--- title: Hiring Junior Devs and How to Stand Out from the Crowd date: 2022-05-17T05:00:00-04:00 author: Sean Smith canonical_url: "https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-10/hiring-junior-devs-and-how-to-stand-out-from-the-crowd/" section: Podcast --- <!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-BEGIN\]\]>[Skip to main content](#main-content)![Terence Sawtell](https://website101podcast.com/uploads/hosts/_200x200_crop_center-center_none/1573787758191.jpeg)Guest Terence Sawtell Founder of Goat / Design & Development Agency based in Vancouver [ ](https://twitter.com/teristimo)[ ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/terence-sawtell-5b7b4a43/) Season 05 Episode 10 – May 17, 2022 37:19 [Show Notes](#show-notes) ## Hiring Junior Devs and How to Stand Out from the Crowd  0:00 0:00 1.0x 0.75x1.0x1.25x1.5x2x [](//dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/website101podcast.com/uploads/mp3/season-05/S05-E10-hiring-developers-with-terrence-sawtell.mp3) Learn about the process for hiring junior developers and get insight into common mistakes made as well as how to stand out from the crowd. ### Show Notes - Terence has 12 years of experience with hiring. - Number of applicants and number of interviews - What's important in filtering candidates to interview - Soft skills - Advice for developers on portfolio sharing - Contracts - Job ad requirements - Code test - Attention to detail - Common applicant mistakes - Bootcamps - Tips to stand out during the application process ### Show Links - [Goat](https://meetgoat.com/) Powered Transcript Accuracy of transcript is dependant on AI technology. **\[00:00\]** **Mike:** Hey, this is Mike, just letting you know that halfway through this episode, Amanda's microphone cuts out, so you won't hear her for the second half, but it's a great episode anyway, tune in, and she'll, of course, be back on future shows. **\[00:13\]** **Sean:** Enjoy! Hello and welcome to their website 101 Podcast, the podcast for novice web developers and small business owners who want to learn more about running and optimizing their websites. This is season 5, episode 10. I'm here with Mike and Amanda as usual. Hello Sean. Hey Sean. And today we have a guest, Terence Saltail, the founder and strategy director at Goat, an agency based in Vancouver and he's going to talk to us about hiring developers. **\[00:47\]** **Mike:** Terrence, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for being here. This is going to be really cool. We have a lot of listeners who are, you know, junior developers kind of thing and maybe some of them are interested in getting into the professional field and hopefully **\[01:02\]** **Terence:** they can learn a bit about it from you today. I hope they can too. I mean, we need more of them, So hopefully we can encourage them and not scare them. **\[01:12\]** **Amanda:** It would probably also be a good refresher for more seasoned developers who've maybe been in a job for a really long time, or working from home, wants us to switch it up. **\[01:22\]** **Sean:** Yeah, exactly. I mean, I don't know anything about applying for a job so far. **\[01:27\]** **Mike:** Yeah, it's going to be interesting to find out what the differences are since when we were doing it. **\[01:32\]** **Sean:** I fell into the one agency job I had. I just got lucky. I didn't even apply for it. It just was handed to me. So I've never actually applied for a web developer job. **\[01:42\]** **Terence:** It's interesting. Our senior devs, most of them have come from that kind of that scenario. It's like they just, you know, conversations happen and referrals, I meet them through something. And it's like, hey, do you want a cool job? Yeah, sure. OK. **\[01:57\]** **Sean:** And that's pretty much what happens. **\[01:59\]** **Terence:** You get up, checks out. Like, all right. **\[02:02\]** **Mike:** So you want to just start off by telling us a little bit about your company, where you work, what you do, that kind of thing? **\[02:08\]** **Terence:** Yeah, we're a small UX UI dev agency based in Vancouver. With nine full time staff, a few contractors that help support different resourcing when we need it. We build lots of content complex websites, like universities, government. And then we also do a lot of work on stuff that's already been half built, and we're trying to audit and go through and fix someone else's work. So there's a lot of very technical work that has to happen. We were Canada's first craft sea and mass partner. That's how Sean and I connected. Ah, nice. So we definitely were a WordPress focus for many, many years. And still have a lot of WordPress work, but a big believer in lean and light products and am a massive fan of PHP. So I'm trying to keep the dead dream alive. **\[03:00\]** **Mike:** Another PHP fan last episode we recorded earlier this week. We had a huge PHP fan in Amanda is big into PHP. She's a resident PHP expert here on the show. **\[03:09\]** **Terence:** Awesome. Yeah, so yeah, we're just, we're small light, but we do a lot, we don't, we try to do, you know, 12 big projects a year is kind of our thing. So we don't want to, you know, the projects are very in depth and have a lot of strategy work that goes with them. **\[03:22\]** **Sean:** Thanks. So a big, 12 big projects a year, that would be one a month, or you just, it's 12 over the year and the length of time depends on each project. **\[03:33\]** **Terence:** It depends on the client and how well they're behaving, right? So if they're fast and their feedback cycles are quick, yeah, we can, we do some pretty crazy amount of work in a short amount of time. But now it's generally speaking, you know, there's, there's, there's over, you know, design over Lapitev and, you know, but it's 12 years, kind of the goal is the goal for us. So from a net new perspective, anyways. **\[03:54\]** **Sean:** So, uh, Terrence, how, how long have you been formerly hiring people to work for your agency, did you do this before you were self-employed or running your own company? **\[04:08\]** **Terence:** Yeah, I've been hiring people for about 12 years total. I worked for Tell Us before this. So you're all based in your all Canadians. You're very familiar with Tell Us. **\[04:19\]** **Mike:** Tell Us is a phone company. Telecom company, I guess telecom company. **\[04:26\]** **Terence:** We'll call it, but they've got so much now. Before that, so I did hire there. And then when I laughed, I was able to do it on my own with my own rules and practices, which was nice. But it was definitely valuable learning how to hire in a corporate world. So I guess collectively 12 years, I'd say, let's say three at Tellus, and let's just say nine doing it on my own. But obviously many different types of positions, but for the most part, it's been related to some type of technical position at both Tellus and this. **\[04:57\]** **Sean:** Wow, so you definitely have a deep experience with looking at resumes, portfolios, and conducting interviews and things like that. How many interviews do you feel that you've conducted over that time? **\[05:11\]** **Terence:** I don't even want to know. **\[05:13\]** **Sean:** 12 years, that would be a lot. It's a lot. **\[05:18\]** **Terence:** You know, with my own company, you know, we're fairly small, so it's actually not as many as I, I'm probably exaggerating a bit, just, you know, biased by my reaction, but, you know, there's all, especially juniors and new developers, you know, we will cycle through quite a few resumes before we'll make the decision to interview and at this point I actually am not the first interviewer or director of operations is and he's more technical than me so it's nice to get those things out of the way first but I've had a few and I've also gone through like the process with a big corporation like Tellus and then been able to take what I've learned there and what I like and didn't like and apply to my own business so With my own company, we're fairly small, so it's actually not as many as I, I'm probably exaggerating a bit, just, you know, biased by my reaction, but, you know, there's all, especially juniors and new developers, you know, we will cycle through quite a few resumes before we'll make the decision to interview. At this point I actually am not the first interviewer or director of operations is and he's more technical than me so it's nice to get those things out of the way first. **\[06:13\]** **Mike:** But you know, you mentioned there a second ago that you go through a lot of them before you actually do interviews or whatever. I was going to ask, because I remember when I was applying for jobs, I would always wonder like how many applicants are these people looking at? Like I'm applying for an RFP right now for a project, and the thing has been online for a month. It's been promoted everywhere, and they must be just be getting flooded with proposals. So when you when you hire for a position, how many I guess how many applicants tend to respond and then how many do you generally try to interview? How's that go? Yeah, it's a good question. I'm also in the RFP space as well. I've been on a lot of stuff. **\[06:56\]** **Terence:** So I feel for you, and I'm sorry for you, and we can be able to talk about that for hours. It's hard to say, I think developers specifically, we try to keep things pretty, we don't wanna go through a ton. It's, there's so much work in trying to evaluate and yet actually end up, it's almost the waste of time. When you're trying to dig through a hundred applications, you're just basically pulling it straws and so. **\[07:23\]** **Mike:** It's like a lot of diminishing returns. Yes, huge amount of diminishing **\[07:26\]** **Terence:** returns and you're just, it's not fair to the candidates to be to be honest, like you're really just setting them up for failure and it's almost like an old saying like you go to a car dealership and so you end up buying the car at the 50th dealership because you're just sick and tired of doing the process, right? So you end up, uh, because there's scummy car dealerships. So, you know, I think that's what happens when you're hiring. So we try to filter quite a bit through just our careers page and making sure that they're their qualified candidate before, and the reality is, there's just not very many of them available. So, you know, you're a product of our current job market is not great for agencies, which is good for perspective employees, but yeah, so I would say, we should try to keep it limited. I'd say on a single junior dev posting, we'll try to get it down to eight or 10 applications, and then from there, we'll interview, probably the first interview for three to four. And if you think about it, that's 25 hours of work for me, right? So we'll keep it. **\[08:28\]** **Sean:** Wow, hiring is an expensive time and chance of process. It's a good idea. **\[08:33\]** **Terence:** It's awful. That's not awful. I quite enjoy it because I love the evaluating of personality and people. It's probably, frankly, one of my favorite parts of being a business owner is the people part of it and evaluating and learning and growing, helping people grow. But I mean, just the time cycle in itself of the interviewing processes is insane. **\[08:54\]** **Amanda:** If you're getting all of these hundreds of applications which doesn't surprise me at all, like how do you have some specific things that you look for to narrow down to potential applicants to hire? Like are you more interested in working at portfolio work or maybe even just student projects? Or do you really just stick more to the stuff on the resume? **\[09:14\]** **Terence:** I don't care about your resume. I want to see your work. I think with developers and I didn't learn traditionally and if you ask me to build a website today, I'd probably fonder. So for me, it's all about are you playing? Like are you having, are you trying things? And I don't think I've always looked at developers. It's a trade, it's a modern day trade. It's like being a tile cider or a carpenter. You need to practice, you need reps. And for orange, if you're in athletics, I played hockey growing up. So, it's all about practice. Like, you shoot 100 bucks a day about like, and if I see a developer that, it spends more time on the resume and selling themselves without actually just getting in and doing it, it's a flag. Yeah. Go play, like, when you were a kid, you had a pile of Lego, play, build shop. Even if it's pointless, you know, the best example, like, look at Werner, like, that's my favorite thing. I'm like, man, if someone just came to me, That made out like a friggin' champ by the way, that helped her bet. You know, he was just playing. He just built something. I heard he made it for his girlfriend. **\[10:25\]** **Sean:** Yeah, he was just like, ah, that's what he said on the syntax FM. Right, Westboss interviewed, **\[10:30\]** **Mike:** we had Westboss on our show just recently and. Oh, nice. He interviewed that, I forget the, Mr. Wardle, I guess his name is Wardle, right? **\[10:38\]** **Terence:** Mr. Wardle, yeah, his name's RWARDLE. Crazy, cool, sorry. **\[10:43\]** **Mike:** It was really cool, yeah. **\[10:44\]** **Terence:** And yeah, so yeah, short answer is it's just, what are you doing to play and learn? And I think for me, that is key. You know, you need to have the core fundamentals in your resume, but like, I personally, I'm skipping right through that. Like, I just want to see what you're making. And it doesn't need to be perfect. **\[11:01\]** **Amanda:** So then, are you actually like going in and looking at their code, or are you more interested in like, almost like a description? You know, oh, this is what the assignment in college wanted. And this is how I went about doing it, in sort of showing more of their creative thought process and also writing the code. **\[11:19\]** **Terence:** I, early on, I, my, me personally, I'm looking at the, the description, like, how you, like, what's the problem when you, how do you solve it? Like, what kind of things did you run into, you know, that, that to me is the, from myself personally, if, if we feel like they are able to articulate that and get through that process, then we'll move on to looking at their code and digging in. You know, I think, when I, when I was exposed to this, you know, even as a teenager and PhD in development, no one wanted to talk to us, we were losers. Like, like we didn't, we had nothing and we had no involvement in the customer experience when it came to delivering the service. We were just the mushroom dwellers in our basements. But now you are expected to be in front of the client. You are in take part of the strategy. So there's more to it than just being able to code something. So I'm trying to evaluate that up front because if you can't figure that out, I can't teach you that. Like, you need to practice that. **\[12:13\]** **Sean:** So to evaluate a developer's ability to communicate with your client or be in a client meeting, what kind of soft skills are you focusing on for most interested in? **\[12:28\]** **Terence:** Good social intelligence, ability to listen, writing notes, right? I mean, there's a classic one that I personally am so horrible at and I just stress and stress. Take notes, don't make mistakes on things clients have said, and you forgot. But that's the kind of credibility stuff you need to work on. And these are all things I personally have had to work on more than I'd like to admit. So I think you're just, you know, good social intelligence ability to carry a conversation and be able to articulate and explain why and what you're doing. I think those are really key. And you know, the reality is you can't expect a junior dev to come at you with all those skills. you know, as employers, we need to be open and ready to teach and learn and teach, sorry, and help develop because if we just, there's nothing worse than like getting a job and they, all right, like here's this massive project, like have fun. You're like, the reality is, you can't expect that from a developer right away. So there's a little bit of push and pull there, but yeah, those are the soft skills, just really, you know, we have a junior dev right now, and he came from a customer service role, you know, from a software, they're like a legal software company and he was, he went and did a bookamp and his soft skills are incredible because he literally spent the last two years like being on vocals, helping people learn how to use their software. So it's reps, right? Yeah. It's back to reps. And there's a certain amount of nurturing that your **\[13:52\]** **Mike:** agency will have to take account for when you bring someone in, right? Yeah. Absolutely. Because I **\[13:57\]** **Amanda:** would feel like new grad, like not only is joining a new job at a new company and meeting new people, that's intimidating. But then you've also got these new graduates who are, you know, they've got imposter syndrome and there's a lot of times they're just intimidated to be talking in front of anybody that they consider an adult because they don't think they are yet. **\[14:15\]** **Sean:** Right, yeah. Oh yeah, I didn't even consider that. On top of like, I'm new to the job and like, I don't know what standards this company is looking for or conventions that they use. There's just so much to think about it to be overwhelming. **\[14:34\]** **Terence:** What I think is really unique about our industry is we are A, we're brand new, right? Our industry is maxed 25 years old. We don't know what we're doing, like we have no really no clue, we have no generational experience. If you look at McDonald's, you look at being a contractor, like there's 100 plus years of time in developing process standards. We don't know what we're doing, like, we're all seasoned, like this is the sad part, like we're the seasoned people. **\[15:04\]** **Mike:** We're the best of us. **\[15:07\]** **Terence:** This group here is like a seasoned group of people that have been in our industry, so that's scary. **\[15:13\]** **Sean:** We created the industry standards as our generation. And you can see this in some of the controversy around things like tailwind and where you're putting like lots of classes inside. And it's like, that's just, you're not separating your concerns. But we're still figuring out what the actual standards should be. **\[15:37\]** **Terence:** And a lot of junior developers and what I love right now is there's a lot of career switchers, right? Like this is what we need. You got people working on gas, potentially going into debt because that's the transition moving to a digital, digital world. And they're used to the hundred plus years of multi-generational industries that have got experience. It's like, it's just no brain or stuff. And they're coming to a company like me. And I'm like, yeah, like here's our doc documentation. It's, you know, I'll say our documentation is really, really good for a company of our size, but it's still nothing in comparison to the onboarding documentation for a company. So, you know, it's a long version of that question. I think it's, you gotta be, you gotta nurture. And you need to really understand that we are children in the grand scheme of industry. and that people don't know that when they come into this business, and this is this profession. **\[16:36\]** **Sean:** Hi, Sean here. Hope you're enjoying this episode of The Website 101 Podcast. We'd love it if you'd give us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. These kind of reviews help new listeners find out about us and allow us to keep doing the show. **\[16:53\]** **Mike:** Thanks. I want to take a step back here briefly. We talked earlier about, you know, you'd like to see the work they've done and see them play, that they've played around in that. What kind of advice do you have for a developer who's looking for a position but the work they've done has been all either behind some kind of a login or it's like proprietary, they're not allowed to show it. And again, speaking for myself, this project that I'm about to submit a proposal for, The thing they're looking for, I've done very similar work for another client, but you can see maybe 10% of the actual work without logging in. And no one will have a login, so what's your advice for someone who has that kind of work? How do they show that? What should they do instead? **\[17:37\]** **Terence:** Well, always look at the contracts and talk to a lawyer. If you're really concerned about proprietary information being shared, I'm always, I'm all about having a good lawyer. But on the flip side of that, I think, you know, a good, just having password protected and write a case study with as many screenshots and as much code snippets as you can possibly share. I think you just need to be really careful. I actually have had, I'm trying to think if someone are we interviewed or hired, they had a really good password protected portfolio that they kind of, so it was a designer, sorry, it wasn't a developer. They had a really good password protected portfolio that they actually had a lot of that stuff in there. It was like, hey, I'm gonna show you this. Don't tell anybody. But it's screenshots and stuff like that. On the flip side, I feel like if, especially if you've got all this experience, and you have a good supportive leader and you say to them, hey, I'm moving on, we know that, is there any way we can work together so I can share some of this so I can help me get my next role? I personally would be all for that. Like yeah, absolutely. Just show me what you're gonna show first. I can just make sure there's nothing like impacting from our legal perspective. Because if you put the company at risk or you make a company in a bad spot, that's a world of hurt. And I would be not very impressed or happy. And I would do all the things I could legally to make sure you pay for that. So I, just talk to your manager. I think that, and you can get a lot. So yeah, good past your protection portfolio and just talk to your manager, like a brand new industry, we all have a responsibility to foster it and build up our people. **\[19:23\]** **Sean:** Mm-hmm. I would also say that for freelancers who are listening, you may not be permitted to publicly share work for whatever reasons, but that's publicly. Like I have relationships with a couple of agencies and they don't want their clients to know that they're contracting me for whatever reasons. So my work is all white labeled. But when I put a proposal together, I can include screenshots and say, hey, I built this and it was managed by agency A, B, C, boom. So, you know, it's getting that permission. And I've explicitly gotten that permission. I don't do it without permission. **\[20:05\]** **Terence:** Yeah. I'm happy to share clause we have in all of our SOWs and our MSA at Massage Service Agreements. And it's basically saying like, I have full right to share with my work privately. Okay, cool. And if you don't have a contract, you are, do not lift your finger until you have a second contract ever. I know it's unrelated to this, but it needs to, it's just a non-starter. So there's a clause I have, if you wanna, if you're a freelancer, I'd love to share it. I'm happy to put it out there. **\[20:38\]** **Mike:** Please do, please do share that. Contracts is our most often requested topic, and we have yet to cover it because we wanna make sure we cover it properly because it's about law and whatever. So we will definitely be following up with that in a later episode and we may hitch you up for some advice if you have a lot of experience on that. **\[20:56\]** **Terence:** I am not a lawyer, but I've been lawyers. So I'm happy to help. **\[21:02\]** **Sean:** Got it. So we've all seen the job ads for developers, where the list of skills or requirements so long it's unrealistic to find anyone who meets those requirements. It's just, you know, language soup. It's just so much in there. Do you employ this kind of job at? Why or why not? **\[21:24\]** **Terence:** No, fun story about this. So we bid on our fee. Hopefully we win it. And then one of the the proponents calls it said it was using we want CSS cards and I didn't I didn't say anything in the in the early the questions or anything and it's a great example of why there's a lot of word soup because they just put lingo in there to make themselves feel like they know what they're talking about and that's a lot of the times the case on a job out especially with big companies and the proponents call I said what do you mean by that because those two things don't go to get there. So yes, that's the programming language. And their card is, I don't know what you mean by that. So they're like, oh, it's just a terminology issue. We probably use the wrong term. So, you know, a lot of times the word soup you see is written by someone who pulled that from a database of something or copy-based from somewhere and they really don't have any idea. So we don't. I would be now that I'm thinking I'm like, oh, do we or not, there's definitely a lot of skills I'm looking for, but when it's a junior developer, which is what this is for, we're pretty light. We just say, you know, you have the basic knowledge and experience to understand syntax and you get that, you understand problem solving and there's, you know, you understand what GitHub does, right? Like, you don't expect you to be able to be an expert in deployment and version control. but no, I try not to get too much in the weeds on the details on skillset. We have a senior dev position we're hiring for right now, and yeah, that one's got some specifics. Like, there's a very, you know, being compensated very, very, very warmly for that. So, but in the junior stuff, we try not to overwhelm. And even, and what I would say to that is don't be discouraged if you do see that because I would just supply anyway. Like at the end of the day, if you're technically proficient, they'll hire you, and if you're not technically proficient, they won't hire you. So what do you have to leave us? **\[23:26\]** **Sean:** How does my follow-up question, what are you going to say to somebody who wants to apply, but is intimidated by that? **\[23:32\]** **Terence:** Don't even look at that stuff. Like, go for it. Like, who cares, what do you have to lose? Yeah. You're not going to make anybody upset. I can tell you right now there's no one on the other side. That's going to go, oh, they didn't look at that last. They don't care. In fact, they probably don't even know the list exists. And really, depending on the process and internal processes, you know, if it's a small company and you know that, you know you're going to be talking to someone on the ground. But if it's a 100 plus person company, they've got an HR person dedicated for that role. And they probably wrote that thing. So just don't worry about it. **\[24:02\]** **Mike:** Yeah, it's, it's probably often written by someone who's not even one of the developers or whatever, doesn't know. **\[24:07\]** **Terence:** Yeah, yeah. They're gonna, they're gonna say no to you if you can't get through their technical testing anyways. And I know that's something we're gonna talk about. So who cares? **\[24:16\]** **Sean:** Yeah, a few years ago, I saw something on the internet. So it's gotta be true. about the creator of a specific language was unqualified for a job because the job required more years of experience in that language than the language had been around for. **\[24:38\]** **Terence:** I saw that. I know it's what you're talking about. That was funny. **\[24:40\]** **Sean:** I can't remember what language it was. **\[24:42\]** **Terence:** It was like, no, what I think, no, or express or something. Oh my goodness, that's so good. Like, years of experience, like that's a really good thing. I actually, we actually purposely put zero years of experience on some of our ads, because we don't want you to have experience. We don't expect you to have experience. You can't have experience, you're brand new. And even our senior dab, I think, we're only asking for three to five years. Like, and even that, it's a loose term. In fact, I almost won't take it out. **\[25:08\]** **Mike:** That's good, that you don't require experience from, because that's one of the big catch 22 stuff. You're trying to get experience, but you need experience in order to get the role. and that's the good that you don't do that. **\[25:18\]** **Terence:** Just don't worry about that stuff. I just focus on being yourself and don't worry about those details. **\[25:27\]** **Sean:** I wanna step back just a bit. You mentioned coding tests and I was wondering do you use a coding test when you're hiring and have you ever applied for a job in the past before you ran your own company where you had one of those? I've never done it. I've just heard lots of bad stories about it. So I'm curious. **\[25:46\]** **Terence:** I've never done a code test. I've never actually had to do development work for other business or other companies. Tell us I didn't have to, so we do do them. Okay. It's a necessary evil. We make them very fair, though, especially because we're a PHP-focused agency and no one wants to teach PHP, which is another topic for another day. I can talk for many, many moons about. There's my input here, go learn PHP. If you learned all this stuff offensive, react stuff in bootcamp, great, but go learn PHP. You'll get a job tomorrow, but yeah, the tests are really important because it helps us understand your level of programming, savviness. I don't want to say expertise, but one of the big challenges we run into now is you get these full stack developers coming out of boot camps all over the country. **\[26:43\]** **Sean:** the record Terrence was doing air quotes when he said full stack development. **\[26:46\]** **Terence:** Yeah, I don't know. It's a podcast. What am I doing? Yeah. It's a quote unquote full stack developers coming on boot camps and the thing that we run into is you're not a full stack developer, so don't put that in your resume. You are a junior developer and you're you need mentorship and you need to learn and you need reps. So the traditional route of programming was go to compsi and learn and learn at university And whilst I absolutely despise most homicide programs, I think they're a joke. One thing they do teach you about is the fundamentals of programming and the scientific part of programming. And the technical tests are important because it helps us understand where your level of programming knowledge is not necessarily your level of react knowledge. And if you can figure out the PHP test that we do, you probably have a good program ahead. You might not be expert, because we're not asking you to do complicated stuff. It's all stuff that you can figure out, but it tests two things. Your ability to kind of, as a programmer, and as your understanding of computer science at very minimum, like very, very basic levels, and also your ability to problem solve and figure things out. Because reality is, most developers are googling everything 100 times a day. They're on Stack Overflow all the time, whether you're the most seasoned developer in the world or you're a junior. Totally. **\[28:12\]** **Sean:** Sounds good to me. **\[28:13\]** **Terence:** Yeah, our test, the one that we do the most with juniors is we basically just show them free figment mockups and we ask them to replicate this in HTML CSS, using either SAS or how you compiled it, and we get them to explain their work. **\[28:28\]** **Mike:** OK, so what is the weirdest thing that you've seen someone include on a resume or send you when they applied that just made you say, what, why would they do that? Can you, do you have any examples of anything like that? Not to put you on the spot, but. **\[28:43\]** **Terence:** So the designer side definitely more. I would say the, I think this is really common practice. Just don't have spelling mistakes. Like, please don't have spelling mistakes. Don't have silly grammatical errors. I'm not expecting you to be an English major, but like just, uh, **\[28:59\]** **Sean:** review your work before you submit it. **\[29:01\]** **Terence:** It's, it's like, it's the, like, It's just exact, it's like, if you try to deploy something without checking your work, like, and that's just a red flag right up, like straight up. But you can't review, don't take the time to review, like spelling on your resume before you send it to us. What are you gonna do when we have a deploy on a Thursday at 3 p.m., and it's gonna, a site with two million visits a month? **\[29:24\]** **Mike:** Yeah. It's like no attention to detail and... **\[29:28\]** **Terence:** Is very evil, and we make them very, very accessible and fun. Actually, you know, I'm glad you bring that up. That's something I didn't forget to talk about in room what we look for in that early phase. What is your attention to detail? We have a way of evaluating that in our kind of like scoring system that we have. It's not a question. It's a combination of many things. What is their commenting looks like in their code? When they do that test, how did they do the interaction? There's a specific interaction we have in there. It's a little bit difficult to make, but how they did. So the attention to detail is everything. In fact, I would say that's the number one thing I'm looking for now that I look back at it. I could care less how good of coding you are at this point, you're brand new, but what's your attention to detail? What are you noticing you can't figure out? **\[30:17\]** **Sean:** Yeah, no, that's a good one. So we only have one or two questions left, Terence. One of those would be what common mistakes do you see kind of it's making? And then this could be in their portfolio resume, like you mentioned typos, or it could be in the actual interview itself. **\[30:37\]** **Terence:** I would say the most common one is just this idea that you need to learn a bunch of little things about everything. I would much rather you focus, whether it's the thing we need or not. I'd rather focus and get good at a certain, hate likes focusing on languages, but like focusing on a certain area of like, if you're gonna do PHP and CMS's, like you've really gone into that, or if you really wanted to do React and understand how to work with APIs and create headless products. Like he really went into that. I have a junior developer. He's just always like playing with all these random things. He's never actually finished something through. And I've always told him like, it's great you're gonna learn a lot about nothing or a lot of, I'm sorry, you learn a lot about everything, but you don't know anything. And that's a problem. So... **\[31:22\]** **Sean:** Jack of all trades, Master of None? **\[31:24\]** **Terence:** That Master of None and, you know, he's never gonna be a Master of anything If you can't just focus on getting pick something and go for it and learn and that's why you play because you figure out what you're good at what you're not what you're comfortable with. So I think that's the most common mistake I see is just and that could be a product of **\[31:42\]** **Mike:** just the way that boot camps are all structured now is like yeah two weeks of it and like **\[31:46\]** **Terence:** of react two weeks of node you know two weeks of express two weeks of sequel like it's **\[31:53\]** **Sean:** like this massive crash course and I think boot camps are just trying to prepare their students for any kind of job. And it's not like when we started 20 years ago where all you needed was HTML, CSS, and jQuery. Now there's just so much more that's needed to get in the door. **\[32:13\]** **Terence:** Boot camps have been the savior of our industry. I will always go to bat for them. They have literally made our jobs cool. And we have to thank them for that. because for many, many moons, our jobs were not cool and they weren't marketed well. So I think, you know, just being present in those interviews and listening and answering questions with confidence, I, every, most kind of, I deal with imposter syndrome horrifically, personally. It's a huge issue for myself and I talk about it a lot with my team like, please don't be afraid to put me up because I have days where I'm like, I can't wait I'm doing this, oh my God. But so you gotta go into those things with a little bit of confidence, bounce B, get yourself ready to go and try to formulate your thoughts in an articulate them in a way that makes sense for a non-developer. So that's another mistake going really technical and trying to like, I'm like, you're lost me, like just explain this in a way that I could potentially show to a client. **\[33:19\]** **Mike:** Yeah. All right, so conversely, and maybe you covered a lot of this when you said, you know, what don't do this instead do that kind of thing. But are there any kind of tips you have for a candidate that would if they did these things, you would kind of go, oh, that's interesting. And they would stand out from everybody else. **\[33:36\]** **Terence:** Yeah. And the application process, how much playing have you done? We talked a little bit about that. Like, what did you built? What have you played with? Like, have you got a hobby that you tried to digitize? Like, uh, for the good one of this, uh, I, I've restored cars for hobby. So, um, and someone applied for job also was into cars, uh, and they built, like, an auto part trucking app when you're building your project useless product. Absolutely useless. You would never use it and they even knew that, but they've played, right? They they it allowed them to have a way to build an API because they needed to connect with rock auto, for example, just a website and then they also like they just they just had a lot of things they could play with and it was **\[34:12\]** **Mike:** product that was useless, but it resonated with you. It resonated with me. I was like cool. I like **\[34:18\]** **Terence:** And they admittedly were like, this isn't useful, but it gave me something, a problem to solve that was big enough that I could talk, you know, do a bunch of different things. So that's a big one. And I think another one is don't be afraid to, you know, people that aren't afraid to, you know, share their work and show me what's up and, and, and be excited about it. There's just like weird thing that you have to put this professional, like, Cold face on all the time. Right. Just like that our industry's not we're not that like we're we're not an accounting firm And and I think I think other industries are actually looking at our industry as like the golden standard of like just just be yourself Yeah, I'm not higher. We're not hiring you to to be this like This fit in a box kind of person like we are hiring personalities We are hiring people that we can put in front of clients that can beat themselves So I think just to stand out don't be afraid to be yourself and if they hire you for that great And if they don't hire you because of that well screw them. They weren't for you Just like any real relationship. So I said those are one to three things. Makes sense. Excellent. Excellent **\[35:28\]** **Sean:** Well, Terrence, this has been a really great conversation We're so glad that we could have you on where can people find you online if they want to learn more about you **\[35:39\]** **Terence:** Yeah, I'm meatgoat.com, so M-E-E-T-M-E-E-E-T-G-O-A-T.com, for myself personally, just like Ben, I'm happy to answer any questions. We do have two postings out right now, we have one for junior dev, one for senior dev, so if you're looking for a new gig, and also two, if you know any companies that want to do the type of work we do, we are an awesome hire. And we love good challenges, so happy to have our conversation, whether you're looking for a job or you want to hire a wicked cool company to do your work. Sounds like a great place to work, too. **\[36:15\]** **Mike:** We try our best. **\[36:18\]** **Terence:** It's important that we are remote, so we're fully distributed across Canada. Oh, yeah. **\[36:22\]** **Mike:** That's a good point. We never really covered that in the age of the pandemic, but yeah, that's good to know. That's really cool. Awesome. Okay Terrence, thank you so much for being on the show. This is really informative. Really appreciate it. **\[36:34\]** **Sean:** You're very welcome. Thanks for having me. Recording from a secret there while plotting world domination, I'm Sean Smith, your **\[36:45\]** **Mike:** co-host. The website 101 Podcast is partly hosted by me, Mike Mele. Find me online at belikewater.ca or on socials at Mike Mele. **\[36:55\]** **Amanda:** One third of the website 101 Podcast Talent is provided by me, Amanda Loots. You can find me online at my website, AmandaLoots.com. I also hang out on Twitter sometimes, you can find me at Amanda Loots Tio. Close Transcript Have a question for Sean, Mike, and Amanda? [Send us an email](/contact). [![Listen on Google Play Music](/assets/images/google_podcasts_badge@2x.png)](https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93ZWJzaXRlMTAxcG9kY2FzdC5jb20vZmVlZC5yc3M%3D)[![itunes badge](/assets/images/itunes-badge.png)](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/website-101-podcast/id1449510012)[![itunes badge](/assets/images/spotify-logo.png)](https://open.spotify.com/show/3rmSM1R9t6q1U8DmYWJRSO?si=NrYPMgDaRV6Dd56PjEaPow)### Season 05 - 1 [ Meet your Host - Sean](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-1/meet-your-host-sean/) - 2 [ Meet Your Host - Mike Mella](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-2/meet-your-host-mike-mella/) - 3 [ Wes Bos - Your Web Boss](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-3/wes-bos-your-web-boss/) - 4 [ Tailwind CSS with Adam Wathan](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-4/tailwind-css-with-adam-wathan/) - 5 [ Starting my own Website with Bill Campbell](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-5/starting-my-own-website-with-bill-campbell/) - 6 [ CSS is Awesome with Kevin Powell](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-6/css-is-awesome-with-kevin-powell/) - 7 [ Meet Your Host - Amanda](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-7/meet-your-host-amanda/) - 8 [ 11 Things to avoid doing on your website](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-8/11-things-to-avoid-doing-on-your-website/) - 9 [ Vanilla Javascript - Fundamentals before Frameworks](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-9/vanilla-javascript-fundamentals-before-frameworks/) - 10 [ Hiring Junior Devs and How to Stand Out from the Crowd](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-10/hiring-junior-devs-and-how-to-stand-out-from-the-crowd/) - 11 [ AlpineJS with Caleb Porzio: Lightweight javascript in your markup.](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-11/alpinejs-with-caleb-porzio-lightweight-javascript-in-your-markup/) - 12 [ Contract Opinions From Not a Lawyer](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-12/contract-opinions-from-not-a-lawyer/) - 13 [ Talking to a New Dev](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-13/talking-to-a-new-dev/) ### All Seasons - [Season 01](https://website101podcast.com/season/01/) - [Season 02](https://website101podcast.com/season/02/) - [Season 03](https://website101podcast.com/season/03/) - [Season 04](https://website101podcast.com/season/04/) - [Season 05](https://website101podcast.com/season/05/) - [Season 06](https://website101podcast.com/season/06/) - [Season 07](https://website101podcast.com/season/07/) - [Season 08](https://website101podcast.com/season/08/) - [Season 09](https://website101podcast.com/season/09/) <!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-END\]\]>