What's going on? Everybody. Welcome to another exciting episode of Adventures and DevOps.
I'm your host today, Will Button and joining me in the studio is
Jonathan Hall. Hey, well, how's it going excellent? So today we
are going to talk about some relevant some relevant topics. You know, we've
seen in the news a lot a lot of layoffs happening. A lot of
companies have announced that they're going to freeze the hiring process, and so the
end result is, if you're looking for a job, it's going to get
a lot more difficult than what it has been in years past. So we're
going to talk about some tips and tricks. Both Jonathan and I have been
doing this for a while. We've been through a few of these up and
down cycles. So we're going to share with you some of the things we've
learned over the last few decades that might help you stand out the job search
process. Awesome, So, do you know anybody will before we get started,
you know anybody who's been laid off recently? No, I don't know
anyone personally who's been laid off. There's some people that I followed them,
they follow me on Twitter that have been impacted and I know a few close
friends who haven't been laid off, but they are feeling pretty insecure currently.
Yeah, I think I'm in the same situation. In fact, I just
had a chat earlier today with a former colleague who is working freelance for a
company. He's not doing DevOps, but he's a front end developer and was
just told recently that they're going to be ending freelance contracts because of the downturn.
So yeah, I haven't had a personal impact or anybody I know,
but it's the same as you on social media. I know some people.
It's definitely a big thing. Companies are starting to do hiring freezes, in
layoffs, and even maybe even I don't know if this is worse, but
just renegging on offers, you know, retracting offers after they've been made,
which is really disappointing as a job as a job seeker. You finally got
a contract, you quit your job, maybe you went on a short holiday
excited about your new job, and then you discovered there is no new job
for you. Yeah, Coinbase stands out in my mind. They just did
that recently. Yeah, So I think the first thing that stands out in
my mind is when you're applying for a job in times like these, you've
really got to go out of your way to stand out from the other candidates.
And I think it falls into three different categories where you can stand out.
One is your resume slash cover letter, if you still use a cover
letter. The other is your social media profile, which I've talked with quite
a few people about this and this actually catches some people off guard. And
then the third I think is your work history or publicly viewable projects to demonstrate
your capabilities. Yeah, think that. I think those are all great areas
to focus on. I wrote an article. I'll put a link to it
in the show notes. I wrote an article a couple of years ago for
a recruitment agency here in the Netherlands about how to use your GitHub profile to
help you land the job. And you know, those those skills are so
important. I mean, basically, I think that you you need to convince
a hiring manager that you're probably a good candidate before they talk to you these
days, because there's so many applicants out there, so many people looking for
work, and so little time. I mean, I'm a hiring manager right
now, I have. I managed a couple of teams, and I've been
doing some interviews, not for DevOps rolls by the way, Sorry, don't
call me for that, But I have very limited time. Every every manager
does. But when it comes to hiring, you know, when there's a
thousand candidates for two positions, you have to pick the candidates that look the
most promising. You don't want to talk to everybody, even though that might
not be fair because there's great candidates who don't have great cvs or don't have
big get hub profiles. But man, realistically, they they're going to look
for somebody who looks promising before even the screening call in many cases, So
you want to look promising. So yeah, I guess that's what when you
talk about how do you look promising from the beginning, Yeah, we're talking
before we clicked on the record button. Like whenever I first got into tech,
you would break out the old newspaper and look for job ads, and
then whenever you saw one that you thought would work for you, you would
print out your resume and put it in the mail and physically mail it to
the place and to stand out, then you would go and buy this really
expensive super thick paper. So when they had a pile of resume sitting on
their desk that this one that was on this really thick paper would hopefully stand
out. Yeah, so do you think that would work these days? You
know, it might not be as effective these days. Like the big question
is when is this physical piece of mail going to actually get to the hiring
manager? Most likely serious, Yeah, like six months after they filled the
role. I hope somebody tries this as an experiment and lets us know how
it goes, because I would. I would be fascinated to hear if there's
a physical CV on any kind of paper, does it even get noticed these
days? I've heard of people putting their resume. One story I heard that
really stands out. Someone put their resume with like a five dollars Starbucks gift
card and then fedexit to directly to the hiring manager. So then if you
get a FedEx envelope the front desk or whoever's collecting the mails and say,
oh, this must be important opened it up in his cover letter said hey,
here's five bucks if you want to meet me for coffee and talk about
my qualifications for this job. I thought that was really clever. That's clever.
I wonder if it might borderline on a bribe, but it's it's certainly
a clever approach. Yeah, for sure, having been in that hiring position
in the past, I would probably meet with that individual and then return the
gift card to them at that point so that there's no no like possible and
misterpretation or anything right, good call. So I think, aside from trying
to FedEx overnight your your CV with a gift cards or another gimmicks, when
I'm looking for candidates, the things I'm looking for, of course, it
depends on the role on the seniority level, but I'm looking for indication that
this candidate has an initiative and they're capable of learning new things. Those are
the two most important things for me, I think in a new candidate,
except at really senior levels, where I don't care if they learn new things
because they already know everything I need them to know. You know, if
I'm looking for an ABS guru who can just come in and clean up our
mess because we made it. We made a crap ton of mistakes on AWS,
I don't really care that they're always trying to learn new things. I
just want an expert to come in and clean up my mess. But usually
I'm looking for I'm looking for potential, right, I'm looking for to hire
somebody who I see has made an effort in the past, and that therefore
hopefully assume that they continue to make an effort to learn new things, try
new new approaches. They're always learning, because I believe that engineering is always
about learning to solve new problems. I look at the code I wrote a
month ago, six months ago, and I think, what was I thinking.
I'm looking for sciences developers and engineers who have a similar mindset that they're
always expending. So that's why I like to see. I mean, what
are the first things I look for Whether I get a CV or a Lincoln
profile, I look for GitHub or get lab. I don't care. It's
not the brand, it's the point. I want to see what kind of
code you've written in the past, and I can often tell. In fact,
I did a couple of interviews of this last week where I looked at
the gi hub profile and I wasn't impressed. I did the interview in a
way and I wasn't impressed, you know, like the code was it is
some toy projects, which is fine, but like it just didn't. Well,
just just to be clear, one of the things that I look for
is unit tests or tests of any kind, and some of these code bases
didn't have that, which tells me that this person, you know, maybe
it's a hobby project, they didn't think it was important. And that's why
I still have the interview. I want to talk and learn learn that stuff.
But you know, if you don't have the discipline to write tests,
do you have the discipline to do other things correctly? And not everybody's going
to agree with me on the test issue, but that's one area that's easy
to look for in a GitHub repository unlike some others. So that that's only
one example. I don't want anybody to hung up on the test thing.
That's just one example of things I look for. Yeah, I think along
those lines. The other things to look for besides tests are documentation on how
to set up and run this, like is there a make file? Is
the read me very clear about how to use it? And then yeah,
and you know some type of c CD if it's a product that's applicable to
that, did you take the time to use GitHub actions or certain CI or
something so that you're not doing that manually, even if it is a personal
project, which I think is more one of the ways that a personal website
can can really work out for you. There. You know, have a
website that's hosted on S three or cloud floor pages or whatever, but integrate
it with CICD and then pull pull some data from a back end database.
So stand up a little API in AWS and so now your website demonstrates what
your capabilities are, and then that code'll losing GitHub that can be seen.
Yes, definitely mean, especially if you're looking for a DevOps type of role,
take the time to build a project, even if it's just an MVC
to do type thing, and it could be a completely throw a right project
if you have nothing else, but take the time to set up CICD,
deploy it somewhere just to show, just to prove that you can. That's
worth a lot. If it's a personal website, that's even better. I
mean, I have a CD pipeline for my personal website which is built with
Hugo set Excite gen Writer, so there's no database, but I still have
CICD and it deploys to so it's not public. But I could make a
public. It's nothing on my website. I'm hiding it's a website for goodn't
think so. Yeah, if you want to, especially if you have a
blog, or even if you don't, we'll probably talk about that in a
minute, create one. But if you a great way to demonstrate that you
know how to do CICD is to put your blog in CICD. If you're
using WordPress, maybe maybe not, but put your blog. If you don't
have, put it on. Use Jackal, or use Hugo, or use
any of those statics site generators. Throw it up somewhere. You can get
free web hosting, you can use Firebase for free, you can get all
sorts of cheap or free web hosting. Throw it up somewhere and you'll have
a CICD pipeline to prove that you know what you're doing. And I'll tell
you what if I saw that on an applicant from an applicant for a DevOps
roll, I would they would jump to the top of my list very quickly
right on. I think one of the other things that helps you stand out
are your other social media profiles, and for tech oriented roles, I tend
to lean towards Twitter a bit more than other social media profiles because Twitter has
such a strong tech unity, and I think it can really help you stand
out if you're active in that community. And it doesn't mean that you have
to have a big following or be posting viral tweets or something. It just
means following some people in the same career space as you and engaging with them
so that whenever a potential employer checks out your profile, they see that you're
active in that community. And it can also give them an idea of your
interest and capabilities by looking at the posts that you interact with in your your
contributions to those posts. Yeah. I think it's also where choosing a username
really is important. Right, So whenever you link to your profile, like
we all know and love you as bomb water four twenty on Reddit, but
you might want to pick a new user name before you paste it into your
resume. Yeah, definitely. I mean it doesn't have to be it doesn't
have to be it doesn't have to be a teching name. It just can't
be unprofessional, right right, Yeah, nothing that's going to flag the content
filters at the old corporate firewall. Yeah, were trying to look at your
Twitter profile but it's blocked for some reason. Do you hire me? I'd
be happy to take a look at that. What do you think about So
I've heard of this happening, and I've never done myself, But what do
you think about somebody who, either on the interview or in an application that
do their cover letter, they point out technical problems that your company is facing.
They like, I discovered these open ports on your firewall, or I
discovered that you have a a some sort of cross site scripting vulnerability on your
website, or there's some mescul injection going on here. Is that a good
thing to do if you could discover that? Or does that? What impression
does that leave? I think it shows initiative, but I would be very
cautious about doing it because delivery is everything. Like, whenever you deliver that
message, the recipient of that me message is going to take it as one
of two ways like oh wow, this person's already actively engaged and looking for
things to help out with, or what the hell are you doing probing our
site? You know? And which of those decisions they come to comes down
to delivery. I would probably not deliver that in any written form. I
would deliver it in a video or face to face format so that I can
control not only the language, but the tone of voice, the facial expressions,
that eye contact, the body language, all that stuff to make absolutely
certain that that message is not misinterpreted. Good advice, Yes, yeah,
what about you? What are your thoughts on that? So it shows initiative,
I think. So. I think as a hiring manager or as a
company, I think it could be nice to ask candidates to do that,
Like if you discover a vulnerability, let us know, we want to talk
to you. And I remember years past someone having a comment in there in
the source code of their HTML that says, if you're reading this, we
want to hire you, or something like that, because it indicated that someone
was, you know, hacking around a little bit. Those kinds of things
are clever and cute. So if you, as a company are interested in
attracting those sorts of people, I think that's cool. Or leave a port
open on your firewall that when you connect to it, it sends you a
message says we want to talk to you. Here's our hiring contact or something
like that. Yeah, it's kind of cool to catch those people that are
doing that. But unless the company is inviting that sort of thing, I
would be cautious. And also for two reasons. Not only does it look
a little bit fishy if you're probing our network, but it also can seem
a little bit show off. Ye yeah, and that can and there's a
there's a fine line, and I don't know where it is. There's a
fine line between being proactive and showing off, And so I would just be
very careful. It's about the delivery. I would I would wait till I
have a rapport with somebody before I started pointing out the problems. Agreed.
Yeah, So I think blogging is a is a great topic here because who
touched on in a little bit. Do you have a blog will that you
ever used to help you get hired? No? No, no, But
I do have my YouTube channel hashtag Shameless self Promotion DevOps for Developers, which
is it's sort of a video blog, you know, because it covers the
same content that I would put in a blog. I just do videos on
it instead. Yeah, well, I had I've had a blog for years
and it's these days I write every day shameless self plug here as daily to
sign up for my daily emails. But I've had a blog for years it
was. It was usually ad hoc, just whenever I thought of something,
or maybe notes to my future self, like, you know, I solved
a problem and I don't want to forget how I solved it, so I
write a little article about it. And that is invaluable as a job searcher.
I mean, if there's one thing I look for after the get hub
profile, I'm looking to see if you have a blog or other social media
presence, as long as it's easy to find. And I don't just mean
like the tweet a thousand times a week. I mean I want to I
want evidence that you have written about your technical accomplishment because that tells me about
who you are and your technical struggles too. And that's fine. You can
write a blog post about always trying to do docer with this weird thing and
it was so frustrating I couldn't figure it out. That's that's also valid.
The point is write about the technical challenges you're facing and what you're doing about
them. That says so much, and it doesn't have to be just technical,
especially if you're interested in a managerial track. If you got to be
a team leader or move into management. Right about your thoughts on management,
right about a conflict you had with a colleague. Maybe change names if you
have to for an anonymicy talk about the guy who mentored you in a great
new way, or taught you something new and exciting, or something you taught
new and exciting to someone else. Just write about your experiences that you know.
Basically, if this is a way a blog or YouTube whatever, and
to some extent, social media is a great way to extend your interview time
without the interview, you can you know all those questions that your managers will
ask, how did you solve a problem? How did you solve the conflict
of the colleague? Answer those sorts of things in a blog and make it
easy to find so that you know, I need to put the link to
your blog at the top of your CV, right next to your get hub
profile or your phone number, so it's easy to find. And those hiring
managers when they see that stuff, they're not going to spend hours reading your
blog. But if they just if they look at your blog and they see,
oh, this guy writes about doctor and Kubernetes, and oh he has
thoughts about management, that makes a big impression and I don't know. I
mean I've had, as I've been in a candidate, I've had managers and
hiring interviewers mentioned my blog many many times. Though, you know, sometimes
it's small like oh, I saw you write a blog about blah blah blah,
and half the time they're wrong, they've misremembered what it was at the
point right. And sometimes it's more detail, like oh, that blog post
about sessions that was really interesting. I never thought of that before or whatever.
So just having a blog is invaluable as a job searcher. It will
put you that in a get hub profile. Are the two things I can
think of above anything else that will get attention. I mean, those are
literally the two things I look for before I even skim through your employment history.
I'm looking for a profile and a personal website, and then I go
back and look at your employment history for sure. Yeah, agreed. I
think one of the on your personal website, which I think is starting to
stand out, is like one of the key things to do here. One
other thing I think a category I rarely see on there, but I think
is super important to have is a testimonials section. For multiple reasons. One,
I think it's good for you to get into the habit of asking people
that you've previously worked with for testimonials, you know, to find out like,
what did you do that they liked? And it's funny because I've always
said, if you know, there's like the party question. You know,
if you could have a superpower, what would it be. Mine has always
been to see myself through someone else's eyes, to see what how they see
me, And testimonials are like a little brief snapshot, and how to do
that. It'll help you refine what you're strong at that you may not have
known that you were strong at. But then, for the purposes of this
podcast, someone who is thinking about hiring you, they're going to get an
unbiased person's opinion on what it's like to work with you, which may help
put you in a more favorable light as they're building out their short list of
candidates to call in. That's a great piece of advice. I would add
to that when you ask for testimonials, try to ask specific questions. But
basically, in other words, if I say, hey, will would you
at a testimonial, You're probably going to write something, Oh yeah, I
know. Jonathan from the Adventures and DevOps podcast he's a great guy. He's
really funny, great guy, and there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah,
there's nothing wrong with that, But it doesn't really tell anybody whether I know
anything at all about DevOps or whatever I might be applying for. So I
think it's important to ask ask direct questions, things like what would you think
were the biggest strengths or what were my biggest strengths on this team? Or
what were my biggest contributions to this project. If you ask things like that
or specific, uh, You're going to get a better testimonial uh. And
this goes. This is the same as like when you when you write a
TV you want to talk about your accomplishments more than your responsibilities. Right,
we did a good job or not responsible. Tell me that you managed the
Kubernetes cluster for ten thousand nodes or whatever, and you had an uptime of
blah blah blah, or you increased the uptime from eighty percent to ninety nine.
You know, something like that. Tell me about an accomplishment something that
you that you did, that you put moved the needle on. If you're
going to ask your your testimonial givers, how did you move the needle and
experiment with different ways to ask that you know it doesn't and if it's somebody
you're close to, hopefully it is you can. You can ask several different
ways to get a powerful testimonial. It's not just he's a nice guy.
I'd love to work with him again, that's fine. At least at least
we know you're not not a complete jerk. But that's a pretty low bar
to when you're trying to stand out above everybody else in an interview. For
sure. Yeah, and I'll just admit to this right here. I've asked
people for testimonials, gotten it back, rewritten it, sent it back over
to them, and said, hey, can I change it to this?
And then, you know, get their approval before I put before I attribute
it to them. But because writing testimonials, testimonials is actually pretty hard,
So it's okay to offer feedback on the testimonial that you like. As you
said, make sure you get the permission first. Yeah, for sure,
don't just rewrite it because you don't like what they said. Yeah, and
don't do like this one company I worked for that will remain nameless and make
up testimonials and then just attribute them to John or Bill, you know,
first name only attributions, right, what else? So let's talk about I
want to cover one more thing on the resume. Whenever you do a resume,
or fill out a resume, or fill out the job application, whatever,
the process of raising your hand and saying I'm interested is one of the
things I think that really helps is to open up their job description side by
side with the application or your resume and rephrase a lot of the statements from
their ideal candidate and their roles and responsibility section of the job description. Rephrase
those into things I've done in your resume. You know, obviously don't lie,
but if they say, hey, we're looking for somebody with experience creating
helm charts for Kubernetes in your resume, you should have a bullet point that
says I created helm charts for Kubernetes in this particular project. And you just
want to create like a Ven diagram where there's this huge overlapping middle section of
things that they're looking for and things that you've demonstrated you've done on your resume.
You know, I heard recently of somebody copying and pasting the job description
in a one point white font so then it would pass you know, all
their all the keyword filters. It would definitely hit everyone, right. I
don't recommend this approach, yeah, because uh, you know, if somebody
sees you're doing that, you're probably you're probably in the on the burn pile
immediately for sure. Yeah, unless it's a job for like SEO management,
then the might you might be in there. Yeah. So we talked about
having a public profile, listing your projects on your resume, adding those to
your blog. For a lot of people getting started, started out though,
just starting their DevOps career, this is going to be a challenging time to
get started for you know, probably the next few years at a minimum.
So how do they go? How do they break that chicken and egg cycle.
I need experience in order to get a job. I need job in
order to get experience. Well, the simple answer to speak isn't the simple
answer to do. But I think I think what it comes down to is
getting the experience outside of a paid job, if at all possible. Yeah,
I mean, maybe you're waiting tables at Denny's for a few years like
I did, but in the evenings, go set up a Kubernetes pluster on
your Raspberry Pie or whatever it is. And you know that's how I got
my first job. I mean I was. I was a teen creer and
a hacker forever, and I was I was running my own dial up modem
ISP from my parents' house high school. But you know that meant that I
had experience when I was ready for a job. You know who else in
nineteen ninety eight had been running a dial up ISP in the bedroom, you
know, on that stack of cvs, I was the only one I could
guarantee that. So if those skills were at all in line with what they
wanted, I jumped right to the top of that list. So whatever your
your hobbies are, if it's Kubernetes on a Raspberry Pie or bitcoin mining or
whatever, find a way to do that stuff, build your three M contracts
or whatever it is in your spare time. I no, not everybody has
spare time. That's not fair, but that's life. But if you do
have spare time, find a way to do that. Even if it's just
an hour a day, or even hour a week, that's better than that's
an hour week more than ninety percent of the people out there, So it
doesn't take a lot to be better than average, because average is a pretty
low bar in most cases. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think
the key there is just always moving forward, even if it's only five minutes
at a time. One of the things I recommend for people to do is
go to Pakathon's meetups, hang out in places where other developers are. So
if you're interested in DevOps, you're kind of in a supporting role for developers.
So go where the developers are and you're going to find a bunch of
developers who are at the same spot in their career that you are in your
career. So they're trying to build their portfolio app and have no idea how
to get this thing live and deployed. So partner up with them, say,
hey, you write the code to build your app, I'll do the
CICD for it and then put it in a public repo, and you both
get to work together to build some portfolio work that you can show off and
demonstrate. And one of the hidden benefits of that is you're actually doing the
thing that you would be doing if you had a DevOps job, you know,
working with developers, understanding what they're trying to do, helping them get
their code to production faster. You're one hundred percent doing the job, and
then you're also just working on building your network and building friendships. And you
know, as as all of you advanced through your career, you're going to
remember those days and someday, you know, they may be working at a
Fortune one hundred company and need a DevOps person. Remember your name from back
in the day. Yeah, you reminded me of a concept that I thought
was pretty groundbreaking when I first learned it a year ago or so. When
it comes to learning, and this is a complicate the thing on anywhere in
tech, but especially in DevOps or even software development, where we just have
to learn so many things. If you look at ten companies looking for DevOps
related roles, they probably have ten different technology stacks. Some of them are
using Java, some are on Rubies, some are PHP, some are you
know whatever, some are on albs. I'm on Google, some mazures,
some are using Kubernetes them aren't you. It's just it's all over the board,
and there's no way you can learn all of the key technologies for all
of those ten companies, let alone the hundred you might be looking at.
So the concept, it's one I got from a book. I'll make it
my pick later on. I'll mention the book then. But the concept is
one called knowledge options, so you know, think of it like stock options.
A stock option is the right to buy stock at a certain price in
the future if you want to, but it's not an obligation to do it
right. So normally, I think the way most people get overwhelmed with so
much to learn is they're thinking, how much do I have to learn right
now? Knowledge options turns that around and it basically you learn just enough about
each technology that you can't do it yet, but you know what's required to
learn enough. So let's say that the topic is Kubernetes. You've heard the
buzzword a thousand times. You don't even know what kubernettes really is yet,
So spend an hour or an afternoon reading up on kubernetes. Get the basic
idea down. So oh, I realized, I understand how kubernetes what it
is now. It manages Docker containers basically, and it manages network meshes blah
blah blah. You know, you still don't know how to use it,
but you have a concept of what it is. And then to a more
or less extent, figure out how long would it take me to learn enough
to be useful with Kubernetes, and maybe that number is three months or three
weeks or or whatever, and then just make a note, a mental note,
maybe a physical note. All right, Kubernetes, I know what it
is, and it's going to take me three months to learn enough. All
right, that's all I need to know for right now. That's your knowledge
option. Now you have the option when Kubernetes becomes required, you know what
it is. You can talk intelligently about it, at least enough for an
interview or at a meetup, and you can now exercise that option when you
want to without wasting the three months on something you may not actually need.
And they do the same thing for AWS, and do the same thing for
Google Cloud, and do the same thing for Terraform and so on and so
forth. And then you have a collection of these twenty five different technologies.
You know a little bit about each one, not enough to use any of
them in your job, but enough to know what's required to go to that
next step. So that's a knowledge option. It's something really powerful, especially
when you don't have the knowledge yet. That's the whole point. So that's
really useful early in your career. It's really useful late in your career too,
especially in this career where this new technology is popping up faster than it
could possibly learn them all. But that that's a really powerful concept. I
just found it kind of eye opening when I learned about that concept. I'll
share the title of the book later where that came from. Yeah, that's
super cool. It reminds me. I've always thought there was this correlation.
You know, the Japanese had the conbine process or just in time manufacturing,
where building automobiles, like the tires showed up literally minutes before the worker needed
the tires for the car and the assembly line. I've always thought that in
technology we're moving towards this just in time learning model where you can't possibly know
everything that you're going to need to know for the next five years. So
instead of stressing over that, just sort of what you just described, be
familiar with the topic, and then when you have to implement it, learn
it just in time to implement it. Yeah, And the truth is that's
good enough for most things. There aren't we occasionally we need a true in
depth Cubernetes expert, but we don't most of the time. Most of the
time, would you sed, somebody's a base level knowledge, something they learned
in three months, it's usually enough to get the job done. So I
wrote about this on my blog. I'll have a link to that also,
and the show notes, and then yeah, the book title I'll share later
on. Right on. So we covered resumes, personal projects, GitHub profile,
social media proof maybe stack overflow. It's kind of social media, but
it is. Yeah, I'll mention that. So one place I found to
be useful sometimes when looking for jobs, actually not even looking, but I've
had a few jobs come to me through stack overflow. I don't know if
this is a this isn't really a life hack because it's kind of one of
those things that requires investment. I mean, I've been on stack overflow for
eleven years and I have something like sixty thousand reputation I think. But I've
been I've been really active lately in the last few years on the go tag,
so that I've had a couple of people reach out to me. They
found an answer where I'd answer one of the questions on the go tag.
They and so you have to put your contact details in your profile there,
but I linked to my website. They found me to that, and actually
that's how I got my current job was through stack overflow, and I've had
a couple other short term contract jobs that way. So if you're a stack
overflow user, especially when who answers questions, I think that's a great way
to get a little bit bit of publicity. Make sure you put a nice
pick a nice name. This professional. We don't want bog Water forty three
anymore. Put a nice professional name on there, put a nice little profile,
put your GitHub and your and your website links in your stack overfill profile,
and say I'm looking for work or I'm available for work if you're interested,
and answer some provide some high quality answers on our topic you're familiar with,
whatever that is, whether it's Kubernetes or JavaScript or whatever. Asking questions
is great too, but the way to get the jobs, in my experience
is answering questions on a topic you're familiar with. Yeah, I think I
think one thing worth pointing out on that is that is a long play game.
You know, it's going to take take a while to build up your
reputation, but it's it's worth doing same thing for well, same thing for
a lot of the stuff we've talked about in this entire episode. None of
it is a magic silver bullet to land a job in the next twenty four
hours. And I think for the next few years the job process, regardless
of what your experience has been up to this point, I think you can
anticipate that finding a job is going to take longer for the next few years
at a minimum. So don't get discouraged, stay persistent, and set up
some type of schedule, some type of reminder or accountability system where you are
continuously moving all of these things forward. You know, you're curating your stack
overflow profile, you're curating your blog content, you're curating your social media profiles,
all of that stuff, just so that they're always moving forward and then
that that long tail traffic does pay off over time. Yeah, and a
couple points on that. Don't watch your web statistics. Do not look at
googling. Sure, the first time I had my blog helped me land a
job. I had fifty visitors a month or something. The thing is,
it's not about volume, and it's not even about people finding you through search
engines. It's about somebody who saw your CV and they followed the link to
your blog and they were impressed. That's all it is. So you're going
to get three visits a month that way, but they're powerful visits. So
do not look at or get depressed over your stats. Those stats are absolutely
meaningless for this purpose. The other thing I want to talk about is soft
skills. That's something we can all work to improve. But it's a great
thing that to work on when you're when you're looking for work, network with
people at meetups, work on help, work on helping people learn, and
just work on improving your soft skills. Those are those are always in demand,
and they're going to be more in demand. I mean when it's a
when it's a candidate's market, you can afford to be a little bit pickier
or less refined to the soft skills because they need your talent so bad.
When there's a thousand applicants out there, they're gonna pick the guy who talks
nice, They're gonna pick the girl who takes the time to explain things sweetly.
They're gonna there. Those soft skills are going to really be important.
So take the time. If you don't already have them take the time to
develop your soft skills. You can't be the loner nerd in the office corner
anymore. You have to be the nice guy for sure. Yeah, there's
there's just a ton of truth to that, you know. Having the ability
to communicate your ideas, to advocate for something whenever it's not like the current
direction of the conversation. To be able to advocate and steer it a conversation
and be a team player is huge, whether it's weather wearing, good times
or bad times. It's a skill that's gonna serve you well over the long
term. There's a quote from Ozzy Osbourne of all people that I heard,
no, no, as soon as actually a legitimate quote. He said,
be nice to the people you meet on your way up the ladder, because
you're gonna meet them again on your way back down. And I was like,
wow, dude, that is deep nice. Yeah. So there you
go. If you've got nothing else in this episode, you've got a quote
from Ozzy Osbourne that you can work into conversation while you're building those social skills.
Awesome, all right, anything else to add I think we've been around
the track. Yeah right, yeah, grammarly as well, yeah, that's
a good one, especially if you're not a native speaker. Yeah, of
whatever language. I'm assuming English, but you could be implying another languages.
So yeah, use a grammar check and spell check actually, especially if you
are a native speaker of English, because a lot of us have assumptions that
when you use a tool like grammarly you're like, oh, I didn't know
that. Yeah, put the most important part of your TV in the top
half of the first page. That's so much more important than is it one
page or two pages of three pages. Just assume that the first half of
the first page is what will be skimmed and put the important stuff there.
Yeah. Yeah, that's a really good point, right. Cool. We
could talk about cvs for a while, but I think they're far less important
than everything else were discussed at this point. So yeah, at this point,
I think the it's just a launching point to get It's a place to
hold the links to get to the meaningful stuff exactly. So make sure those
links are at the top. Don't put your gut hell profile at the end.
That's like your name and get help profile, personal website, phone number,
that that should be the order of the top the top four things on
your CV, I think, yep, for sure. Cool, all right,
let's do some picks. Yeah, so I'm going to pick the book.
I think I picked it on this program before, but it's a bit
a while and I just mentioned it, so I have to pick now.
It's the book that taught me about knowledge options, and it's the book is
called Commitment, a novel about managing risk, or I'm sorry, Commitment a
novel about managing project risk. And it's it's a fictionalized graphic novel of all
things. I never read a graphic novel until this. But it's about a
project manager who's working on a struggling project. But really the point of it
is how to how to use what's called real options, which is a technical
term for basically waiting until the last minute to make the last responsible minute to
make decisions so you're not committed to something that might turn out to be the
wrong answer. So it's really applicable to software delivery and technology in general.
It's even applicable to the way you drive your car to work in the morning,
if you want to think about it that way. You know, should
I change lanes in now or wait until later? So it's really applicable to
all areas of life, but it's specifically about project management, which I don't
know. I enjoyed it. It's a graphic novel, as I said,
so you don't probably, I mean, I guess guess you could get a
kindle version if there is one, but you really want to see the pages.
Yeah, so yeah, that's my recommendation commitment novel about managing project risk
by Olav Massen and others. Lincoln right on, I'm going to check it
out. I'm just interested because you mentioned that it's a graphic novel, and
now I'm like, I gotta I gotta see what that's about. Novels are
for nerds, all right, and maybe they are. I don't know that.
I guess I'm a nerd now because I've read one. It makes me
wonder, like, could I pull off a book on Kubernetes. It's like
a coloring book or dot to dots. I want the link to sign up
for that already. It's a dot to dot which you've got to identify the
prime numbers to connect your doctor container to the Kubernetes control plane. Nice.
Yeah, yeah, all right, I'm on it. So my pick is
going to be. There's a new book out from a guy named Thiago Forte
called it Building a Second Brain. You may have heard of his content.
This is his first book, but he's been doing the Building a Second Brain
content for a while. I got the book because I am horribly unorganized.
I've got stuff in dropbox, I've got it in Apple Notes, I've got
it in ever note, Google docs, notion and post it notes and three
ring binders, and I have all these notes, but I can never find
any of them whenever I need it. And so the Building a Second Brain
is his strategy for organizing all of that stuff so that you can find it
and when you're looking for it, you know where to look, which is
the big obstacle for me, Like, I know I have this piece of
content somewhere, but for the life of me, can't figure out where it's
at. So if you're unorganized like me, check it out Building a Second
Brain by Tiago Forte. And yeah, with that, best of luck in
your job search. Let us know on social media if we overlooked anything,
or even call us out if you think completely wrong on something because or even
halfway wrong, ie you completely wrong. To want to know about it.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not aware of any instances, but there are
rumors that I've been wrong before in the past, so I'm curious to get
your feedback. You know, I thought I was wrong once, but then
I realized I wasn't all right everyone, thanks for listening. Thanks Jonathan,
I'll see you next week. Until next time,