He says he hates it, but he’s really good. You’d rather go play basketball. That’s what he says all the time in it. And you can see it in his body language. He doesn’t love doing it, but he’s just really good at it. And that’s like, the not the norm, I would say, right? That’s the anomaly. Instead of somebody that’s truly passionate, and they love what they do and the work and the work, they’ll put in the work to do that. Right. So yes. So saying you’re passionate is overrated and working. That’s how I’d say that statement.
Abdul:
Right? You need to see right because work at work. I think if you get to prove it, right like you can feed everyone on their feed that I’m really passionate about something. But your work ethic is what proving that? are you passionate? Or are you just kind of you know, just saying it because it sounds good. Yep.
Michael:
Yeah. And I think kind of in that, in that vein, the next topic that we kind of have here is smart. Like everyone always says work smarter, right? That’s what everyone always says, right? But at the end of the day, if you just work your tail off, it’s gonna be you’re gonna be fine. Now, do we all want to work smarter? Yeah, I don’t want to have to dig a trench from here to 3000 yards from here with my hand. I’d rather go get a backhoe to dig it out, right? Like that’s working smarter now. But will you still have to work your butt off, you still got to go and do the work. And I think that’s kind of how I do that statement. So and I think what it relates to developers, that’s because that’s kind of our position in this is that you want the guy that’s going to work his butt off, right? And try to really, really get after
Abdul:
so and you have to be smart about it. Like I said, like not digging a trench with your hand. But the problem here nowadays is that you fear a lot of people when they see someone who’s working really long hours or working a lot. If you look, it’s not about hard work. It’s about smart work, because you feel a sort of contempt in that statement, right? Like, they don’t want you because they don’t work hard enough. They don’t want you to also work hard enough, right? And just think smart, work smart. It’s just their way of kind of, you know, like, telling their mind that what they’re saying is correct, right, because anyone who’s a really hard worker, I’ve never seen them not working smartly as well not being smart about their work. They’ll find out good ways to kind of okay,
Michael:
maximize, they learn, they learn they learn to get smarter, and they work harder they work smarter that way after, like talk about your programming right? Just think how much better you are at programming now than the first bash script you created right of house much smarter you’ve gotten just because you’ve done the hard work to get to where you are right and I think that really shows them programming. Yes,
Abdul:
no. Making anything because now the problem in snake what people when the when you hear people saying that they don’t mean it the way that we are talking about it right now, right? They mean it in more of a like a contempo? Why are you what kind of why are you working so hard? Like you shouldn’t, you should take it easy. That’s what they kind of mean, when they say working smarter, like they think somehow working smartly means working less. It doesn’t mean working less. It means getting more done in a shorter amount of time. Yeah, that’s the main thing. It doesn’t mean working less. So I think that’s big. And I hear this a lot when talking to people as well like when interviewing people. And I do put this as a question as well. Do you believe in hard work or smarter because that’s kind of a trick question by me, because that’s how I kind of and then I ask them Okay, why? And then that’s when you get to know okay, how does this person think like, they just kind of pay just to get whatever they get done? Are they really like into it? Because you hear this a lot and like a smart work in schools. Everyone wants to say smart, very few people come in and say artwork, but what If that’s what you have, because it’s not cool
Michael:
hardware, it’s not cool. But to be honest, that’s how I got to where I am. I think that’s how I’m where you how you got to where you are, right? We grind it out every day come in, do the work, gets smarter through doing the work and become more efficient through all of that, right. I think the next thing we kind of talk about is, you know, being a manager, like you have manager if one written down, you know, being self sufficient, especially in this work at home environment, right? Where we kind of all are now, more so than we were 6334 months ago, right? Is this manager of one, why don’t you expand upon why you think that’s important for developers and when it’s key when you’re hiring or looking to hire those guys, or gals,
Abdul:
I think like what the things we’re talking about so far, and they apply to everyone, right? They not just tell us don’t apply to developers they apply to everyone. I think exactly as your phone also applies to everyone but like these are things that are very important for Developers well, because like, like you said, in our environment where nowadays, like development has changed a lot Mikey, like you always mentioned that you used to develop like a few years back as well. So if you just think about that time, like, things have changed a lot right at that time, there was like a waterfall method of development, like you had the speed features like, one department will get it done, we’ll send it to the next team, they’ll get it done, they’ll send it to the next team, they kind of foreign or any waterfall kind of method, and product development taking like two years, three years to get printed on a CD, like a DVD and then nowadays, it’s very exciting. So they have like there are a lot of people still their dependencies, but a lot of things move much, much faster. So if the person isn’t a manager of when if they cannot pick up their own toxic splint, either they are following again like I Jen methodology before, again, Ben, Scrum, whatever you’re following. If they’re not there, they cannot plan their workout. They cannot commit to estimations. They cannot estimate Wait, how much time it will take, they cannot pick up their own tasks, they cannot kind of like, get anyone, anyone else who needs to kind of come into their task or give them something cannot get them to do that. The problem is, then it becomes like they become the weak link in the team, right? Like when the team is moving fast, someone will have to compensate for that there will be someone in the team who will have to kind of you know, compensate for that weak link. So I think it’s very important like they say, and I think like, like I think we’ve talked about before like hat like using those sports kind of things in business as well. And in these development teams as well. You can have 10 really, really good developers put in a week developer like put in a big player, the team he’ll pull everyone down because everyone will have to wait for him. And I think sports also like I think you can expand on that. It’s very common in sports as well. Like you were asked I don’t know how it’s how that statement goes Are you as as powerful as the weakest kind of link in the team like that?
Michael:
Now you definitely see that especially I you know, I coach high school basketball and if you’re a practice, you have to, you can only teach to the to the slowest learner, right is really are the one that picks up the skills and unless you just leave them behind right is what’s kind of what you’re saying in the programming world, you just leave somebody behind because they can’t keep up. Right. So I think that, you know, just having that ability to do that. So commitment to the product is next. And then we have Lastly, belief in the product and management team. So I think they kind of go in together, right. So the commitment to the product. I think, as leaders, it’s important for us to establish the vision so that they see what we’re trying to build. And they have to believe in it to be a very, very successful developer, I think, a fraud and our two developers a fraud and Hassan truly believe in the product we’re building. And that’s why we get great work from them. Right. And I think they believe what we’re trying to do, which is the management team part of it, right? So your thoughts thoughts on that? No, I think like,
Abdul:
unless even if, like if I’m working on something, if I believe in it, my the way I work on it would be very different to just something Oh, I just have to do this just because I’m getting paid to do this kind of attitude, right? Because when you believe in something that okay, this is something that I really believe in and this can they really take off? everything, every action that you take will be dependent on that table. If you don’t believe in it, that means you will always have an exit plan ready, right? Because if you don’t believe in one foot out the door, or Yeah, you’ll always have an exit plan. And when you have an exit plan, it reflects in the code, right? Because if you know that you’re here for the next five years, anything that you go today, you know that tomorrow, come and bite you, right? So you will be mindful of that. But if you know that, okay, I’ll be out of here in like six months, right? So then it’s the next four in your mind, even if you’re not doing it consciously, subconsciously in your mind. That’s the next guy’s problem. That’s not you problem, right to figure it out. So I think these things like sometimes like, it’s difficult to see, like, consciously because a lot of these things just happen subconsciously. If you don’t believe in the product, your code will suffer because of that, if you don’t believe in the management team, okay? You don’t believe that these guys know what they doing, are they they have the right vision in their mind, your respect for them will be not that much, again, that will reflect in your code, right? So having developers that sometimes they don’t need to understand everything, right. Like when early development fund came on board, he wasn’t from this kind of the same cloud industry. He didn’t know much about cloud hosting and how that was, but he knew he was a great developer. And I didn’t do a technical interview with him. But I knew when I met him the first time that okay, this guy’s knows what he’s talking about, and he has the right attitude. So now if if someone talks to him today, no one will know that it’s been like one and a half months that he’s been beaten this cloud hosting industry because he Because he was he worked hard. We covered that gap in like, one month. And he was up to speed with everything. So I think that’s where it kind of starts becoming very important to have all these things in developers as well. Because something I think, is to add one thing, many times you just see that when people are looking to hire developers, they just look for technical skills they will use to our technical interviews, give them hundreds of questions. They’re just looking to get the most technically competent guy. But it’s not like it’s not a Okay, if you have just one development, the team like you just you have one developer in your company, maybe it can work. But if you have more developers, making sure they can play well in the team, making sure that like, even like when I meet people, like it’s okay 3.2 games, I know the culture of the team right now. 20 people 35 people that we have, I need to make sure that the next person that comes in has a similar cultural value as well because then you don’t want to disturb everything in the team for these things that aren’t like kind of talked about a lot, but they do matter.
Michael:
Yeah. Yeah. And I think kind of what we’re talking about here, usually look for in positions outside of developers, right? That’s and we, we’d like to your point, we just go straight to the technical Hey, do you know this language, I will do you know this, but like this database, whatever. And you have to remember, these people aren’t just the technical part, they still form part of your team part of your company that people interact with and see. So those same things like we always hire on passion, right? So and hard work, right? Both of those and you want a developer that’s going to be both of those, not just somebody that’s strong, technically, right. But somebody that’s engaged in your code wants to be a part of the growth of the company. So that’s kind of at a high level, what we look for when hiring developers and what we’ve learned kind of through this, hopefully, you guys can get a nugget or two out of this. It’s pretty subjective. You know, a lot of people look at this differently. You know, Hey, I just want a technical guy that can do this cool. That’s maybe what you want. We want people that are passionate about our product that are committed to the product, and that believe in what we’re trying to build itself. Right. So any last words you want to put in?
Abdul:
I think we kind of covered it all.
Michael:
Cool. Alright, well, that wraps it run in your sass business, what to look for when hiring developers. Michael, he’s Abdul. See you guys next time.
