Month: March 2015

On to Smaller and Better Things!

Lindsey1 Comment

My time with Udacity has come to an end. I made some amazing lifelong friends out of it and learned enough to fill a book but I decided it was time for me to trundle along to a new opportunity. So I’m excited to announce that I’m joining Scripted as a JavaScript Engineer! It’s going to be a bit of a brain warp focusing most of my efforts on the front end but I’m ridiculously excited for the opportunity and working with the awesome new coworkers that I’ve met so far. The team is much smaller and very careful to cultivate their culture and I just felt right at home the minute I came on site for my interview with them (as an aside: sort out culture fits first or you will be miserable no matter how potentially amazeballs you think a project is). I really look forward to diving back into my JavaScript roots and being able to geek out about all the upcoming changes.

My other hope in this transition is to get back into mentoring more. Working in Mountain View and attempting to mentor in SF was super draining on me, but now that I’ll be working in SF, I want to pour more of my free time back into mentoring and helping others join this awesome ride that is the tech industry. So I’ll be spending some time thinking about how to approach that aspect.

Reminder: Choose For Culture!

Lindsey

Lately I’ve been interacting more and more with people trying to break into the tech industry. It’s something I’m keenly aware of as a recent wall breaker myself and my general desire to mentor and champion other people to do what they want.

I recently had the privilege with my co-host and awesome, awesome person Jennie to lead a talk for Udacity Nanodegree students on how to get into the industry and how to make connections/get a job/etc. I wish I could link you all to it, but it’s behind a paywall currently. Lies! Youtube video:

https://youtu.be/Ek88SNthVPc

The talk itself was pretty standard:

  1. Network, network, network.
  2. Recruiters can be your friend/spy.
  3. People are generally nice, especially when you don’t spam them and actually ask them things that are relevant to them.

But between that and a lot of the recent articles on tech interviewing/culture (which I’m not going to give my opinion on in this post as it’s nuanced and hard, but spoiler: pair programming interviews are the bomb) I’m a little dissatisfied that I didn’t mention my number one rule for finding a job:

CULTURE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR

I’m not going to pass judgement on different cultures as people are, shockingly, different. Just know that if you have the luxury, which thankfully is often the case in tech, please, please don’t choose a job just for prestige or some weird convoluted inner turmoil. Make sure your coworkers are rad. You will need them, a lot. Many of my best friends now are former/current coworkers. We have nerdy parties, we play video games, we send each other stupid cat gifs (okay, that’s just me sending them out to everyone else, but they appreciate them damn it!), but more importantly they have my back. They can help me troubleshoot stupid mistakes or understand my inner rage at a feature or just geek out with me over the hot new programming hotness.

I think a person I follow on Twitter put it best when he said:

https://twitter.com/tef/status/578676050055561216