You'd get to the 45 minute mark and then you'd see your build fail Not because it didn't compile but because it had two lines of white space next to each other and that was just the most sole crushing thing That I've had to deal with as a developer they see this job opening as this hole that they're trying to fill and in order to do that they crunch themselves up and they make themselves small in order to fit in this neat little hole when in reality they have all
of this experience that is valuable
Welcome to Episode 3 of the WebJoy podcast. I'm your host, Eddie. In this podcast, we interview guests about their origin story and what makes them excited and joyful to be part of the tech community. I hope you enjoy today's episode "Taking up Space" with Alex Karp. Today we have Alex Karp and Alex do you want go ahead and introduce yourself who you are, what you do, where you work just uh brief intro
Yeah my name's Alex He/ him pronouns I am based out of the Boston area just north of Boston I am an engineering manager at Twitter My team is called media foundation client so my team owns the media library at Twitter So anytime that you watch a video or listen in on a space or laugh at funny GIF that's all based off of my team and our library
Nice Well Hey I appreciate the work you all do I use plenty of GIFs on your service and have joined a couple of spaces So definitely glad you all are there and doing what you do
Yeah we have a lot of fun doing it
Well what's kind of a short version of your story How did you get involved in tech and what has your trajectory been like
Yeah I've been talking about this a lot lately with all of the coffee chats with the # hunter devs folks I tell people I got really lucky in a way I knew from a very young age that I liked computers I liked messing about on them and so I found resources online to teach myself basic web development.
This was back in the day when there weren't nearly as many resources as there were now though to be fair there was only one flavor of JavaScript and I kind of liked it that way, Kind of missed that but I looked at programming as a cool way of solving problems, usually my own problems cause I'm a little bit selfish like that so it was this way of doing that And so I would just start on these projects and learn through that then when the iPhone was released I was like oh wow This means
that I could take my things wherever I go. So of course I dived into iOS development and that's been most of my more recent developer history but I've done both front-end and back-end development on web and a bunch of iOS development.
Because I knew from such a young age what I wanted to do I was able to put myself through a computer science program get internships and then right outta school I was at Microsoft for a year doing some front-end back-end and Microsoft development so I got to do some interesting server side executable things.
Sorry to hear that That doesn't sound fun
Honestly the least fun bit about it was the way That our compile system worked the whole thing would take 25 minutes on an incremental build more like 45 on a clean release build.
But the most frustrating thing about it was that we had this linter and the linter was incredibly strict if it found anything it would fail but they didn't run the linter until after they had compiled everything So you'd get to the 45 minute mark and then you'd see your build fail Not because it didn't compile but because it had two lines of white space next to each other and that was just the most sole crushing thing That I've had to deal with as a developer
Yeah that sounds painful And for anyone listening who isn't as familiar with programming linter would basically be like a grammar checker for programming code So it's checking to make sure all the grammar of the programming is the exact correct As it should be And like someone missed a period at the end of the sentence and that 45 minute whole thing was wasted Now
yeah Especially on a team it's just a way of ensuring that all of our code kind of looks the same and that we can read each other's code That's that sort of thing.
After that I ended up at Wayfair for about five years going from doing development into management which was interesting but I did have a lot of fun there in the almost five years that I was there we grew from seven mobile engineers to I think we were about 155 When I left, so some pretty rapid growth and it was a wild ride and then back in February of 2020 I was part of the layoffs at Wayfair, so that's how I ended up at Twitter
Yeah that's definitely been a journey that you've been on this fun ride and you've ended up where you are now what keeps you excited and what interests you about tech now that you've been here for a while
Yeah I think it's the fact that tech and software engineering it just intersects with everything if you think of anything else that's outside of tech that you're interested in there is some intersection with software so that's a really cool thing where if you get bored of working on one sort of thing you can go work on a different sort of thing I think that really helps keep things exciting and there's always something new to learn Like you're basically forced to.
As long as you like learning new things and trying out different areas then you know it's a lot of fun
I love that I really feel that in my core I worked for a design agency where we built stuff for random companies I did something that helped doctors in the ER see how to use certain surgical tools on an iPad And then I was working on a cyber security application and now I'm at Glassdoor And I'm helping build software for businesses to understand the needs of their Employees in an anonymous fashion and stuff.
Like you those are all very different things And yet we get to be involved in all of it because we are technology professionals So that's super exciting
Yeah, absolutely.
Well the goal of this podcast is to kind of talk about things that Bring us joy around the tech industry so I have a question for you which is what brings you joy and what would you like to talk about
I'd say recently it's just been not only the number of people but I guess the breadths of people that taking part in things like #100Devs or other boot camps or teaching themselves and just kind of deciding Hey I want to try this let's give it a shot and just how open everybody has seemed to be about their journey as they learn which I think is awesome
That's definitely cool what do you think gets you excited about getting into tech and helping people get into tech?
Yeah I would again say that I've been kind of lucky in my career in that with both Wayfair and Twitter they had programs that were designed to bring more people in so at Wayfair we called that Wayfair Labs And at Twitter we have Twitter apprenticeships And the idea with both of these is to take people who are either coming off of a bootcamp or have taught themselves how to how to write code or are just starting out in their career or switching from another career.
Any of these circumstances where it might be difficult for them to just go out and get a job as a junior engineer These are programs where you have a three month period or a one year period in which they're looking to bridge the gap between being able to write code and being able to write code as part of a team at a software company and I've gotten to do a lot of both interviewing for these roles And I've gotten to work with a lot of the people who have come through these programs And
I am constantly amazed by the people that come through these programs they are some of the most driven people I've seen They have really interesting ideas that I don't think we would have thought of had we had we not had them on our team and also they're just really happy to be there and that happiness is kind of infectious
I totally get that I helped mentor at the collab lab which is a nonprofit focused on helping people in the exact same stages that you talked about the Twitter apprenticeship and at Wayfair and like you said I've seen the same stuff. I helped a cohort earlier this year and I was just amazed at how they came together and worked together in a team.
No one had to teach them how to work together in a team that just blows my mind because I feel in the people who are normally in the developer tech industry I feel one of the big things we have to do in engineering management type things is figure out how to get our people to work together rather than just be engineers in their corners programming and this influx of new people who want to work together and solve problems it's a really fresh perspective.
Yeah absolutely and that's one of the things that I tell a lot of people when they're asking about how to get into tech is to think about some of these other skills that they have especially if they've had other jobs or even the experiences you wouldn't think about where they develop things like teamwork communication leadership resilience all of these experiences that just get completely overlooked when people are applying to jobs that end up actually being really
important And I would say at equally important and potentially even more important than the tech side of things
Yeah that makes a lot of sense at the end of one of our eight week cohorts we have one person become like the pseudo tech lead for the cohort whereas the mentors have been leading it up to that point and the cohort I was just a part of ... I was amazed because one person was like yeah I'll do it And they were so organized and I'm like they've never really worked in a team programming setting in this way And yet here they are knocking things off the list like a tech lead of
years And I'm like how is this possible? To your point then I found out after the fact jobs that they've been at in the past they've been team leads in non-technical capacities They've been in these leadership type things And then you bringing those skills into the tech realm it's just goes flawlessly And if they don't realize that they can put that out there as a strength and as a resource then they're definitely missing something that can help it
Yeah I talk about it a lot in terms of taking up space . for junior engineers or people going for their first role they see this job opening as this hole that they're trying to fill right and so in order to do that they crunch themselves up and they make themselves small in order to fit in this neat little hole when in reality they have all of this experience that is valuable and by really thinking about what it is that they bring to the table what value they bring
to the team to the company they're taking up space and that's just a much stronger place to sell yourself from It's like Hey this is who I am This is the value that I bring These are the experiences that I've had that I think will help the company or will help me think differently that makes a much stronger case than by trying to fit into what you perceive as the hole that they're trying to fill
If you could choose one thing that's the most important for people to know when they're trying to get into tech What do you think that is?
Honestly I would say that's probably one of the biggest things that I would mention to people. A couple of other things that I think are right up there. One is don't focus so much on the technical interviews and if you do focus on them focus on learning how to problem solve it's a much more generic way of looking at these problems cause you will never ever memorize enough algorithms and data structures to attack each one perfectly nor should you have to.
The other one is don't be afraid to apply if you don't meet all of the requirements for a role people forget that these job descriptions are written by people who overwhelmingly suck at writing job descriptions and conveying specifically what it is that they're looking for, and I include myself in this category. So don't get discouraged if you don't meet things perfectly you're likely that candidate anyway
I agree with that As someone who's also written job descriptions it's like we are trying to create a person out of nothing we know that what we are writing this person doesn't exist as a single entity but we have to craft a person And if you feel like any part of that person resonates with you then you're probably a good candidate because we know not everyone's going to match everything And so yeah Throw your hat in the ring if you feel like it touches on your experience
in some way And that's what interviews are for, For us to tease out and figure out if you are the right fit And so it doesn't hurt to to throw your hat in the ring.
I know that I started getting a lot more job interviews because I used to have that same perspective I'd look down and I'm like oh I'm two years shy of this requirement And I wouldn't apply And definitely in the last four years five years or so I've started to just say you know what if this thing is remotely where I'm headed remotely what I'm interested in If I can find some way to spin it as being relevant to my experience like I'm going to apply And
if I get to the interview and It bombs then that saved me because I wasn't ready but if it doesn't then I am ready and just let the interview be the thing that cancels you out rather than not applying
Right Cause you'll always wonder what if I had applied Like what have I gotten that job you'll never regret applying for something and getting told that you're not ready yet
As we wrap up this episode as a community like we love to support each other We love to hear what each other is doing and what's going on So is there anything that you're involved with or anything you've worked on recently that you'd like to share and let the community know about
Absolutely So I just I wrote a book and it's available now So it's called running start and the whole premise of the book is that it is intended to help More people get into tech my goal when writing it was to take my experiences and my observations as both an engineer and a manager and Use that to create I sometimes call it a cheat sheet for your career but it's basically everything that I wish that I would have known at the beginning of my career that I think if I
had known would've made a big difference and the goal in writing it was to try to make it as accessible as possible so the primary audience for the book are people who are coming out of boot camps people who are trying to break into tech but the way that it's written I think really anybody can get value out of it.
Awesome let's pause for a second and realize you just said I just published a book I mean that's a huge thing you know what I mean so many people myself included have thought about writing a book but most of us haven't so congrats! What a huge milestone to be able to say yes I not only started writing a book which thousands of people have done but you finished writing a book and It's published and it's out there for people to check out So congrats on that
Thank you It's really surreal but I'm so happy that it's out there
Awesome as Alex has said like it is useful to everyone, people particularly in bootcamps and things like that but really if it sounded interesting to you you're probably in the target audience So is there a website that they can go to check
Yeah absolutely You can go to RunningStart.dev where you can purchase a digital copy Or if you go search Running Start on Amazon you can buy a copy for your Kindle a hard cover or a paperback.
Awesome So everyone go check it out And that's about it for this episode Thank you for joining us Alex!
Thank you for having me
Thanks for joining us for episode 3, "Taking up Space" with Alex Karp. You can find out more about Alex on his Twitter @AutisticManager. You can find links to everything we talked about in this episode, as well as a link to Alex's Twitter in the show notes. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider rating and reviewing it in your favorite podcast directory. And following us on Twitter @WebJoyFM Thank you and have a great day!