Developer Stories: Peter

‍Profile:

Name: Peter

Job title: Software engineer

Company joined: AI Startup (still in stealth mode)

Funding stage: Pre-Seed

Current number of employees:  2 founders + Peter

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Tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into software engineering

I’m a software engineer at an early stage startup. I used to be an architect in my previous career and spent 10 years working and studying in that field. I was involved in different sorts of projects from commercial towers to residential buildings and stadiums. 

I never intended to be a software engineer. During COVID, I had a lot of time on my hands and decided to pick up some skills out of interest. One thing led to another, I ended up enjoying it more than I thought and decided - Hey, this could be a viable career path! 

So, I decided I was going to go all in. I quit my job and gave myself a year’s worth of runway to teach myself software engineering and get a job. It ended up talking a year and one month. My first job was at a property technology company called Ailo, and I was fortunate enough they saw my potential. 

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How did you end up at the AI startup?

I completed a profile on SkillsRobin not expecting to get anything out of it. I thought they were still designing the platform. I didn’t realise they had actually signed people on and started connecting people. I didn’t expect an opportunity like this. Really, thank you so much for the introduction!

After Steve (one of the founders) and I had connected through SkillsRobin, I was invited in to do a work trial with them. Coincidentally, I recently had been working on my own AI project, so it piqued my interest that these guys were using AI. I always thought AI was cool, but it seems like a bit of a fad right now. After actually working with them for the past two weeks though it’s like - Holy crap! This is a new era! 

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How’s your new job? What’s it like joining a startup at the very beginning?

The startup’s still at an early stage where all possibilities are on the table. For example, I was hired as a front-end focused full stack engineer and in the first week I’ve quickly had to pivot to python and doing AI and data science. At such an early stage, you have to be receptive to taking on new things outside of your comfort zone. They’ve been really accommodating as well - knowing we have a team of generalists who can get anything done. 

You also feel like you have a lot more ownership of the direction of the product and the company. There's almost no time to sit back and just assume someone else will take care of defining the product vision. You have to design it yourself and always have it at the back of your mind. 

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What’s it like working there compared to working at a more established tech company?

My last company Ailo was a property management startup with about a hundred people, of which around half were product, design and engineering. At Ailo there’s a clear product, target market and user group.  A lot of features had already been built out. The work there was more executing on a vision that was already scoped and continuing along that trajectory. It was very much business  and product manager/designer driven because the requirements were essentially taking what the property management industry wants and translating that into tech. 

In contrast, with the AI startup I’m at now, we’re actually pre-product. One really interesting difference Steve has talked about is this idea of ‘product engineers.’ It’s this idea of how do we design a product engineering first? We work with AI, so a lot of the innovation or insights we bring clients is driven by technology. So we use technology to find insights and then develop a potential product from there.

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What do you like most about your new job?

The small team and the wealth of experience that the two founders have. Steve previously worked as a product lead at Stripe and Jamie was an early team member on the Google LaMDA AI team.  What really attracted me to join them was the learning I could gain as an early stage engineer. I could deepen my knowledge of engineering, but it’s also a really unique opportunity to get exposed to a product at a very early stage. I don’t think it’s a common opportunity to come by. 

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A lot of the companies using our platform are early stage startups looking to hire engineers? Do you have advice for them as an engineer?

It depends what your short and long-term goals are. But if you are long-term minded, then think about candidates holistically. And I think people who do career changes have a lot to offer because they're more certain about what they want. Most people wouldn't give up everything - all their status and promotions from a previous career to just suddenly do this.

If you’re short-term minded then I understand why you would hire a senior engineer. You need to achieve an end goal and that's fine, but I think there's opportunity for everyone. 

Also leverage the network, right? So once you hire one good engineer, they'll probably know more. And I think platforms like SkillsRobin are good too.

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As part of the interview process, I know you were asked to do a work trial instead of the traditional tech test. Can you tell us about that?

One thing Steve mentioned to me, was a reason they came up with the live job trial, was this is probably the most effective way to recruit if you’re a small startup. At that stage you have the time and energy to see how people work through ambiguity, how they take on challenges and of course their technical and interpersonal skills.

Within the three days there were two sets of activities. One was more front-end focused and another was more open-ended product design and engineering. I think it was really good for both parties to get a sense of whether we'd want to work with each other. So it was very mutual. 

It’s unique and good for the size of the company. There’s not much you can glean from doing leetcode tests or tests where you sit in a room and they ask you to define what a type generic is. Also for self-taught engineers it can be very tough because you’re only being assessed on that one narrow skillset, which is technical. At larger companies, I would say leet code questions are an understandably effective but imperfect way to mass filter out candidates. It misses a lot of other qualities. Things like motivation, self-starter mentality, the ability to be proactive, ask questions if you need to, how to communicate with the team, how to lead -  peripheral skills to software engineering. 

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Do you have any advice for people looking for their first job in software engineering?

Work hard, learn the fundamentals, don't take it too personally if you interview for some companies that might not see you as a fit because each companies' requirements are different. I was fortunate enough to be being offered a job at a company where they saw my potential. If you can, find companies that have the mentality of hiring for attitude and not just specific domain knowledge - because the domain knowledge will come, right? If you look for those companies, I think it's mutually beneficial because they're willing to teach you and you’re hungrier to learn as well. 

What's interesting is that the founders at the startup I am currently working at are both self-taught engineers as well. Steve, even though he’s a product manager, taught himself to code so he could be a better product manager. Whereas Jamie was an economist who became an engineer and eventually found his path as well. There are many software engineers out there who are self-taught and are later in their careers and didn't go through the formal path. If you are self taught or career changing, those engineers will probably be more open to giving you opportunities as well.

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How did you self-teach yourself software engineering?

In this day and age, everything that you can learn is learned online. So what I did was look at the course curriculum of all these bootcamps and then went on Udemy or YouTube and just ticked off exactly what I needed to learn. 

If you’ve done well in a previous career, I think you realise anything that can be taught can be learned. It’s not rocket science, you just have to put in the time. I mean I’m not some guru but if you look at your career as a very long game, then sometimes you have to take a step back.  Would I be better off financially had I stuck with architecture as of now? Yeah, of course. But am I more fulfilled? Am I more hungry? Yeah, absolutely. 

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Lastly, I know you were working on a project that other job seekers might be interested in. Do you want to tell us about it?

So I've worked on this for about a month. It's a side project called Dev Links.  It's like Linktree for software engineers.  Often when you apply for a job or send your details to someone, you spam them with five links - like your Github, portfolio, LinkedIn, etc. With Dev Links you send someone one link and it contains all the other things you want to apply with. For early career engineers, I think it’s beneficial if you can get your projects to shine through, rather than doing all those tests asking you to define what a typescript generic is. Anyway - you can check it out here. 

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