⚡Shana Roberts

Last week I sat down with Matthew Sevey (Founder of My Code Career & Head of Engineering at Celestia Labs) and Mike Massari (Career coach and ex-Director of Platform & Integrations at Chainlink Labs) to discuss the Job Market in 2024, with a focus on the industry we know best, Tech & Web3. A few takeaways below 👇 How to Stand Out in a Competitive Job Market: 1. Build an Online Presence: Whether it’s posting on LinkedIn/X or building out your GitHub profile with open-source contributions, a strong online presence can set you apart. 2. Network: Engage both online and in person at events or conferences. Talk about your passions and connect with others in your field. 3. Do the Work Up-Front: Tailor your CV and cover letter for each application and prepare thoroughly for your interviews to make a strong impression. Challenges Employers Face in Hiring: 1. Testing for Soft Skills: In a remote-first world, skills like communication and adaptability are crucial but harder to evaluate during the hiring process. 2. Filling Specialised Roles: In Web3, rapidly changing technology requirements make it challenging to find candidates with the right expertise. 3. Managing Compensation: Compensation management is especially challenging when hiring for niche roles across regions with diverse compensation expectations. To understand how to manage compensation check out our salary report: https://lnkd.in/gaZxPufW Navigating the tech job market in 2024 requires both job seekers and employers to adapt and evolve continuously. Staying proactive, whether in skill development or hiring strategies, is key. If you’re on the hunt for a new role, check out https://www.calyptus.co/ for 100+ roles across 50+ top web3 protocols.  If you need bit of extra support when it comes to applying to roles and interview preparation, I’ve not doubt that Matthew & Mike would be happy to chat. 

42

3 Comments

Latest q2 software engineering comp report (accepted offers) is out and it's a doozy. Please DM or email me natan@singlesprout.com for the data. Overall trends: - compensation is up big in q2 - companies hiring more for seniority - in-office requirements continue to rise ... and much more

17

1 Comment

Justin's career journey did not always go as expected, but that did not stop his momentum. He had a strong 💪 desire to learn and optimize, which influenced his 9-year journey at #Twilio. Read more about the hurdles he overcame, from engineering manager to vice president of engineering, in our "Career Journeys @ Twilio" series. #careerjourney #engineering #leadership #mobility

2

At the core of effective engineering leadership is the ability to stay connected with your team. This is perhaps the most challenging aspect because retaining the respect of your people is difficult unless you remain technically involved yourself. In my journey as an engineering leader, staying true to the individual contributor role that originally earned their respect has kept me close. This approach extends beyond technical expertise; it's about maintaining a deep connection with the core activities that propel product development forward at Gearflow. One of my biggest professional fears is becoming irrelevant or disconnected from my team and our work. This fear motivates me to continually reinvent and retool in response to market demands. Next month, I'll be sharing about my adventures generating synthetic data recently. And while I'm no expert when I start preparing for these talks, the process is incredibly valuable. It's less about delivering a perfect talk and more about how the preparation expands my thinking and exposes me to new capabilities. This helps me connect the dots to opportunities at Gearflow that bring real innovation to our customers. Speaking regularly holds me accountable and pushes me to learn ahead of the curve, ensuring I remain relevant and impactful day-to-day. Every talk is a journey of discovery, helping me to lead with humility, communicate clearly, and inspire a culture of innovation through a deep, technical understanding of our work.

19

Did Amazon drop the ball with Alexa? Here’s what insiders think: In September 2023, Amazon unveiled a new, conversational Alexa to a buzz-filled room. The demo hinted at a smart assistant ready to rival ChatGPT 🤖 Yet months later, silence The promised Alexa upgrade is nowhere to be seen across its half-billion devices. What went wrong? 🤔 Former employees point to deep-rooted issues. They describe Alexa's AI as lagging behind the competition. While giants like Google and Microsoft push the boundaries with GenAI, Amazon's Alexa struggles with outdated technology and internal chaos 🏃‍♂️💨 The flashy demo was just that – a demo Behind the scenes, Amazon wasn't prepared for a full-scale launch. The promised GenAI remains largely undeveloped, constrained by a lack of cutting-edge data and hardware 🚧📉 Even a promising partnership with Anthropic's Claude AI has been mired in internal red tape and privacy debates. Instead of integrating Claude into Alexa, Amazon has diverted resources to bolster its cloud services 🌩️🔒 Frustration has brewed within Alexa’s team Engineers, facing impossible deadlines, grapple with a sprawling bureaucracy and a lack of cohesive vision. This internal disarray has kept Alexa from evolving alongside its AI peers 😓🔄 Amazon once led with Alexa, pioneering the smart assistant space. Now, it appears to be playing catch-up The rush to respond to ChatGPT’s rise has left Amazon scrambling without a clear path forward Insiders doubt the project will ever fully deliver, potentially leaving Amazon in the dust as rivals surge ahead 🕰️ Can Amazon revive Alexa’s fortunes or has it fallen too far behind in the AI race? 💬

4

My prediction: AI will ruin YouTube - unless Google implements some serious changes in their algorithm. We've already begun to see some seriously good companies sprout up that allow people to make AI-generated videos. It's not perfect and you can definitely tell - but it's getting better each day. I think that within 2 years, a majority of videos uploaded will be terrible, AI-generated crap. True "creators" will be overrun by fake AI content that can be mass produced in minutes. Why spend 30 hours on a video when you can generate 1,500 long form videos in the same time? So here's what YouTube needs to do - stop pushing out AI-created content. It's easy to spot AI generated text. It's probably a bit harder to spot AI generated video. And yes, YouTube already has some stuff in place to notify viewers if they're watching AI content. But until they can detect and automatically shadow ban these YouTube channels, the crappy content will keep coming. I estimate 90% of videos uploaded to YouTube will be fully AI-made in 2 years. And to me, that really defeats the whole purpose of "content" What do you guys think?

4

1 Comment

Last week I wrote a blog on screening resumes with AI agents. Now with more and more workflows being solved with AI, recruiters can cut up to 80% of their back-office tasks with the OneLoop recruiter AI agents toolkit. 1. Writing Job Description 2. Sourcing candidates (from external and internal rolodex) 3. Screening resumes qualitatively and quantitively 4. Personalizing scheduling and rejection emails Recruiters can now focus on learning about the candidates 1-1, and being with them through their interview journey.

20

1 Comment

🚨 It is CRITICAL to develop your engineering career framework. Experienced engineering leaders design this playbook early into growing their team. 🗣️ Context always matters. Seniority in Company 1 ≠ Seniority in Company 2 E6 at Meta ≠ L6 at Google ≠ L6 Amazon Despite Levels.fyi having fairly accurate data points for salaries and leveling guides, they are only indicators, not predictors. Plenty of engineers performed at a different level at Meta for many reasons: familiarity with topics they were interviewed on, lack of preparedness, personal reason, and often Difference in scope and scale of their previous projects. 🫵 A job title (Senior, Staff, Principal, Lead) is only as valuable as you define it. 📗 Designing an efficient career framework defines (per each level/seniority): ⭐ Scale of projects - how many users / internal engineers does this person touch with their work ⭐ Scope of projects - how many engineers and partners are involved, in what part of the process does the engineer step in vs. End-to-end ⭐ Leadership - how many engineers does the person mentor and support + how senior are the engineers (I.e. mentoring 3 junior engineers, mentoring 5 senior engineers) ⭐ Cross-functional collaboration - what stakeholders does the engineer collaborate with + how senior (i.e. working with tech leads + product managers) Looking back at the past 6-12 months this should not only serve as an indicator of what is expected on that level but also be a great help for 📈 PROMOTING ENGINEERS - you help people track what is expected of them at their current level and how they can get to the next one; what they need to pick up. How can they “climb the ladder” or take a step horizontally if they want to become people managers? This is also great for 🌝 HIRING SENIOR+ ENGINEERS A well-crafted framework equips the team with what you are looking for and assessing during their interviews. You can use it to split what skills/competencies you are going to be looking for per each interview round. Engineering leaders are also better equipped in their planning of how many engineers do they need and at what level for the types of projects that are mapped out in the coming Qs. In the year of lean recruiting, failing to plan, is planning to fail. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- How do you plan to grow? #EngineeringCareer #EngineeringGrowth #TechCareerDevelopment #EngineeringLeadership

8

🎯 Hiring managers…have you ever felt overwhelmed opening a new software engineering role? 🤓 Hiring software engineers for your team shouldn't be a headache. My video below reveals the top 3️⃣ struggles I see – and the small, actionable 🎯 adjustments that'll save your team time in the hiring process. 🤝Ready to partner for a smoother search? Watch ⬇️!

9

Thinking of taking a Team / Tech Lead role? Might be worth thinking again... Unless you have a burning desire to Lead and Manage teams full time down the line (in an Eng Manager, VP, Head of or CTO level position), taking a Team/Tech Lead role is likely a BIG mistake. Sure, you might get a bit of title prestige, but with it comes a few major negatives that for most will significantly outweigh the pros... - Tech Lead type positions are currently at the bottom of the list in terms of demand from companies. - Tech Lead salaries are (for the most part) sitting below Senior Eng salaries in the current market - Tech Leads (perhaps wrongly, but I don't make the rules) are often considered to be less sharp technically than their more hands on colleagues - Tech Leads will generally have a much harder time switching to a Staff or Principal level position in the future (again, perhaps wrongly, but it's true nonetheless) - Tech Leads are often the first to go in redundancies, with preference regularly shown to more hands on Senior Engineers - And finally, most people don't actually like it. Leading and Managing is a slog, and all the fun parts (mentoring, leading by example, high level decision making etc.) can often be done as a Senior, Staff or Principal Engineer anyway. (This is what we are seeing in start-ups and scale-ups, your mileage may vary in the corporate world).

28

7 Comments

We have been hiring a lot at ODIN AI lately and I've noticed a concerning trend during job interviews. It seems like some candidates are using AI assistants to cheat, which is frustrating and counterproductive. We've started to combat this by looking out for delays in responses and the inability to answer specific questions. Often, if you start a detailed train of thought, the candidate struggles to follow because the AI takes time to generate a response. This has become a reliable way to identify if someone is cheating. It's crucial to ensure that candidates are genuinely capable and not relying on AI to get through the interview process.

32

6 Comments

We’ve been seeing more and more demand for strong System Design skills from Senior Engineers. Infact, from talking to hiring managers about their recent hiring experiences, the common theme is that almost every Senior Engineer they meet is failing the Sys Design aspect of the interview. At this point, if you can’t showcase that kind of skill set in the interview process, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll be graded as a Mid level, no matter how much experience you have. So - if you’re on the hunt for a new role at that Senior level, especially if you’re trying to push for the upper end of what’s achievable comp wise…. Make sure you can smash it out of the park from a Sys Design perspective, because that’s the person who’s going to get the job.

19

8 Comments

Measuring what matters 📏 There are four data points I've been helping a seed stage startup monitor and improve, alongside helping them build their engineering team. 1️⃣ Application to first interview ratio ➝ Why it matters: Highlights the effectiveness of job postings and hiring partners. 2️⃣ Time to hire (TTH) ➝ Why it matters: A quicker TTH helps secure top candidates, while a longer TTH can negatively impact candidate experience. 3️⃣ Lost talent at each stage ➝ Why it matters: Identifies potential process issues and areas for improvement. 4️⃣ Offer acceptance ➝ Why it matters: Indicates the strength of your company culture, mission, package, and talent qualification process. Getting clear on the data points that are most important to your business, why they are important, and how you are going to track them is essential. Make sure your partners understand your data points, and help you in the process of achieving your targets. If you're experiencing challenges in your hiring process. Book in a free discovery call using the appointment button on this post or on my page. #hiring #recruitment #hiringtips #datadrivenhiring #startup

15

4 Comments

New blog post: The little things that got me into stream processing (https://lnkd.in/gU7Ba5Ym)

60

Protip: If you use a 3rd-party API in your app, check in frequently. APIs change. One of my favorite projects, my resume map (https://lnkd.in/g8zbx_H), was based on Mapbox's Javascript library and used Stamen's toner map. Stamen decided to shift their tile service to Stadia Maps. Mapbox decided to update its library and rebrand it as MapLibre. Ever break all the things? So, after a few quick updates, it's back online, just as pretty as it ever was. #map #maplibre #stamen #stadia #gis

9

2 Comments

I've been hearing a lot about "the end of the Jr Developer" lately and how no one should take software engineering anymore. Sure, the market is a bit of a mess right now with lots of layoffs and a bias toward hiring senior developers but what happens in 10 years when those senior devs are retiring or moving into managerial roles? It's the same with anything, if you aren't training the next generation of developers you are heading for a crisis sooner rather than later. We are trading short term gains for long term pain. AI might be steering use towards another dotcom or crypto style bubble but software development isn't going anywhere and ChatGPT isn't going to take any of our jobs. #softwaredevelopment #ai #softwareengineer

19

14 Comments

I'll be at #PlatformCon24 in a few weeks to moderate a panel discussion on Architecting the Future: Platform Strategies for API Adoption & Impact. I am eagerly looking forward to learning more about how API leaders from Wayfair, The New York Times and Cox Automotive have led digital transformation with Apollo GraphOS to yield tremendous impact for their users and their business! RSVP if you'd like to join in person! #ApolloFederation #Platformengineering #APIOps #GraphQL

23