Job Hunting in Tech

About this Episode

This episode of the Acima Development Podcast tackles how job seekers, especially new grads, should present themselves to employers. Mike opens with an analogy comparing modern hiring to online dating: both have shifted from relationship-based filtering to app-driven processes that strip away the context you'd normally get from a trusted network. Interns Vivian and Jordan share their recent experiences, with Vivian noting that her degree, hard classes, and high GPA did almost nothing to land interviews, while the opportunities she did get came through people who knew her. The panel adds that credentials can even backfire, since some hiring managers screen out prestigious schools or high GPAs, assuming those candidates will be hard to work with or quick to leave.

The group converges on what actually matters to interviewers: evidence that a candidate can think, solve problems, and tolerate the constant frustration inherent to software work. Jordan's apartment-scraping side project, built to solve his own problem, was what interviewers consistently asked about, and Mike recalls hiring someone whose homeschooling app proved she could identify and solve real problems even if the code was rough. Dave and Will emphasize the psychological side of the job, including grinding through failure, reading far more code than you write, and managing imposter syndrome. They also make a half-joking but sincere case for taking work at sketchy startups, since even dubious employers provide real experience, connections, and a paycheck while you build toward something better.

The dominant through line is that connections beat credentials. Nearly every panelist got their jobs through people they knew, and Dave offers a detailed playbook: cultivate loose acquaintances rather than close friends, ask curious questions over lunch, and let warm introductions bypass corporate filtering. Justin recommends joining active local industry groups like OWASP or user groups, where presenting your work makes you visible to people who hire. On the AI question, the panel agrees on tailoring effort to the audience: if an AI will screen your resume, let AI write it, but a human touch still differentiates when real people are reading. Vivian's closing takeaway captures the consensus, that human connection transcends any amount of resume optimization, and Will signs off urging listeners to add everyone they've ever worked with on LinkedIn.

Transcript:

MIKE: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Acima Development Podcast. I'm Mike, and I am hosting again today. With me, I've got Dave Brady.

DAVE: Howdy, howdy.

MIKE: We've got Eddy Lopez, Vivian Moore, Justin Ellis, Will Archer, Kyle Archer, and Jordan Dickerson. And we had a lot of interest in the pre-call here today, and I've been thinking about how to present the topic.

So, there's been a huge transformation in the way people meet each other over the last couple of decades. 20 years ago, you say, "I met somebody online," you'd get some side eye. "You met them where? On the internet? Are you one of those people [laughs]?" And now date using an app, right? It's how it's done.

DAVE: It's de facto.

MIKE: Yeah, de facto, exactly. So, fundamental shift, right? Fundamental shift in the way that that's done. There's some consequences to that. There is a loss of a lot of the filtering that you got previously because a lot of times previously you'd get people out of this network of people that you knew. It still happens, right? People still meet each other that way. They don't follow the de facto route because that's not working. They still meet somebody through somebody they knew.

But, you know, there's this lack of filter because you're going to be meeting somebody you met on, you know, on your dating app. You don't have all the context that you have, and the people say, "Oh no. Stay away from that guy [laughs]." And so, there's a lot more of this...who am I talking to? And the sudden evaluation that you got to do.

Now, I haven't been dating for a long time. Very happily married, I have been for [laughter]...28 years now. It'll be 30 years in just a couple of years. I've been married for a long time. Glad I'm not dating [chuckles], that can be painful. But I don't even hardly remember doing it that way [chuckles] back when.

But there's that evaluation process you go through very quickly. You know, is this...first of all, am I safe with this person [laughs]? Are they going to kill me? Followed by, you know, what's the next choice? You know, are they gross? Do they smell bad? You know [chuckles], to the acceptable...[laughs] Are they an acceptable person to be around? And, you know, they gradually move into your circles of trust, and you see how close they're going to get. And you have to go through the evaluation process.

The same thing has happened in hiring, where hiring has very much been taken over, in many cases, by this whole stream of filtering that happens online before you ever meet people. And people spend a lot of work carefully crafting their resume to meet keywords. And sometimes we miss the right people. Sometimes we miss the right people because they didn't have the right keywords.

And then when you meet somebody, you know, you have to go through that evaluation process. I've done a lot of interviews. I've done a lot of interviews over the years. I interviewed two people today, as a matter of fact [chuckles]. It's a thing I've done many times. And it's always tricky, right? Because you have to try to go through that filter because you don't have the context. You know, how do I quickly evaluate whether this person is somebody I want to work with? And coming from the other side, if you're looking for work, that's a tricky problem, too.

I know, Justin, you've recently done this. We've got Vivian and Jordan who were recently applying for an internship. You know, so we've got some folks here who've recently been through this process. It's hard. What do I put on my resume? And this broader sense of, "How do I present myself to employers?" is a tricky one.

And that's what our topic's going to be today. How do I represent myself, and what do I do? Just kind of a broader sense. What do I do? Should I get certificates? Should I not get certificates, or should I even put them on my resume if I've got them? Should I do networking? Should I go do volunteer work? Should I go and work on projects and put them on my GitHub? Do none of those matter at all [laughs]? I just have to put the right keywords on my resume. That's the topic we're going to talk about.

And I could throw some of my spin on this because I have, like I said, done quite a bit of interviewing. I might actually start with the interns we've got here because I know that they have very recently been going through the hiring process. And I'm curious: the first question I'm going to ask is, what did you focus on? And that [laughs] can give us a launching point. You know, what did you focus on that you thought, "Hey, this will maybe work," as you put it on your resume? And then we can maybe talk about how that landed.

VIVIAN: Coming out of college, I assumed that a degree, working hard in school, taking difficult classes, having a high GPA would be the ways that I would get a job after college. I was immediately confronted by the fact that that did absolutely nothing to do anything for me, especially in the industry that I came into in 2024.

WILL: Not nothing. Not nothing. Not enough [laughter].

VIVIAN: Not enough. Definitely not enough. I would say, for sure, not nothing. It taught me the skills that I needed to eventually do the jobs that I could potentially apply for. But in terms of actually securing an interview and moving on to the next steps, that was next to inconsequential in terms of what it actually provided for me.

The situations where I have been able to, at the very least, have an interview to potentially move forward to the next step, it has been finding a place where not a lot of people are applying for, or knowing someone who already works there who can give me a reference for something that I can apply for that either, again, not a lot of people are applying for. Or they know that I'm capable, and so they can vouch for me to get me onto the top of the pile.

WILL: God bless a sketchy, trashy, bottom-feeding, scum-sucking, borderline felonious startup.

MIKE: [laughs]

WILL: Who among us, who among us didn't break in, like, on the bottom of the barrel [laughter]? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I want to see...I mean, go lower. How [laughter]...how low can you go? If it pays [inaudible 06:38] better than DoorDash and the check only bounces [laughter] half the time --

DAVE: Half the time [laughter].

WILL: You're in, baby. You're in.

VIVIAN: So, the lesson I'm learning from this is compromise your morals and values.

WILL: Yeah. Yeah.

DAVE: It's just...be ready to settle.

WILL: Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Yeah, you got it. That's a wrap, boys.

MIKE: [laughs]

KYLE: I was going to say, I think it's interesting, too, for new grads to join the job market. I don't know how many hiring managers had the bias of...I won't give names, but the location that I went to [laughter] after college, he had a bias in the sense of what schools. If you had certain schools on your resume, he wasn't interested. He had hired those schools before and no longer wanted to deal with them.

If you had certain GPAs and you're thinking, "Okay, cool, 3.9, 4.0, that's great," nope, you were out of the list. He didn't want the high GPAs. He wanted 3.4s. He wanted 3.0s. He had a certain opinion of those. So, I'm saying, sometimes, it's even awkward in the sense that your school, your GPA, your classes, those might even negatively affect you for some individuals.

WILL: I have run into people who will not hire from certain top-tier schools, right?

KYLE: Oh yeah. Top tiers are not uncommon for...especially smaller companies.

WILL: If you went to Stanford, there were people who were just like, "No, dude," like, either they suck, you know, and they went to Stanford, but they couldn't hack it. Or they're just sort of, like, you know, they're overqualified, and, like, they're going to bounce, you know, at the earliest opportunity because, you know, I'm not Google. I'm not even Facebook.

DAVE: You need to be good enough, have a degree from a college good enough that I trust that you can do the job, but not such a nice enough place that I'm going to look at your resume and go, "I don't want to pay for that." Because you're going to start here as a new intern, and you're not going to know anything. I don't want to pay Harvard for that because you're going to have expectations.

KYLE: Well, there's an interpersonal concern, too, with either the higher GPA...the individuals that have the higher GPAs or that go to the more prestigious schools, right? How interpersonal are they going to be? How easy are they going to be to work with?

VIVIAN: I mean, I can speak from personal experience. I know that the shift from my high school GPA to my college GPA changed me as a person. I went from about a 4.4 to a 3.6, and I became a much better person at the 3.6 than I ever was at the 4.4, even though I was way more academically successful.

I fully see and agree with all of those pieces of information, and I've had specific confirmations. I had an interview with a place that I won't name at the moment, but they talked to me and basically walked me through my resume and went, "Okay. Well, you want to do this job, but you're overqualified for this. So, we know you're going to leave in a year, so we're not going to hire you." Like, they explicitly told me that out in the open because they just didn't want to deal with the fact that I might be overqualified.

But, like I was talking about, I was sitting trying to go for the bottom of the barrel, apply for anything I possibly could because I could not find a job in the industry.

DAVE: Be aware that, like, it's tempting to phrase that story as value negative. But I would say it's value neutral. They may have self-selected out of a bad fit for you and for them.

I had the exact opposite where...I'm a dilettante. I've flunked out of college six times, legitimately. My resume looks like the kind of person...it's, "Oh, you've had one year of experience eight times," that kind of thing, right? I hopped around. I was everywhere. My father-in-law said, "You're like a horse maneuver. You're all over the place."

And I went to a shop, and they said, "You work on really interesting things. You're constantly jumping to new stuff. We're not going to hire you because we need somebody who likes boring. We need a support person for this product. The person we hire is going to become the masc..." It was a small startup. "We want you to be the support guy, and you need to know this product inside and out. And that's going to take a year or two to train you. And then we want you to be happy to stay on just that product for another two or three years while we go off and build the interesting thing." And I was desperate for a job, and I treated it as value negative. And, in hindsight, it was a really good self-selection.

VIVIAN: No, I feel the same way. As much as it hurt in the moment because I was like, I need a job and I want this so bad, at the end of the day, I think, although I couldn't see into the future, in the future, that value was brought by not wasting the time doing the job that wasn't going to, in the end, progress and improve my quality of life and career.

DAVE: Yeah, 100%.

WILL: Eh, I'm still going with it. I'm still going with negative. Like, I got to pay the mortgage, man.

JUSTIN: You got to get the health insurance.

WILL: Yeah. No, I got that Obamacare. I'm all right. I'm all right. As long as I can write the check, I'll be okay. I don't know. Like, I'm more [laughs] [inaudible 11:49]

DAVE: I 100% agree with you. We're talking about timescales, right? Like, you got to pay the rent. You know, I'll flip burgers, man. But a year from now, two years from now, a burger joint's got to know I'm not going to be here, right? You are rent money. You are not career.

WILL: I just choke it down to my inability to, like, [inaudible 12:08] them on effectively enough. That's a personal failing.

MIKE: So, Jordan, what did you think would be valuable on your resume?

JORDAN: Well, I haven't quite graduated yet. I just finished my sophomore year at the U, so I didn't think that would be as helpful, especially because every internship I applied for was telling me they wanted me to be a junior before they would hire me on. So, I mostly focused on the personal projects that I built outside of school.

My biggest one was a thing that would scrape all apartment listing data in Salt Lake City to find me the best deal on apartments. I built that in Java Spring Boot, and that's what interviewers would bring up the most. So, I kind of moved that up on my resume every time I redid it.

DAVE: Especially because you built it because you wanted it, not because, oh, I just figured I'd throw something up for resume fodder, right? It's like, okay, this guy knows how to scratch an itch. Yeah, I like it.

MIKE: Also how to pay less on rent.

JORDAN: Yeah [laughs]. That was the biggest thing.

DAVE: So, we could pay him less [laughter].

WILL: I think more than anything, like, if I'm...because I've hired junior developers before. And that's a standout to me because, like, more than anything, you know, in my advanced years, the thing that matters the most, I feel like, in terms of, like, longevity and effectiveness in the business is mostly psychological.

Do you really like making stuff, and can you deal with the inevitable frustrations of just the unending torrent of nonsense that the trade is going to throw at you? Like, it's just not that hard to parse JSON. It's just not. Anybody could parse JSON. I mean, I could teach anybody of slightly above room temperature IQ to read some JSON and read these logs and do it, but --

DAVE: I disagree with that. This is so weird to be the person disagreeing with you in the other direction. But there is a programming test called FizzBuzz. And [laughter] if you talk to a junior developer, they will cross their eyes and kind of tilt their head, and they'll think about it. And if you ask a senior developer, they look at you, and they go, "That's not a programming test. That's a typing test," right?

It's literally print the numbers 1 to 100. If the number's divisible by three, print the word fizz instead of the number. If it's divisible by five, print the word buzz. If it's divisible by both, print fizzbuzz. So, it's literally one, two, fizz, four, buzz, and so on down the thing. And a senior will be like, "That's a typing test."

And I was offended by that test and its simplicity, and then I ran into three people in a row I was interviewing...I was hiring at that point for my company, and I ran into three people in a row that couldn't do it. So, there is a floor. There is a floor.

I agree with you if you are thinking of people that kind of meet a minimum thinkability standard. That shop was where I came up with the idea that I don't care if you program in the language that we use here. And I know I'm going to have to teach you our codebase. I don't mind teaching you a language, but I cannot teach you how to think. And that's what I interview for when I interview candidates: can you think?

WILL: Fair enough. I mean, I don't know, I mean, like, me personally, like, if you've built some projects of significance, like, on your own, again, this is, like, just me, I wouldn't recommend anybody try this out because of the way the industry is, especially right now.

But, like, somebody self-taught who built some stuff and it works, and you can use it, and they did it all on their own versus, like, you know, a bachelor's degree holder without, I would lean more towards somebody who's, like, actually built some stuff, and they did it on their own and they have, like...because it signifies some of those intangible qualities. But I feel like the way things are right now is, like, everybody's like, "I want both [laughter]," you know, which is, I don't know.

MIKE: Well --

WILL: I don't know if it'll stay that way. I don't know. There's a lot of feeling around, like, this is a brand new world. Everything's different now, and I'm just like, reaally? Really different? It doesn't feel that different where I'm sitting.

MIKE: There's, not only in software, but across many industries, not most, I've seen statistics to suggest that new grads are in a really weird spot. So, new grads are in a weird spot, like, across the board. That's a complicated phenomenon. Maybe won't go in here. But, yeah, I think that whether that's going to persist, I can't say.

WILL: I feel like cheap, easily exploitable workers will always have a place in the American economy.

MIKE: [laughs] So, I would also agree that the experience, it matters. I'm thinking about people...quite some time ago, I interviewed somebody who'd been at home doing school with their kids, and she built an app to manage that. And it was probably bad code [chuckles], right? But she saw a problem and solved it, and had the code and was using it, like, actively using it because this solved a problem, from zero to that in some relatively short amount of time. Like, oh, wow, that's impressive. And that is somebody who's gone on to be very successful in their career. Hired [chuckles] at an entry-level, but has gone on to be very successful. Yeah, that really does make a difference.

And I'm inclined to say something similar. We don't hire people to write code. That's part of it. We hire people to solve problems. You know, if somebody has been about the business of solving problems, they're somebody that I'm very interested in.

I also really align to your thoughts about the psychology of it. I've said, in the past, and I've probably said on the podcast, that I've felt many times that software engineering is primarily about frustration management. That's what you're living with is endless frustration and being able to deal with that and get through it. It's related to the problem-solving, right? Here, have a whole bunch of problems you can't solve. Good luck [chuckles]. Knock yourself out.

And if you can navigate that, navigate the imposter syndrome, like, should I...Am I even somebody who can do this: navigate the, you know, emotional pain of failing over and over again, of going and discovering stuff and trying to do stuff where you don't know enough, and so you are kind of incompetent? You know, all of those things is challenging. And then, in the end, if you can solve problems, that's somebody that you want to hire.

KYLE: It's interesting that you kind of bring that up, because while we were in the middle of the pandemic, my wife was like, "Maybe I want to do more of a career like you do." And she's like, "Maybe I should get into development." So, I got her doing a few programming tasks and sitting down and working on some of these things. And she was doing something a little bit beyond a "Hello, world."

And she ran into a problem, and we debugged through it, and she ran into another one. And it was one of those things where she was just kind of like, "This is annoying. I would not want to do this all day [laughter]." And I had to be like, "Hun, this is what you do all day."

DAVE: This is the job [laughter].

KYLE: This is the job. Like, if you don't like this part, you're not going to like it. Yeah, she quickly pivoted from that interest, but...[laughs].

DAVE: That's great.

MIKE: That was the right choice.

DAVE: That's completely valid. That's fantastic. I look at this job, and it's a Rubik's cube. I get paid to work puzzles all day, and I love it because it's puzzles, to me. But I can absolutely see it as being maddening at the same time.

EDDY: Actually, I'd argue that getting a different outcome after an hour is a lot more exciting to me now than having to read someone else's hogwash code, right, that made sense to them at the time [laughter].

Like, I spend a lot more time reading than I do writing, you know, and so I have a different level of elegancy and standard, right? So, what I usually tell people is, yeah, like, yeah, you got to learn to, like, push through, like, all of the mundane stuff. But also, I say, "Do you like to read?" Is a huge one. I'm like, "Oh, you don't? You struggle with reading? Sorry, dude. Like, that's all you're going to do is just read, read, read, read. And if you can't do that, then..."

DAVE: This is deep-ends knowledge work. Yeah.

WILL: How do you like writing passive-aggressive, like, emails [laughter]?

JUSTIN: Hey, that's my job [laughter]. Here's a vulnerability. I feel like you should fix this, you know [laughter].

WILL: Before the company is bankrupted [laughter] or all our servers melt through the floor because they've been taken over by crypto mining bots. What do you think? What are your thoughts?

JUSTIN: What do you think [laughter]?

MIKE: I think that a quality engineer would care about these things. I don't know [laughter], how do you feel about it?

WILL: Ooh, I got one. I got one for you. This is an interesting defect. However, I thought perhaps the back-end team could fix the back-end problems because I do not have access to that codebase. But if there's something you guys would like me to do without access to the code, please let me know [laughter].

JUSTIN: Just add a language barrier in there, too, then --

MIKE: That's right [laughs].

JUSTIN: Then you've got my job to a T [laughter].

WILL: Do the needful, boys. Do the needful [laughter].

DAVE: If this podcast ends with two of us quitting our jobs, I'm going to call that a backfire [laughter].

WILL: If this podcast was live, I would be flipping a coin as to whether my laptop was going to get bricked by the time I stop recording [laughter]. Sorry, guys. Let me just put you on mute. I'm getting a call from HR [laughter].

JUSTIN: You get calls? Wouldn't that be just an email [laughter]?

WILL: Screen just turns black.

JUSTIN: Oh, man. So, one of the reasons why I suggested this was to talk about what kind of shines in, you know, what you guys are looking for, and we've mentioned grades, pluses and minuses. We've mentioned things. But the thing that was, like, key there was, like, show that the candidate thinks, and you can do that in several ways. I mean, obviously, you do that through a live coding test that they're live with you and, hopefully, not, like, looking at an AI prompt on the side. But --

MIKE: I actually watch for that. Like, I watch their eyes.

JUSTIN: Yeah, I know [laughs]. That is something that we deal with, too. But it's like, there are a couple different ways to kind of establish yourself as somebody who can work. And I think one of the biggest ways is just, like, the people who know you personally or who have worked with you can vouch for you as someone who knows how to work and knows how to think. That, I think, is, like, the number one way that you can convey to people that, hey, you can think, and you're a good candidate for this job.

Sometimes it's difficult to know if, you know, if you're a friend of a friend of a friend. I mean, LinkedIn, for all its pluses and minuses, it is good for, you know, if you're going to have a long career, which hopefully you will, it is good to stay in touch somehow. And you aren't going to stay in touch through, like, Instagram or something like that. All that's kind of personal.

But LinkedIn is fulfilling a function of professional connections, such that you can remember people from, you know, five jobs ago, and, you know, it'll remind you. That's one way. Another way is just, you know, making sure you keep journals so you can write down the people you work with. But I've found that LinkedIn has actually been a net positive for the most part for me. But there's definitely just that function, that core functionality of remembering who you've worked with, and seeing if a candidate has worked with somebody that you know that you can ask them independently about. That's really good for that purpose.

DAVE: Yes to all of that, and I just realized the thing I'm about to ask is going to be a topic shift, so I'll leave it in the water a bit. When we pivot, Justin, you talked about certificates in the pre-call, and we all got very excited about this, and my question is largely revolving around that.

WILL: Oh, I just want to throw in an endorsement. Like, if you're listening to this, everybody you went to school with, especially the people who didn't suck, and everybody you were on a team with, whether they sucked or not, add them all. Add all of them. All of them. Because, like, you know what I mean, the thing about it is, is, like, they know you. They know your work. Like, hopefully, you weren't terrible, and they'll be like, "Well, you know, Will showed up every day. He was rarely late to stand up. And, you know, you could do worse." I'll take it. I'll take it. That'll get you an interview at the very least.

So, I mean, like, I've gotten jobs from people that I didn't like, and they didn't like me. But, like, they knew I was reliable, and I knew that I wouldn't lose my house. At the end --

DAVE: Those people are significantly...like, no joke, loose acquaintances are way more valuable than close friends when you are looking for work. Because your close friend is going to want to, A, is going to...if you say, "Hey, who's hiring?" they're now immediately filtering for good matches for you. They don't want to send you to a bad company because you're going to come back to them and go, "Man, the job you told me to go get..." Even if you're like, "I promise you I'm not going to be upset if you send me to a bad place," right, they will feel that way. And also, in reverse. I've had it kind of reverse, where it's like, ooh, there's a really...shop over here, but I don't want to burn my reputation if I recommend somebody who's kind of a dud. Loose acquaintances.

Okay, to be fair, if you're a dud, that's going to follow you no matter where you go, because wherever you go, there you are. But loose acquaintances are people who they don't care if you get the job or not. And they're not asking for...they're not going to be thinking, "Who is hiring the exact shape of you? Who is hiring somebody with seven years of SQL Server and two years of Rust?" whatever, right? It just...that's a zero-hit query, right, for most people.

But two things to do: find your loose acquaintances and ask open questions that have nothing to do directly with the job. "Hey, who's working in Postgres? Hey, do you know anybody that's doing geographical queries? Who do you know that's doing GraphQL stuff? Did I hear you say you were working in microfinance? Who else is doing that?" that kind of stuff.

And then you don't go ask that person for a job. You say, "Hey, can you introduce this person to me?" You get an introduction, then you go to that person and say, "I'd love to talk with you about..." whatever it was you asked your acquaintance about. "You guys are doing geographic stuff. You guys are doing microfinance. I'd love to talk with you about it. Can I pick your brain?"

And this is where it gets expensive. I usually buy them lunch, and I show up. Everything is fascinating to me, so I...it's like a podcast. I don't have a topic or a subject. We just jump in, and I get fascinated, and off to the races you go. Take that attitude to a lunch with somebody and just say, "Hey, tell me about...what kind of database stuff do you..." And have questions. Get interested. Get curious. If you say five words during the entire lunch, they will think you're a genius because you got them talking, right?

I can't remember what the quote was that...two prime ministers, Benjamin Disraeli...somebody said, "At a dinner party, if you had dinner with him, you felt like he was the smartest person in the room. But if you had dinner with Winston Churchill, you felt like you were the smartest person in the room."

So, ask questions; get curious; get interested. Then on the way out, it's natural. It's like, "Hey, are you guys hiring?" Half the time they're like, "Yeah, and I get a hiring bonus if I recommend you. Send me...don't send it to HR; send it to me." Now you've got a warm recommendation to HR, and that goes right through most of the corporate shielding, and it's a fantastic way. So, there you go. There's my secret to finding work.

WILL: I like that, but I also sort of wonder about the denominator, right? I mean, because it's, like, sort of, like, you're going to have a certain number of shots on goal, right?

DAVE: Yeah.

WILL: And then it's kind of expensive per try, right?

DAVE: It is.

WILL: Where it's like –-

DAVE: It is. It's not a scattershot. It's spearfishing; it's not net. It's not casting a net. That's absolutely right.

WILL: Well, exactly. I mean, and so it seems to me that that is suited for a particular kind of job hunting, which is, like, A, you're not missing any meals, and B, you have something specific. And, like, I would almost say, like, implicitly, you're a little bit more of the senior developer, in that, like, I am looking for this sort of a role doing this sort of a thing, and I have something to offer. Versus just, like, I need to not --

DAVE: Maybe.

WILL: I'm a baby turtle, and I need to make it to the ocean before the gulls pick me off, you know, by any means necessary.

DAVE: I'd be really impressed if a junior dev took me to lunch and said...this is a podcast call. Please take me to lunch. I'm hungry [laughter]. But if somebody came and said, "Hey, talk to me about what you guys do," and then I come to find out that they're very, very junior... that actually happened.

I'll name a name. Brandon Hayes is a Ruby developer that was here locally. I honestly don't know if he's still doing Ruby. He moved back to Texas, but he came to me...2010 and said, "I'm in marketing, and I hate marketing. How do I get out of marketing?" And I said, "Come to URUG." Somebody told him to start coming to URUG. That's how I met him. He was coming to the Utah Ruby Users Group. And we sat and started talking, and I didn't get him to a company that hired him, but he picked my brain.

And because he was a little older, he was a little more mature, so he had real experience. He had 10 years or, you know, 8 or so of experience as a marketer, and he was good at it. So, I was able to give him kind of, like, customized...I guess that's the other thing is, if you're good at something and it's not the thing you want to do, get a job where you can do both, because then it goes on your resume.

And if you can get...and they said, "Well, we'll hire you half, 50/50 marketing and programming." And he's like, "Should I take the job?" And I said, "Yes, and be aware that they're going to work you 90/10 at best. You're going to have to fight for every second you get to program. But after a year, you're going to have one year programming experience on your resume, and that's going to be your ticket into the next place."

WILL: Yeah. Yeah. Like, I worked with Brandon, not in the 50/50 marketing role, but, like, when he was just learning to program. Utah Ruby community is, like, crazy small. I think the Ruby community in general is crazy small. Yeah, I don't know, someday I'll get back to it.

DAVE: It's well-connected. It's very personable. Yeah.

WILL: So, I really love the community. I like the language, too. Someday I'll get back to it.

JUSTIN: I really like what you brought up, David, about the community, and that goes back to, like, your connections to other people. I'm mainly part of two communities, like, industry communities. One is the local OWASP chapter, which is, like, OWASP Application Security Group, and it is actually really small. But we have meetups, probably I attend every other month at least.

So, we are active, and it's local people, so, you know, people in, you know, Utah County, Salt Lake County, and Davis County. And there's probably 20 people, 25 people that attend off and on. But we know each other, and if anybody's, like, looking to hire people, it's like your network has just expanded so much because of the people in this, you know, cybersecurity group.

And so, that's...I'd recommend people go out and join an industry group that is active locally. It's not something that you're remote or anything else. This is somebody you go out and have lunch with, like, once a month or once every other couple of months.

And the other thing that that brings is, like, we do presentations at that event. And so, you present, and you get the opportunity to show other people, like, your technical expertise. And when they're looking for people to hire, they're like, "Oh, yeah, Justin presented on AI security two months ago, and it looked pretty impressive, and we're hiring for somebody for that. And so, let's go talk to that guy." So, it's a lot easier to present at that local group than, you know, say, at DEF CON, or something like that.

So, that, and I'm also a member of UJUG, which is the Utah Java Users Group. And I go to that one every couple of months and say hi to people, and, you know, you just get to know people there.

DAVE: I'll just say I don't think I've been to a URUG in the past year that there wasn't somebody looking for work or looking to hire. And so, like, that's an open...that's a fair...there's no shame. That's what we're there for, in addition to learning cool stuff.

WILL: Yeah, I mean, it's a lot like getting in shape, right? Like, it's a process. It's a long-term process, and you can't do it in a day, you know, when you have to, like, sort of bootstrap it from, like, a cold start. Like, it was like, "Oh, I got laid off, you know? Like, I lost my job, what do I do?" It's like, okay, well, step one is hop in the time machine and go back six months and do all the right things that you were supposed to do.

But, I mean, I will say that, like, I mean, not for nothing, and, like, I say this with the full understanding that I have, like, a family, and I've got a full-time job. And I try and do things that aren't sitting in front of this keyboard like a lab rat. And so, I don't do any of this stuff, like, not nothing, but, like, the absolute bare minimum. I'm not better than anybody. Like, I'm not doing any of this stuff.

But the thing that makes it such a differentiator, especially, honestly, like, if you're in the sort of, like, scraping just to survive stage, is nobody wants to do it. Everybody walks in the door at 6:00 o'clock if you're lucky, 7:00 [laughs] if you're not, or worse. And they don't want to sit down in front of the laptop and, like, hit congrats on the promotion to your project manager that you hated five years ago because they always wrote screwed-up stories. But now they're a principal product owner in a company that you might want to know about six months from now, you know?

And, like, nobody's doing that, and that's what makes it such a differentiator. And it really is a needle mover, and it's a needle mover because it sucks for everybody, and nobody does it, and everybody hates it. And if you're willing to do it, you know what I mean, over the long term, you know, it will move the needle for you in a really meaningful way. You got to stay after it.

I mean, like, a lot of the stuff where, like, I tell everybody who's a junior who's looking for work is to, like, just go out and do personal projects. Share them on the internet. And, like, you'll find these blogs of people who are doing exactly this, and they run for six months at most. And then they're never updated again because they got a job in the industry and they're working now, and they don't have time for that [laughs].

MIKE: There's a through line in all of the comments so far. You know, Vivian talked about finding people who would...through connections. Like, you know somebody over there [chuckles] and working those. And now we're talking about LinkedIn and maintaining those relationships. We talked about getting involved in communities to have those relationships, so the connections.

So, we started the call talking about, you know, dating and how we used to depend on those relationships to make it happen. And everybody goes to the app. And the same thing has happened to job searches. You know what? You know how easy it is to find job search by just throwing yourself out on the app? You will never get a bite. Maybe you get a bite. I've never gotten a bite that way in the past. I think every job I've ever gotten came through a connection I had. So, we're saying that the connection network never went away. It's just been papered over by these apps sitting on top that maybe they work sometimes [chuckles].

WILL: I mean, foundationally, like, I think, it boils down to, like, availability bias, right? Hiring managers are lazy as hell. They're lazy as hell. Not lazy, they're not all bad people. Some of them. I'm sure there are exceptions. But you got to make it easy. Don't make hiring managers think really hard, you know? Like, they get a stack of 100 resumes, and they want 10. They want 10 so bad. Make it easy to be one of the 10, and, like, the better you could do that, then, you know, the more successful you're going to be.

People...like, there's nothing that makes a hiring manager happier than, like, a hot lead, where it's just like, oh my God, you're saying, like, Dave knows a guy, and I could just skip this entire rigmarole? Like, I don't have to go through the marathon of, like, interviews, and callbacks, and reschedules and, like, all this stuff? I could skip it all and just hire Dave's guy and get back to work? Oh my God. Make it easy.

And the easier you can make it, and, like, the wider a net you could cast...because, I mean, like, all this stuff is dumb. It's dumb. Like, there's 10 guys in the stack of resumes better than me, that's it, you know? Like, I mean, honestly. Like, if you went through the whole stack, I guarantee you could find somebody better than me every single time [laughs]. But I got somebody to send you a text message. And it's just like, "Okay, just hire him. He's fine [laughs]."

MIKE: I would also suggest where you should put your effort, and that's kind of where we started this. Where do you put your effort? Do you go get a bunch of certifications online? Is that going to help you? I'm guessing that is less, you know, based on everything that we've said, and this is based on my personal experience as well. I don't care if you've got five certificates. In fact, I'm like, "Why do you got all these certificates?" Unless it's, you know, very specific that it's something that I care about, which is probably not what it is.

But if it's somebody I know and they can vouch for you, bam, you're in the door. That's a big deal. Anything you can do to build those connections is probably more important. So, laying out a practical approach here. It's probably more important than meaningless credentials. There are meaningful credentials. If you go through four years of school, that was a lot of work. That was a lot of money. You proved that you could get through that [chuckles]. But there's those other things that are worth a lot less.

WILL: Yeah. I think most of the online credentials, pretty rough. Pretty low impact, I got to say.

KYLE: Even then it's your skill level, right? Because, I don't know, Mike, tell me if I'm wrong. Do you care if your seniors have a four-year degree?

MIKE: No.

KYLE: Does that impress you? That's...

MIKE: [inaudible 39:13]

KYLE: It's just new hires, right? So, I mean, even then, it's like...to me, it'd be more impressive if I saw a junior with more certificates than if I saw a senior with five certificates, right? If I saw a senior with five certificates, I'm just like, "Okay. Didn't you already know this? Why'd you take the certificate test?" Like [chuckles], I don't know [laughs].

MIKE: Yeah. Yeah. Well, when I'm interviewing, I'm trying to deduce the problem-solving skills. I'm getting a sense of their experience. I'm not asking what your GPA is. Never once have I thought, "Oh, what was your GPA?" I've thought, you know...never has that even crossed my mind as I've hired. I've looked for somebody who's curious, right? Curious, somebody who sniffs a problem and they can't resist working on it until they get it solved. Somebody who can, yeah, break through the obstacles, get things done, somebody who can deal with challenges. Those are the kinds of things I'm looking for.

JUSTIN: One thing I would like to invite, like, the newbies here, is to look into volunteer work in, like, a passion, something you find interesting that you enjoy doing and that you can contribute meaningfully there as well.

And it just goes back to, like, the cybersecurity group I'm part of. I'm pretty passionate about that. And going and, you know, having fun with this group of friends that you're all part of and that you are doing meaningful work together. That is actually...it makes it not a task, not a chore, to reach out beyond yourself.

So, figure out what you enjoy doing and see if there's, like, some sort of community group or something like that. And everybody needs a programmer [laughs], every single one of those community groups. But that, and then, you know, if it is an IT type of skill or industry that you're in, cybersecurity or something like that, reach out.

WILL: I mean, I'd say, like, this, I mean, like, not for nothing, but, like, there is a through line that I think nearly everybody, like Dave, Mike, Matt, Kyle, I don't know whether you're a member of the club, but, like, sketchy startups, sketchy [laughter] startups, man.

Like, because here's the thing, right? Like, you'll get...again, the money is highly dubious. Highly dubious. Like, if you've ever had a paycheck bounce, like, I know I have, but you will build stuff. Usually, these guys are hustlers, and you'll get, like, a year of experience and, like, stuff that you've done. The world is full of sketchy startup hustlers, you know? It worked for me, you know? I don't know what to say. Like, it worked for me [crosstalk 42:00]

JUSTIN: Yeah. So, to expand on that, Will, there are a ton of entrepreneurial groups that form in Utah and other places that, if you can go to these, like, presentations that they're doing, like, the elevator pitches and whatever, and you say, "Hey, guess what? I'm a programmer," and they're like, "Ah [laughter]. Somebody who can make my idea work." So --

DAVE: There used to be a group here in Utah County that was CEO Breakfast. The generic form, if you want something a little less depressing, Vivian, the generic form of Will is where there's muck, there's brass. You're not going to find gold sitting out in the middle of a field because everybody's combed that field a million times. All the easy gold's been picked up. If it was easy to pick up, why isn't anybody picking it up? But if you're willing to get down on the latrine, get up to your knees and shovel it, and people see, "Oh, you've been shoveling." Yeah.

And, at the bare minimum, if you go work at a skeezy place and kind of hope for the best and it doesn't work out the best, you'll learn what you don't like. And you'll learn how to spot it.

WILL: It's true. Well, I mean, and, like, you know, those places have massive turnover, and that's just build your network [laughter]. Like, they've all been scattered to the four winds. It sounds bad because it is. It is bad, but it's better than nothing.

DAVE: Will, we need to do job bingo. Like, it's like, you know, I5, CEO went to prison. B6 [laughter] --

WILL: Oh man.

DAVE: I have I5 [laughter].

WILL: Oh, I got it too. It might be the same guy. Yeah, I got bad stories. We can save that for the post-call because, like --

MIKE: But, you know, it comes down to what your specific needs are in the moment. There is some moral value in feeding your kids and [chuckles], you know, paying the rent.

DAVE: [SP] Begrudging.

MIKE: And working for a place that pays you most of the time can get you there. And putting up with some bad things while you're doing that is, you know, arguably not lowering your standards, but doing what you can in the situation that's been handed to you, and allowing you to move on to what you care about more.

If you have some flexibility, do the volunteer work, right? Well, then you're not getting paid anything. It's the same sort of, you know, that you're taking the opportunity to go do some real work, make those network. It's a similar sort of approach depending on what your needs are.

WILL: I mean, I'll say, like, you know, like, volunteer work might be an unsung hero there. Because, like, I'll be totally honest with you, I mean, like, most nonprofits, they got a lot of rich people around.

MIKE: [laughs]

WILL: I'm not kidding. Like, who donates to nonprofits? Like, rich people with bad egos, and, like, guilty consciences [laughter], you know what I mean?

JORDAN: And a lot of money that they're willing to give.

WILL: A lot of money and guilty consciences [laughter]. And --

DAVE: I feel like this is the bad advice podcast, is like, "Okay, what you want to do is go work for the mob, and then...[laughter]"

WILL: It's not...I guess I'm trying to, like, I suppose, like...I'm being absolutely sincere, right? I mean, in that, like, it's not just me. It's not just me. My career is not the only career that fell off the back of a truck, you know [chuckles]?

MIKE: Looking for work in the year after the 9/11 bit was not great. And, yeah, you're going to pay me to do work, and I get a check? Okay, yes. I'm not even going to look at what the amount on that check is [chuckles]. If it's money, I'll take it.

WILL: It's the truth. It's the truth. I don't know.

DAVE: I'll put a pin on that one as well. Don't be terrified by a bad job market. It's a game of percentages. If you are in the top 10%, then when the market is really, really low, you actually are gold at that point, because they're looking for people, and you're the right people to look. So, you're only competing with yourself and the person next to you.

WILL: Well, I mean, and it's...I mean, something is always better than nothing. And luck is also a factor of time.

DAVE: Absolutely.

WILL: You know, it's a matter of shots on goal. If you're just hardheaded and you're just going to keep on knocking on doors until one of them opens and you're not sort of overly precious about quality of the offer that gets you in the door, the cream rises. Like, there's just not that many good engineers in the world. There's just not.

If you're good and you're persistent, then I believe...and maybe this is just a, you know, a naive, like, Boomer-esque article of faith, but I just don't see that many good engineers in the world. So, that, like, somebody who has the talent and the sand for it and is willing to stick it out is not going to be successful in the end.

VIVIAN: Okay. This may be taking it too off topic, but I have questions. The first one is, from a business perspective, from the other side of the aisle, how do you approach kind of the inverse problem of you have 300, 400, 500 people who have applied for this job? How do you know that you're picking the right person? And, obviously, you're not going to know that you're picking the right person.

But how do you find the people that you know are a bet worth taking, and how do you, like, make a positive return on that bet? Because every time you're making a hire, you're making that, essentially, a gamble, because you don't know. No matter how many references they have, you don't know. Like, is the reference way the only way to kind of even the odds, give yourself that edge in the gamble?

MIKE: Go to a role-playing game store and buy dice with a lot of sides [laughs]. There is some real aspect to, like, the keyword matching, having some of that. And you know what the biggest thing is about a resume? No grammatical errors. If it has no grammatical errors, if it's formatted correctly, you're better than 90% of the resumes out there.

WILL: Really? I mean, because, honestly, like, AI tools, like, I have, like, I mean, for better or worse --

MIKE: Maybe it's changing.

DAVE: People don't run AI. I work on an AI site after work talking with people. And they submit articles and documents and short stories, and there's...like, the summaries that they write, the AI will do that for them, and they don't. And I'm like, "Bro, you have AI. I know you have AI [laughter]. You're on an AI site."

WILL: I don't know. Like, I'm a weirdo, and I have no...I have only the loosest possible, like, relationship with how normal people think, you know? Like, I project, like, my theory of mind onto people. It's not very accurate. I got a lot of misses. But, I mean, like, it's just, like, I put it in Claude. I put, like, the job description into Claude. I put my, like, big resume, right, where I just have everything but the kitchen sink, you know, and I put that into Claude, and then I season with embellishment as needed.

Listen, if you're not cheating, you're not trying [laughter]. And I assume that that, like, five minutes of, like, half-assed labor is what everybody would [laughs]...

MIKE: And that's what differentiates you. That's what differentiates you. And even in this AI era, yeah, you're going to get a lot of AI-filtered resumes. But the people who have actually gone in and gotten the weird stuff out and made it actually match them and added some human touch, they'll stand out.

WILL: That's so weird to me. You know, I guess, yeah, sure. Why not? Okay. Hmm. Who knew? I mean, I don't know. I wonder a lot about, like, you know, the next step in the dystopian arms race, whereby, you know, AI will generate you a thousand plausible resumes, and a recruiter or a hiring manager or whoever needs to winnow that down to, like, a human-processable amount of data, right?

I mean, you think about, like, 1001-page resumes. It's like, I can't read War and Peace to hire a junior developer, you know what I mean? And so, like, what's the next step in the arms race? It's like, is it going to be like an AI call, you know, where I have, like, some AI bot who's going to give me a call to, like, just, like --

MIKE: Maybe.

WILL: You know what I mean? I mean, is that how it's going to go? Because, I mean, fundamentally, I do have a lot of empathy for hiring managers, because, like, I don't think people who are applying for jobs can appreciate the magnitude of 100 resumes. They're all pretty good. You're stuck with this person. Whoever you pick, you're stuck with them for the next, you know, two to five years. And, like, that relationship can be an unending torment, or it could be your new best friend, depending on, like, how good of a job you do in, like, sniffing out who's going to be a goer and who isn't. It's a tough thing to do, and it's a daunting amount of work. I don't know. It's hard to do. And you're on the hook in a big way, in a big way.

VIVIAN: Up until this job, I never used an LLM for doing any sort of coding beyond the Copilot auto-complete that would finish one or two lines of code for me, which essentially was just an advanced, like, linting auto-complete. And I never used AI to do any sort of cover letter writing, any sort of resume writing, any of that. But I fine-tuned that to the best of my knowledge.

I had multiple recruiters and people look over it to try to give me the best advice. Often, it was conflicting. I tried to do specific things to add a light touch of humor, a human touch. And I wrote every single cover letter that I applied to every single job for by hand, which was well over 100 jobs that I applied for, writing an individual unique cover letter per job. And I think I maybe got two, like, responses back. And I don't know if there's something --

DAVE: That's a high hit rate. That's a high success. I'm not kidding [laughter].

MIKE: It is.

VIVIAN: No, I know.

MIKE: Like, wow, you got two [laughs]?

DAVE: 1,000 to 1 is the standard

VIVIAN: The two that I got responses from were people that I knew [laughter].

WILL: There you go. There you go.

VIVIAN: And so, like –-

DAVE: There you go...

VIVIAN: Like, at the end of the day, like, I put in a tremendous amount of effort towards this thing, tried to do all of the things right, at the end of the day, on my resume. Is there something to be said about the fact that we are moving to a place where the data influx is simply untenable to be processed by a person? And that no matter how much I want it to be written by a human because it gets that human touch...if they're requiring a cover letter, and they're the 40th job I've applied for that day, I don't have enough time to write a full-page cover letter to outline my experience that's tailored to this specific job. I need something that can do it faster, and also something that knows what an AI wants. I don't know what will be ingested and processed to be exactly what is wanted, but an AI is the AI that might be doing that.

DAVE: If your AI represents you well without doing triads and em dashes and looking obviously like an AI, that's going to tell me that you're good at managing your AI, and that's a job skill that we're hiring for. And if your AI makes you look like a drooling idiot, we'll go, "Hmm, yep. Keep trying."

WILL: That's a great point, Dave.

DAVE: Sorry, Will, I cut you –-

WILL: And so many people miss AI insights that you...sorry, I was trying to do AI speak. Yeah, I don't think it worked [laughter].

DAVE: You're right to be curious on this topic, yes [laughter].

WILL: I think you could look at it in two ways, right, and say, like, 100 applications, right? That's a daunting amount of applications. You can look at it a different way, right? And I would encourage people to look at it this way, right? 100 applications, an hour per application, that's 100 hours. That's two and a half weeks.

What? Like, I got bad news for you about the rest of this year once you get this job. Like, oh, it's going to get so much worse. That's a sprint, you know? Like, oh, I spent a sprint on my new job. Okay. You know, I mean, and, like, that sort of, like, I don't know, hardheaded, like, grindy attitude. Like, I mean, I guess that is, like, maybe symptomatic of somebody who's successful in the industry, like, you know what I mean?

Like, I've been doing this for a long time. I'll probably be stuck here till I die. That's the attitude that I approach it with. And, not only that, but, like, when they raise the bar, and they raise the bar, and they raise the bar, then I just...I look at it like, "Oh, well, look at all these people." Like, I don't have to outrun the bear; I just have to outrun all you guys, you know?

And so, it's just, all right, you know, like, okay, well, people gas out at 100 hours. Okay. So, I just have to go for 101 hours, and then all you people are going to drop out. All right. That's not even that much. Like I said, that's a sprint. That's a hard sprint. And, I mean, obviously, like, because of the pipeline issues, like, it will take you longer than that, because they don't turn around in an hour, then that's really the problem.

But I don't know. I mean, like, that's just sort of, like, you know, the bar will raise, and raise, and raise, and raise, and raise. But people are still people, and they will get tired. And as long as they get tired first, I win [laughter].

DAVE: Everybody needs something. The more people you talk to and ask them what they need, somebody's going to be willing to trade you a paycheck for it.

KYLE: I think, like, what we're kind of coming to, though, is she's...like, Vivian is like, "So, how do I make this more human in my applications and everything?" You go with the most human approach, which is you know somebody. That's kind of...I feel like the end of the story is like...not the end of the story, but the biggest part of the story is that's how you do it. Your human approach is you know somebody, be it somebody in your class, church leader, whoever, you know, whatever group you're part of, you know somebody.

I mean, my last job, well, I guess this one [laughter], I had the interview before I ever gave them a resume. Like, that was a formality, right? It's all about who you know.

VIVIAN: So, to kind of get a little bit of an overview, the general consensus of what I'm getting is tailor the effort to the audience. If I am spending my time creating cover letters and resumes for a company that's going to review my resume with AI and that's the only way it will likely ever be seen, let an AI do it, because that doesn't matter. If no one ever reads it, then it doesn't matter if it's handcrafted to look perfect and to feel authentic and to perfectly describe my experience in relationship to this organization.

But if I can make a connection, again, that's the human connection that transcends all of it. Because, I mean, I was talking to Balaji just this morning, actually, and he said something a little bit interesting, that his perspective is that humanness, like the ability to be human, is just going to continue to get more and more and more valuable as technology advances and becomes more and more human-like because that humanness becomes that key essential aspect.

And so, like, I don't know. You guys have talked a lot about networking, about finding these connections, a lot about, like, ways to optimize things. But, I don't know, my overall takeaway from it is, at the end of the day, I could hyper-optimize my resume to be perfect, and then I might get one job that may work out, or I can find somebody that I know. And the success rate and the effective success rate of that is going to be way more efficient than any sort of, like, mass application process.

DAVE: And likely to be a job you like, because you'll be able to...we always tell people you need to interview the company. And if you're talking with people and it's somebody that...it doesn't have to be...we keep saying somebody you know. Somebody you've met, and you've just, like, again, like, lunch with somebody is enough of a note. Met them twice at a URUG is enough of a note. But you've had the chance to actually interview their company, and it pays off in both directions.

KYLE: Even if you don't know them, introduce yourself. I've seen people do that, too. They're applying, I mean, personally, I think it's more worth your while rather than writing a cover letter. Look at who's in the department that you're looking to go into, and introduce yourself on LinkedIn. Try and reach out. See if anybody will respond, and, all of a sudden, you've got a connection.

WILL: Yeah. I mean, I suppose, like, you know what I mean? In, like, sort of a general sense, rather than, like, don't care, right? I would scale your effort into, like, an application process with, you know, your expected value of the thing, right? Like, if you've got a warm lead, right? You know, your old college roommate is on, and they're a project manager at some startup, and, like, they're like, "Hey, you should apply for this job," put a little extra in, put a little more into that, because, like, the odds of somebody beating that are pretty high. And, well, obviously, you know, you don't want to burn your contact, right? And if it's just sort of some, like, LinkedIn open to work, you know, cattle call, then we're probably looking closer to the bare minimum, right? And so, I mean, like, that'd be just to generalize that theory a little bit.

MIKE: Honestly, we might want to save more questions for next time, because it's...I think we've come back to the same conclusion. It is this people, this human aspect that's more important. No matter all this technology we have, that's usually what works best. Use the technology if you can, but, man, that's the lowest valuable, the least value way of going about it.

WILL: Yep. And I'm going to sign off with this: If you're listening to this right now, go and add everybody that you've ever worked with and everybody on this podcast. If you're listening to the sound of my voice, add me on LinkedIn. I'll add you back. I don't care [laughter]. Like, everybody on this podcast, add everybody. Add all of them. All of them. It costs you nothing. Everybody you went to college with, everybody, like, just look around. Stand up from your desk and look around the office, and every face you see, add them on LinkedIn. Do it now.

Why are you still sitting [laughter]? I'm joking. I'm joking.

KYLE: [inaudible 1:00:44] [laughter].

DAVE: Yeah. Yep.

MIKE: With that, until next time on the Acima Development Podcast.