Podcasts about CS

Sign up to all live workshops and podcasts here: https://lu.ma/fullfunnelHere are 5 things CitizenLab does to drive international demand in a niche market.Ctizenlab helps governments solve a problem that's hundreds of years old (constituent engagement). Unfortunately, this also means that a lot of would-be clients are not aware of modern tech solutions.During an interview at Full-Funnel B2B Marketing Show, Amir Bolouryazad shared 5 things they do to create that awareness and drive demand for their product:1. Involve their customer in content creation and distribution Next to creating case studies, CitizenLab runs webinars, bringing other civil servants from different cities who have used their platform successfully.They get a chance to tell their peers a community engagement platform can be extremely helpful into their day-to-day lives, and how their citizens become more satisfied with how their government is engaging them into the decision-making process.They also invest a lot in creating content that makes their customers more successful. Very often, the customers share such content with their colleagues and peers.2. Involve the whole revenue team in content planningThe marketing team works closely with sales and government success teams to define the priority topics and content to be covered.The sales share the most common prospect questions, trending vertical use-cases, and new legislations. By creating content about these trending topics, CitizenLab taps into the existing demand (for information) to create awareness and demand for their product.The CS team who's more involved in day-to-day customer projects share the specific challenges that different types of customers are having with implementation. By creating handbooks for these challenges, CitizenLab helps the existing customers — while addressing the objections of the prospects considering the platform.3. Leverage content partnershipsIn each (local) market, CitizenLab identifies the most relevant publications and associations catering to their audience.And since their content strategy is already aligned with local trending topics, very often the content partners will be happy to publish informative and educational content on these topics.The key is to produce high-quality pieces that inform and educate their readers or members, not to promote your brand.4. Align sales and marketing on an "allbound" approachIn a lot of companies, sales does outbound, and marketing does inbound — independently of each other.And they are leaving a lot of money on the table by doing just one or the other and not combining the efforts.CitizenLab takes an allbound approach:- Their marketing helps their SDR efforts by running highly-targeted ads educating the prospects about the same topics the sales reps are mentioning in their outreach- Marketing also targets events their salespeople are visiting to create awareness and help sales meet more prospects- Sales uses first-party intent data about e.g. website visitors to learn about buyers and governments to understand their interest, so they can run timely and personalized outreach and follow-up campaigns5. Localize their content and channels for local marketsThe culture of governments varies dramatically from one market to the other. Add to that the different use-cases driven by different legislations and trends.To localize their approach to each market, CitizenLab:- Adapts the tone of voice and appearance. For example, European markets tend to be more functional and require more details about the product and features, while in the US the storytelling behind the features becomes more important- Uses the local customer stories and case studies- Identifies local content partners to help with content distributionTune in to the full episode below

Federico comenta la manifestación de guardias civiles y policías contra la Ley de Seguridad a la que acudieron PP, Vox y Cs.

Betting picks ahead of the EFL weekend. This podcast is sponsored by Betfair. This week with Betfair if you bet £20 on multiples or Bet Builders you'll receive a £5 free bet to use on multiples or Bet Builders, T&Cs apply. Betfair also have no cash out suspensions on match odds for all Football League games, applicable to singles and multiples. Over 18s only. Gamble responsibly. BeGambleAware.org. Join the NTT20 Squad on Levellr! An EFL Community on Telegram with non-stop EFL chat and bonus video & audio content from George & Ali. Join with a 2-week free trial & then £4.99 per month: bit.ly/3hBgv4L

Kate Robertson, CS, from Buena Vista, Colorado, USA

Join Sammy Warrayat and Jerry Fu as they discuss how to come up with conflict resolutions. Jerry is a leadership coach working with Asian-American professionals. In this episode, he shares tips on sorting things out when conflicts arise.Set BoundariesThere is such a thing as unhealthy conflict, according to Jerry. It is when expectations are not met that consequences must be enforced. For example, a person whose tardiness is habitual must be given sanctions to break the habit. Jerry says that when no consequence is given, that person will lose respect for the leader. On the other hand, there is a healthy conflict that when something comes up, the people involved fix it quickly, which makes it feel like the conflict was never there in the first place. Jerry emphasizes the importance of setting boundaries, especially with conflicts, because it will be the defining point of the relationship. Nice people are often taken advantage of for not giving a consequence; that is why ironing things out is a must. It sets the boundary that the habit should be stopped. Conflict is always involved in a healthy relationship, but the difference is that it can be dealt with in a way that allows people to be honest without being disrespectful.Resolving ConflictConflicts are not the same and differ depending on circumstances. Despite this, Jerry has developed a general approach to dealing with any conflict regardless of the situation, summarized into four Cs: shut the comfort, get curious, collaborate, and find closure. About Jerry Fu:Jerry Fu is a leadership coach. He works with Asian-American professionals on their careers and life journeys. He focuses on resolving clients' conflicts at work, in culture, and within themselves. His services include one-on-one coaching, group workshops, and keynote presentations.Jerry completed the CoachRice Leadership Certificate Program in the spring of 2020. He is an ICF-certified coach and certified talent optimization consultant with Predictive Index.Outline of the Episode:[02:47] Jerry's journey to becoming a conflict resolution coach[06:23] Not so good aspects in terms of culture that need to be unlearned[10:35] Why boundaries must be set when it comes to resolving conflicts[12:44] The process of how to resolve conflicts[17:14] Address issues across different types of people[21:27] Sponsor advertisements[23:52] How to say something without being defensive[26:14] Conflict resolution in social media[28:53] Jerry's way of coaching based on factors that concern conflict resolution[31:06] Common mistakes people fall into when trying to resolve conflicts[34:19] Conflict resolution in the workspace setting[39:35] Jerry's books, podcasts, and video recommendationsConnect with Jerry:Website: https://www.adaptingleaders.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerry-fu-pharmd-acc-53710187/Connect with Sammy!Website: https://financezilla.net/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/financezilla/The Coldest Water!  - 10% off using code FINANCEZILLAHabits365 apparel - 15% off using code FINANCEZILLA

We've aired a few special episodes recently, but now we're back to RevOps 201. Today we're talking marketing metrics to align your revenue operation. Marketing metrics are super interesting. There's a ton of them and many don't even help you align. It's kind of like sales and CS. There's stuff that's good to know, but "how many phone calls your sellers make” is not necessarily helping you align your revenue operation. Tune-in for a deep dive on the ONE marketing metric to rule them all: CAC (customer acquisition cost). Plus, a deep-dive on LTV and many other fun acronyms. Follow the Hosts on LinkedIn: Jordan Henderson (Sr. Director of Revenue Operations) Brandon Redlinger (Sr. Director of Product Marketing) Jonathan Stevens (Sr. Revenue Operations Manager) Sponsored by: Revenue.io | Powering high-performing revenue teams with real-time guidance Explore the Revenue.io Podcast Universe: Sales Enablement Podcast Selling with Purpose Podcast RevOps Podcast

01:01 - Ian's Superpower: Curiosity & Life-Long Learning * Discovering Computers * Sharing Knowledge 06:27 - Streaming and Mentorship: Becoming “The Career Development Guy” * The Turing School of Software and Design (https://turing.edu/) * techinterview.guide (https://techinterview.guide/) * twitch.tv/iandouglas736 (https://www.twitch.tv/iandouglas736) 12:01 - Tech Interviews (Are Broken) * techinterview.guide (https://techinterview.guide/) * Daily Email Series (https://techinterview.guide/daily-email-series/) * Tech vs Behavior Questions 16:43 - How do I even get a first job in the tech industry? * Tech Careers = Like Choose Your Own Adventure Book * Highlight What You Have: YOU ARE * Apply Anyway 24:25 - Interview Processes Don't Align with Skills Needed * FAANG Company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech) Influence * LeetCode-Style Interviews (https://leetcode.com/explore/interview/card/top-interview-questions-medium/) * Dynamic Programing Problems (https://medium.com/techie-delight/top-10-dynamic-programming-problems-5da486eeb360) * People Can Learn 35:06 - Fixing Tech Interviews: Overhauling the Process * Idea: “Open Source Hiring Manifesto” Initiative * Analyzing Interviewing Experiences; Collect Antipatterns * Community/Candidate Input * Company Feedback (Stop Ghosting! Build Trust!) * Language Mapping Reflections: Mandy: Peoples' tech journeys are like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Keep acquiring skills over life-long learning. Arty: The importance of 1-on-1 genuine connections. Real change happens in the context of a relationship. Ian: Having these discussions, collaborating, and saying, “what if?” This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: ARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 260 of Greater Than Code. I am Arty Starr and I'm here with my fabulous co-host, Mandy Moore. MANDY: Thank you, Arty. And I'm here with our guest today, Ian Douglas. Ian has been in the tech industry for over 25 years and suggested we cue the Jurassic Park theme song for his introduction. Much of his career has been spent in early startups planning out architecture and helping everywhere and anywhere like a “Swiss army knife” engineer. He's currently livestreaming twice a week around the topic of tech industry interview preparation, and loves being involved in developer education. Welcome to the show, Ian. IAN: Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. MANDY: Awesome. So we like to start the show with our famous question: what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? IAN: Probably curiosity. I've always been kind of a very curious mindset of wanting to know how things work. Even as a little kid, I would tear things apart just to see how something worked. My parents would be like, “Okay, great. Put it back together.” I'm like, “I don't know how to put it back together.” So [chuckles] they would come home and I would just have stuff disassembled all over the house and yeah, we threw a lot of stuff out that way. But it was just a curiosity of how things work around me and that led into computer programming, learning how computers worked and that just made the light bulb go off in my mind as a little kid of, I get to tell this computer how to do something, it's always going to do it. And that just led of course, into the tech industry where you sign up for a career in the tech industry, you're signing up for lifelong learning and there's no shortage of trying to satiate that curiosity. I think it's just a never-ending journey, which is fantastic. ARTY: When did you first discover computers? What was that experience like for you? IAN: I was 8 years old. I think it was summer, or fall of 1982. I believe my dad came home with a Commodore 64. My dad was always kind of a gadget nut. Anything new and interesting on the market, he would find an excuse to buy and so he, brought home this Commodore 64 thinking family computer, but once he plunked it down in front of me, it sort of became mine. I didn't want to share. I grew up in Northern Canada way, way up in the Northwest territories and in the wintertime, we had two things to do. We could go play hockey, or we'd stay indoors and not freeze. So I spent a lot of time indoors when I wasn't playing hockey—played a lot of hockey as a kid. But when I was home, I was basically on this Commodore 64 all the time, playing games and learning how the computer itself worked and learning how the programming language of it worked. Thankfully, the computer was something I had never took apart. Otherwise, it would have been a pile of junk, but just spending a lot of time just learning all the ins and outs. Back then, the idea was you could load the software and then you type a run command and it would actually execute the program. But if you type a list, it would actually show you all the source code of the program as well and that raised my curiosity, like what is all this symbols and what all these words mean? In the back of the Commodore 64 book, it had several chapters about the basic programming language. So I started picking apart all these games and trying to learn how they worked and then well, what would happen if I change this instruction to that and started learning how to sort of hack my games, usually break the game completely. But trying to hack it a little bit; what if I got like an extra ship, an extra level, or what if I change the health of my character, or something along those lines? And it kind of snowballed from there, honestly. It was just this fascination of, oh, cool, I get to look at this thing. I get to change it. I get to apply it. And then of course, back in the day, you would go to a bookstore and you'd have these magazines with just pages and pages and pages of source code and you'd go home and you type it all in expecting something really cool. At the end of it, you run it and it's something bland like, oh, you just made a spreadsheet application. It's like, “Oh, I wanted a game.” Like, “Shucks.” [laughter] But as a little kid, that kind of thing wasn't very enticing, but I'm sure as an adult, it's like, oh cool, now I have a spreadsheet to track budgeting, or whatever at home. It was this whole notion of open source and just sharing knowledge and that really stuck with me, too and so, as I would try to satiate this innate curiosity in myself and learn something, I would go teach it to a friend and it's like, “Hey, hey, let me show you what I just did. I learned how to play this thing on the piano,” or “I learned how to sing this song,” or “I learned how to use a magnifying glass to cook an ant on the sidewalk.” [chuckles] Whatever I learned, I always wanted to turn around and teach it to somebody else. I would get sometimes more excitement and joy out of watching somebody else do it because I taught them than the fact that I was able to learn that and do it myself. And so, after a while it was working on the computer became kind of a, oh yeah, okay, I can work on the computer, I can do the thing. But if I could turn around and show somebody else how to do that and then watch them explore and you watch that light bulb go off over their head, then it's like, oh, they're going to go do something cool with that. Just the anticipation of how are they going to go use that knowledge, that really stuck with me my whole life. In high school doing little bits of tutoring here and there. I was a paid tutor in college. Once I got out of college and got into the workplace, again, just learning on my own and then turning around and teaching others led into running my own web development business where I was teaching some friends how to do web development because I was taking on so much work that I had to subcontract it the somebody where I wasn't going to meet deadlines and so, I subcontracted them. That meant that I got to pay my friends to help me work this business. And so, that kind of kicked off and then I started learning well, how to servers work and how does the internet work and how do I run an email server on all this stuff? So just never-ending stream of knowledge going on in the internet and then just turning around and sharing that knowledge and keeping that community side of things building up over time. MANDY: Very cool. So in your bio, it said you're streaming now so I'm guessing that's a big part of what you do today with the streaming. So what are you streaming? IAN: So let's see, back in 2014, I started getting involved in mentorship with a local code school here in Denver called The Turing School of Software and Design. It's the 7-month code program and they were looking for someone that could help just mentor students. They were teaching Ruby on Rails at the time. So I got involved with them. I was working in Ruby at SendGrid at the time where I was working, who was later acquired by Twilio. And I'm like, “Yeah, I got some extra time. I can help some people out.” I like giving back and I like the idea of tutoring and teaching. I started that mentorship and it quickly turned into hey, do any of our mentors know anything about resumes and the hiring and interviewing and things like that. And by that point, I had been the lead engineer. I had done hiring. I hired several dozen engineers at SendGrid, or helped hire several dozen people at SendGrid. And I'm like, “Yeah, I've looked at hundreds and thousands of resumes.” Like, “What can I help with?” So I quickly became the career development guy to help them out and over time, the school started developing their career development curriculum and I like to think I had a hand in developing some of that. 3 years later, they're like, “You just want a job here? Like you're helping so many students, you just want to come on staff?” And so, I joined them as an instructor, taught the backend program, had a blast, did that for almost 4 full years. And then when I left Turing in June of 2021, I thought, “Well, I still want to be able to share this knowledge,” and so, I took all these notes that I had been writing and I basically put it all onto a website called techinterview.guide. When I finished teaching, I'm like, “Well, I still miss sharing that knowledge with people,” and I thought, “How else can I get that knowledge out there in a way that is scalable and manageable by one human being?” And I thought, “Well, I'll just kind of see what other people are doing.” Fumbled around on YouTube, watched some YouTube videos, watched people doing livestreaming on LinkedIn, livestreaming on Facebook, livestreaming on YouTube and trying to think could I do that? Nah, I don't know if I could do that. A friend of mine named Jonan Scheffler, he currently works at New Relic, he does a live stream. So I was hanging out on his stream one night and it was just so much fun seeing people interact and chat and how they engage the people in the chat and answering questions for them. I'm like, “I wonder if I could do that.” The curiosity took over from there and you can imagine where that went; went way down some rabbit holes on how to set up a streaming computer. Started streaming and found out that I wasn't very good at audio routing, [chuckles] recording things, and marketing, all that kind of stuff. But I kind of fumbled my way through it and Jonan was very generous with his time to help me straighten some things out and it kind of took off from there. So I thought, “Well, now I've got a platform where I can share this career development advice having been in the industry now for 25 years. Now, I've been director of engineering. I'm currently the director of engineering learning at a company. I've got an education background now as an instructor for several years. I've been doing tons of mentoring.” I love to give back and I love to help other people learn a thing that's going to help improve their life. I think of it like a ripple effect, like I'm not going to go out and change the world, but I can change your world and that ripple effect is going to change somebody else's world and that's going to change somebody else's world. So that's how I see my part in all of this play out. I'm not looking to be the biggest name in anything. I'm just one person with a voice and I'm happy to share my ideas and my perspectives, but I'm also happy to have people on my stream that can share their ideas and perspectives as well. I think it's important to hear a lot of perspectives, especially when it comes to things like job hunt, interview prep, and how to build a resume. You're going to see so much conflicting advice out there like, “This is the way you should do it,” and someone else will be like, “No, this is the way you should do it.” Meanwhile, I'm on the sidelines going, “You can do it all of that way.” Just listen to everybody's advice and figure out how you want to build your resume and then that's your resume. It doesn't have to look like the way I want it, or the way that someone else wants it; it can look how you want it to look. This is just our advice kind of collectively. So the livestream took off from there and I've got only a couple of hundred followers, or so on Twitch, but it's been a lot of fun just engaging with chat and people are submitting questions to me all the time. So I do a lot of Q&A sessions, like ask me anything sessions and it's just been a ton of fun. ARTY: That's awesome. I love the idea of focusing on one person and how you can make a difference in that one person's life and how those differences can ripple outward. That one-on-one connection, I feel like if we try and just broadcast and forget about the individuals, it's easy for the message and stuff to just get lost in ether waves and not actually make that connection with one person. Ultimately, it's all those ones that add up to the many. IAN: Definitely. Yeah. ARTY: So can you tell us a little bit more about the Tech Interview Guide and what your philosophy is regarding tech interviews? IAN: The tech interview process in – well, I mean, just the interview process in general in the tech industry is pretty broken. It lends itself very well to people who come from position and privilege that they can afford expensive universities and have oodles and oodles of free time to go study algorithms for months and months and months to go jump through a whole bunch of hoops for companies that want four, or five, six rounds of interviews to try to determine whether you're the right fit for the company and it's super broken. There are a lot of companies out there that are trying to change things a little bit and I applaud them. It's going to be a tough journey, for sure. Trying to convince companies like hey, this is not working out well for us as candidates trying to apply for jobs. As a company, though I understand because I've been a hiring manager that you need to be able to trust the people that you're hiring. You need to trust that they can actually do the job. Unfortunately, a lot of the tech interview process does not adequately mimic what the day-to-day responsibility of that job is going to be. So the whole philosophy of me doing the Tech Interview Guide is just an education of, “Hey, here's my perspective on what you're likely to face as a technical interview. These are the different stages that you'll typically see.” I have a lot of notes on there about how to build a resume, how to build a cover letter, thoughts on building a really big resume and then how to trim it down to one page to go apply for a particular job. How to write a cover letter that's customized to the business to really position yourself as the best candidate for that role. And then some chapters that I have yet to write are going to be things like how do you negotiate once you get an offer, like what are some negotiation tips. I've shared some of them live on the stream and I've shared a growing amount of information as I learn from other people as well, then I'll turn around and I'll share that on the stream. The content that's actually on the website right now is probably 3, 4 years old, some of it at least and so, I'm constantly going back in and I'm trying to revamp that material a little bit to kind of be as modern as possible. I used to want to go a self-publish route where I actually made a book. Several of my friends have actually gone through the process of actually making a book and getting it published. I'm like, “Oh, I want to do that, too. My friends are doing that. I could do that, too,” and I got looking into it. It's like, okay, it's an expensive, really time-consuming process and by the time I get that book on a shelf somewhere, a lot of the information is going to be out of date because a lot of things in the tech industry change all the time. So I decided I would just self-publish an online book where I can just go in and I can just constantly refresh the information and people can go find whatever my current perspective is by going to the website. And then as part of the website, I also have a daily email series that people can sign up for. I'm about to split it into four mailing lists. But right now, it's a single mailing list where I'm presenting technical questions and behavioral questions that you're likely to get asked as a web developer getting into the business. But I don't spend time in the email telling you how to answer the question; what I do instead is I share from the interviewer's perspective. This is why I'm asking you this question. This is what I hope to hear. This is what's important for me to hear in your answer. Because there's so many resources out there already that are trying to tell you how to craft the perfect answer, where I'm trying to explain this is why this question is important to us in the first place. So I'm taking a little bit different perspective on how I present that information and to date I've sent out, I don't know, something like 80,000 emails over a couple of years to folks that have signed up for that, which has been really tremendous to see. I get a lot of good feedback from that. But again, that information it doesn't always age well and interview processes change. I'm actually going through the process right now in the month of November to rewrite a lot of that information, but then also break out into multiple lists and so, where right now it's kind of a combination of a little bit of technical questions, a little bit of behavioral questions, a little bit of procedural, like what is an interview and so on. Now I'm actually going to break them out into separate lists of this list is all just technical questions and this list is all just behavioral questions and this list is going to be general process and then the process of going through the interview and how to do research and so on. And then the last one is just general questions and answers and a lot of that is stemmed from the questions that people have submitted to me that I answered on the live stream. So it all kind of packages up together. MANDY: That's really cool. I'd like to get into some of the meat of the material that you're putting out here. IAN: Yeah. MANDY: So as far as what are some of the biggest questions that you get on your street? IAN: Probably the most popular question I get—because a lot of the people that come by the stream and find the daily email list are new in the industry and they're trying to find that first job. And so by far, the number one question is, how do I even get a job in the industry right now? I have no experience. I've got some amount of education, whether it's an actual CS degree, or something similar to a CS degree, or they've gone through a bootcamp of some kind. How do I even get that first job? How do I position myself? How do I differentiate myself? How do I even get a phone call from a company? That's a lot of what's broken in the industry. Everybody in the industry right now wants people with experience, or they're saying like, “Oh, this is a “entry-level role,” but you must have 3 to 4 years' experience.” It's like, well, it's not entry level if you're asking for experience; it can't be both. All they're really doing is they're calling it an entry-level role so they don't have to pay you as much. But if they want 3-, or 4-years' experience, then you should be paying somebody who has 3-, or 4-years' experience. So the people writing these job posts are off their rocker a little bit, but that's by far, the number one question I get is how do I even get that first job. Once you get that first job and you get a year, year and a half, 2 years' experience, it's much easier to get that second job, or third job. It's not like oh, I'm going to quit my job today and have a new job tomorrow. But the time to get that next job is usually much, much shorter than getting this first job. I know people that have gone months and months, or nearly a year just constantly trying to apply, getting ghosted, like not getting any contact whatsoever from companies where they're sending in resumes and trying to apply for these jobs. Again, it's just a big indication of what's really broken in our industry that I think could be improved. I think that there's a lot of room for improvement there. MANDY: So what do you tell them? What's your answer for that? How do they get their first job? How do you get your first job? IAN: That's a [chuckles] good question. And I hate to fall back on the it depends answer. It really does depend on the kind of career that you want to have. I tell people often in my coaching that the tech industry is really a choose your own adventure kind of book. Like, once you get that job a little bit better, what you want your next job to be and so, you get to choose. If you get your first job as a QA developer, or you get that first job as a technical writer, or you get that first job doing software development, or you get that first job in dev ops and then decide, you don't want to do that anymore, that's fine. You can position yourself to go get a job doing some other kind of technical job that doesn't have to be what your previous job was. Now, once you have that experience, though recruiters are going to be calling you and saying, “Hey, you had a QA role. I've also got a QA role,” and you just have to stand firm and say, “No, that's not the direction I'm taking my career anymore. I want to head in this direction. So I'm going to apply for a company where they're looking for people with that kind of direction.” It really comes down to how do you show the company what you bring to the company and how you're going to make the company better, how are you going to make the team better, what skill, experience, and background are you bringing to that job. A lot of people, when they apply for the job, they talk about what they don't have. Like, “Oh, I'm an entry level developer,” or “I only went to a bootcamp,” or “I don't know very much about some aspect of development like I don't know, test driven development,” or “I don't really understand object-oriented programming,” or “I don't know anything about Docker, but I want to apply for this job.” Well, now you're highlighting what you don't have and to get that first job, you have to highlight what you do have. So I often tell people on your resume, on your LinkedIn, don't call yourself a junior developer. Don't call yourself an entry level. Don't say you're aspiring to be. You are. You are a developer. If you have studied software development, you can write software, you're a software developer. Make that your own title and let the company figure out what level you are. So just call yourself a developer and start applying for those jobs. The other advice that I tend to give people is you don't have to feel like you meet a 100% of the requirements in any job posts. As a hiring manager, when I read those job posts often, it's like, this is my birthday wish list. I hope I can find this mythical unicorn that has all of these traits [laughter] and skills and characteristics and that person doesn't exist. In fact, if I ever got a resume where they claim to have all that stuff, I would immediately probably throw the resume in the bin because they're probably lying, because either they have all those skills and they're about to hit me up for double the salary, or they're just straight up lying that they really don't have all those skills. As a hiring manager, those are things that we have to discern over time as we're evaluating people and talking with them and so on. But I would say if you meet like 30 to 40% of those skills, you could probably still apply. The challenge then is when you get that phone call, how do you convince them that you're worth taking a shot, that you're worth them taking the risk of hiring you, helping train you up in the skills that you don't have. But on those calls, you still need to present this is what I do bring to the company. I'm bringing energy, I'm bringing passion, and I'm bringing other experience and background and perspectives on things, hopefully from – just increasing the diversity in tech, just as an example. You're coming from a background, or a walk of life that maybe we don't currently have on the team and that's great for us and great for our team because you're going to open our eyes to things that we might not have thought of. So I think apply anyway. If they're asking for a couple of years' experience and you don't have it, apply anyway. If they're asking for programming languages you don't know, apply anyway. The languages you do know, a lot of that skill is going to transfer into a new language anyway. And I think a lot of companies are really missing out on the malleability and how they can shape an entry-level developer into the kind of developer and kind of engineer that they want to have on the team. Now you use that person as an example and say, “Now we've trained them with the process that we want, with the language and the tools that we want. They know the company goals.” We've trained them. We've built them up. We've invested in them and now everybody else we hire, we're going to hold to that standard and say, “If we're going to hire from outside, this is what we want,” and if we hire someone who doesn't have that level of skill, we're going to bring them up to that skill. I think a lot of companies are missing out on that whole aspect of hiring, that is they can take a chance on somebody who's got the people skills and the collaboration skills and that background and the experiences of life and not necessarily the technical skills and just train them on the technical skills. I went on a rant on this on LinkedIn the other day, where I was saying the return on investment. If a company is spending months and months and months trying to hire somebody, that's expensive. You're paying a recruiter, you're paying engineers, you're paying managers to screen all these people, interview all these people, and you're not quite finding that 100% skill match. Well, what if you just hired somebody months ago, spend $5,000 training them on the skills they didn't have, and now you're months ahead of the game. You could have saved yourself so much money so much time. You would have had an engineer on the team now. And I think a lot of companies are kind of missing that point. Sorry, I know I get very soapbox-y on some of the stuff. ARTY: I think it's important just highlighting these dynamics and stuff that are broken in our industry and all of the hoops and challenges that come with trying to get a job. You mentioned a couple of things on the other side of one, is that the interview processes themselves don't align to what it is we actually need skill-wise day-to-day. What are the things that you think are driving the creation of interviews that don't align with the day-to-day stuff? Like what factors are bringing those things so far out of alignment? IAN: That's a great question. I would say I have my suspicions. So don't take this as gospel truth, but from my own perspective, this is what I think. The big, big tech companies out there, like the big FAANG companies, they have a very specific target in mind of the kind of engineers that they want on their team. They have studied very deep data structures and algorithms, the systems thinking and the system design, and all this stuff. Like, they've got that knowledge, they've got that background because those big companies need that level of knowledge for things like scaling to billions of users, highly performant, and resilient systems. Where the typical startup and typical small and mid-sized company, they don't typically need that. But those kinds of companies look at FAANG companies and go, “We want to be like them. Therefore, we must interview like them and we must ask the same questions that they ask.” I think this has this cascading effect where when FAANG companies do interviews in a particular way, we see that again, with this ripple effect idea and we see that ripple down in the industry. Back in the early 2000s, mid 2000s—well, I guess right around the time when Google was getting started—they were asking a lot of really oddball kinds of questions. Like how many golf balls fit in a school bus and those were their interview challenges. It's like, how do you actually go through the calculation of how many golf balls would fit in a school bus and after a while, I think by 2009, they published an article saying, “Yeah, we're going to stop asking those questions. We weren't getting good signals. Everybody's breaking down those problems the same way and it wasn't really helpful.” Well, leading up to that point, everyone else was like, “Oh, those are cool questions. We're going to ask those questions, too,” and then when Google published that paper, everyone else was like, “Yeah, those questions are dumb. We're not going to ask those questions either.” And then they started getting into what we now see as like the LeetCode, HackerRank type of technical challenges being asked within interviews. I think that there's a time and place for some of that, but I think that the types of challenges that they're asking candidates to do should still be aligned with what the company does. One criticism that I've got. For example, I was looking at a technical challenge from one particular company that they asked this one particular problem and it was using a data structure called Heap. It was, find a quantity of location points closest to a target. So you're given a list of latitude, longitude values, and you have to find the five latitude and longitude points that are closest to a target. It's like, okay and so, I'm thinking through the challenge, how would I solve that if I had to solve it? But then I got thinking that company has nothing to do with latitude and longitude. That company has nothing to do with geospatial work of any kind. Why are they even asking that problem? Like, it's so completely misaligned that anybody they interview, that's the first thing that's going to go through their mind as a candidate is like, “Why are they asking me this kind of question?” Like, “This has nothing to do with the job. It had nothing to do with the role. I don't study global positioning and things like that. I know what latitude and longitude are, but I've never done any kind of math to try to figure out what those things would be and how you would detect differences between them.” Like, I could kind of guess with simple math, but unless you've studied that stuff, it's not going to be this, “Oh yeah, sure, no problem. It's this formula, whatever.” We shouldn't have to expect that candidates coming to a business are going to have that a, formula memorized, especially when that's not what your company does. And a lot of companies are like, “Oh, we're got to interview somebody. Quick, go to LeetCode and find a problem to ask them.” All you're going to do is you're going to bias your interview process towards people that have studied those problems on LeetCode and you're not actually going to find people that can actually solve your day-to-day challenges that your company is actually facing. ARTY: And instead, you're selecting for people that are really good at things that you don't even need. [chuckles] It's like, all right! It totally skews who you end up hiring toward people that aren't even necessarily competent in the skills that they actually need day-to-day. Like you mentioned FAANG companies need these particular skills. I don't even think that for resilience, to be able to build these sort of systems, and even on super hardcore systems, it's very seldom that you end up writing algorithmic type code. Usually, most of the things that you deal with in scaling and working with other humans and stuff, it's a function of design and being able to organize things in conceptual ways that make sense so that you can deconstruct a complex, fuzzy problem into little pieces that make sense and can fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. I have a very visual geometric way of thinking, which I find actually is a core ability that makes me good at code because I can imagine it visually laid out and think about the dependencies between things as like tensors between geographically located little code bubbles, if you will. IAN: Sure. ARTY: Being able to think that way, it's fundamentally different than solving algorithm stuff. But that deconstruction capability of just problem breakdown, being able to break down problems, being able to organize things in ways that make sense, being able to communicate those concepts and come up with abstractions that are easy enough for other people on your team to understand, ideally, those are the kinds of engineers we want on the teams. Our interview processes ought to select for those day-to-day skills of things that are the common bread and butter. [chuckles] IAN: I agree. ARTY: What we need to succeed on a day-to-day basis. IAN: Yeah. We need the people skills more than we need the hard technical skills sometimes. I think if our interview process could somehow tap into that and focus more on how do you collaborate, how do you do code reviews, how do you evaluate someone else's code for quality, how do you make the tradeoff between readability and optimization—because those are typically very polarized, opposite ends of the scale—how do you function on a team, or do you prefer to go heads down and just kind of be by yourself and just tackle tasks on your own? I believe that there's a time and place for that, too and there are personality types where you prefer to go heads down and just have peace and quiet and just get your work done and there's nothing wrong with that. But I think if we can somehow tap into the collaborative process as part of the interview, I think it's going to open a lot of companies up to like, “Oh, this person's actually going to be a really great team member. They don't quite have this level of knowledge in database systems that we hope they'd have, but that's fine. We'll just send them on this one-week database training class that happens in a week, or two and now they'll be trained.” [overtalk] MANDY: Do they want to learn? IAN: Right. Do they want to learn? Are they eager to learn? Because if they don't want to learn, then that's a whole other thing, too. But again, that's something that you can screen for. Like, “Tell me what you're learning on the side, or “What kinds of concepts do you want to learn?” Or “In this role, we need you to learn this thing. Is that even of interest to you?” Of course, everyone's going to lie and say, “Yeah,” because they want the paycheck. But I think you can still narrow it down a little bit more what area of training does this person need. So we can just hire good people on the team and now our team is full of good people and collaborative, team-based folks that are willing to work together to solve problems together and then worry about the technical skills as a secondary thing. MANDY: Yeah. I firmly believe anybody can learn anything, if they want to. I mean, that's how I've gotten here. IAN: Yeah, for sure. Same with me. I'm mostly self-taught. I studied computer engineering in college, so I can tell you how all the little microchips in your computer work. I did that for the first 4 years of my career and then I threw all that out the window and I taught myself web development and taught myself how the internet works. And then every job I had, that innate curiosity in me is like, “Oh, I wonder how e-commerce works.” Well, I went and got an e-commerce job, it's like, okay, well now I wonder how education works and I got into the education sector. Now, I wonder how you know this, or that works and so, I got into financial systems and I got into whatever and it just kind of blew my mind. I was like, “Wow, this is how all these things kind of talk to each other,” and that for me was just fascinating, and then turning around and sharing that knowledge with other people. But some people are just very fixed mindset and they want to learn one thing, they want to do that thing, and that's all they know. But I think, like we kind of talked about early in the podcast, you sign up for a career in this industry and you're signing up for lifelong learning. There's no shortage to things that you can go learn, but you have to be willing to do it. MID-ROLL: Rarely does a day pass where a ransomware attack, data breach, or state sponsored espionage hits the news. It's hard to keep up with all this and also to know if you're protected. Don't worry, Kaspersky's got you covered. Each week their team looks at the latest news, stories, and topics you might have missed during the week on the Transatlantic Cable Podcast. Mixing in-depth discussion, expert guests from around the world, a pinch of humor, and all with an easy to consume style - be sure you check them out today. ARTY: What kind of things could we do to potentially influence the way hiring is done and these practices with unicorn skilled searches and just the dysfunctional aspects on the hiring side? Because you're teaching all these tech interview skills for what to expect in the system and how to navigate that and succeed, even though it's broken. But what can we do to influence the broken itself and help improve these things? IAN: That's a great question. Breaking it from the inside out is a good start. I think if we can collectively get enough people together within these, especially the bigger companies and say like, “Hey, collectively, as an industry, we need to do interviewing differently.” And then again, see that ripple effect of oh, well, the FAANG companies are doing it that way so we're going to do it that way, too. But I don't think that's going to be a fast change by any stretch. I think there are always going to be some types of roles where you do have to have a very dedicated, very deep knowledge of system internals and how to optimize things, and pure algorithmic types of thinking. I think those kinds of jobs are always going to be out there and so, there's no fully getting away from something like a LeetCode challenge style interview. But I think that for a lot of small, mid-sized, even some large-sized companies, they don't have to do interviewing that way. But I think we can all stand on our soapbox and yell and scream, “Do it differently, do it differently,” and it's not going to make any impact at all because those companies are watching other companies for how they're doing it. So I think gradually, over time, we can just start to do things differently within our own company. And I think for example, if the company that I was working at, if we completely overhauled our interview process that even if we don't hire somebody, if someone can walk away from that going, “Wow, that was a cool interview experience. I've got to tell my friends about this.” That's the experience that we want when you walk away from the company if we don't end up hiring. If we hire you, it's great. But even if we don't hire you, I want to make sure that you've still got a really cool interview experience that you enjoyed the process, that it didn't just feel like another, “Okay, well, I could have just grind on LeetCode for three months to get through that interview.” I don't ever want my interviews to feel like that. So I think as more of us come to this understanding of it's okay to do it differently and then collectively start talking about how could we do it differently—and there are companies out there that are doing it differently, by the way. I'm not saying everyone in the industry is doing all these LeetCode style interviews. There are definitely companies out there that are doing things differently and I applaud them for doing that. And I think as awful as it was to have the pandemic shut everything down to early 2020, where no hiring happened, or not a lot of hiring happened over the summer, it did give a lot of companies pause and go, “Well, hey, since we're not hiring, since we got nobody in the backlog, let's examine this whole interview process and let's see if this is really what we want as a company.” And some companies did. They took the time, they took several months and they were like, “You know what, let's burn this whole thing down and start over” as far as their interview process goes. Some of them completely reinvented what their interview process was and turned it into a really great process for candidates to go through. So even if they don't get the job, they still walk away going, “Wow, that was neat.” I think if enough of us start doing that to where candidates then can say, “You know what, I would really prefer not to go through five, or six rounds of interviews” because that's tiring and knowing that what you're kind of what you're in for, with all the LeetCode problems and panel after panel after panel. Like, nobody wants to sit through that. I think if enough candidates stand up for themselves and say, “You know what, I'm looking for a company that has an easier process. So I'm not even going to bother applying.” I think there are enough companies out there that are desperately trying to hire that if they start getting the feedback of like you know what, people don't want to interview with us because our process is lousy. They're going to change the process, but it's going to take time. Unfortunately, it's going to drag out because companies can be stubborn and candidates are also going to be stubborn and it's not going to change quickly. But I think as companies take the step to change their process and enough candidates also step up to say, “Nah, you know what, I was going to apply there,” or “Maybe I got through the first couple of rounds, but you're telling me there's like three more rounds to go through? Nah, I'm not going to bother.” Companies are now starting to see candidates ghost them and walk away from the interview process because they just don't want to be bothered. I think that's a good signal for a company to take a step back and go, “Okay, we need to change our process to make it better so the people do want to apply and enjoy that interview process as they come through.” But it's going to take a while to get there. ARTY: Makes me think about we were talking early on about open source and the power of open source. I wonder with this particular challenge, if you set up a open source hiring manifesto, perhaps of we're going to collaborate on figuring out how to make hiring better. Well, what does that mean? What is it we're aiming for? We took some time to actually clarify these are the things we ought to be aiming for with our hiring process and those are hard problems to figure out. How do we create this alignment between what it is we need to be able to do to be successful day-to-day versus what it is we're selecting for with our interview process? Those things are totally out of whack. I think we're at a point, at least in our industry, where it's generally accepted that how we do interviewing and hiring in these broken things—I think it's generally accepted that it's broken—so that perhaps it's actually a good opportunity right now to start an initiative like that, where we can start collaborating and putting our knowledge together on how we ought to go about doing things better. Even just by starting something, building a community around it, getting some companies together that are working on trying to improve their own hiring processes and learning together and willing to share their knowledge about things that are working better, such that everybody in the industry ultimately benefits from us getting better at these kinds of things. As you said, being able to have an interview process that even if you don't get the job, it's not a miserable experience for everyone involved. [chuckles] Like there's no reason for that. IAN: Yeah. MANDY: That's how we – I mean, what you just explained, Arty isn't that how we got code of conducts? Everybody's sitting down and being like, “Okay, this is broken. Conferences are broken. What are we going to all do together?” So now why don't we just do the same thing? I really like that idea of starting an open source initiative on interviewing. Like have these big FAANG companies be like, “I had a really great interview with such and such company.” Well, then it all spirals from there. I think that's super, super exciting. ARTY: Yeah. And what is it that made this experience great? You could just have people analyze their interview experiences that they did have, describe well, what are the things that made this great, that made this work and likewise, you could collect anti-patterns. Some of the things that you talked about of like, are we interviewing for geolocation skills when that actually has absolutely nothing to do with our business? We could collect these things as these funky anti-patterns of things so that people could recognize those things easier in there because it's always hard to see yourself. It's hard to see yourself swinging. IAN: An interesting idea along those lines is what if companies said like, “Hey, we want the community to help us fix our interview process. This is who we are, this is what our business does. What kinds of questions do you think we should be asking?” And I think that the community would definitely rally behind that and go, “Oh, well, you're an e-commerce platform so you should be asking people about shopping cart implementations and data security around credit cards and have the interview process be about what the company actually does.” I think that that would be an interesting thing to ask the community like, “What do you think we should be asking in these interviews?” Not that you're going to turn around and go, “Okay, that's exactly what we're going to do,” but I think it'll give a lot of companies ideas on yeah, okay, maybe we could do a take-home assignment where you build a little shopping cart and you submit that to us. We'll evaluate how you did, or what you changed, or we're going to give you some code to start with and we're going to ask you to fix a bug in it, or something like, I think that there's a bigger movement now, especially here in Canada, in the US of doing take-home assignments. But I think at the same time, there are pros and cons of doing take-home assignments versus the on-site technical challenges. But what if we gave the candidate a choice as part of that interview process, too and say, “Hey, cool. We want to interview you. Let's get through the phone screen and now that you've done the phone screen, we want to give you the option of, do you want to do a small take-home assignment and then do a couple of on-site technical challenges? Do you want to do a larger take-home and maybe fewer on-site technical challenges?” I think there's always going to be some level of “Okay, we need to see you code in front of us to really make sure that you're the one that wrote that code.” I got burned on that back in 2012 where I thought somebody wrote some code and they didn't. They had a friend write it as their take-home assignment and so, I brought them in for the interview and I'm like, “Cool, I want you to fix this bug,” and they had no idea what to do. They hadn't even looked at the code that their friend wrote for them it's like, why would you do that? So I think that there's always going to be some amount of risk and trust that needs to take place between the candidates and the companies. But then on the flip side of that, if it doesn't work out, I really wish companies would be better about giving feedback to people instead of just ghosting them, or like, “Oh, you didn't and pass that round. So we're just not even going to call you back and tell you no. We're just not ever just going to call.” The whole ghosting thing is, by far, the number one complaint in the tech industry right now is like, “I applied and I didn't even get a thanks for your resume. I got nothing,” or maybe you get some automated reply going, “We'll keep you in mind if you're a match for something.” But again, those apple looking at tracking systems are biased because the developers building them and the people reading the resumes are going to have their own inherent bias in the search terms and the things that they're looking for and so on. So there's bias all over the place that's going to be really hard to get rid of. But I think if companies were to take a first step and say like, “Okay, we're going to talk to the community about what they would like to see the interview process be,” and start having more of those conversations. And then I think as we see companies step up and make those changes, those are going to be the kinds of companies where people are going to rally behind them and go, “I really want to work there because that interview process is pretty cool.” And that means the company is – well, it doesn't guarantee the company's going to be cool, but it shows that they care about the people that are going to work there. If people know that the company is going to care about you as an employee, you're far more likely to want to work there. You're far more likely to be loyal and stay there for a long term as opposed to like oh, I just need to collect a paycheck for a year to get a little bit of experience and then job hop and go get a better title, better pay. So I think it can come down to company loyalty and stuff, too. MANDY: Yeah. Word of mouth travels fast in this industry. IAN: Absolutely. MANDY: And to bring up the code of conduct thing and now people are saying, “If straight up this conference doesn't have a code of conduct, I'm not going.” IAN: Yeah. I agree. It'll be interesting to see how something like this tech interview overhaul open source idea could pick up momentum and what kinds of companies would get behind it and go, “Hey, we think our interview process is pretty good already, but we're still going to be a part of this and watch other companies step up to.” When I talked earlier about that ripple effect where Google, for example, stopped asking how many golf balls fit in a school bus kind of thing and everyone else is like, “Yeah, those questions are dumb.” We actually saw this summer, Facebook and Amazon publicly say, “We're no longer going to ask dynamic programming problems in our interviews.” It's going to be interesting to see how long that takes to ripple out into the industry and go, “Yeah, we're not going to ask DP problems either,” because again, people want to be those big companies. They want to be billion- and trillion-dollar companies, too and so, they think they have to do everything the same way and that's not always the case. But there's also something broken in the system, too with hiring. It's not just the interview process itself, but it's also just the lack of training. I've been guilty of this myself, where I've got an interview with somebody and I've got back-to-back meetings. So I just pull someone on my team and be like, “Hey, Arty, can you come interview this person?” And you're like, “I've never interviewed before. I guess, I'll go to LeetCode and find a problem to give them.” You're walking in there just as nervous as the candidate is and you're just throwing some technical challenge at them, or you're giving them the technical challenge that you've done most recently, because you know the answer to it and you're like, “Okay, well, I guess they did all right on it. They passed,” or “I think they didn't do well.” But then companies aren't giving that feedback to people either. There's this thinking in the industry of oh, if we give them feedback, they're going to sue us and they're going to say it's discriminatory and they're going to sue us. Aline Lerner from interviewing.io did some research with her team and literally nobody in recent memory has been sued for giving feedback to candidates. If anything, I think that it would build trust between companies and the candidates to say, “Hey, this is what you did. Well, this is what we thought you did okay on. We weren't happy with the performance of the code that you wrote so we're not moving forward,” and now you know exactly what to go improve. I was talking to somebody who was interviewing at Amazon lately and they said, “Yeah, the recruiter at Amazon said that I would go through all these steps,” and they had like five, or six interviews, or something to go through. And they're like, “Yeah, and they told me at the end of it, we're not going to give you any feedback, but we will give you a yes, or no.” It's like so if I get a no, I don't even find out what I didn't do well. I don't know anything about how to improve to want to go apply there in the future. You're just going to tell me no and not tell me why? Why would I want to reapply there in the future if you're not going to tell me how I'm going to get better? I'm just going to do the same thing again and again. I'm going to be that little toy that just bangs into the wall and doesn't learn to steer away from the wall and go in a different direction. If you're not going to give me any feedback, I'm just going to keep banging my head against this wall of trying to apply for a job and you're not telling me why I'm not getting it. It's not helpful to the candidate and that's not helpful to the industry either. It starts affecting mental health and it starts affecting other things and I think it erodes a lot of trust between companies and candidates as well. ARTY: Yeah. The experience of just going through trying to get a job and going through the rejection, it's an emotional experience, an emotionally challenging experience. Of all things that affect our feels a lot, it's like that feeling of social rejection. So being able to have just healthier relationships and figuring out how to see another person as a human, help figure out how you can help guide and support them continuing on their journey so that the experience of the interview doesn't hurt so much even when the relationship doesn't work out, if we could get better at those kinds of things. There's all these things that if we got better at, it would help everybody. IAN: I agree. ARTY: And I think that's why a open source initiative kind of thing maybe make sense because this is one of those areas that if we got better at this as an industry, it would help everybody. It's worth putting time in to learn and figure out how we can do better and if we all get better at it and stuff, there's just so many benefits and stuff from getting better at doing this. Another thing I was thinking about. You were mentioning the language thing of how easy it is to map skills that we learned from one language over to another language, such that even if you don't know the language that they're coding in at a particular job, you should apply anyway. [chuckles] I wonder if we had some data around how long it takes somebody to ramp up on a new language when they already know similar-ish languages. If we had data points on those sort of things that we're like, “Okay, well, how long did it actually take you?” Because of the absence of that information, people just assume well, the only way we can move forward is if we have the unicorn skills. Maybe if it became common knowledge, that it really only takes say, a couple months to become relatively proficient so that you can be productive on the team in another language that you've never worked in before. Maybe if that was a common knowledge thing, that people wouldn't worry about it so much, that you wouldn't see these unicorn recruiting efforts and stuff. People would be more inclined to look for more multipurpose general software engineering kinds of skills that map to whatever language that you're are doing. That people will feel more comfortable applying to jobs and going, “Oh, cool. I get the opportunity to learn a new language! So I know that I may be struggling a bit for a couple months with this, but I know I'll get it and then I can feel confident knowing that it's okay to learn my way through those things.” I feel if maybe we just started collecting some data points around ramp up time on those kind of things, put a database together to collect people's experiences around certain kind of things, that maybe those kinds of things would help everyone to just make better decisions that weren't so goofy and out of alignment with reality. IAN: Yeah, and there are lots of cheat sheets out there like, I'm trying to remember the name of it. I used to have it bookmarked. But you could literally pull up two programming languages side by side in the same browser window and see oh, if this is how you do it in JavaScript, this is how you do it on Python, or if this is how you write this code in C++, here's how you do it in Java. It gives you a one-to-one correlation for dozens, or hundreds of different kinds of blocks of code. That's really all you need to get started and like you said, it will take time to come proficient to where you don't have to have that thing up on your screen all the time. But at the same time, I think the company could invest and say, “You know what, take a week and just pour everything you've got into learning C Sharp because that's the skill we want you to have for this job.” It's like, okay, if you are telling me you trust me and you're making me the job offer and you're going to pay me this salary and I get to work in tech, but I don't happen to have that skill, but you're willing to me in that skill, why would I not take that job? You're going to help me learn and grow. You're offering me that job with a salary. Those are all great signals to send. Again, I think that a lot of companies are missing out and they're like, “No, we're not going to hire that person. We're just going to hold out until we find the next person that's a little bit better.” I think that that's where some things really drop off in the process, for sure is companies hold out too long and next thing they know, months have gone by and they've wasted tons of money when they could have just hired somebody a long time ago and just trained them. I think the idea of an open source collective on something like this is pretty interesting. At the same time, it would be a little subjective on “how quickly could someone ramp up on a, or onboard on a particular technology.” Because everybody has different learning styles and unless you're finding somebody to curate – like if you're a Ruby programmer and you're trying to learn Python, this is the de facto resource that you need to look at. I think it could be a little bit subjective, but I think that there's still some opportunity there to get community input on what should the interview process be? How long should it really be? How many rounds of interviews should there be from, both the candidates experience as well as the company experience and say, as a business, this is why we have you doing these kinds of things. That's really what I've been to teach as part of the Tech Interview Guide and the daily email series is from my perspective in the business, this is why. This is why I have you do a certain number of rounds, or this is why I give you this kind of technical challenge, or this is why I'm asking you this kind of question. Because I'm trying to find these signals about you that tell me that you're someone that I can trust to bring on my team. It's a tough system when not many people are willing to talk about it because I think a lot of people are worried that others are going to try to game the system and go, “Oh, well, now that I know everything about your interview process, I know how to cheat my way through it and now you're going to give me that job and I really don't know what I'm doing.” But I think that at the same time, companies can also have the higher, slow fire, fast mentality of like, “All right, you're not cutting it.” Like you're out right away and just rehire for that position. Again, if you're willing to trust and willing to extend that offer to begin with. If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. It's a business decision; it's not a personal thing. But it's still devastating to the person when they don't get the job, or if they get fired right away because they're not pulling their weight, but if they're cheating their way through it, then they get what they deserve to. MANDY: Awesome. Well, I think that's a great place to put a pin in this discussion. It is definitely not a great place to end it. I think we should head over to our reflection segment. For me, there were so many things I wrote down. I loved that you said that people's tech journey is like a choose your own adventure. You can learn one thing and then find yourself over here and then the next thing you know, you find yourself over here. But you've picked up all these skills along the way and that's the most important thing is that as you go along this journey, you keep acquiring these skills that ultimately will make you the best programmer that you can be. Also, I really like that you also said something about it being a lifelong learning. Tech is lifelong learning and not just the technical skills. It's the people skills. It's the behavioral skills. Those are the important skills. Those skills are what ultimately it comes down to being in this industry is, do you have the desire to learn? Do you have the desire to grow? I think that should be one of the most important things that companies are aware of when they are talking to candidates that it's not about can this person do a Fibonacci sequence. It's can they learn, are they a capable person? Are they going to show up? Are they going to be a good person to have in the office? Are they going to be a light? Are they going to be supportive? Are they going to be caring? That's the ultimate. That right there for me is the ultimate and thank you for all that insight. ARTY: Well, I really, really loved your story, Ian at the very beginning of just curiosity and how you started your journey, getting into programming and then ended up finding ways to give back and getting really excited about seeing people's light bulbs go off and how much joy you got from those experiences, connecting with another individual and making that happen. I know we've gotten on this long tangent of pretty abstract, big topics of just like, here's the brokenness in the industry and what are some strategies that we can solve these large-scale problems. But I think you said some really important things back of just the importance of these one-on-one connections and the real change happens in the context of a relationship. Although, we're thinking about these big things. To actually make those changes, to actually make that difference, it happens in our local context. It happens in our companies. It happens with the people that we interact with on a one-on-one basis and have a genuine relationship with. If we want to create change, it happens with those little ripples. It happens with affecting that one relationship and that person going and having their own ripple effects. We all have the power to influence these things through the relationships with the individuals around us. IAN: I think my big takeaway here is we have been chatting for an hour and just how easy it is to have conversation about hey, what if we did this? How quickly it can just turn into hey, as a community, what if? And just the willingness of people being in the community, wanting to make the community better,

Jenny Sawyer, CS, from Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Jeremy Fain is the CEO and Co-Founder of Cognitiv. With over 20 years of interactive experience across agency, publisher, and ad tech management, Jeremy led North American Accounts for Rubicon Project before founding Cognitiv. At Rubicon Project, Jeremy was responsible for global market success of over 400 media companies and 500 demand partners through Real-Time-Bidding, new product development, and other revenue strategies, ensuring interactive buyers and sellers could take full advantage of automated transactions. Prior to Rubicon Project, Jeremy served as Director of Network Solutions for CBS Interactive. With oversight of a $30 million+ P&L, Jeremy was responsible for development, execution and management of data-driven solutions across CBS Interactive's network of branded sites, including audience targeting, private exchange, and custom audience solutions. Prior to CBS, Jeremy served as Vice President of Industry Services for the IAB, where he shaped interactive industry policy, standards, and best practices, such as the first VAST standard and the Tc&Cs 3.0, by working on a daily basis with all the major media companies as well as all the agency holding companies. Jeremy Fain attended Yale University where he graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering and Columbia Business School where he received his MBA. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The gang discusses “love of nature”.

Laurie Scott, CS, from Plymouth, Massachusetts, USA

'Wild Isle' is a story about a day trip to the Isle of Mull - from wild-landscapes to wild-life, the island is showing off its "untamed side".We start with a hike in the hills of south Mull, discovering the plants of the bog, swimming in a mountain loch and exploring the corries of the coast. Then, we're hitting the road and make our way along the scenic route from Pennyghael to Salen.But the real stars of this episode are the animals we see along the way - from eagles to otters, from Highland coos to herons. You're in for a safari!After the story, I'll tell how my top tips to visit the Isle of Mull for yourself and make the most of it.Are you ready? Great – let's travel to Scotland!Visit our website to find the full show notes incl. our top tips for a trip to the Cairngorms National Park.This episode is brought to you by Go Ape.Book now at www.goape.co.uk and use the code WILDSCOT to receive 10% all four Scottish Go Ape sites - Aberfoyle, Peebles, Aberdeen, Dalkeith (Edinburgh).See full T&Cs on wildforscotland.comLinksJoin the Wild for Scotland email list here.Subscribe here to join the waitlist for my Ready-Made Itinerary, launching soon!Plan your trip with my Isle of Mull travel guide.Go off the beaten path to the Ross of Mull.Book a guided hike with Tony McLean.Access the transcript of this episode on wildforscotland.comSupport this show on Patreon and unlock bonus episodes.CreditsWritten and hosted by Kathi Kamleitner. Produced and edited by Fran Turauskis. Cover Art illustrated by Lizzie Vaughan-Knight. All original music composed by Bruce Wallace. Additional music and sound effects from Zapsplat and Pond5. Support my show on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Please Fill out our end of Year Listener Consensus Here Join our Investing Masterclass Waitlist Here This is our last episode of the year until March 2022, so we're ending the season off with a review on how our investing styles have changed over the past 12 months! Reminder: Use the Sharesies NZ promo code GTI to get a bonus $10 in your account, ready to invest! The offer is only available to New Zealand investors T&Cs https://intercom.help/sharesies/en/articles/5440077-girls-that-invest-promo-terms-and-conditions For more Girls That Invest: Join our Facebook group and follow us on Instagram Till next year! Sim & Sonya xo

EP280 - Anker Innovations Head of Global Communications Eric Villines Eric Villines is the Global Head of Communications for Anker Innovations. Anker is one of the most successful brands to be started on the Amazon platform. In this broad ranging interview, we discuss the origin story of Anker, their evolution from early Amazon FBA seller to Global Omni-channel brand. Eric covers their incubator, Anker Innovation, and their Amazon FBA consulting service OceanWing. We also discuss his recent book, Get Funded!: The Startup Entrepreneur's Guide to Seriously Successful Fundraising. Episode 280 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Wednesday. November 17th, 2021. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:00] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 280 being recorded on Wednesday November 17th 2021 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:15] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners Jason is a fellow Gadget addict one of our favorite brands that we love from consumer perspective is Anchor and then we also spend a lot of time here on the show talking about anchor because it's a very interesting brand that is one of the few that we call kind of digitally native Amazon born so today on the show we are very excited to welcome Eric villines he is the head of Global Communications at anchor and is based out of Sunny Seattle Eric welcome to the show. Eric: [0:50] Thanks for having me we've also been having about two months of rain so we're living up to our our cliche. Jason: [0:59] That for the last two months that might have sounded bad but being here in Chicago I have a feeling that rain is about to start looking pretty good to me. Eric: [1:07] Yeah means known cold and wind. Jason: [1:09] Exactly all of the above although it's been pretty mild so far. Eric before we jump into all the anchor discussions we always like to get sort of a brief background about our guests and maybe you could tell us what your role is an anchor. Eric: [1:25] Sure so I run Global Communications at anchor Innovations which is essentially a fancy way of saying public relations. Which in time it's sort of corporate Communications you could be crisis Corporate social responsibility and then obviously the most exciting part of what I do which would be product PR dealing with the media on reviews and, I'm getting the word out of on the cool gadgets we. Jason: [1:51] That's awesome so does that mean you have one of everything. Eric: [1:55] I have two of everything. It's a funny story I've worked in consumer electronics for a long time and I remember Steven Yang who hired me personally for the role, I remember I was in China and I said I want to make sure that I've got budget to give everyone on my team, you know one of the products and he giggled and I'm absolutely serious, we all have to you know live it and breathe it and love it and know the good and the bad aspects of all of our products because we're talking with the media all the time so I kind of. I'm kind of insistent that everyone on my team has the products and then the other part is we all we can never run out of battery that's like that's like a major faux pas here, if I ever hear the words even coming out of my own mouth that my phone is almost out of juice that's super bad as a charging company. Jason: [2:45] That does seem off brand I am I have a little bit of a fetish for your products and the thing I've noticed is every time I have a family gathering I get completely cleaned out. Eric: [2:57] Oh yeah there is. Jason: [2:58] So I yeah I didn't realize you were in such a replenishment category but it's ended up being one for me. Eric: [3:04] It's funny because I started out an entertainment before I came into consumer electronics and one of the first things I did here because I'm just using my own family Dynamics as I have three children. And my wife of course is involved in this as well and we steal each other's cables constantly and then we lie to each other, about you know and it's gotten so bad that people take you know colored Sharpies and all sorts of things but we had done a survey, on you know what are some of the most irritating things that happen in the family and this came in like is a top four. People stealing each other's charging components and then lying about it so it's a national issue that we just haven't spent enough time talking about. Jason: [3:48] Yeah we'll have to dedicate a whole nother show to solving that problem one last product related question do you have a favorite anchor products. Eric: [3:57] Well gosh I so we have these new cables that you said fetish I don't want to take it too far but it's. It's the material that's made out of is reminds me of certain things and that Dominion but it's a super soft latex like, cable that seems to never because of the material it seems to never not up. And that's one of my favorite things and they come in all these super cool colors and that's really new for us we've always offered two colors a beautiful white and the Beautiful Black Version, and so this year we started getting into more colors and that's been really exciting because that's a really easy way to distinguish your product from say your son's because you can have different colors but the material it's really nice I keep them in my bag I've got him for all my products. Those are really cool we launched a new line of Mag go products which we have a desk version which allows you to, put your phone against and it'll you know magnetically charged it but the battery is removable so you can actually bring it with you, so it serves two purposes and I keep that like in the kitchen so when I'm cooking and I have my recipes but then I can grab it and go. So those are really cool but I mean man we launch new products every day so you ask me next week I'm going to tell you something completely different. Scot: [5:23] Yeah this is an unsolicited but my favorite is there's a little Hub you guys have for the Macbook so I can just plug in one USB C and I've got this thing I'm looking at it now it looks like a mutated octopus with with 800 things, poking out of it that I no longer have to plug into my MacBook so you're you're saving me a lot of ports which I really appreciate. Eric: [5:40] Yeah as they move to usb-c only but you still had a myriad of other things you needed to connect to it. Scot: [5:47] Yeah well now the magsafe is a now they're back yeah they decided they're giving you guys too much Martin said so now they now they have like they're like oh man when you need to add more stuff you know. Eric: [5:57] Well I've talked to a lot of pro users and they're really excited to see the HDMI cable come back it's just a you know it's a strong connection that cables is still different. And sometimes it's a huge hassle putting a hub attached to the computer and then attaching your HDMI cable and everything else to it. Scot: [6:16] Yeah absolutely especially when you're traveling and you're popping into someone else's conference room you'd never have that one little cable, so we obviously we talked a lot about anchor on the show and we can just kind of stopped fan blowing on the on the user side would love to hear kind of your view of the founding story of anchor, you know we kind of classify it as you heard is this kind of like Amazon born would love to know how you guys tell that story. Eric: [6:43] Yeah I mean it's you know I had relatives that move during the Dust Bowl and move to Pasadena and built. You know a chain of gas stations and it's this true Americana story but he what's interesting is I think Steven Yang story is very similar it is that that's story of an idea and perseverance and building and Global brand that. People have in their purses and backpacks even if they don't know it's anchor there's a strong probability that it is and that's that's one is exciting the others a branding dilemma. But Stephen was a senior engineer in California at Google and he had he was trying to find a new battery for his Toshiba laptop. [7:32] And as he was looking online including Amazon and the Toshiba websites he realized he had sort of two choices you either going to buy the one from Toshiba that was super expensive, for take a chance, on all of these other versions white-label versions and unknown brands on Amazon and and purchase one from their sort of buyer beware. And he kind of had a light bulb moment and thought you know this is this is ridiculous like who are the people that are putting these online how they've been tested how can I know that, what I'm buying is going to work with my laptop and you know give me a year of battery life. Long story short he moved back to China with his wife who was then his fiance he took a small loan from his mom. And he started anchor and in the beginning what Stephen did was go around to different factories and and Developers, and with his engineers and they went and tested all these batteries so in the beginning it was a white label play was him finding and filtering through. [8:38] I'll just say it a lot of garbage and trying to find the absolute best, alternatives to all of these laptop batteries and they started selling those through Amazon and that was the first point was the easiest place for them and selling specifically and exclusively to the United States. A year later it was a massive success beyond anything that he had ever imagined, and the next logical step was to take that concept and move it into mobility and start looking at mobile phones and chargers and portable batteries and all these things that were at the time, really starting to come out but the big difference when he went into Mobility is the idea was we need to get as fast out of, the white labeling as we can because we have some ideas that even these these smaller factories and people that were producing, can are doing that we can find ways to make it better, so that sort of unearth the world of you know contract manufacturing where they're Engineers were developing and designing, you know the specifics and then Contracting manufacturers to develop those products and the rest as they say is history. Ironically today we are celebrating our 10-year anniversary actually last month. [9:58] And that's a pretty big deal so we went from a guy and his wife. And a little mama money from his mom to a you know a multibillion-dollar company. With multiple Brands and over 3,000 employees all around the world. So in addition to charging which is still a huge huge part of our, DNA we've developed a number of Brands subsequently over the last three to four years everything from robotic vacuums and future robotic products, to home security high-end true wireless headsets. Smart Home Entertainment pet products baby socks I mean like you know smart baby socks I mean just like the whole gamut. [10:45] And the sort of the common line through all of this is that Steven and his team are constantly looking for areas within an emerging or establish consumer electronics area where they can bring value. And you know usually we might come in and the play might be okay we're going to come up with a really great product that's going to be, a little lower cost and that gets our foothold and then the the long-term strategy is then to LeapFrog over the competitors with something truly innovative. And this is kind of a phenomenon that's worked really really well. For Stephen and his engineers and the marketing teams and all of our sales people around the world. Scot: [11:28] Did he have an industrial design background hurry just had the pain and kind of cheeses and created the company from there. Eric: [11:37] Well he's a Hitman he's a True Blood engineer so I mean he's he's right at that right at the hardware level and into coding and all of that so the industrial design. Was not his core competency so bringing in people that that could fill in, those areas and ultimately well they say 10 years later we brought color right but of course then we had great devices that worked really well but we're but when we look at industrial design, I would say that you know that's what's going to propel us over the next 10 years with with the Thinker charging. Scot: [12:14] Yeah it's been the you know I really like kind of the functional but still kind of modern kind of vibe you guys have with your products it's really nice is he still with the company is you still still involved. Eric: [12:27] Yeah yeah I mean I talked to him regularly he is very approachable. It's interesting because he shares his office with two other people at the company and it's kind of this kitchen table set up he doesn't have a private office, because there's so much collaboration and you look around the company we're all like that even though I'm in Seattle, and in my office I do the same thing with my team we just take some long tables and we connect them up and everyone just sits on them because it's like jazz we're just constantly. You know coming up with ideas and talking and it's just more efficient. Jason: [13:06] I do want a Lobby by the way I feel like you have some cool colors now you have like a like a lavender and a mint but what you really need is like a retailgeek blue I think would be. Eric: [13:18] Retailgeek blue yeah. Jason: [13:20] Yeah I could send you the PMS colors at that. Eric: [13:22] Okay yeah send me the Pantone colors yeah the, yeah I mean we I would think the colors are sort of muted so they're they're a joke they don't offend anyone so they're not they're not super striking their kind of muted across the color spectrum but so far they've been. They've been received really really well there's there's an old joke and consumer electronics that people are always screaming for color. And then when you look at the sales and you find it's the white and black that sell the most. So it's like you need to have the color but in the end most people end up choosing the the kind of safer black and white. Jason: [14:05] Yeah now I actually I'll be honest the style of the colors fine and actually think they are attractive kind of pastel colors but the it's just nice to have a diversity because I actually have a system like I have one color for my USBC cables. Eric: [14:19] Mmm. Jason: [14:20] One color for my lightning cables so that I can you know quickly distinguish them in my back. Eric: [14:24] You're not messing around man. Jason: [14:27] I have a little I have a problem. So I it's funny in the early days of these kind of digitally native direct to Consumer Brands there used to be this religious battle there were companies that were like. And the path to the customer through Amazon we're going to sell this stuff on Amazon and I would characterize anchor as the poster child for the most successful brand that was born. By primarily making themselves available on Amazon and selling through Amazon's traffic. But for every company like that there was another company that's like that's crazy Amazon is going to steal your customer and knock you off and they're all these you know potential, downfalls to Amazon and you know we should own the customer ourselves and we should have our own website and so increasingly that became the Shopify contingency and so it used to be, you know a company was either an Amazon company or a Shopify company. And more recently I feel like the increasingly the answer is not or it's and that. You know the consumers on Amazon so you need to be on Amazon but you also do have consumers that want to buy direct and you should have your own website and. My proof point for that is I want to say in the last year or so anchor has launched its own Shopify site so I now can shop anchor on Amazon but also on your own direct website is that like. [15:54] Like you got did you guys have debates and conversations about that and was that a very overt decision or is it just something where you just swept up a Shopify side at some point and you really still think of yourself as an Amazon only company. Eric: [16:07] Well there's a lot to unpack I'm going to I'm going to try to I'm going to try to find the question in that statement, the first of all we started definitely start on Amazon and one of the things I would argue about Amazon is that it is direct, so whether you're selling on your website you know or you're selling on Amazon you're ultimately. [16:29] Selling direct through the Amazon platform and you're engaging with your customers and your you know you're dealing with customer service and all the things you would normally do so I think Amazon has been a great partner and it is it continues to be definitely a big part of our DNA. But as we evolved into different regions around the world you know that there are different channels, that in our sort of different stages of development but the omni-channel approach meaning, you know in our case Amazon which is always a big part of us our own website which is great for Branding and direct connection and through our Retail Partners because in the United States were sold everywhere we're sold at you know Best Buy Walmart Target, Etc you can go to medium art overseas, so we don't see ourselves as just a single Channel we definitely are see ourselves is an omni-channel but I think you know Amazon is provide us an incredible platform to launch on, the ability the ability I think for a person that has a great product looking to sell something and any part of the world where Amazon is is so convenient and so easy. [17:41] And you know the financial Commitment if you're just starting out and you're Distributing your products the platform has evolved its improved. And it's ultimately pretty easy to get going on the platform without you know a tremendous amount of financial backing. Jason: [18:02] Yep and it is interesting because you have you know been a heavy practitioner on the platform from the early days in it does feel like it's evolved a lot. From your guys's perspective do you still feel like there's a. Competitive advantage in knowing the platform better than other sellers like it feels like there's a lot of levers to pull now and I mean you know different companies with different levels of sophistication in their Amazon presents. Why does everybody learning all the best practices now and they're sort of parody or do you feel like you guys can still kind of win more than your fair share of eyeballs on Amazon. Eric: [18:38] I mean we we've been doing this for you know for 10 years now and so they're the they're the tools and there's the Instinct and then there's the the lessons learned from the billions of mistakes that we've made, along the way and I don't know those things are those things are harder to I think grass for people that are just coming into the space so I think we absolutely have an advantage, but you know I mean I think it's not magic it takes a lot of work and a lot of patience, and a lot of observation, you know if you're putting a listing on Amazon and you're putting that listing in Italy or France or the UK or whatever, you know simply Translating that listing into the local language is just the bare minimum I mean you're dealing with customer service and being able to communicate. With customers being able to deliver products on time being able to answer their questions be able to take returns and then that's you know even before you've really thought about marketing because there are. [19:44] Something like nine million sellers on Amazon right now and that is a huge ocean, just filled and filled with Fish And you are you're battling against the the those eyeballs every day. Organic search or even direct search you're going to you know if you go up and look for toothpaste I mean you know, in the search engine you're going to see a myriad of players in there including you know ones that are common Brands to others that seem interesting and what's going to draw the eyeball away from the common brand that everyone knows too, the new brand what's going to make the consumer just try and reach out a discover you and take that extra effort so everyone going on to any platform, that may deal with a bunch of Brands is dealing with you know millions of competitors and it stopped. [20:39] I think getting set up on the platform and getting started is easy but that's that's you know that's step one, but then you got to get people seeing your listings and you got to get people reading your listings and you got to get people putting stuff in their shopping cart and clicking the shopping cart and, fulfilling and then you know being there at the end of that process to give them great customer service in every language, where you're selling that product because if you can't do that and that last part is critical, you're going to get bad reviews and people don't buy products with two and sometimes even three star ratings when you're dealing with you know consumer electronics they're looking for four and five. So you could have the greatest product in the world but you could have a lot of mad consumers out there where you haven't done right by them and they're not going to give you some great star ratings and you can pretty much. You know kiss your Prosperity goodbye. Jason: [21:33] Yeah I sometimes describe it as a. A darwinian meritocracy that like you know if you think about old school if you sell a product to Walmart and they give you shelf space and you screw up and run out of stock, you lose all the sales while you're out of stock but the day you restock your back on the Shelf your kind of entitled to that that shelf position. The duration of a program but you have to earn that visibility in the front of the Amazon shelf what every minute through a wide variety of best practices and if you screw up, you fall off that shelf and when you get back in stock you don't get your spot back you got to climb back up the hill. Eric: [22:10] Yeah yeah I mean especially now in today's climate there's a lot of. Material shortages and other things and that's been you know super painful for four people across every, line of business not just consumer electronics and that very same thing you know you're working hard to develop customer base and then, you don't have the materials to produce the products or the factories that you're working with and then you can't fulfill you been all this great marketing you brought everyone to your front door and then, grab we don't have any products, and that's it's painful to see for especially you know entrepreneurs and people new to the game because they have brilliant ideas and great products and. You know they've done an amazing job building word-of-mouth and it's super sad to see that fail at that last step. Jason: [23:03] For sure that actually is a great segue we're recording this in mid-november double 11 day just happened Black Friday is next week. As we sit here I think there's something like ninety one container ships off the coast of Long Beach either a bunch of cool new anchor products like trapped in those boats what's holiday looking like for you are you guys well well stocked and well positioned. Eric: [23:30] I think we are with some things and we could be better and other things I mean again we have the advantage of having a lot of skus so we I would say it's easier for us, to adapt, then than others and you know I can say from my perspective if I go out on a media to and September and I show a lot of really cool gadgets. And then we reach the end of October and I'm like well crap so that isn't coming we're going to we're going to delay that because of something it is what it is what we're used to it. But we have so many skus that you know we were Prime day or Black Friday or Cyber Monday or just basic Christmas shopping or Hanukkah shopping we've got something, so we can adapt it will get past it. Jason: [24:23] Yeah speaking of which I given that you're in the consumer at Rackspace is CES ordinarily a big part of your marketing mix. Eric: [24:32] I would say it is I think in the new world order it isn't as important for us. But we you know we've done Big Boost and we've done stuff and you know our sales teams of gone out there I think it's wait and see. This January we've done some some interviews with with media and I think we found that maybe forty percent of those that normally attend are coming, the rest are waiting and seeing we didn't do a booth this year I've also heard from our sales team that their counterparts at some of the retailers may not be coming in January as well. So I don't know is it going to be like a bad prom or nobody dances. I think we're going to have to wait and see I think maybe for many it's going to be a real last minute decision. Jason: [25:25] Yeah it's interesting I've attended like 28 CES has and I'm not going and, talking which I used to catch a flu at CES every single year so it's the I'm not care. I think Tom Clancy wrote a book where like the terrorist likes bedspread the biological Weapon by disseminating it at CES just for. Eric: [25:47] Perfect yeah I think it's you know I think people I think you have to have a vaccination card this time around to get in I think that's what I've heard but yeah I mean from point A to Z you know your. There's a lot of airplanes. Jason: [26:02] I'm kind of curious I think less people are going to but then the magic question is. Does that kind of will they discover that the world didn't end when they didn't go and put your point like does that accelerate the changing World Order and CES becomes less important or you know is this just going to be a down year and next year they'll be back to normal I think, that's going to be interesting to watch. Eric: [26:22] Yeah I mean there's CS is just the beginning you've got Mobile World Congress you've got aoife you've got you know as we move into next year and all of them are going to have to be making those tough decisions. And then I think that the repercussions of companies that didn't go in the world didn't sink either going to be wondering you know what are these what's the value of these trade shows. To us as a business you know I think for us they're valuable you know on the one end of the communication Spectrum it's super beneficial to scale our pitching by having an enormous number of people from all around the world in ones. But it's also very noisy so you know you're competing with a lot of large names. And we've always been very Scrappy so we tend to do a lot of are moving and communication before CES. And after CES or even entirely outside of the you know the wake of any of these trade shows. So and that's that's generally how we've been successful. Scot: [27:27] Brickell any other interesting holiday Trends or anything you guys noticed as we've kind of gone through covid and or kind of hopefully coming out the back side. Eric: [27:37] Yeah I mean I you know not to sound boring but charging is always a big thing during the holidays people bought their new iPhones people are buying new MacBooks people are buying peripherals. And you know around that time usually you know a couple of weeks later when they lost their cables already or you know they realize they won't one for travel and they wanted to stay home and they want one in their home office and they want one in the kitchen, so it's always a good time for us in that category, so charging definitely the other big part of our business right now is audio so our sound Core Audio brand, we develop a super popular line of true wireless headphones the Liberty series, and one of the things that makes it unique is we work with a bunch of grammy award-winning Engineers to help us tune them, so they would come out of the box sounding like the mix that the engineers originally in planned versus over based or over traveled, that's been really really popular for us all around the world I mean as far as India hugely popular in the United States the UK Germany, Emerging Markets that's a big thing and then I'd say home security that's been a big a big Boon for us we launched our home security brand yuffie about three years ago. [28:59] And you know we're developing a lot of unique products in that space that separate us from the rest for one we don't we don't use the cloud when you buy the product at your. [29:12] All of the footage is captured on a secure SD card that's integrated either into the base station or the independent products that you put outside the house. Which is really cool and we have millions of users around the world right now, using that product because they see it not only is protecting your security but also their privacy. [29:32] You'll see a lot of people do personal gifts to themselves during the holiday so a lot of those those big, tend to be you know people in a house saying hey how about we get this for ourselves for Christmas, and and we recently launched a super-smart robotic vacuum called the X8 it's are you fee robotic vacuum. That's super smart so instead of bumping into walls and trying to figure things out at uses both Visual and Laser mapping. And will actually draw up a map of your house that you can look at on your phone, and see it's how it's found the most ingenious way of cleaning around chairs and couches and other things and making sure that it can do everything and then you can create zones, I didn't say well I just want to let stay away from the baby room because the baby's sleeping but you can clean this Zone and that zone and this Zone. That's been really popular and we had been doing kind of lower in robotic vacuums until that point. Entry level and this was one of our first push and super-premium summarize forleo some but that LeapFrog, so in the beginning we might find Our Place coming in as as a lower-cost alternative that still is super quality, and then with the X8 we're doing the LeapFrog moment and trying to jump past the competition with the technology. Scot: [30:59] Frankel, so one of the things we want to do is Pivot you guys have some other innovations that are not gadgets or charging or anything like that, you guys launched a new division that both Jason and I were excited to learn more about called ocean wing. My guess was it was drones but I think that's wrong tell you tell us more about what ocean when you. Eric: [31:24] Yeah so I say first with the title but when I first started working with anchor Innovations in the United States over four years now, I was actually working for ocean Lee that was our that was how we presented our Corporation, and the the story is that it was ocean Wing to essentially take our technology and fly across the Pacific or Atlantic Ocean and bring it to the United States. So when the idea came up of developing a Consulting business, under anchor Innovations the ocean Wing name came up again and simple it's actually makes a hell of a lot more sense for this than it may have Hazard LLC in the United States when we were bringing anchored to the United States. [32:14] But long story short we established in 2019 so we've been around awhile we have about 200 employees around the world. And the long and the short of it is that we're trying to take the the decade of experience that we've developed. Again with all those mistakes along the way to become you know the 7 billion dollar, consumer electronics company and give people an option to improve their business lines, so that's from the beginning to the end of the process and what we're looking for is companies that have already gone in and let's just say made their first 10 million, and they've hit a wall. [32:55] Because they haven't been able to expand the business or scale either through supply chain issues through fulfillment customer service maybe the advertising has become, complicated and convoluted because they've developed so many skus there's just so many problems that when someone reaches a certain point and they want to get to that next 10 or 20 million dollars when they're doing business, it's a different skill set, you know what they've done is worked it to a certain point and they is try as they might they can't get past that threshold and that's where we come in, so we're developing essential overall Amazon selling and operations processes that could be digital marketing marketing insights, advertising management helping them develop their Brand store and their product pages to customer service and relationship management which I mentioned earlier is. Reticle to get those star ratings in a good place through good authentic communication with your customers in a great experience with the products. [33:59] Obviously e-commerce and all the financial systems, and then what we're dealing with a lot these days is supply chain and Logistics management so you get yourself to a certain point and there's a lot of people that are coming to us and that is the area, where they're really hurting the most and they need help they need help developing new contacts new supply chain partners, for how do I deal with the issue if you're dealing with something that might spoil like we're dealing with a company that, deals in collagen and when something spits on one of those tankers out in the middle of the ocean for too long when it arrives in the warehouse, it's past its fresh state so you've just lost all that inventory so each client is unique, but with this kind of broad scope of things that we can help them with and we can help audit the business and hopefully help them transcend whatever's keeping them from moving to that next 10 and 20 and 30 million dollars. Jason: [34:59] Very interesting so going back to our earlier conversation this is sort of a way for other young young Brands to leverage all the expertise and skills you guys have have built-in staying on top of this ecosystem. Eric: [35:14] Exactly it's an opportunity for us to take what we've learned and apply it to that young brand I couldn't have said it better myself. Jason: [35:22] Yeah and it at this point is ocean Wing primarily focused with Amazon distribution or would they also leverage all the other distribution channels that you guys have expanded into. Eric: [35:36] Yeah I mean I think I think our sweet spot is definitely FBA so specifically Amazon. That is not to say that we can't help them with other things like supply chain and Logistics but for us, it's a recipe and you know where we've had our success with the clients have come in or people that have been focused on Amazon and then we can kind of look at what they're doing and we can evolve the recipe a little bit, and and get it all the ingredients in place and help them be successful because they all work together, so but I would say Amazon is definitely our primary focus right now at least dealing with businesses that are on Amazon that isn't to say that these businesses are you solely focused Amazon because they're not but Amazon is a key Channel especially if they're going globally and that's where we come in. Jason: [36:31] Got it and obviously over the last year there's kind of been a lot of Buzz around these I'll call them FB a roll ups where you know these, these companies have raised a bunch of money and they go out and acquire Brands and aggregate them and try to help them with their Amazon presents and we you know we've followed thrash Co and perch and, and all of those is, is this kind of your version of that do you see your value prop being different than those other companies or is it just that you have. Sort of more experience and and product scale than some of these companies. Eric: [37:05] How to say this without sounding like it like it's not a jerk but the again we this is what we do, this is how we built our business so we can take. The lessons learned the hard ones too and we can apply it to our clients and I think that alone is super unique that we're a company that's already done this and you know in spades, and now we can apply those learnings to irregular company the other part of it is that most consultancies are focused on Consulting, and but we're a consultant that actually you know rolls up our sleeves and gets into the nitty-gritty of the business and helps and and and that's really depending on the level of the contract or the engagement but you're not only dealing company that can come in and, say some pretty words and show you a powerpoint of what you should be doing, but you know we've already done it and we can roll up our sleeves and get deep in there with you and help you do it or do it. And then that last part in terms of supply chain and and Logistics and you know dealing with manufacturers around the world or suppliers and stuff I think that's a definitely a secret sauce because of our relationships. In China and around the world that we can bring to bear that others can't. Scot: [38:23] So I'd be remiss as the entrepreneur on the show if I noticed in your bio on LinkedIn you have written a book and it's very much in my wheelhouse it's called get funded the startup entrepreneurs guide to seriously successful fundraising I wish I'd had this 20 years ago but I'm glad it exists now tell us tell us about this book and how it came to be. Eric: [38:46] Well my writing partner John Biggs is a little bit of a media icon we've known each other for I think I took them on a media tour maybe 12 13 years ago and. [38:58] We just became very good friends and our families have subsequently traveled the world with each other and we just kind of dig each other and we both have the same kind of sense of humor and sensibilities. [39:10] A couple of years ago he reached out to me that he had been approached by McGraw-Hill to write this book, and thought that I could help provide sort of the second part of the book so the book is broken out into two parts one is is about financing but written in such a way that whether you're trying to develop a taco truck, or you know a retail store or something else what are the different options out there from let's say SBA Loans to even using cryptocurrency, 22 you know set up fundraising all the way down to the meetings and how you value the company how do you pitch people, how do you put presentations together, so very very very this is not this is for the person that was really starting out with very limited knowledge, on the fundraising process and how do you present yourself at the end of the day so John really focus more on the fundraising side and I focus more on the presentation skills, how to pitch how to talk how to prepare how to answer questions the technical aspects of doing a presentation when everything goes wrong. Obviously if I could if I could rewrite a whole section on this now since the book was published last year in September I probably be a whole section on how to pitch during covid because that was. [40:35] That was definitely not it was not a reality when we were writing the book but it was definitely a reality by the time the book was published and I hope and we've heard, the people the industry has adapted that investors and seed funders and people are hard at work and investing but, for the person that might not have the background in this I still think the book for evaluating your company, getting all your ducks in a row building your presentations and how to pitch is still very valuable. Scot: [41:12] Very cool yet this kind of books I think they're kind of Evergreen and it's kind of a little snowball kind of effort so be patient it'll it'll catch up. Jason: [41:22] I am curious it does feel like there's a little bit of a disruption in the fundraising World why you know there for a long time there's this kind of traditional VC path, and obviously there's still a lot of money that flows through that path but I feel like the the role of Angel Investors and sort of other untraditional fundraising. Is becoming more common than it used to be like you guys try to cover that those kind of approaches in the book as well or is it mostly focused on on moving through Sandhill Road. Eric: [41:52] Well it's we wanted it in some ways to be the antithesis of Silicon Valley so for those people that are going down that road you know inevitably they're going to partner up. Let's say at the app generation. They're going to partner up and kind of go down that road our book really tries to focus everything from the pros and cons of using your own credit card friends and family, crowdfunding as I said SBA Loans if you're a minority or women owned business looking at options they're looking at. Prices and options like through FedEx has a great program for entrepreneurs and trying to cover the whole gamut, so we could make fundraising more reasonable and open to the entrepreneur is opposed to. Yeah the tech bro going to Silicon Valley and looking for for someone's bill. Scot: [42:45] Awesome I had one follow-up on Ocean we just took kind of clarify it for listeners you guys are your kind of more in the agency side of things you're not going out there and finding, new brands that are also born on Amazon and acquiring of in kind of rolling them up like the thrashes of the world is do I have that right. Eric: [43:04] We're talking about anchor Innovations right. Scot: [43:07] Yeah the ocean Wing synchronization set. Eric: [43:12] Well on the ocean on the ocean Wing side it's definitely consultative but I mean those things are going to evolve as the business comes in and I don't know if you mean like Financial stakes and the business and stuff but. I mean who knows right if if something came along that looked amazing and a great partnership I'm sure we would consider that. On the anchor Innovation side I think you'll be seeing and you know in the future probably incubator initiatives and things like that, it would be to me it would be a personally exciting to get involved in as seeking out and finding you know exciting. Developers all around the world we tend to be very myopic here and look at the United States as being, where everything's happening and I'd say you know maybe from apps and things like that might be true but when you're looking at Innovation and medicine or innovation and Robotics or innovation and Farm Technology or whatever, you really have to look outside and around the world and you're going to find that Innovation and really unique an unassuming places. So is is if we do get into more ink you know becoming more of a global incubator, I would imagine in our direction would be all over the place and looking in places like India and Africa and you know wherever cool things are being developed. Scot: [44:34] Cool so no almost boundless growth opportunities for you guys it sounds like an exciting time. Jason: [44:44] Well this is certainly going to be a exciting and different holiday season and this is going to be a great place to leave this conversation because it is happen again we've Perfectly Used up our allotted time, But Eric we really appreciate your time and enjoyed hearing about anchoring some of the exciting new initiatives there. Eric: [45:05] Thanks God and thanks Jason. Scot: [45:07] Yeah if anyone wanted to follow you or you are you big on Tick-Tock or I said it's usually or Twitter or LinkedIn or you publish their and then where should they go for some good the latest Anchor Information. Eric: [45:22] Someone can connect with me on LinkedIn my focus to be quite Frank with you as I'm So Married to my work as I tend to focus my communication through work as opposed to myself. I think it's one of those things when you work in Communications you got to be careful about what use you say. So mostly I'm just talking about my company in the things that we do. Jason: [45:49] Awesome well we will put a link to your LinkedIn profile in there and certainly some links to Anchor and until next time happy commercing!

In this interview with Ashley Waring, we discuss Ashley's experiences with integrating CS in the classroom, lessons learned providing professional development for new-to-CS educators, what Ashley learned helping write Alabama's CS standards and providing support after the rollout, language and oppression in standards development, why focusing on a college degree as an end goal might not be as important as focusing on lifelong learning, and more.Click here for this episode's show notes.

Today's episode is quite different as hosts Kevin Palmieri and Alan Lazaros share a feature they did separately on Over Scheduled Millennial Master Class. Alan talked about business and entrepreneurship, while Kevin leaned more towards podcasting. There is so much value in this episode, and you'll get access to two different wells of wisdom. Enjoy!What are you waiting for? Grab this  FREE COURSE now! https://next-level-university-courses.teachable.com/p/what-it-takes-to-get-to-the-next-levelGroup coaching details: https://nextleveluniverse.com/group-coaching/We love connecting with you guys! Reach out on LinkedIn, Instagram, or via emailWebsite

Valerie Minard, CS, from Ballwin, Missouri, USA

How do you know you're making financial progress? Most people think they can measure it by understanding the stock market, having enough to donate to charity, paying off debt or buying a sports car. But none of them say much about your financial life. In fact, they can be signs of a declining financial life.  In this episode, you'll find out what really shows your financial progress—and how to build your financial future on a solid foundation.  Want to let go of the myths and look forward to a stable financial life? Listen now!  Show highlights include:  Why a “financial vision” is the no.1 thing that ensures your financial progress (6:28) The weird reason knowing everything about personal finances can be useless (unless you put it into action) (8:40) How contributing a lot of money to charity can make you less generous (11:15) The “5 Cs” you can use to make sustainable financial progress and make your financial vision a reality. (16:06) Remember to download Grandma's Top Tips for an Independent Financial Future by dropping into https://grandmaswealthwisdom.com/free/. It's time for YOU to break through to a smart, stable, financial future. If you'd like to see how Grandma's timeless wealth strategies can work in your life, schedule your free 15-minute coffee chat with us by visiting www.grandmaswealthwisdom.com/call ... just like Grandma would want us to do.  Links mentioned on the show:  https://stillmethod.com

Listen to this podcast episode to learn how to fix websites that don't convert well. Wayne Mullins, the Founder of Ugly Mug Marketing, talks about: What are the three major reasons why websites don't convert well? What do high-converting websites do differently? How can you get more conversions from your website? What are the 5 questions that you should ask about every page of your website to optimize it for conversions? What are the 3 Cs of designing a website?On this episode, Wayne also shares fun stuff like the next place on his travel bucket list and one superpower he would like to have.Tune in to listen to him talk about it all and check out Wayne's new book, "Full Circle Marketing: Transform Your Marketing and Turn Customers Into Evangelists" now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Betting picks ahead of the EFL weekend. This podcast is sponsored by Betfair. Starting on Friday, this week with Betfair is Double Daily Rewards week - if you bet £20 on multiples or Bet Builders you'll receive a £10 free bet to use on multiples or Bet Builders, T&Cs apply. Over 18s only. Gamble responsibly. BeGambleAware.org. Join the NTT20 Squad on Levellr! An EFL Community on Telegram with non-stop EFL chat and bonus video & audio content from George & Ali. Join with a 2-week free trial & then £4.99 per month: bit.ly/3hBgv4L

Meet Bekah George. First and foremost a lover of the Lord Jesus Christ.  Holder of a Master degree & 2 Bachelor degrees. Former mental health counselor. Now spiritual soul care coach & CEO of Shear Vision Coaching. Bekah helps faith-based leaders and business leaders find fulfillment and maintain balance in all areas of life. She has a unique way of bringing faith + mental health together. On this episode, we talk about: - recovery from a narcissistic relationship (something both Bekah & I experienced) - the 4 Cs to live your best life (listen to learn what those powerful Cs are) - how her faith allows her to get her clients better results To learn more about Bekah visit: http://shearvisionscoaching.com   >> DOORS TO the Founders' Round of the Joyful Scaling Mastermind are NOW OPEN! Wanna scale your business, with JOY & simplicity? (Yes, it IS possible to have both -AND- a highly profitable & super impactful business, without compromising your faith or your values) Take this NEXT STEP to Apply today: bit.ly/JoyfulScalingConsult    >>Grab a copy of my brand NEW, 20-page resource: The Ultimate Scaling Guide: 4 Proven Strategies for Exponential Growth =>  https://www.judyweber.co    Join the Joyful Scaling for Female CEOs on FB: https://www.facebook.com/groups/joyfulscaling   Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/judyweberco  

Bryan Habana and Dylan Hartley join Alex and Tinds at The Prince in Fulham to look ahead to England and South Africa's first clash since the World Cup Final two years ago. We all know how that ended - but have England kicked on since then? They're just as unpopular, apparently, so we find out why everyone hates England, and remind ourselves of one of the greatest head-to-heads of all time: Habana vs a cheetah. partypoker tournament T&C's: 18+. Full T&Cs apply. begambleaware.org. Take time to think. Play responsibly.

The team begins Chapter 2 of The Four Loves, which is entitled “Likings and loves of the sub-human”. This chapter will be read over the […]

What if you could have the Instagram growth you desire in 2022 without spending hours on the platform and no longer let Instagram suck your soul? You're constantly inundated with strategies, and "do this," "try that" methods with no real success.  I think you might be missing the bigger picture sister! It doesn't matter if you're an extrovert or introvert; you can have success on Instagram by simplifying your approach with the 6 steps I share in today's episode. This episode is for you if you're still questioning Instagram all together and still trying to come up with a perfect strategy. After listening today you'll know: The 3 Cs to Instagram growth (the big picture) The 3 Vs to your strategy (the big game) But here's the good news! You don't have to do it alone! The Insta-Accelerator Academy is coming! Ready to grow on Instagram with Clarity, Simplicity, Control, and Ease? Then the Insta-Accelerator Academy is for you! So what is the Insta-Accelerator Academy? This is a membership community for those mompreneurs who are ready to clarify and build their brand on Instagram with simplicity and control. attract and work with their dream clients without spending all day tied to their devices Stop doing it alone and find support from others on the business building journey There's challenges, caption templates, story templates, stock photos, reel templates, and so much more to help you boost your account and get the visibility you desire. If this is something that you need, get on the waitlist now to secure the launch price. The doors will be open before you know it! And as I mentioned in the show, you can get access now to the Personal Brand Workbook to work on the 5 essential elements to a rockin' brand!

Tony Lobl, CS, from London, England

'The Birds and the Trees' is a story about a scenic road trip through the Cairngorms National Park. But it is also a story about Scottish wilderness - or rather what's left of it.We're driving down the Snow Roads scenic route, from the jaw-dropping drama of the Levht Road to the lush glens of the Royal Deeside and the high Munros in the heart of the Cairngorms.After getting a taste of this landscape from the roadside, we visit Mat Lodge Estate and go for a walk through one of the Scots pine regeneration areas managed by the National Trust for Scotland.After the story, I'll tell how my top tips to make the most of your drive down the Snow Roads and things to do on the Cairngorms National Park.Are you ready? Great – let's travel to Scotland!Visit our website to find the full show notes incl. our top tips for a trip to the Cairngorms National Park.This episode is brought to you by Go Ape.Book now at www.goape.co.uk and use the code WILDSCOT to receive 10% all four Scottish Go Ape sites - Aberfoyle, Peebles, Aberdeen, Dalkeith (Edinburgh).See full T&Cs on wildforscotland.comLinksJoin the Wild for Scotland email list here.Subscribe here to join the waitlist for my Ready-Made Itinerary, launching soon!Plan your trip with my Cairngorms travel guide.Get Andrew Painting's book Regeneration: Rescue of a Wild Land.Learn more about the conservation work at Mar Lodge Estate.Minimise your impact with my responsible travel tips.Access the transcript of this episode on wildforscotland.comSupport this show on Patreon and unlock bonus episodes.CreditsWritten and hosted by Kathi Kamleitner. Produced and edited by Fran Turauskis. Cover Art illustrated by Lizzie Vaughan-Knight. All original music composed by Bruce Wallace. Additional music and sound effects from Zapsplat and Pond5.Bird sounds sourced via RSPB: Northern Wheatear, Willow Warbler, Meadow Pipit, European Stonechat. Support my show on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Zac took us from his discovery of development in high school, through his CS degree, to his work as a freelancer. We discussed freedom, the skills required to lead your own business, missing your estimates, etc. Zac then took us through his first interviews and office jobs, all the way to discovering developer advocacy and his current work at Huawei.Here are the links from the show:https://www.twitter.com/devwithzacharyhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/zachary-mg-powell/https://linktr.ee/devwithzacharyhttps://developer.huawei.com/consumer/en/doc/overview/AppGallery-connectCreditsCover Campfire Rounds by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.Your host is Timothée (Tim) Bourguignon, more about him at timbourguignon.fr.Gift the podcast a rating on one of the significant platforms https://devjourney.info/subscribeSupport the podcast, support us on Patreon: https://bit.ly/devjpatreonSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/timbourguignon)

Hello loves! We're super lucky to have a VIP on the podcast today, the infamous Glen James from the My Millenial Money Podcast, Glen is an award winning ex financial advisor and recently an author for the #1 personal finance book Sort Your Money Out and Get Invested We chat with Glen today about - His background - How his career began - His investment portfolio including if he invests in crypto, NFTs, stocks and real estate - His investing tips and tricks You can follow Glen James on Instagram and join their FB group *Buy Glen James book Sort Your Money Out and Get Invested Here* ______________ Reminder: Use the Sharesies NZ promo code GTI to get a bonus $10 in your account, ready to invest! The offer is only available to New Zealand investors T&Cs https://intercom.help/sharesies/en/articles/5440077-girls-that-invest-promo-terms-and-conditions For more Girls That Invest: Join our Facebook group and follow us on Instagram Till next week team, Sim & Sonya xo

The goal of this blog and podcast series is to bring CS education research into the K-8 classroom. In this episode, I take a deep dive into two papers: Tapestry Workshops: Helping High School Teachers Grow and Diversify Computing and Lessons Learned from Providing Hundreds of Hours of Diversity Training with Luther Tychonievich. He is an Associate Professor of CS at the University of Virginia. I first met Luther when he got involved with the CS Institute in 2019, helping us bring the equitable CS teaching strategies he talks about in this episode to K-8 teachers. Find resources here.

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.DEEP WORK QUESTIONS:- Are some people more suited for deep work than others?  [4:54]- How do I tame post-shutdown excitement?   [8:33]- How to I deal with ambiguous deep work?  [14:41]- Can you  (Cal) elaborate on the Friction/Flow/Finalization project pathway?  [17:41] - How do you time-block plan in a company obsessed with last minute meetings?  [23:21]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS:- Are you (Cal) a control freak?  [41:16]- What have you (Cal) learned from the pandemic?  [45:07]- Would you (Cal) do your CS research and writing if you couldn't share it?  [51:54]- How did you (Cal) never get tempted to join a social media platform?  [56:11]- Is the monastic life the ultimate deep life?  [59:24]Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering.

In this episode of Molecule to Market, you'll go inside the outsourcing space of the global drug development sector with Carl Turner, Vice President Supply Chain at Mayne Pharma. Your host, Raman Sehgal, discusses the pharmaceutical and biotechnology supply chain with Carl, covering: Managing 30+ CDMOs across several drug delivery systems and having the unique perspective of being on the buy CMO side, but having visibility of the CMO sell side. The 4 Cs that Carl looks for in sourcing, evaluating and selecting a new CMO partner. And what a great vendor relationship looks like The constant balancing act of risk mitigation and achieving economies of scale in using third party vendors. The impact of globalisation on product supply and the value of having plant-level contacts and communications. Carl has almost three decades of experience in the pharmaceutical sector. A biologist by trade, he worked his way up the ranks at Abbot for 12 years in operations. He then made his way into planning and supply chain operations during 11 years with Hospira (became Pfizer). He has spent the rest of his career at Mayne Pharma helping the Australian-headquartered pharma company manage its complicated clinical and commercial global supply chain. Please subscribe, tell your industry colleagues and join us in celebrating and promoting the value and importance of the global life science outsourcing space. We'd also appreciate a positive rating! Molecule to Market is sponsored and funded by ramarketing. An international content, design and digital agency that helps companies in life sciences get noticed.

In this episode I unpack the report titled “2021 state of computer science education: accelerating action through advocacy,” which is an annual report on the state of K-12 CS in the United States that was authored by The Code.org Advocacy Coalition, Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA), and the Expanding Computing Education Pathways Alliance (ECEP).Click here for this episode's show notes.

How does P2P lending work in India? How safe is P2P lending? Deepak and Shray explore how the industry works, the risks involved and whether the returns are enough to justify the risks. Summary Banks keep a considerable spread between the interest they offer on a deposit and the interest they charge a borrower. So, some people think, why is the spread so big? Why can't I deal with the borrower directly and receive more interest on my money? The problem is you don't know the person you are going to be lending money to. In comes the P2P lending company, which acts as a sort of intermediary between the lender and borrower. When you give your money to a bank (as a deposit), the bank will guarantee that you will get your money back. But in the case of P2P lending, there is no such guarantee that you will get your money back. Another problem with P2P lending is, no one outside knows the actual default rates, and they are often much higher than what these companies report, even though the whole operation is legal. In P2P lending, you don't see one of the three Cs of lending – you don't have collateral; you have capacity and creditworthiness. One of the reasons why P2P companies have flourished is that banks, which should ideally lend money to people whose credit might be questionable, don't lend to them. But the answer is not to 'lend' them money. You can consider it as a form of charity, in which case, even if you don't get the money back, you don't mind losing it. And there are companies that work on this model. An alternative could be microfinance. But there are problems there too. Often, multiple microfinance companies want to lend to the same borrower, who uses the money for purposes other than what they were intended for, with the result that they are not able to repay. But microfinance companies can take this pressure because they are a company. A P2P lending firm is just an intermediary. They have no way to recover the money if a borrower refuses to pay, except send legal notices (because there is no collateral), which may not work. So, the gist is, if you want to give loans through a P2P lending firm, only lend so much that you won't mind even if you lose the money. Give it for charitable purposes. Give it to people who are in such bad shape, they can't afford anything else. Read the full transcript.

How do the 5 Cs take place when talking about Jesus with those who don't know him? Join us as we examine perhaps the most famous evangelistic encounter in the New Testament, Paul at the Areopagus where we consider how truth has been scattered among humanity but most fulfilled, explained, and empowered through Jesus. Pastor Dave leans heavily upon a diagram in the second half of this sermon, you may want to hop on over to our YouTube channel to get a good look at it and fully enter into the consideration : )

Betting picks ahead of the EFL weekend. This podcast is sponsored by Betfair. This week with Betfair if you bet £20 on multiples or Bet Builders you'll receive a £5 free bet to use on multiples or Bet Builders, T&Cs apply. Betfair also have no cash out suspensions on match odds for all Football League games, applicable to singles and multiples. Over 18s only. Gamble responsibly. BeGambleAware.org. Join the NTT20 Squad on Levellr! An EFL Community on Telegram with non-stop EFL chat and bonus video & audio content from George & Ali. Join with a 2-week free trial & then £4.99 per month: bit.ly/3hBgv4L

First Home W of the season for the Cs vs the Toronto Raptors. Quick Postgame Reaction on Corner Trey ☘️!

Nos adentramos en el proceso composicional de Raymond Torres-Santos para su nueva versión de “El País de los Cuatro Pisos,” obertura sinfónica basada en el ensayo de José Luis González y estrenada el pasado sábado, 23 de octubre de 2021, por la Orquesta Sinfónica de Puerto Rico. Recuerden que tenemos nueva Academia de Música y Artes Simbiosis (AMAS) en la Plaza de Recreo Santiago R. Palmer en el pueblo de Caguas; LLAMA o ESCRIBE ahora al: 939-273-7223 o al 939-207-6051, ¡para más información!   Música: "El País de los Cuatro Pisos", Obertura Sinfónica del Compositor Raymond Torres-Santos, basada en el ensayo de Jose Luis González. Grabación por la Orquesta Sinfónica de Puerto Rico (1990).   INTRO/OUTRO: "Ciudad de las Voces", Pabón Music   Música Anuncio Academia de Música y Artes Simbiosis: Main Theme (Overture) | The Grand Score by Alexander Nakarada | https://www.serpentsoundstudios.com Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/ Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/   Preguntas a nuestros anfitriones y temas sugeridos pueden ser dirigidas a nuestro email: conversacionesimbioticas@gmail.com    A Pedro Emanuel Franco Fraticelli lo pueden buscar en Facebook y SoundCloud bajo su nombre, y en Instagram: @peterfranks7; a Juan Luis O'Halloran lo encuentran bajo su nombre en Facebook, y @jl.ohalloran en Instagram y Twitter; y a Christian García Roque lo encuentran bajo su nombre en Facebook, y @tenorboricua en Instagram. ¡Hasta la próxima!   Conversaciones Simbióticas fue creado por Pedro Emanuel Franco Fraticelli y Julio E. Quiñones Santiago.   Anfitriones: Pedro Emanuel Franco Fraticelli, Christian García Roque y Juan Luis O'Halloran.   Producción: Pedro Emanuel Franco Fraticelli, Juan Luis O'Halloran Acevedo y Raquel Melisa Cordero Castro.   Artes por María Victoria Art.   Simbiosis Puerto Rico LLC Productions (c)   ##PodcastPuertoRico #CS #PodcastEnEspañol #Boricua #MusicCommentary #SimbiosisPR #RTSMusic

It's been quite a while since College Station Economic Development Director Natalie Ruiz stepped up to the podcast microphone to update us on the restaurants, retailers, industries, and events that might be coming to CSTAT. In this discussion with College Station Communications Director Jay Socol, Natalie covers Midtown, Costco, Gringo's, the Wolf Pen Creek area, and how CS ranked so high on a list of Texas cities with the best tacos. All Up In Your Business is now available via: Podbean Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts iHeartRadio Spotify Stitcher YouTube Please subscribe, rate and recommend! Have a suggestion for a future topic or interview, or just want to say hi? Send to jsocol@cstx.gov. 

Kelsey Hightower is a Principal Engineer at Google Cloud, open-source advocate, and one of our favorite speakers in tech. We hear about his early experiences with computers, thoughts on CS degree vs self-taught, running a tech support business, managing comedians, open-source, and his journey through tech. Regardless of where you are in your career, Kelsey drops knowledge on how to get yourself to where you want to go.Connect with Kelsey:https://twitter.com/kelseyhightowerhttps://github.com/kelseyhightowerMentioned in today's episode:Open Policy AgentKings of Comedy Search - Ronnie JordanTotal SystemsCoreOSPuppet LabsGo for Sysadmins - GopherCon 2014Want more from Ardan Labs?You can learn Go, Kubernetes, Docker & more through our video training, live events, or through our blog!

Cam and Yonas welcome Kim Beinborn to the show this week! Kim is the Head of Customer Success at Slack, and has previously worked at companies like LinkedIn, BuiltIn Chicago, and GE. After beginning her career in talent acquisition, Kim transitioned into the CS space and has been curating excellent customer experiences ever since.

Alexis Deacon, CS, from Portland, Oregon, USA

Andrew, David, and Matt finish discussing the Introduction to The Four Loves where Lewis looks at two different kinds of nearness, Nearness-by-likeness and Nearness-of-approach, and explains how loves, when they become gods, become demons.

We're back with part two of Chris's interview with Mark Hesse. Their conversation continues and encompasses lessons Mark has learned through his coaching career, especially from his swimmers; the nature of the coach-athlete relationship as a partnership for optimal long-term athletic development; the quality coaching framework and the 4 Cs; the magic of mutual belief and trust; and of course a sprinkling of John Wooden. A quick note on our audio: we apologize for the echo that pops up in this half of the interview! We're continuing to learn and improve on this whole podcast front… thank you for your patience. The echo does not appear on any of Mark's responses, it's worth it to keep listening!

About AmyAmy (she/her) has spent the better part of the last 15 years in the tech start-up world, starting off as a front-end software engineer before transitioning into leadership. She has built and led teams across the software and product development spectrum, including web and mobile development, QA, operations and infrastructure, customer support, and IT.These days, Amy is building the software engineering team at EdTech startup, Unicycle, and challenging the archetype of what a tech leader should be. She strives to be a real-life success story for other leaders who believe that safe, welcoming, and equitable environments can exist in tech. Links: Unicycle: https://www.unicycle.co AmyChanta: https://twitter.com/AmyChanta TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking databases, observability, management, and security.And - let me be clear here - it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself all while gaining the networking load, balancing and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build. With Always Free you can do things like run small scale applications, or do proof of concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free. This is actually free. No asterisk. Start now. Visit https://snark.cloud/oci-free that's https://snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: Writing ad copy to fit into a 30 second slot is hard, but if anyone can do it the folks at Quali can. Just like their Torque infrastructure automation platform can deliver complex application environments anytime, anywhere, in just seconds instead of hours, days or weeks. Visit Qtorque.io today and learn how you can spin up application environments in about the same amount of time it took you to listen to this ad.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. A famous quote was once uttered by Irena Dunn who said, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” Now, apparently at some point, people just, you know, looked at the fish without a bicycle thing, thought, “That was overwrought. We can do a startup and MVP it. Why do two wheels? We're going to go with one.”And I assume that's the origin story of Unicycle. My guest today is Amy Chantasirivisal who is the Director of Engineering at Unicycle. Amy, thank you for putting up with that incredibly tortured opening. But that's okay; we torture metaphors to death here.Amy: [laugh]. Thank you for having me. That was a great intro.Corey: So, you are, at the time of this recording at least, a relatively new hire to Unicycle, which to my understanding is a relatively new company. What do you folks do over there?Amy: Yes, so Unicycle is not even a year old, so a company born out of the pandemic. But we are building a product to reimagine what the digital classroom looks like. The product itself was thought up right during a time during the pandemic when it became very clear how much students and teachers are struggling with converting their experience into online platforms. And so we are trying to just bring better workflows, more efficiency into that. And right now we're starting with email, but we'll be expanding to other things in the future.Corey: I am absolutely the wrong person to ask about a lot of this stuff, just because my academic background, tortured doesn't really begin to cover it. I handle academia about as well as I handled working for other people. My academic and professional careers before I started this place were basically a patchwork of nonsense and trying to pretend I was something other than I was. You, on the other hand, have very much been someone who's legitimate as far as what you do and how you do it. Before Unicycle, you were the Director of Engineering at Wildbit, which is a name I keep hearing about and a bunch of odd places. What did you do there?Amy: [laugh]. I will have to follow up and ask what the odd places are but—so I was leading a team there of engineers that were fully distributed across the US and also in Europe. And we were building an email product called Postmark, which some of your listeners might use, and then also a couple of other smaller things like People-First Jobs and Beanstalk—not AWS's Beanstalk, but a developer repository and workflow tool.Corey: Forget my listeners for a minute; I use Postmark. That's where I keep seeing you on the invoices because it's different branding. As someone who has The Duckbill Group, but also the Last Week in AWS things, it's the brand confusion problem is very real. That does it. Sorry. Thank you for collapsing the waveform on that one. And of course, before that you were at PagerDuty, which is a company that most folks in the ops space are aware of, founded to combat the engineer's true enemy: sleep.Amy: Absolutely. It's the product that engineers love to hate, but also can't live without, to some degree. Or maybe they want to live without it, but uh… [laugh] are not able to.Corey: So, I have a standing policy on this show of not talking to folks who are not wildly over-represented—as I am—and effectively disregarding the awesome stuff that they've done professionally in favor of instead talking about, “Wow, what's it like not to be a white guy in the room? I can't even imagine such a thing. It sounds hard.” However, in your case, an awful lot of the work you have done and are most proud of centers around DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Tell me about that.Amy: Absolutely. I would say that it's the work that I've spent my time focusing on in recent years, but also that I'm still learning, right, and as someone who is Asian American, and also from a middle-class socioeconomic background, I have a bunch of privileges that I still have to unpack and that show up in the way that I work every day, as well. And so just acknowledging that, you know, while I spend a lot of time on DEI, still have just barely scratched the surface on it, really, in the grand scheme of things. But what I will say is that, you know, I've been really fortunate in my career in that I started in tech 15 or so years ago, and I started at a time when it wasn't super hard for someone who has no CS degree to actually get into some sort of coding job. And so I fell into my first role; I was building HTML and CSS landing pages for a marketing team, for an ISP that was based in San Francisco.So, I was cobbling together a bunch of technical skills, and I got better and better. And then I reached this point in my career where I didn't really have a lot of mentors, and so I was like, “I don't know what's next for me.” But then I am also frustrated that it is so hard for our team to get things done. And so I took it upon myself to figure out Scrum and project management type of stuff for my team, and then made the jump into people management from there. So, people management and leadership through project management.But when I look back on my career, I think about, “Oh, if I had a mentor, would that still have been my fate? Would I have continued down this track of becoming a very senior technical person and just doing that for my whole career?” Because letting go of the code was definitely a hard, hard thing. And I was lucky enough that I really did enjoy the people and the process side of all of this. And so [laugh] this relates to DEI in the fact that there's research and everything that backs this up, but that women and women of color generally tend to get less mentorship overall and get less actionable feedback about their job performance.And you think about how that potentially compounds over time, over the course of someone's career and that may be one of the reasons why women and people of color get pushed out of tech because they're not getting the support that they need, potentially. They're not getting feedback, they're not being advocated for in meetings, and then there's also all the stuff that you can add on around microaggressions, or just aggressions period, potentially, depending on the culture of the team that you're working on. And so all of those things compounded are the types of things that I think about now when I reflect on my own career and the types of teams that I want to be building in the future.Corey: Back when I was stumbling my way through piecing my career together. I mean, as mentioned, I don't have a degree; I don't have a high school diploma, as it turns out, and—that was a surprise when I discovered midway through my 20s that the school I had graduated from wasn't accredited—but I would tell stories, and I found ways to weasel my way through and I gave a talk right around 2015 or 2016, about, “Weasel Your Way to the Top: How to Handle a Job Interview,” and looking back, I would never give that talk again. I canceled it as soon as someone pointed out something that was only obvious in hindsight, that the talk was built out of things that had worked for me. And it's easy to sit here and say that, well, I had to work for what I have; none of this was handed to me. And there's an element of truth to that, except for the part where there was nothing fighting against me as I went.There was not this headwind of a presumed need for me to have to prove myself; I am presumed competent. I sometimes say that as a white guy in tech, my failure mode is a board seat and a book deal, and it's not that far from wrong. It takes, I guess, a lot of listening and a lot of interaction with folks from wildly different backgrounds before you start to see some of these things. It takes time. So, if you're listening to this, and you aren't necessarily convinced that this might be real or whatnot, talk less, listen more. There are a lot of stories out there in the world that I think that it's not my place to tell but listen. That's how I approach it.What's interesting about your pathway into management is it's almost the exact opposite of mine, where I was craving novelty, and okay, I wanted to try and managing a team of people. Years later, in hindsight—I'm not a good manager and I know that about myself, and I explicitly go out of my way these days to avoid managing people wherever possible, for a variety of reasons, but at the time, I didn't know. I didn't know that. I wanted to see how it went.First, I had to disabuse myself of this notion that, oh, management is a promotion. It's not. It's an orthogonal skill.Amy: Yes.Corey: The thing I really learning—management or not—now, is that the higher in the hierarchy you rise, if you want to view it that way, the less hands-on work you do, which means everything that you are responsible for that—and oh, you are responsible—isn't something you can jump in and do yourself. You can only impact the outcome via influence. And that was a hard lesson to learn.Amy: Right. And there are some schools of thought, though, where you can affect the outcome by control. And that's not what I'm about. I think I'm more aligned with what you're saying in terms of, it's really the influence and the ability to clear the way for people who are smarter than you to do the things that they need to do. Just get out of their way, and remove the roadblocks, and just help give them what they need. That's really, sort of like, my overall approach. But I know that there are some folks out there who lead the opposite way of, “It's my way, and I'm going to dictate how things should be done, and really you're here to take and follow orders.”Corey: It's always fun interviewing people to manage teams. “So, why do you want to be a manager?” It's, “Oh, I want to tell people what to do.” And I have to say that as an interviewer, there is nothing that takes the pressure off nearly as well as a perfectly wrong answer. And, yes, that at least to my world, is a perfectly wrong answer to this. There aren't that many pass-fail questions, but you can fail any question if you try hard enough.Amy: [laugh]. Oh, gosh, yeah, it's true. But also, at the same time, I would say that there are organizations that are built that way. Because—all it takes is the one person who wants to tell people what to do, and then they start a company, and then they hire other people who want to tell people what to do. And so there are ways where organizations like that exist and come into being even today, I would say.Corey: The question that I have for you about engineering leadership is, back when I was an engineer, and thinking, all right, it's time for me to go ahead and try being a manager—let's be clear, I joke about it, but the actual reason I wanted to try my hand at management was that I found people problems more interesting than computer problems at that point. I still do, but these days, especially when it comes to, you know, cloud services marketing and such, yeah, generally, the technical problems are, in fact, people problems at their core. But talking to my manager friends of how do I go and transition from being an engineer into being a manager, the universal response I got at the time was, “Ehh, I don't know.” Every person I knew who'd had made that transition was in the right place at the right time, and quote-unquote, “Got lucky.”Amy: Absolutely.Corey: And then once they had management on their resume, then they could go and transition back to being an IC and then to management again. But it's that initial breakthrough that becomes a challenge.Amy: Absolutely. And I fell into it as well. I mean, I got into it, partially for selfish reasons because I was, an IC, I was doing development work, and I was frustrated, and I had teammates who were coming to me and they were frustrated about how hard it was for us to get our work done, or the friction involved in shipping code. And so I took it upon myself to say, “I think I see a pattern about why this is happening, and so I will try to solve this problem for the team.” And so that's where the Agile and Scrum thing come in, and the project management side.And then, when I was at this company—this was One Kings Lane; this was, like, the heyday of flash sales websites and stuff like that, so it was kind of a rocket ship at that time—and because we were also growing so fast and I was interviewing folks as well, I just fell into this management role of, “Well, if I'm interviewing these people, then I guess I should be [laugh] managing them, too.” And that happens for so many people, similar stories of getting into management. And I think that's where it starts to go wrong for a lot of organizations because, like you said, it's not an up-leveling; it's a changing of your role, and it requires training and learning and figuring out how to be effective as a manager. And a lot of people just stumble their way through it and make a lot of mistakes—myself included—through that process.And that becomes really troubling knowing that you can make these really big mistakes, but these mistakes that you make don't affect just yourself. It's the careers of the people that you manage as well and sort of where they're headed in their lives. And so it's troubling to think that most leaders that are out there today have not received any sort of training on how to be a good manager and how to be effective as a manager.Corey: I would agree with that wholeheartedly. It seems that in many cases, companies take the best engineer that they have on their team and promote them to manager. It's brilliant in some respects in just how short-sighted it is. You are taking a great engineer and trading them for a junior and unproven manager, and hoping for the best. And there is no training on any of these things, at least—Amy: Right.Corey: —not the companies that I ever worked at. Of course, there are ways you can learn to be a better manager; there are people who specialize in exactly this. There are companies that do exactly this. But tech has this weird thing where it just tries to solve itself from first principles rather than believing for a minute that someone might possibly have prior experience that could be useful for these things. And—Amy: Absolutely.Corey: —that was a challenge. I had a lot of terrible managers before I entered management myself, and I figured, ah, I'll do the naive thing and I'm just going to manage based upon doing the exact opposite of what those terrible managers all did. And I got surprisingly far with it, on some level. But you don't see the whole picture when you're an individual contributor who's writing code—crappy in my case—most of the time, and then only seeing the aspects of your manager that they allow you to see. They don't share—if they're any good—the constraints that they have to deal with, that they're managing expectations around the team, conflicting priorities, strategic objectives, et cetera because it's not something that gets shown to folks. So—Amy: Absolutely.Corey: —if you bias for that, in my experience you become an empathetic manager to the people on your team, but completely ineffective at managing laterally or upwards.Amy: Mm-hm, absolutely. And you know, I'm exploring this idea of further. Being at a very small company, I think allows me to do that. And exploring this idea of, does it have to be that way? Can you be transparent about what the constraints are as a leader while still caring for your team and supporting them in the ways that they need and helping them grow their careers and just being open about one of the challenges that you have in building the company?And I don't know, I feel like I have some things to prove there, but I think it's possible to achieve some sort of balance there, something better or more beyond just what exists now of having that entire leadership layer typically be very opaque and just very unclear why certain decisions are made.Corey: The hard part that extends that these to me beyond that is it's difficult to get meaningful feedback, on some level, when you're suddenly thrust into that position. I also, in hindsight, realize that an awful lot of those terrible managers that I had weren't nearly as terrible as I thought they were. I will say that being on the other side of that divide definitely breeds empathy. Now that I'm the co-owner of The Duckbill Group, and we're building out a leadership team and the rest, hiring managers of managers is starting to be the sort of thing that I have to think about.It's effectively, how do I avoid inadvertently doing end-runs around people? And oh, I'm just going to completely undermine a manager by reaching out to one of their team and retasking them on something because obviously whatever I have in mind is much more important. What could they possibly be working on that's better than the Twitter shitpost I'm borrowing them to help out with? Yeah, you learn a lot by getting it wrong, and there becomes a power imbalance that even if you try your best to ignore it—which you should not—I assure you, the person who has less power in that relationship cannot set that aside. Even when I have worked with people I consider close friends, that friendship gained some distance during the duration of their employment because there has to be that professional level of separation. It's a hard thing to learn.Amy: It's a very hard line to walk in terms of recognizing the power that you have over someone's career and the power over, you know, making decisions for them and for the team and for the company, and still being empathetic towards their personal needs. And if they're going through a tough time, but then you also know from a business perspective that X, Y, or Z needs to happen, and how do you push but not push too hard, and try to balance needs of people who are humans and have things that happen and go on sometimes, and the fact that we work in a capitalist society and we still need to make money to make the business run. And that's definitely one of the hardest things to learn, and I am still learning. I definitely don't have that figured out, but I err on the side of, let's listen to what people are saying because ultimately, I'm not going to be the one to write the code. I haven't done that in years, and also I would probably suck at it now. And so it behooves leaders to listen to the people who were doing the work and to try, to the best of their abilities in whatever role whether that's exec-level leadership or mid-level… sort of like, middle management type of stuff to do what is in your power to help set them up to succeed.Corey: I want to get back a little bit to the idea of building diverse teams. It's something that you spend an inordinate amount of time and effort on. I do too. It's one of those areas where it's almost fraught to talk about it because I don't want to sound like I'm breaking my arm by patting myself on the back here. I certainly have a hell of a lot to learn, and mostly—and I'm ashamed to admit this—I very often learn only by really putting my foot in it sometimes. And it's painful, but that is, I think, a necessary prerequisite for growth. From your perspective, what is the most challenging part of building diverse teams?Amy: I think it's that piece that you said of making the mistakes or just putting yourself in a position where you are going to be uncomfortable. And I think that a lot of organizations that I've been in talk about DEI on a very surface level in terms of, “Oh, well, you know, we want to have more candidates from diverse backgrounds in our pipelines for hiring,” and things like that. But then not really just thinking about, but how do we work as a team in a way that potentially makes retention of those folks a lot harder? And for myself, I would say that when I was earlier on in all of this in my learning, I would say that I was able to kickstart my learning by thinking about my own identity, the fact that I was often the only Asian person on my team, the only woman on my team, and then more recently, the only mom on my team. And that has happened to me so many times in my career. More often than not.And so being able to draw on those experiences and those feelings of oh, okay, no one wants to hear about my kid because everyone else is, you know, busy going out to drink or something on the weekends. And like that feeling of, you know, that not belonging, and feeling of feeling excluded from things, and then thinking about how then this might manifest for folks with different identities for myself. And then going there and learning about it, listening, doing more listening than talking, and yeah, and that's, that's really just been the hardest part of just removing myself from that equation and just listening to the experiences of other people. And it's uncomfortable. And I think a lot of people are—you have to be in the right mindset, I guess, to be uncomfortable; you have to be willing to accept that you will be uncomfortable. And I think a lot of folks maybe are not ready to do that on a personal level.Corey: The thing that galls me the most is I do try on these things, and I get it wrong a fair bit. And my mistakes I find personally embarrassing, and I strive not to repeat them. But then I look around the industry—and let's be clear, a lot of this is filtered through the unhealthy amount of time I spend on Twitter—but it seems that I'm trying and I'm failing and attempting to do better as I go, and then I see people who are just, “Nope. Not at all. In fact, we're not just going to lean into bias, we're going to build a startup around it.”And I look at this and it's at some level hard to reconcile the fact that… at first, that I'm doing badly at all, which is the easy cop-out of, “Oh, well, if that is considered acceptable on some level, then I certainly don't even have to try,” which I think is a fallacy. But further it's—I have to step beyond myself on that and just, I cannot fathom how discouraging that must be, particularly to people who are early in their careers because it looks like it's just a normal thing that everyone thinks and does that just someone got a little too loud with it. And it's abhorrent. And if people are listening to this and thinking that is somehow just entrenched, and normalized, and everyone secretly thinks that… no. I assure you it is not something that is acceptable, even in the quote-unquote, “Private white dude who started companies” gathering holes. Yeah, people articulating sentiments like that suddenly find themselves not welcome there anymore, at least in every one of those types of environments I've ever found myself in.Amy: Yeah, the landscape is shifting. It's slow, but it is shifting. And, myself on Twitter, like, I do a lot of rant-y stuff too sometimes, but despite all of that, I feel like I am ultimately an optimist because I have to be. Otherwise, I would have left tech already because every time I am faced with a job search for myself, I'm like, “Should I—is this it? Am I done in tech? Do I want to go do something else? Am I going to finally go open that bakery that I've always wanted to open?” [laugh].And so… I have to be an optimist. And I see that—even in the most recent job search I've done—have seen so many new founders and new CEOs, really, with this mindset of, “We want to build a diverse team, but we're also doing it—and we're using diversity as a foundation for what we want to build; it's part of our decision-making process and this is how we're going to hold ourselves accountable to it.” And so it is shifting, and while there are those bad actors out there still, I'm seeing a lot of good in the industry now. And so that's why I stick around; that's why I'm still here.Corey: I want to actually call something out as concrete here because it's easy for me to fall into the trope of just saying vague things. I'll be specific about something, give us a good example. We've done a decent job, I think, of hiring a diverse team, but—and this is a problem that I see spread across an awful lot of companies—as you look at the leadership team, it gets a lot wider and a lot more male. And that is an inherent challenge. In our particular case, my business partner is someone who I've been close friends with for a decade.I would not be able to start a business with someone I didn't have that kind of relationship with just because your values have to be aligned or there's trouble down the road. And beyond that, it winds up rapidly, on some level, turning into what appears to be a selection bias. When you're trying to hire senior leaders, for example, there's a prerequisite to being a senior leader, which is embodied in the word senior, which implies tenure of having spent a fair bit of time in an industry that is remarkably unfriendly in a lot of different ways to a lot of different people. So, there's a prerequisite of being willing to tolerate the shit for as long as it takes to get to that level of seniority, rather than realizing at any point as any of us can, there are easier jobs that don't have this toxicity inherent to them and I'll go do that instead. So, there's a tenure question; there's a survivorship bias question.And I don't have the answers to any of this, but it's something that I'm seeing, and it's one of those once you see it, you can't unsee it any more moments. At least for me.Amy: Yeah, absolutely.Corey: Please tell me I'm not the only person who see [laugh]—who is encountering these problems. Like, “Wow, you just sound terrible.” Which might very well be a fair rejoinder here. I'm just trying to wrap my head around how to think about this properly.Amy: Yeah. I mean, this is why I was saying that I am very optimistic about [laugh] new companies that are coming—like, up-and-coming these days, new startups, primarily, because you're right that a lot of people just end up quitting tech before they get to that point of experience and seniority, to get into leadership. I mean, obviously, there's a lot of bias and discrimination that happens at those leadership levels, too, but I will say that, you know, it's both of those things. There are also more things on top of that. But this is why I'm like, so excited to see people from diverse backgrounds as founders of new companies and why I think that being able to be in a position to potentially either help fund, or advocate, or sponsor, or amplify those types of orgs, I think is where the future is that because ultimately, I think a lot of the established companies that are out there these days, it's going to be really hard for them to walk back on what their leadership team looks like now, especially if it is a sizable leadership team and they're all white men.Corey: Yeah. I'm going to choose to believe we say sizable leadership team that it's also not—we're talking about the horizontal scaling that happens to some of us, especially during a pandemic as we continue to grow into our seats. You're right, it's a problem as well, where you can cut a bit of slack in some cases to small teams. It's, “Okay, we don't have any Black employees, but we're three people,” is a lot more understandable-slash-relatable than, “We haven't hired any Black people yet and we're 3000 people.” One of those is acceptable—or at least understandable, if not acceptable—the other is just completely egregious.Amy: Yes. And I think then the question that you have to ask if you're looking at, you know, a three-person company, or [laugh] I guess, like in my case, I was looking at the seven-person company, is that, “Okay. There are currently no Black people on your team. And why is that?” And then, “What are you doing to change that? And how are you going to make sure that you're holding ourselves accountable to it?”Because I think it's easy to say, “Oh, you know, the first couple of hires were people we just worked with in the past, and they just happened to, you know, look like us and whatnot.” And then you blink becau—and you do that a handful of times, and you blink, and then suddenly you have a team of 25 and there are no people of color on your team. And maybe you have, like, one woman on the team or something. And you're like, “Huh. That's strange. I guess we should think about this and figure out what we can do.”And then I think what ends up happening at that point is that there are so many already established behaviors, and cultural norms, and things like that, that have organically grown within a team that are potentially not welcoming towards people from different backgrounds who have different backgrounds. So, you go and attempt to hire someone who is different, and they come in, and they're just sort of like, “This is how you work? I don't feel like I belong here.” And then they don't stay, and then they leave. And then people sit there and scratch their heads like, “Oh, what did we do wrong?” And, “I don't get it.”And so there's this conversation, I think, in the industry of like, “Oh, it's a pipeline problem, and if we were just able to hire a lot of people from diverse backgrounds, the problem is solved.” Which really isn't the case because once people are there and at your company, are they getting promoted at the same rate as white men? Are they staying with the company for as long? And who's in leadership? And how are you working to break down the biases that you may have?All those sorts of things, I think, generally are not considered as part of all of this DEI work. Especially when, in my experience in startups, the operational side of all that is so immature a lot of the times, just not well developed that deeper thought process and reflection doesn't really happen.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by something new. Cloud Academy is a training platform built on two primary goals. Having the highest quality content in tech and cloud skills, and building a good community the is rich and full of IT and engineering professionals. You wouldn't think those things go together, but sometimes they do. Its both useful for individuals and large enterprises, but here's what makes it new. I don't use that term lightly. Cloud Academy invites you to showcase just how good your AWS skills are. For the next four weeks you'll have a chance to prove yourself. Compete in four unique lab challenges, where they'll be awarding more than $2000 in cash and prizes. I'm not kidding, first place is a thousand bucks. Pre-register for the first challenge now, one that I picked out myself on Amazon SNS image resizing, by visiting cloudacademy.com/corey. C-O-R-E-Y. That's cloudacademy.com/corey. We're gonna have some fun with this one!Corey: I do my best to have these conversations in public as frequently as is practical for me to do, just because I admit, I get things wrong. I say things that are wrong and I'm doing a fair bit of learning in public around an awful lot of that. Because frankly, I can withstand the heat, if it comes down to someone on Twitter gets incredibly incensed by something I've said on this podcast, for example. Because it isn't coming from a place of ill intent when someone accuses me of being ableist or expressing bias. My response is generally to suppress the initial instinctive flash of defensiveness and listen and ask.And that is, even if I don't necessarily agree with what they're saying after reflection, I have to appreciate on some level the risk-taking inherent in calling someone out who is in my position where, if I were a trash fire, I could use the platform to turn it into, “All right. Now, let's go hound the person that called me out.” No. I don't do that, full stop. If I'm going to harass people, it's going to be—not people, despite what the Supreme Court might tell us—but it's going to be a $2 trillion company—one in particular—because that's who I am and that's how I roll.Whenever I get a DM—which I leave open because I have the privilege to do that—from folks who are early career who are not wildly over-represented, I just have to stop and marvel for a minute at the level of risk-taking inherent to that because there is risk to that. For me, when I DM people, the only risk I feel like I'm running at any given point is, “Are they going to think that I'm bothering them? Oh, the hell with it. I'm adorable. They'll love me.” And the fact that I'm usually right is completely irrelevant to that. There's just that sense of I don't really risk a damn thing in the grand scheme of things compared to the risk that many people are taking just living who they are.Amy: Yeah. And someone DMs you and you suppress that initial sort of defensiveness: I would say that that is an underrated skill. [laugh].Corey: Well, a DM is a privilege, too. A call in—Amy: Yes.Corey: —is deeply appreciated; no one owes it to me. I often will get people calling me out on Twitter and I generally stop and think about that; I have a very close circle of friends who I trust to be objective on these things, and I'll ask them, “Did I get this wrong?” And very often the answer is yes. And, “Well, I thought the joke was funny and I spent time building it.” “Yeah, but if people hear a joke I'm making and feel bad about it, then is it really that good of a joke or should I try harder?” It's a process, and I look back at who I was ten years ago and I feel a sense of shame. And I believe that if anyone these days doesn't, either they were effectively a saint, or they haven't grown.Amy: Yes.Corey: And that's my personal philosophy on this stuff, anyway.Amy: Yeah, absolutely. And that growth is so important. And part of that growth really is being able to suppress your desire to make it about you, [laugh] right? That initial, “Oh, I did something bad,” or, “I'm a horrible person because I said this thing,” right? It's not about you, there's, like, the impact that you had on someone else.And I've been giving this some thought recently, and I—you know, I also similarly have a group of trusted friends who I often talk about these things with, and you know, we always kind of check ourselves in terms of, did we mess something up? Did we, you know, put our foot in our mouths? Stuff like that. And think what it really comes down to is being able to say, “Maybe I did something wrong and I need to suppress that desire to become defensive and put up walls and guard and protect myself from feeling vulnerable, in order to actually learn and grow from this experience.”Corey: It's hard to do, but it's required because I—Amy: Extremely, yes.Corey: —used to worry about, “Ohh, what if I get quote-unquote, ‘canceled?'” well, I've done a little digging into this and every notable instance of this I can find is when someone is called out for something crappy, they get defensive, and they double-down and triple-down and quadruple-down, and they keep digging a hole nice and deep to the point where no one with a soul can really be on their side of this issue, and now they have a problem. I have never gotten to that point because let's be honest with you, there are remarkably few things I care that passionately about that I'm going to pick those fights publicly. The ones that I do, I am very much on the other side [laugh] of those issues. That has not been a realistic concern.I used to warn every person here before I hired them—to get this back to engineering management—that there was a risk that I could have a bad tweet and we don't have a company anymore. I don't give that warning anymore because I no longer believe that it's true.Amy: Mm-hm. Mm-hm. I also wonder about, in general, because of the world that we live in, and our history with white supremacy and oppression and all those things, I also wonder if this skill of being able to self-reflect and be uncomfortable and manage your own reaction and your emotions, I wonder if that's just a thing that white people generally haven't had a lot of practice for because of the inherent privileges that are afforded to white people. I wonder if a lot of this just stems from the fact that white people get to navigate this world and not get called out, and thus don't have this opportunity to exercise this skill of holding on to that and listening more than talking.Corey: Absolutely agree. And it gets piled on by a lot of folks, for example—I'll continue to use myself as an example in this case—I live in San Francisco. I would argue that I'm probably not, “In tech,” quote-unquote, the way that I once was, but I'm close enough that there's no discernible difference. And my social circle is as well. Back before I entered tech, I did a bunch of interesting jobs, telemarketing to pay the bills, I was a recruiter for a while, I worked construction a couple of summers.These days, everyone that I engage with for meaningful periods of time is more or less fairly tech adjacent. It really turns into a one-sided perspective. And I can sit here and talk about what folks who are not living in the tech bubble should be doing or how they should think about this, but it's incredibly condescending, it's incredibly short-sighted, and fails to appreciate a very different lived experience. And I can remind myself of this now, but that lack of diversity and experience is absolutely something where it feels like the tech bubble, especially for those folks in this bubble who look a lot like me, it is easy to fall into a pattern of viewing ourselves as the modern aristocracy where we deserve the nice things that we have, and the rest. And that's a toxic pattern. It takes vigilance to avoid it. I'm not saying I get it right all the time, by a landslide, but ugh, the perils of not doing that are awful.Amy: Agreed. And it shows up, you know, getting back to the engineering manager and leadership and org building piece of things, that shows up even in the way that we talk about career development and career ladders, for those of us in tech, and software engineering specifically for me, where we've kind of like come up with all these matrices of job levels, and competencies, all that, and humans just are so vastly different. Every person is an individual, and yet we talked about career ladders and how to advance your career in this two-dimensional matrix. And, like, how does that actually work, right?And I've seen some good career ladders that account for a larger variety of competencies than just, “Can you code?” And, “What are your system design skills?” And, “Do you understand distributed systems?” And so on and so forth, but I think a lot gets left behind and gets left on the table when it comes to thinking about the fact that when you get a group of people together working on some sort of common cause or a product, that there's so much more to the dynamic than just the writing of the code. It's how do you work with each other? How do you support each other? How do you communicate with each other? And then all my glue work—that is what I call it—like, the glue work that goes into a successful team and building products, a lot of that is just not captured in the way that we talk about career development for folks. And it's just incredibly two-dimensional, I think.Corey: One last question that I have for you before we wrap the episode here is, you spend a lot of time focusing on this, and I have some answers, but I'm very interested to hear yours instead because I assure you, the world hears enough from me and people who look like me, what is the biggest mistake that you see companies making in their attempts to build diverse teams?Amy: I would say that there's two major things. One is that there have been a lot of orgs in my own past that think about diversity, equity, inclusion as a program and not a mindset that everyone should be embracing. And that manifests itself into, sort of like, this secondary problem of stopping at the D part of D, E, and I. That's the whole, “We're going to hire a bunch of people from different backgrounds and then just we're going to stop with that because we've solved the problem.” But by not adopting that mindset of the equity, the inclusion, and also the welcoming and the belonging piece of things internally, then anyone that you hire who comes in from those marginalized or minority backgrounds is not going to want to stay long-term because they don't feel like they fit in, they don't feel like they belong.And so, it becomes this revolving door of you hire in people and then those people leave after some amount of time because they're not getting what they need out of either the role or for themselves personally in terms of just emotional support, even. And so I would say that's the problem that I see is not a numbers game—although the metrics and the numbers help hold you accountable—but the metrics and the numbers are not the end goal. The end goal is really around the mindset that you have in building the org and the way that people behave. And the way that you work together is really core to that.Corey: What I tend to see on the other side is the early intake funnels. People will reach out to me sometimes, “Hey, do you know any diverse speakers we can hire to do a speaking engagement here?” It doesn't… work that way. There's a lot more to it than that. It is not about finding people who check boxes, it is not about quote-unquote, “Diversity hires.”It's about—at least in my experience—structuring job ads, for example, in ways that are not coded—unconsciously in most cases, but ehh—that are going to resonate towards folks who are in certain cultures and not in others. It's about being more equitable. It's about understanding that not everyone is going to come across in a job interview as the most confident person in the room. Part of the talk that I gave on how to handle job interviews, there was a strong section in it on salary negotiation. Well, turns out when I do it, I'm an aggressive hard-charger and they like that, whereas if someone who is not male does that, well, in that case, they look like they're being difficult and argumentative and pushy and rising above their station. It was awful.One of the topics I'm most proud of was the redone version of that talk that I gave with a friend, Sonia Gupta, who has since left tech because of how shitty it is, and that was a much better talk. She was a former attorney who had spent time negotiating in much higher-stakes situations.Amy: Yeah.Corey: And it was terrific to see during the deconstruction and rebuilding of that talk, just how much of my own unconscious bias had crept in. It's, again, I look back at the early version of those talks and I'm honestly ashamed. It wasn't from ill will, but it's always impact over intent as far as how this has potentially made things worse. It's, if nothing else, if I don't say the right things when I should speak up, that's not great, but I always prefer that to saying things that are actively harmful. So—Amy: Absolutely.Corey: —it's hard. I deserve no sympathy for this, to be clear. It is incumbent upon all of us because again, as mentioned, my failure mode is a non-issue in the world compared to the failure mode for folks for against whom the deck has been stacked unfairly for a very long time. At least, that's how I see it.Amy: Right. And that's why I think that it's important for folks who are in positions of power to really reflect on—even operationally, right, you were mentioning your job ads, and how to structure that to include more inclusive language, and just doing that for everything, really, in the way that you work. How do decisions get made? And by whom? And why? How do you structure things like compensation? Even, like, how do you do project planning, right?Even in my own reflections, now when I think back towards Scrum and Agile and all of that, I think that the base foundation of all of that was like was good, but then ultimately the implementation of how that works at most companies is problematic in a lot of ways as well. And then to just be able to reflect and really think about all of your processes or policies—all of that—and bring that lens of equity, really, equity and inclusion to those things, and to really dig deep and think about how those things might manifest and affect people from different backgrounds in different ways.Corey: So, before we wrap, something that I think you… are something of an empathetic party on is when I see companies in the space who are doing significant DE&I initiatives, it seems like it's all flash; it feels like it's all sizzle, no steak to appropriate a phrase from the country of Texas. Is that something that you see, too?Amy: I do think that it is pretty common, and I think it's because that's… that's the easy route. That's the easy way to do it because the vanity metrics, and the photo of the team that is so diverse, and all these things that show up on a marketing website. I mean, there—it's, like, a signal for someone, potentially, who might be considering a job at your company, but ultimately the hard work that I feel like is not happening is really in that whole reflecting on the way you do business, reflecting on the way that you work. That is the hard work and it requires a leadership team to prioritize it, and to make time for it, and to make it really a core principle of the way that you build an org., and it doesn't happen enough, by far, in my opinion.Corey: It feels like it's an old trope of the company that makes a $100,000 donation and then spends $10 million dollars telling the world about it, on some level. It's about, “Oh, look at us, we're doing good things,” as opposed to buckling down and doing the work. Then the actual work falls to folks who are themselves not overrepresented as unpaid emotional labor, and then when the company still struggles with diversity issues, those people catch the blame. It's frustrating.Amy: Yeah. And as an organization, if you have the money to donate somewhere, that's great, but it can't just stop at that. And a lot of companies will just stop at that because it's the optics of, “Oh, well, we spent x millions of dollars and we've helped out this nonprofit or this charity or whatnot.” Which is great that you're able to do that, but that can't be it because then ultimately, what you have internally and within your own company doesn't improve for people from those backgrounds.Corey: I want to thank you for taking so much time to chat with me about these things. Some of these topics are challenging to talk about and finding the right forum can be difficult, and I'm just deeply appreciative that you were able to clear enough time to have that chat with me today.Amy: Yeah, thank you for having me. I mean, I think it's important for us to recognize, even between the two of us that, I mean, obviously, you as a white man have benefited a lot in this space, and then even myself as, you know, that model minority whole thing, but growing up very adjacent to white people and just being ingrained in that culture and raised in that culture, you know, that we have those privileges and there's still parts of the conversation, I think, that are not captured by [laugh] by the two of us are the nuances as well, and so just recognizing that. And it's just a learning process. And I think that everyone could benefit from just realizing that you'll never know everything. And there's always going to be something to learn in all of this. And yes, it is hard, but it's something that is worthwhile to strive for.Corey: Most things worthwhile are. If people want to learn more about who you are, how you think about these things, potentially consider working with you, et cetera. Where can they find you?Amy: So, I am on Twitter. I am the queen of very, very long threads, I should just start a blog or something, but I have not. But in any case, I'm on Twitter. I am AmyChanta, so @A-M-Y-C-H-A-N-T-A.Our website is unicycle.co, if you're thinking about applying for a role, and working with me, that would be awesome. Or just, you know, reach out. I'd also just love to network with anyone, even if there's not an open position now. I just, you know, build that relationship and maybe there will be in the future. Or if not at Unicycle, then somewhere else.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:48:13]. Thank you so much, once again. I appreciate your time.Amy: Thanks for having me.Corey: Amy Chantasirivisal, Director of Engineering at Unicycle. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with a comment pointing out that it's not about making an MVP of a bicycle that turns into a unicycle so much as it is work-life balance.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Leah Chaney is the founder and Chief Experience Officer of BetterGrowth, a consultancy that helps companies gain clarity on why sales are decreasing, churn is climbing, and employees are leaving by providing a step-by-step action plan. She's also the Founder of BreakoutCS, a community for CS professionals. In this episode, Ben and Leah discuss the stories behind BetterGrowth and BreakoutCS, some of the challenges she's faced while navigating her career as a queer person in tech, and how people and companies can support the growth of diversity and inclusion in the tech industry.

'Step by Step' tells the story of a 6-mile hike along the Fife Coastal Path. Sure - you could drive from village to village. But with so many things to see on such a short stretch of coast, why not make the most of the excellent paths and bus routes on the East Neuk of Fife and go for a leisurely walk.We start at the beach of Ruby Bay in Elie and work our way past St Monans and Pittenweem to Anstruther. Along the way, we explore historic ruins, stop to take in the landscape and hear about some of the quirky stories and sights that make this region so unique. In 2-3 hours, you've discovered more of the East Neuk of Fife, than you ever could on the road.After the story, I'll tell you some of my top tips to explore the East Neuk of Fife for yourself.Are you ready? Great – let's travel to Scotland!Visit our website to find out top tips for a trip to the East Neuk of Fife.This episode is brought to you by Go Ape.Book now at www.goape.co.uk and use the code WILDSCOT to receive 10% all four Scottish Go Ape sites - Aberfoyle, Peebles, Aberdeen, Dalkeith (Edinburgh).See full T&Cs on wildforscotland.comLinksJoin the Wild for Scotland email list here.Subscribe here to join the waitlist for my Ready-Made Itinerary, launching soon!Use my trail description to follow this hike.Plan a trip to the greater region with my Fife travel guide.Find out what to do in St Andrews.Access the transcript of this episode on wildforscotland.comSupport this show on Patreon and unlock bonus episodes.CreditsWritten and hosted by Kathi Kamleitner. Produced and edited by Fran Turauskis. Cover Art illustrated by Lizzie Vaughan-Knight. All original music composed by Bruce Wallace. Additional music and sound effects from Zapsplat and Pond5. Support my show on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Welcome back lovelies. Today we talk about FOMO investing, if it's actually that bad for you, the effects of it, and what tips we have to deal with it! This eppy is a good one so sit back, relax and enjoy! Reminder: Use the Sharesies NZ promo code GTI to get a bonus $10 in your account, ready to invest! The offer is only available to New Zealand investors T&Cs https://intercom.help/sharesies/en/articles/5440077-girls-that-invest-promo-terms-and-conditions Our socials: Facebook group - @GirlsThatInvest Instagram - @GirlsthatInvest Till next week team, Sim & Sonya xo

Andrea McCormick, CS, from Denver, Colorado, USA

This week we invite you to slow down and reflect upon each of the 5 Cs individually, allowing God to speak to you regarding how each one is displayed or needs further development in your life. We encourage you to find a quiet place and grab a pen & paper for this short reflection exercise.

Susan Stark, CS, from Boston, Massachusetts, USA