Welcome to the first edition of all the other things, where I will talk about all the non-technical parts of building a great career in tech.
In this newsletter, you can expect to see:
Ideas from around the internet that will hopefully help you with your career. Some of the topics will include productivity, personal development, communication skills, working with a team, working in a large organization, job search, interviewing, hiring, building a brand, and product skills.
Interviews with smart people on the topics listed above.
Original content on hiring, leadership, engineering management, product management, and building a startup.
Profiles of interesting companies that are doing well and actively hiring.
A little bit about me:
I’m currently co-founder and CTO at Laskie, where we are building the most powerful platform for matching people with tech jobs. Our last company, Interviewed, was acquired by Indeed, where I ran the engineering teams to help it become the largest job assessment product in the world, with over 200M assessments completed per year and over 600K customers.
I’ve been working in product and engineering at startups for most of my career. I’ve also worked in leadership roles at a few larger companies after acquisitions.
I’m mostly an engineer, but have experience with and interest in just about every role that’s needed to build a successful software business. This includes product, design, support, marketing, account management, and operations.
YC alumni. 3x founder with 2 exits.
Get good at getting lucky
Github’s ReadME Project published a good article on why you should publish your work to increase your luck.
The author talks about all the good things that can come from sharing your work publicly, how to get past the fear of public scrutiny, and how to decide what to work on. If you are interested in working in public, you should give it a read.
When a person is truly interested in the thing they’re writing or talking about, their excitement is contagious.
Whatever you’re excited about, be excited about it publicly. Whatever you’re curious about, be curious about it publicly.
- Quote from Publishing your work increases your luck
This idea is part of a mental model that is very useful for building a good career — luck surface area. Your luck surface area is a product of the quality/quantity of your work/ideas/content and how much you tell people about it. The greater your luck surface area, the more likely you are to “get lucky”.
All this basically means is that you can manufacture more opportunities to get lucky and, in turn, get lucky more often. Either do more interesting things or share more about what you are already doing. Or both.
Most successful people have in some way benefited from this kind of self-made luck.
The amount of serendipity that will occur in your life, your Luck Surface Area, is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you’re passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated.
- Jason Roberts, the guy who coined the term
While this might sound like generic self-help advice, it’s something that a lot of talented people don’t do well. Especially engineers, who often bias towards working on technical problems over sharing their work with other people.
All the advice on learning to get lucky can be summarized with the following high-level ideas:
Get good at talking about yourself, your ideas, and what you are working on. Doing great work alone won’t create opportunities for you. Other people need to see it.
Build your network. The more people who are paying attention to your work or who you can easily connect with, the easier it will be to share your ideas.
Build your brand. The more you are known for your expertise or your personality, the more likely it will be that people seek you out.
Sometimes just showing up can be good enough to invite luck. Two of the bigger opportunities in my career came from simply attending hackathons. Look for opportunities to be present and visible with people you want to connect with.
Build useful skills and work on interesting projects. The more interesting your work is, the easier it will be to share.
Be patient and persistent. Sometimes it can take time to get lucky, even if you are generating lots of opportunities for yourself.
Luck is rarely a lightning strike, isolated and dramatic. It’s much more like the wind, blowing constantly.
Sometimes it’s calm, and sometimes it blows in gusts. And sometimes it comes from directions that you didn’t even imagine.
- Tina Seelig, Stanford professor focused on entrepreneurship and luck
The ideas in this post inspired me to create this newsletter. If you want to increase your own luck but aren’t sure what to do next, here are a few ideas specifically for engineers:
Be more vocal to your coworkers about the cool things you are working on. Do a lunch-and-learn or find another way to talk about it to the broader team.
Learn a new language, framework, or library in public. Write about or record each step in your process. Help people avoid the same mistakes you made or get to useful insights faster.
Build a side project in public. Take an idea from design to finished product in a series of blog posts, videos or on a stream.
Contribute to a popular open source community. There are hundreds of communities out there that need help.
Join and contribute to a Discord channel.
Participate in a hackathon.
Write or stream about any topic or problem that interests you. Use Twitter, blog, stream, start a podcast, or create a YouTube channel… it doesn’t matter.
Build a free tool or service that will be useful to at least some niche audience.
Start and promote an open source library. Hard to do but very high leverage if you can find an underserved use case.
Give a tech talk.
If you read this and commit to do something from this list, send me a note. I’d love to help. Maybe even talk about it in this newsletter.
Career advice from someone successful
Sahil Bloom is a master at building a personal brand and an audience. He’s an investor, entrepreneur, and podcast host who has made at least a few good career decisions.
He recently posted advice that he wished he’d had earlier in his career. There are a few interesting ideas worth sharing that I’ve summarized below. Ideas that definitely would have helped me early in my career.
This feels like good advice. But should you listen to it? We’ll never know for sure.
Learn to sell. This is very similar to the advice above about increasing your luck surface area. It can be painful, especially for software engineers, but it's incredibly useful to be decent at selling your product, your vision, your ideas, and yourself.
Build a personal board of advisors. Find 5-10 people at different stages of their career. Use them as your sounding board when you need to make important decisions. Support each other while you grow professionally and personally. The more diverse the better – you should consider finding at least a few people in different industries or careers. I personally love this idea and plan to implement it.
Develop your storytelling skills. If you want to get people to listen to you, it’s very helpful to know how to tell a good story. It can be especially helpful when you are trying to talk about the value of a product or feature you built. Knowing how to talk about the user journey, their problem, and your solution will help your work feel more compelling.
At the start of your career, prioritize experience, not salary. Sometimes for engineers, working at a big name company gets you both a great salary and great experience, but not always. Consider the longer term value of projects or companies you might invest your time in. Working on deep technical problems or starting your own company are two examples of paths that don’t pay the best in the short term but can pay off big in the long run.
I will be diving deeper into some of these topics in future editions.
Cool companies that are doing well
This isn’t an ad. This is just me highlighting a few companies that are doing things I find interesting. I also happen to know that they are growing and actively hiring in case you are looking for a new job at a cool company.
Deel - making it easy to build a global team
The facts:
Their product allows businesses to hire employees and contractors in less than five minutes, without needing a local entity.
They have 8,000+ customers in 150+ countries.
They recently raised $50M and are currently valued at around $5.5B.
Their team is around 1,400 people.
For their size, they are a pretty young company. They went through Y Combinator in the winter 2019 batch.
Hiring contractors or employees in other countries has historically been a painful process. Their product makes it very easy. It’s a must-have service for any company that wants to build a global team.
At Laskie we recommend them to all of our customers that are hiring internationally.
Check out their open positions here. They have over 120 open roles with around 10 for engineering.
Paragon - making integrations suck less
The facts:
This LA-based start-up is trying to become the connecting layer for all software. Their product abstracts the complexities of SaaS integrations into a single SDK, helping engineering teams spend less time building high quality integrations.
They just raised a $13M Series A. They were in Y Combinator’s winter 2020 batch and went on to raise from a handful of good investors.
They have around 35 people on their team.
I’ve spent countless hours building and maintaining integrations. It’s a common, time-consuming thing that’s been waiting for someone to make it better. I’m glad the Paragon team is working on it.
You can check out their job openings here. They are currently hiring for at least 3 engineering roles.
If you are thinking about starting a job search or have suggestions for this newsletter, hit me up.
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