So the other day I'm out with my son and I decide to swing by my local Walmart to check out the transformer section. I haven't been in quite a few weeks. And if some of you saw the video that I posted Saturday, you know what I ran into. Okay, so Dylan and I are at Walmart today. Say hi Dylan. Hi. And we they got the new siege line in but each one of these looks like they've been stomped on. So you get the whole Wave 2 collection and they are beat to death. I mean that's horrible. I mean I opened my stuff out of the package but this is ridiculous. So after posting that online there was a lot of comments saying I should have bought one of the figures I should have asked for a discount. So I took your advice and I went back to the store early yesterday morning before work. So I walked back to the toy department and really lucked out the manager was having the team meeting back there. So I go and I grab one of the figures off the shelf and I ask hey all these toys are crushed up. Is there any discount for him being this way? So the one manager looks at me and he immediately goes yeah sure buddy no problem. And then he goes well wait I need to scan it to see if some code will allow him to do it. So he hands the item over to another employee. The employee scans it and says nope. But the manager says well I tell you what I already told you I'll take 10% off of it just tell them at the front desk.  So I think he ended up being $17.98. I mean look at this this is how I got him off the shelf. And every one of every wave two figure was just like this. Now honestly I think 10% for something like this is a little lacking but I take these out of the box anyway and still $2 off what the hell. So anyway let's check out siege side swipe. Here he is in the box. This thing look at this. Look how much figure is there. Okay here's the figure. Look how much empty space. This is a chip bag figure. You know how you get a bag of chips and it's half air. Look at that. It just that's amazing. It just blows my mind. Anyway there's the front of the box. There's the side of the box. There's the devastated back of the box showing prowl vehicle mode green x-adactyl and this guy. What's his name? Ameless. I did a review on this guy. I should know. And there's the bottom of the box. Nice crushed up and in my possession. So let's go ahead and get this guy removed from this terrible packaging and see if the figure survived. And welcome to Patriot Prime Reviews. Now once you get siege prowl out of the packaging you'll see that he comes with a sheet of instructions where just like the other siege instructions they are great very easy to follow and very easy to understand.  Now the blaster fits on top of the light bar by inserting the clip right into the peg up top. So there you have the vehicle armed. Another option is you can remove the light bar and just peg in the weapon like so. That of course doesn't look near as good. So let's just stick to the light bar since prowl is a police officer. And now let's take a look at this vehicle mode. It is very very white but I dig it. It is not as bad as I originally thought. I was not really wanting to get a prowl but he's better in hand than what the pictures show. A lot of nice sculpted details but he could use some extra paint. He's got little yellow slivers right there for lights. I think he could do with a little bit more right in those areas there. Nice tamper graft Autobot symbol on the hood. Cybertronian lettering here on the side. Black paint on the bottom. I love the translucent windows on top with the what do you call that circuitry or Cybertronian designs underneath. I dig it on the back. A lot of nice molding as well. Now the one thing I don't like is these clear tires. I just I don't get it but it's Cybertronian so I guess I can let it slide. Now you think he'd roll pretty good? He looks like he does but really it's only the back wheels moving.  I mean this one that's a little better than it was earlier but that one does not want to move. So all in all not a bad vehicle mode for prowl. It fits the character. He's a Cybertronian law enforcement officer. Now let's get to the transformation. To transform prowl the first thing you want to do is open these doors up. They actually have two pegs holding them in place. It's in there a little tight. So once you pop those open there you go. Go underneath and you're going to lift the arms up and swing around. Next you're going to flip this section over. Now you can leave the lights attached or take them off. I'm going to take them off just for the sake of transformation and then you'll just extend the legs out like so. Rotate at the waist. Then you're going to pull these apart. They peg together real well. Fold these down forming the feet and then flip out the heel spurs. So now we have this going on. Now from here it gets a little tricky. You want to kind of unfold back like so. There's a little black section right here. You're going to flip this out and around and then push this section from the hood.  Then you'll just keep flipping back. Flip this over the head. There we go. Just got to go and manipulate a little bit. Get him down, locked in place. Turn the arms so the wheels are facing back. These little shoulder sections up here like to shift around a bit. Fold the wings back or the doors back and there you have prowl in robot mode. Now according to the instructions you take the blaster and the light bar and connect the two up top like so. I really don't like the looks of this so I turn it like that. And then you can fit the blaster in his hand. So I think that looks good but another option just take the light bar off, turn him around and plug it into his back. So now it's out of the way and it works. I like that a lot better than having the light bar on the weapon. Robot mode is great. It is very G1. I mean check out that head sculpt. He's got a lot of white on him but they painted the face silver with blue eyes not to mention his red horns. The Autobot symbol really stands out. Nice little yellow details and I love the feet. That's a nice throwback to his generation one figure. Though they are a little big. Wings of course on the back which also harking back to his generation one figure. I really like this guy. He is so much better than I thought. Articulation arms can go up and down a complete 360. He's got elbow bend, elbow swivel. There is wrist rotation, head, ball joint. Little tight but can go all around. Legs he can do a split up and down all around knee bend and he's got an ankle tilt. So yeah I really like this guy. Now for some size comparison. Here is war for Cybertron Siege prowl with generation one Optimus Prime. Combiner Wars prowl with Toyhacks upgrades and generation one prowl. Notice the G1 throwbacks. You've got the windows on the legs and the Autobot symbol on the feet as well. So I really dig that. Now being a Siege figure, prowl has great interactivity with some of the other Siege figures such as Firedrive here. This figure totally surprised me. I was totally going to pass him up and now I am so glad I decided to pick him up. Of course the 10% off helped. I'm hoping that a third party group will give him his shoulder cannons that his G1 figure had. I see slots right up here on top. I know he's getting remolded and recolored into a barricade figure and a smoke screen figure that has those launchers. So hopefully a third party company will help us out. So there you go guys. There is war for Cybertron Siege prowl. So does a war for Cybertron Siege prowl belong in your collection? Absolutely. I really like this guy. He's got a solid vehicle mode, a solid robot mode. I never noticed any loose joints whatsoever. My only complaint with the guy was the one wheel that just wouldn't turn. So yeah, you see this guy pick him up. Whether he's in a crush box or not, I think he'll be very happy. And guys I want to thank you for stopping by and checking out my videos. Don't forget to like and don't forget to subscribe. I try to put out one to two videos a week. Just depends on my schedule. Also check out my series The Sit Rep where I sit down and interview other Transformer collector YouTubers from all over the world and we just sit down and talk about those plastic robots. Guys, this is Patriot Prime, signing out. Hoorah!


We're going to have a lot of fun here. So I want to get started as soon as possible. Thank you all for finding us down here in this crypt. But it's really heartening to see a good crowd here. So anyway, I'm going to start by just briefly introducing myself. My name is Obi Fernandez. I'm known in the Rails community for writing The Rails Way and subsequent editions of it. Rails Four Way is out as a beta book. You can get it on Lean Pub. And it's going to be out in print within a week or two. That's one of the big reasons I'm here. And I want to introduce the rest of my panel, starting with Alan Grant. Hi, my name is Alan Grant. I'm one of the co-founders of Hired, formerly called Developer Auction. You might have seen us here last year. We're a pretty young company. We're about a year and a half old. And actually started out of my Rails Conf trip to Austin three years ago where I tried really hard to hire engineers from my previous startup and failed and came back and over drinks. This idea was born and I was like, I can hack this out in a week, and let's see if it works. And here we are today. Hi, I'm Chad Pytel. I'm a developer and the CEO of Thoughtbot. We are, in case you're not familiar with us, we're the creators of Factory Girl Shoulda Paperclip. And we work with early stage startups building products. OK. And over the last two years, we've gone from 19 people just in Boston. We're in our 11th year. We've gone from 19 people just in Boston, and we're 81 people across eight offices now in the world. They're only two people. Yeah, yeah. And it's been a lot of fun growing, and we've obviously hired many Rails developers over those two years. Jeff Kazimer, I have a company called Jumpstart Lab that I started in 2009 to teach primarily Ruby and Rails programming. Since then, I started a program in DC called Hungry Academy, a living social program in Denver called G-School, and most recently a training program called Turing, the Turing School of Software and Design. And over the past two years, I have helped about 72 new developers find great jobs. So hope to share some of that today. Wow. I'm Corey Haines. I post pictures of cats on Twitter. I'm the CTO of a local company called Viewpoints. That is a ratings and reviews site for consumer products. I know a lot of developers, and I've worked with a lot of developers, sort of Rails developers, sort of on their code bases and stuff, seeing the sort of evolution of the skills and all of that over the last few years. I think that's why I'm here. Not the cats. Oh, yeah, and I wrote a book. Obi said I could do that. Go look at four rules of simple design. It's a good book. You should get it. Actually, I invited you because we'll start out with the red meat, because I'm that kind of panel moderator. How important is craftsmanship? I know that employers can generally be all over the map, but Ruby started before it hit the mainstream. I think it was very, very important to practice TDD and peer programming, all this stuff. And how is that evolving as we hit the mainstream? And you're welcome to start. Well, I think if you have the benefit of a team of very experienced developers, then you can sort of stray from a lot of the established practices. And as you gain more experience as a software developer, you start to be able to question and be effective using different techniques. There's no one true way that is the best way. But there are a ton of really bad ways to develop software. And I think experience is about finding out what are those ways that are bad. And so my opinion is that especially when you're sort of beginner moving into intermediates, so for me that's usually up to about five or seven years of experience, you should sort of find a way that a lot of other people are effective doing and do that until you're really good at that. And make sure, it doesn't matter who, but if you really grasp onto somebody who's very effective, really study how they do it and get good at that way. And then eventually, you figure out where are the corners and the holes. So I'm going to give the rest of the panel a chance to respond to that. Well, so here's the thing. You mentioned that for the first five to seven years. But Rails has, everyone's talking about 10 years. I don't know that a significant number of people started doing it really until 2007, 2008, where we could really, and it's really not until the last few years that's really become a mainstream phenomenon, right? So does that change your perspective of his answer, any? What's really important to me and my team and what I think is the foundation of craftsmanship is not that you are good or that you are the best, but that you are always trying to be better at what you do. And that defines a really high-functioning team of people and high-functioning developers who are crafts people. What if you start out being really bad at that? Well, if you don't have a team of people supporting you, then you should seek out those people. But if you're just content to sit back and be poor at what you do, then you're not going to accomplish anything. And people aren't gonna want to hire you, I think, or you wouldn't want to work at the place that would. So a question for Ellen. Given that there seems to be a lot of Ruby jobs and if all of you guys go to the center of your pamphlet here, you see an infographic that Hire provided. It seems like there's an extraordinary demand, especially in San Francisco. How many people are poor programmers that are trying to cash in on the fad? Is it like the dot-com era all over again? There are no poor programmers, just programmers at the start of their careers. It's actually an interesting question. And I want to kind of go back to the previous question for a second as well and kind of do you really a question for a bit. On craftsmanship, which is a word that I only know a little bit about, I aspire, but I wouldn't consider myself an expert. I feel like there's a cultural element where different companies define it very differently. Like one of the things we talked about was pairing, right? There's companies that have very strong pairing cultures and there's companies that have very strong like no pairing cultures and remote cultures. There's still pride, different types of craftsmanship. So to some extent it becomes a, are you a fit, so to speak, for the environment that you're gonna be performing in. Now, different aspects of culture, which you just mentioned as far as wanting to always be better and not wanting to be selling your job. Also cultural elements, I feel like they're much more universal. I don't think that there's a company that's like, I wanna hire the developer that's stagnating. Like that's exactly who we're going after. And but I guess before answering your question, we see a variety of different candidates and we curate the pool that actually participate and hired. And so to some extent, the people that are participating have already passed some sort of bar there. But I'm kind of curious as far as the audience, like what brings people to this particular panel? Cause I think that will help us better understand what we should be talking about. Like maybe like as a show of hands, like how many people are here because you're hiring Rails engineers and you really wanna figure out how to like hire Rails engineers. Like how many are here from the company side? Okay. And then how many are here because you're interested in sort of the future of jobs from your own perspective as an engineer? Okay, so that's the overall majority. Cool, that's good to know. So then why is there so much, if everyone here is looking for a job, then why are there's apparently so much demand for Rails developers and it's so hard to hire them? Well, so a better question then on that is how many people that raise their hand that are here from the company side are currently employed and actually how many are currently interested in job opportunities that are not currently employed? Right, right. So I don't think people are here because they have a hard time finding Rails jobs. I think it's just because, what you said, everybody wants to continue to keep learning and leveling up. What's the next step? There's also the idea that right today people aren't having jobs and there's a lot of Rails jobs, but what's the landscape look like a year from now, two years from now, five years from now, if all you know is Rails or you entered the industry primarily through Rails, where are the places that you should be going? I don't know if this was a later question, but what should you be studying? Are you gonna be able to find a job in the future if all you know is Rails? Thank you. Let's save that one for, we got about half an hour left. Let's save that for the last quarter, but here's another microphone. I have a quick comment on that. While we're on that, it's actually kind of hard now to get a job doing just Rails, right? We had an engineer that started recently who is extremely smart, passed all of our coding tests, just stellar, had no Rails experience, and after his first week, he's like, wow, I am really, really challenged. I'm like, why? He says, well, I knew I would have to learn Ruby, and that's cool, and I knew I'd have to learn Rails, and that's cool, but now I'm also having to learn CoffeeScript because you use CoffeeScript instead of JavaScript, and I'm pretty good at JavaScript, but I'm not an expert, I'm an Angular, and Capybara, and RSpec, and all these different ecosystems, like it is a really, really rich ecosystem, and some of those ecosystems are Rails-specific, like the RSpec, Capybara, but some extend beyond that, so I feel like even today, it's hard to just be a Rails developer. Yeah, totally, I think that's been one of the big barriers to, it's one of the things I scratched my head about, so maybe there's a chance for Jeff to jump in. You are teaching, you're teaching people ostensibly to be hireable as Rails devs, but to be a Rails dev, you have to know SQL, you need to know JavaScript, you probably need to know some CSS, or at least understand the ASAP Pipeline, which is really hard as a beginner. It's really hard period, yeah. Yeah, how the hell do you do that in nine weeks, or five months, or whatever it is that you do starting from scratch? I think the first problem is that it's really difficult to understand how many pieces there are now, right? Like when I started writing Rails applications, and you started writing Rails applications, it was like download the Rails gem, generate an app, and go. And now it's like, you can't even just do that, you need V8, so the ASAP Pipeline will do this, and you need all these header libraries, so Postgres gem will build, and now it was set up Postgres, and good luck with that, and it's just there are so many pieces just to get going, where one of the central premises was like, this is fast, this is full stack, like everything's ready to go. We've kind of lost some of that just from the physical setup of getting going. But then also mentally, you can't, when I learned Ruby, the question was, how little of this Ruby stuff do I need to know to build Rails applications, right? And I think- Actually, let's riff on that. I want each of you guys to answer this.  Very little. I would say very little, and I actually, when I do tutoring and stuff at the schools, is I tell them to stop learning JavaScript and stop learning all of the other stuff, because if you're sort of at the beginning of your career and you join a place where you're expected to be proficient in all of that stuff, that's the wrong place, you're not going to be really effectively learning there. So I tell them, learn a little bit more depth, have a surface knowledge, but learn the Rails stack, learn how to spin up a Rails app and build just a raw HTML type of thing. And then when you find the job, hopefully there's people there, you're at a place where they know that already and then they can bring you in. The rest of you guys agree? Yeah, very much so, but I would encourage people to be very upfront about what they do and don't know, but don't spin it like I don't know these things so I can't do it. Spin it in the context of here's what I've learned and it's much more important to demonstrate that you can learn than it is that you know things now. And that's what we do every day, we learn new stuff, from the smallest things to the biggest things and being able to do that is being part of being an effective developer. Yeah, and I would agree with that as well based on what we've seen as far as hiring activity on the hired platform. Specifically how much Rails knowledge do employers look for? I think that to me or your point, it's very important to be accurate about it. So if you claim that you're a Rails expert, you're gonna get interviewed on deep Rails stuff, but I think the thing that employers care most about is that do you know how to program? And it's language independent and I think that it's actually more about Ruby than about Rails. Do you know how to write a loop? One of the things that we've seen in our own interviews that actually happens more with Rails developers than I would say with other kinds of developers is not knowing how to loop over an array of elements or not knowing how to loop except for each. So then you're like, oh I need the index, how do I get the index? For each with I and then throwing that away. Those are the things that I feel like people stumble on more so on interview than Rails stuff. Like I feel like people expect you'll learn the Rails things on the job. Are you guys seeing candidates that can't write and anything but a fundamental loop? Back in the Java days I had everyone and their grandma was doing Java because it was so hot at a certain point and I had a candidate and the second question I asked them was can you tell me what an interface is? And he just absolutely could not tell me what an interface was. And I was like, what are we even doing here? Are you having that kind of experience? So at Thoughtbot, full developers at Thoughtbot are experienced Rails developers. They've shipped multiple applications. They do test-driven development. They're very good with, we don't have, we don't have front end developers so they tend to. Do you help your clients hire as well though? Yeah, and we do. And what I tell them is that if you're serious about hiring and building a team you need to provide an environment of training and support because these people just didn't appear magically. They don't just appear magically and you're trying to hire two people. No one knows who you are. It's gonna be very difficult to attract the kind of level of person that you're setting your standards to. And so. So there's still Thoughtbot and Pivotal and Hashrocket and other firms that attract top talent. It sounds like you just said that it's difficult for some of these startups and smaller clients to actually attract, let's say, quote unquote top talent. Is that a fair statement? Yeah, I mean, that's what we see with people that we work with. Not to say that it's not impossible but those people have their choice of where they're going to work for. And so they are very choosy. And what's it take to hire some of those people? And any of you can answer. I think one of the things we see that doesn't work is salary. Although engineering salaries, developer salaries start off with a high floor. You won't find many developers like under 60K. It does top out relatively quickly and that's something I try and warn our students of. You don't find a lot of people who are doing full-time programming that are making over 200. And so it's kind of like you start quick and you ramp up and you're two years in and you're making 110, 120, 130 and then it starts petering out. Now there's also the flip side of that is once you really get up above like $100,000 the relative value of those dollars starts diminishing really quickly. And so I see not it frequently people turning down more money to do a project they're more interested in or work with a team they're more excited about. Which makes a ton of sense to us but to business people that's incredibly frustrating because they're like no I wanted that guy. Like I will pay 20K more and it's like pay 50K more it doesn't matter like he's not coming. So when I, so I do a lot of counseling to our students about picking a job. Most of our students are fortunate to get between like two and five job offers. And if they really have a hard time choosing I ask them to pick the job where there's a person responsible for them becoming the person they wanna be. And so like whose job is it to make the team awesome and you as an individual awesome. The great Jim Wyrick that was one of his responsibilities at Neo like he did not work on production code. He worked on making sure the team were learning and becoming the developers that they wanted to be. I think I have this like long talk rants about why developers quit. And I think one of the reasons good companies lose good people is because doing the work isn't good enough to get you to keep you growing. Like just doing the work. You don't see hate sports analogies but like players can't just show up to the game to get better. Like you have to practice, you have to have that learning and like that mentoring built into the company or else after a little while people are gonna leave because I get good enough at the job I'm doing and then Corey's like hey we're selling clothes and trunks and I'm like yeah let's do it. Like some new challenge I don't know about. Some area of growth for me. Yeah I agree with that especially the first part with salary not being like the primary consideration. We've seen this actually in data. So when we started the company hired it was originally called developer auction. We quickly changed our name because there was a misnomer here where we're saying oh you're putting people up for auction it's all about the money. I have to go to the highest bidder and it's like no it's not really an auction. All it means is that you get to see salary up front and the companies that make you an offer see the other offers. That's the only part of this like an auction. But what we saw very early on is 70% of the time the highest bidding offer is not the one that gets rejected. The candidate is not even interested in going on an interview. I mean there's big companies in Chicago not to name names that have sometimes very, very aggressive offers and people a lot of times may not be interested in moving to Chicago or working for that particular company. Now the part. Oh just really quick I do advising for like startup founders looking for technical talent as well. And one of the things that I try to counsel on Amon is there's a very good chance they don't need quote unquote top talent. Like you're building a crud app. You probably don't need this like fancy computer scientist. You can probably get away especially at the beginning with somebody who knows how to build that sort of thing and then counseling them on figuring out what the right technology is for that specific thing. And then you can get away with a mid-level experienced person who's aggressive and really wants it and is getting better and better. So let's talk some numbers. What do you pay a mid-level experienced person that you just mentioned? How many years? Well you have it in Chicago. Corey you just described, you just kind of painted a picture of someone who can definitely do a crud app but it's not a computer scientist. So maybe DHH. How much? I won't say that. See what I did there. I don't have an, it depends on where at here in Chicago. I would probably, I would probably 60, 70. 60 or 70. I would think so. The rest of you guys agree with that? It's a little higher than that. Your answer would be higher. Yeah, a little. I would say somebody who can effectively build a crud app, use the mic. If you can effectively build a crud app independently, I would say you're gonna be in the 80, 90 range in a normal market, in Chicago or D.C. Sounds like Chicago's a shitty market. There are different factors though. So like a startup company that's giving people, you know, an opportunity to work on something that they actually care about, then you would be able to get people at, you know, 10 or $20,000 less than 80 or 90 because you're gonna be able to make a compelling story, let alone convince them to work for almost nothing for equity. Yeah, and I mean, from a numbers perspective, I don't get into that a lot with the people. So that's sort of like what I would probably offer. So probably know better on what the market is. Okay, so like off in a galaxy, far, far away known as San Francisco and the Valley, it's like completely different story, right? Like what do you see in terms of numbers? Yeah, I think it's very rare to see a number like below 100K for kind of a mid-tier, mid-tier or even junior developer. I think, you know, we see, we actually see people's expectations get elevated. So we have a number that we ask for, which is how much are you looking to make that we don't reveal to anybody and we see a lot of times people getting like 30, 40% more than what they expect, specifically when it's in the Bay Area. Of course, it's a very unique market. So 110 to 130 is sort of the range. So that's not necessarily what we see for in, what we see now that we have offices in eight cities all over the world is sort of like the same effect that it tops out pretty quickly. There's actually not that much range. And so you get into situations where the difference in salary that you see in San Francisco doesn't actually match the difference in cost of living. And you see people not making anywhere near that because they have been convinced to work on a startup or they really, at Thoughtbot, like we make certain sacrifices in order to work the way that we do. And people wanna work at Thoughtbot because of that. Okay, I wanna shift gears a little bit. So, sure, two minutes. Yeah, I wanna add one point to your original question, which I think will actually be useful to people looking to hire. So the question was, if you wanna get the top engineers, what makes the difference to them? And I think all the points were spot on. But one thing that I feel like it's easy to change a lot of times is the interview process. It's crazy how many times we see great companies miss out on great candidates because people are too busy to interview or something like that. Like, oh yeah, sure. Like we'll talk to you next week. And then the next meeting the week after that, that like that is the one thing that every company can fix that shoots a lot of companies in the foot. So given that most of the room here is not employers, but employees, like, if you're on the other end of that situation, is there anything you can do about it? Don't apply through the website. Or if you do apply through the website, you have to find the person who's, that website probably dumps into a box that somebody checks once a week or something like that. And almost every student of ours that gets hired at a place, it's because we're able to introduce them to someone on the team, whether it's a engineer, senior engineer, VP of technology, whatever it is. Like someone who's not in HR that can like circumvent all those slow, slow processes. Okay, true or false and why? It's a dirty little secret of the industry that most of the great jobs are not gotten through recruiters and websites. All industries. Like you advertise as a last resort, right? Like you've already maxed out your friend network, anyone at your meetups that you knew, et cetera. And now it's like, okay, now we'll advertise. I'm like, get some random people. So you guys agree, okay? Yeah, and the meetups, Ruby meetups, Rails meetups are very, very important to not only finding a job, but finding people. I can't stress that enough. That's where a lot of stuff happens. And it's not even just at the meetup, but it's then going out afterwards and socializing with those people. Because that's where, if you have a company that you're passionate about working for, you really care about them and you think they might be the right fit for you, then seek, you know, not in a various way, but seeking the people who work out that company and building a relationship with them is gonna make it so much easier to actually get the interview or be persistent with them. And really quick on the flip side of that is going to a lot of meetups and building your network of people around. That's also a great way to discover what jobs are out there.  Can I throw in real quick? If you do apply to kind of a top tier place, knowing somebody can be a way to stand out, but you can also find other ways, like we've had students that they wanna get to a place, I don't know people there, but we find one of their open source projects and like send them a poll request. We had a student get rejected from this company, I think it was called Thought Bot. And in the rejection email, the guy who rejected him had a PGP signature. And so the student replied back to him and said like, oh, thanks for your time. You know, I'll apply again in the future and encrypted it with the dude's PGP key and then got interviewed and then got hired. So it's like, when you're applying to a place, it's getting like hundreds of applicants. When everyone else is getting no applicants, you have to find a way to stand out. And persistence is key. So we have an apprentice program and we have over 400 people waiting to even get their application reviewed. And unfortunately the people who really stand out are the people who get back to us every month or whatever and they say, I'm really interested in this opportunity and it makes a big difference. And it's a well-established fact that if you include with your email at least one picture of a cute cat, it will get noticed at every company. I wanna throw one more piece on there, sorry. Another thing that I tell students is like companies who are hiring are hiring. And a lot of tech companies, it's very rare that it's like, we have these very defined roles of we want two mid-level engineers, whatever. It's just like, we wanna add people to the team. And if you find a company you're interested in but they're advertising a job that is not the job you're a fit for, they're interested in hiring you too. Because if they're hiring anybody, it shows that they have money and they're growing and just nobody advertises junior jobs. People don't really advertise them any mid-level jobs. Everybody advertises senior jobs. But you find a company that is hiring for senior people and you consider yourself a mid-level or junior person, apply anyway. They might hire you anyway. So would you say that a strong Rails developer, maybe five years experience something like that, can easily find work as a freelancer for $100 an hour? Just consistent work?  So yes. All right, so maybe even 125, 150? As a freelancer, I don't think you can build under 100 an hour and even cover it. Okay, so if you're working full-time at those rates, that's equivalent to $200,000 or $300,000 a year, who in their right mind would go work for an employer in that kind of market? So it's hard to actually bill enough hours to actually make it add up to that. And the act of getting to the point where you can bill that many hours is pretty difficult. And then you have to deal with that many customers or invoicing them and the headaches of contracts and all that stuff. So there are people in their right mind who just don't wanna deal with all that stuff and would rather- $100,000 to them. Yes. I think freelancing is one of the worst jobs on earth. Like I would never ever go back to freelancing because it's all on you. There's like no one ever shares the burden. No one, like there are all these jobs that you're not qualified to do. You're now like reading, writing, editing contracts. You're doing accounts payable and receivable. And at first it's like, oh, it's not so bad. It's so fun. I can wear my pajamas and stuff. And then like a year into it, you realize like there's this big entrepreneur myth, right, of like, start your own company, be your own boss, it's amazing. And I'm sure it's the same for you when you guys are starting out. When you're in charge, that means you worry all the time. Like, what's the pipeline? What helpful is the pipeline? It's okay. Now I know what I'm doing three days from now. That's cool.  It should be two months. It should be six months out. Oh, maybe I'm not billing enough. Maybe I'm billing too much. This client, they're not paying on time. You send out net 30 invoices and they get paid in 90 days.   Like, I don't, like, I can't, I can't, like. And besides that, I mean, there's also like, what about mentorship? Who are you gonna learn from?  And then what about the projects that, you know, never go anywhere? Like, I came from that world and, you know, had a consulting company for a number of years.  Like, working on something and I was like, you know, it doesn't go anywhere and you're working on something else. Like, what about, you know, that feeling of creating some of this really, really quality? Corey, anything? Any thoughts on that? No, no, exactly. So it seems like, okay, so between, between hitting the mainstream hard and the efforts of people like Jeff and other, and apprenticeship programs at some of the consulting shops, is there a possibility that over the course of the next couple of years, we're gonna see a glut of talent on the market? And what, you know, what basis do you have for that? I mean, are we immune to like all the other kind of historical trends that happen in any sort of market? I wouldn't take it that far. But, you know, I worry, of course, like if we're training developers, we're gonna graduate over 100 developers in 2015. And at what point do you reach saturation? But the reality is when you compare it to like Java developers, how many Java developers are coming out of college every year, it's tens of thousands. So like all the training programs all put together, it's not even a drop in the bucket. I'm not as worried as much about a glut as much as a severe drop in skill level. As you start pushing beginners out like crazy, Deb Bootcamp here puts out like 20 people every three weeks. And they are nine weeks in. They're absolute beginners. And from what I understand, they're graduating and making like 60K or more. Yeah, I mean, I don't honestly pay much attention to the money, because I don't think that that's important. What I think is important is the fact that you start to see more rescue projects. And you start to see, there's ideally these people come out and they join a company that has either an apprenticeship program or a very heavy culture of mentoring and learning. There's only so many of those companies that have effective apprentices. And then they started working, they need a job. So they go work at a company where they're sitting in a cube cross-training into another language and basically just sit there writing bad code because, and so that's what I'm afraid of more than a glut where like, oh, salaries go down or anything like that. It's just across the board, the general skill level is gonna go down and then you're gonna start seeing projects failing. There's going to, I know that there's more and more sort of contracting companies that consist of basically people out of schools. Chad's not afraid of this trend because he does rescues. I don't want that work. No, we get, that's not what we exist on. That's not our primary business. And we don't want that either. That would be really bad. I would be bad not only for the industry, but Rails specifically. But I mean, it really seems like these programs are popping up in every single city. They're starting to come from overseas. I literally got an email two days ago from a program that's coming over from Spain and setting up shop in Miami. And there's a new one in Atlanta now. I mean, it's all over the place, so. If the people can actually, if people are graduating from the programs and can actually do the work, then there's really, there's not an issue because there's more than enough jobs. So, we're just nowhere near how many jobs there is or will be. And so, the bigger concern would be that those people are actually not able to effectively do a good job. Is it self-regulating, you think? I don't think it's self-regulating. I think there's a lot of responsibility on what I consider our generation of developers that got into this community in 2005 to 2009, who at the time were developers and are now VPs of engineering and CTOs and CEOs and so forth. And there's the pressure on us. Like, we know that apprenticeship works if you do it well, right? And like, we know how to build the teams we would have wanted to be on as junior developers. And the question is like, will we follow through? There are, you know, Prentice I.O. of course is a great example of companies that are doing it right and bringing through people and you get high retention, you get high loyalty and there's so many benefits to it, but you have to be willing to make a three-year play, a five-year play that it's not the most profitable thing for the next six months. And that's where I think everyone outside of San Francisco has a big advantage. Like, we see if you're in Denver, for instance, where we are, like, there isn't the focus of get out, get out, right?  It's more of we're building a company for five years, we're building a company for 20 years, so it's worth the investment. Like, we want these people to be around in five years. Anyone, we're coming up in five minutes. Anyone have any burning questions they want us to discuss or broach? Okay, so the question is mid-level developer, a lot of his experience is just personal projects. How do you get an employer to recognize that? I think you have a great privilege in programming, almost unique across any field, any professional field, that you can demonstrate your skill very quickly. And if you can get a few minutes with somebody, I can sit down with somebody in half an hour and tell you how good a developer they are, like, pretty accurately. And so how can you get them to see your code, right? The obvious answer is like open source work. I think a lot of people are intimidated by open source that getting into projects is too hard and all that. You can just publish your own projects. We have a- So the answer is, you know, get hub, get them to show you stuff.  Don't do it under the context of an interview then. Contact the company and say, hey, can I come in and like pair with one of your developers for a day or a couple hours? And you'd be surprised that the company would say, yeah, that's great. We'd love to have you come join us for the day. Yeah, actually, if I can plug in old blog posts of mine, one of the ways to hire senior people sometimes, even if they're working for someone else at the time, is tell them, hey, can I get you to come in and just consult for a few hours or maybe a day and give them like a high rate for doing so, like maybe a thousand bucks or something. And if you start making that a habit before you know it, you've hired a senior person. We had another question in the room. So the question is, how do self-starters, people who are self-taught, who have a mentality of continued learning compared to people who are coming out of programs where there was more of a curriculum and they were kind of, were force-fed a certain way of doing things? Is that fair? We've seen people out of all different kinds of programs and the people who get into the programs largely have the same drive and everything as anybody else. And the programs aren't so structured where it's mostly just building applications and pair programming with people and doing programming. So it's not like going to school in the same traditional sense. Can I get a show of hands for people that pair program every day? Well, someone said used to. How many of you used to pair program every day and don't anymore? Okay, well, it's not necessarily. Is pair programming a big part of the future Ruby jobs? No, I don't think so. I think diversity is important. Like there are some people that love pairing and some people that hate it. And I think both opinions are totally valid. Right, I agree, but I just, it's not a big problem. But you don't let anyone pair program at thought bot. No, so people pair program whenever they want. I think the future is understanding the benefits of pairing in different situations like senior, junior, peers and applying it when it's appropriate. There are places like Pivotal that do it 100% of the time and are very effective at it. There's places that don't ever do it and are still very effective. But if you can really understand it and not look at it as what we have to pair because Corey said so and instead look at it as what you get out of it then you can find those situations and not have to say we do it all the time or we don't do it. I would be surprised if there was any company that never paired because if you don't have a situation where you go, I can't figure this out. Hey, can you come over here and help me figure this out? Which is pairing, I would probably think that's not a great place to be. Okay, so final kind of future facing question. Are we, as a community right now, are we Java like in 98 or 99 or 2003, 2004 where still a lot of growth left, a lot of excitement, a lot of growth left or is something gonna disrupt us in the next couple of years? Obviously I'm asking you to predict a little bit but what do you think? Is it Go or JavaScript or something? I think based on what we're seeing on our platform there's a lot of growth left and the reason I say that is because we're seeing the early stage startups a lot of times, series A, series B funded, they're growing their early teams and they're making investment in Rails and that's not going away and those things are gonna take years to unfold. I mean, we'll see what happens but I think that based on the number of companies that are just now starting to adopt Rails in a really big way, I think we're still in the early days. So I think you're absolutely right in terms of the growth. I think that there, I don't think the thing that's going to attract people to switch away from Rails especially experienced Rails developers to switch away from Rails really exists yet where it's gonna happen in large numbers but I think that we are on the sort of cusp of something potentially coming along that does that. I see people at Thoughtbot, myself and people just in our community who are very, very interested in other things and are actively seeking them out. And do you attribute that to maybe just being burnt out a little bit on, you know, we're approaching 10 years for the oldest members of this community, you know. Are we just kind of ready for something fresh or is it more global? I think that's part of it. I think that it's Ruby Rails. I think it's the leader of our community getting up on a stage and telling 70% of the audience that they're doing something wrong year after year might wear on people a little bit. So all those factors combined, you know, cause people to look for other things. I think that Java's the wrong analogy. I think we're actually the PHP. And I don't mean that in a negative way. It's hardly a positive way to know that. So if you look at what PHP does is it allows people with very little experience to write an application, get it up there, have it running more so than Java, like spin up a new Java web app as a new person but spinning up a new Rails app, getting your ID out there. You end up oftentimes with very poorly written systems and difficult to maintain systems which we already see in Rails. But what it is, is it's giving people the power to put their idea out there. And it doesn't, you know, it's not exactly conducive for building really long-term maintainable applications if you use the standard set of ways of developing it and you are not a highly experienced developer. And but the beauty of PHP was that you can just load up PHP, you know, install PHP and have a website running. That's an amazing amount of power. And when you talk to people who are just starting programming, like the thing I tell them is you wake up in the morning and at the end of the day, you've created something that is not there yesterday and that is beautiful and an amazing type of thing. And Rails, you're able to do more in a more effective way than you are with raw PHP. So I think what we're seeing is Rails going into what I think is its natural state, which is taking the problems and the frustrations with PHP, layering on these sort of productivity enhancers and then putting it back into the hands of the people to be even more productive than they are. If you look around you at a conference like this or at your local user group, it's really just the tippy top of the iceberg, right? In terms of the people who are doing Rails at this point. I mean, it used to be that you went to Rails Conf, you were with a significant portion of the worldwide population when we first started out. Nowadays, what do you think that you're seeing in a conference like this? Like percentage? Yeah, I agree. You know what I'm saying? I mean, it's a self-selecting group, right? So it is the people who are most engaged with what they're doing. If I can add on to the previous question real quick.  The thing I fear most is becoming a guy that I met and I was talking to him about Rails and he said, oh, I use wheels. And I said, what's that? Have you ever heard of this? No. And he said, oh, it's Rails, but it's implemented in cold fusion.  And so whenever I see people in Ruby rebuilding stuff that already exists in JavaScript or already exists in Elixir, I'm like, oh, shit, it's wheels. Like, we're wheels. And that's the thing that I worry about is like, if we are too stuck in our little world that we'll lose the perspective of like what's really happening. I think that Ruby and the Ruby generation are probably the last great programming communities, not because something is gonna- Like in the end of history kind of way? Yeah, like because it's too easy now to get started, it's too easy to like bootstrap a community and application framework and all those kind of things. And I think from now on, we'll only have like micro communities. So we're like Bitcoin and everything else is like doge. Well, not so unevenly. But you know, when I think you look at like closure, great, small community, people that love doing closure, it's never gonna have this like rocket to the top, elixir, not gonna have to go. I just don't believe that there are too many good options. Yeah, but people said that about Java. Well, Java had the marketing machine, right? Like you tie in the colleges and the AP tests, now you create this pipeline of developers. And I just don't think there will ever be that concentration again in one place. What does the rest of the panel think? Yeah, I agree. I think I disagree with that to a certain extent because when you look at closure, like it's a language that is very good at solving specific problems. So it's not going to get to a general audience in the same way that Ruby did. I gotta disagree with you too. It sounds like a recipe for getting blindsided by whatever comes next. Let me make one thing is that I think it's important to realize that as I understand it, he's talking, you're gonna have a lot of these micro communities that build up and it's not to say that it's going to be only a hundred people and forgive me if I misunderstood you, but it's not that there's a hundred people, but you're not necessarily going to get this massive group of people who all come together and all of that. You can have these small, and you already see it in the Ruby and Rails community where you're starting to see them splinter off into these small. And people identify as Rubyists, but also participate in micro communities, right? So what percentage of Go programmers only program in Go? Probably almost zero, right? They have some other home that they came from and now dive into those micro communities. And I think if you don't pay attention to those, that is how you get blindsided. You do need to be participating in Elixir and JavaScript. And it doesn't matter which other thing you try as long as you have some outside perspective and some outside connection. I think it's very likely that there will be a venture. I mean, we're working, it was only 10 years ago where Java was this huge thing. Like, you know, I think it's very likely that in 10, 20, at some point, it's very likely that there's a new language or something becomes very popular that lots and lots of people use. Yeah, I think it's two shorts. Like, to the end of time, never have anything else. You realize that's this year. And I think the point that Jeff made was about the acceleration of adoption, and that point's been made about a lot of different things, social networks, about a lot of things. Like, this is the last one because nothing's gonna grow as fast. But what we've seen with everything is that adoption gets faster and that doesn't lead to more clustering of community. It leads to a point where when something fundamentally has more value than anything that's come before it, that it will take the world by storm at a much faster rate. So I- And then Facebook will buy them.   That thing's gonna be PHP, by the way. It's gonna wrap back around. It's gonna be fooby. All right. Well, I want to thank my panel. Thank you guys for providing entertainment.


The world is a vampire. Talk to you soon, but maybe this summer, deadlift competition, follow me, Salamike 2Ks. You can see the nudies every Friday. Flex Friday. Checking in. Showing you the progress. And there may or may not be a fat loss program coming along with it. I don't know. Do you try to get shredded? He shreds life. What's up, guys? Salamike checking in. Another update. Wanted to give you guys kind of just the down low on what my training and nutrition currently look like. Got a lot of questions for my diet, especially I've been obviously consulting and working with my homies, Barquan and Omar Esoff. We have some things in the works, but basically they've been helping with my diet and my macro breakdown. Depending on the day, depending on training, refeed, etc. I'm eating kind of anywhere between 2,000 and 2,500 calories. And I know some of you may say, that's not very much, Mike. But I've been dieting for a while now. I can maintain my body weight on a good amount of calories. But personally, to diet, I need to dig a little bit. So I'm feeling good. Energy is moderate considering the situation. My heaviest weight was 235 pounds. And this morning, live update, live and direct, hit my lowest in probably three years. 204. And overall training is going pretty dang solid considering that fact. Protein trying to hit around 200 grams and then everything else tried to get it in fat. I'm trying to stay under 75 grams and then carbs again. Other ones I manipulate the most, depending on training, refeed, or what heavy days I have coming up. Training, I'm trying to not focus on the poundage as much. I've been doing updates on Instagram. Be sure to follow me. Silent Mike with 2Ks. Silent, M-I-K-K-E. Every Friday on my diet progress. So the goal right now for the last six weeks, and I'll probably do another four to six weeks to finish this cut, is to get below 200 pounds and to mentally just focus on feeling good, feeling healthy, lifting weights, but not worry about my strength. In the past, I've talked about it. The number one mistake I've made over the years in my training and still to this day is I can't choose just one goal. I haven't been able to just just chase down strength or just chase down my cut. I've always kind of tried to balance both and I've done an OK job of it. But I knew I'd be further along in my lifting career, both aesthetically and strength-wise, if I could focus up and blocks. So I have made cuts before. I've gotten down to 190 pounds a couple years ago. And my strength suffered, but I did the cut a little bit slower so my strength would stick around. This time I'm purely focusing on burning that fat. Aesthetic bras shreds life. So I guess what the training looks like. Many of you already know, but Kaizen training is a training website that Omar Barton and I have made. We have a free program, F-R-E-E, and that is kind of the basis program I use for all my training. It is in the description below, always free for anybody to download. If it says a price by it, that's probably one of our other programs. So I know people talk a little bit of mess, but you're just confused. We do have totally free programs. They're on there. And it's the infinite off-season. And that's basically how I rotate all of my training. So deadlifts are very similar to that, except of instead of doing three sets of five, I'm doing five sets of three. And that is because I don't think I can handle the time under tension with my back, considering the tweaks I've had in the past. I'm doing a little bit experimenting on wild dieting on my bench and squat, handling some higher intensity singles. I'm pretty proud of the technique I've made. Again, I'm a semi-advanced lifter. I've been doing power lifting specific for about eight years plus. I've been lifting for over ten years. And so I can maintain my form really well. So I'm trying to see how I can hold on to strength that way while still maintaining some of the volume. Some of the volume's been a little tougher for me just again because it's purely aesthetic-based training. And to get my mind off of my old PRs, I just want to handle, you know, 80-85% semi-regularly to feel good. To feel good, and that's it. Cardio is here nor there. Kind of going by feel, but averaging probably two to three times a week. Sometimes it's a hard cruise. I don't want to call it low intensity because I'm moving pretty good on elliptical or my favorite, the assault bike. And then other times, if I'm feeling real good, especially in the beginning of the diet, I was doing interval. So I was doing 20 to 30 seconds all out and then a minute and minute 30 rest on the assault bike. You know, five to maybe seven rounds again depending on how good I am feeling. So that's a little bit of updates on how the training's going. You know, I've been squatting around 500 lately. The goal after this would probably be to push myself towards some PRs once I do reach my body weight goal. So once I get around 200 pounds, we'll introduce a little bit more calories. See if my back can handle doing a little Carlton there. Oh, a little salsa there. Oh, a little Dougie, a little mix. We'll see if my body can handle it. Don't know what my back can handle still.  So we're just rebuilding. I think it's this workout or maybe another one I handled five sets of two on deadlifts at 500 pounds or 4.95 and that felt pretty dang solid. Regular soreness afterwards, a little bit stiff afterwards and all that I can handle. It's just when that bad tweak, my back really locks up on me that I'll have to make bigger adjustments. So, so far so good squatting two to three times a week, benching two to three times, deadlifting once with another heavy stiff leg added in. Again, the cardio two to three times and just staying locked in on the nutrition. I've been pretty damn good for the first time in a long, long time. I'm focused. I'm focused, man. So I'm really happy with my own adherence to my own diet. So everything's feeling good. More updates to come again on Instagram. I'll show you guys a little bit of the progress and if you guys comment below, let me know if you're in either a bulk stage or trying to gain some muscle whether you're trying to gain strength or are you want to cut getting ready for summer already because if you guys didn't know, summer is around the corner and if you want to get jacked, if you're trying to get aesthetic, if you're trying to get lean, trying to get sub 12% body fat, we got kind of starting out. So I'm not necessarily entertaining my beach bod, but I am wanting to get to that lower body weight for other goals that we'll talk about in the future. So comment below. Let me know team, what everybody's goals here. Be sure to give this thing a thumbs up. Enjoy the rest of the videos. Appreciate everybody's support. This is maybe near the third year anniversary of my channel. So really cool to keep going. I'm really lucky to be able to call this myself career. Look at that belly popping out. Look at that angle. I'm sorry. But I am. I'm super, super lucky and happy to have you guys support over the years here. Instagram Mama's boys podcast and everything else I've done over the years. So appreciate you guys. Shout out to everybody listening. Enjoy the rest of the video. I don't know if my body just woke up. Five o'clock. Shout out to my guy BJ Goddour for having me on his podcast. Maybe I'll link it. Maybe I'll forget. Who's that? BJ Goddour is a legend. He's been in the fitness industry a long time. He's probably in his mid 30s. But you name it, he's kind of done it. Play college football, etc. So he has that kind of background in pure athletics, trained athletes, trained soccer moms. He was the fitness director for men's health for a very long time and now more recently he's been on his own but he's consulted for numerous like fitness equipment companies and stuff like that. So he's on his own grind now. He's actually moving to California soon. So I'm sure we'll do a video with him eventually. But yeah, just chatted.  He's a fun guy. And I got a package in the mail. People said they'd send us stuff on that video because I guess I complained. I didn't mean to complain. I don't really need anything. I'm a blessed, happy guy.  I was like, I don't need stuff. I appreciate you guys though. But, oh man, I believe it's from Raymond, the online coach, sent it to me. So let's see what we got. Chop it up. Make it look cool, Casey. Nice, Dad. Bro, what about Drake? I was up till midnight. On Fortnite? Yeah, it was amazing. It was amazing. He said like four words though. No, he was more talking in the beginning. Oh really? And Juju talked a bunch. Do you know Juju? No. He's a wide receiver for Pittsburgh Steelers. He was in the same game. He's a legitimate. He's doing his own Twitch stream. So he was streaming. He had like 10,000 people in there too. But he's like one of the best wide receivers in the NFL. It was sick. I was so stoked. I was so stoked last night. I was literally like a little kid. I can't remember the last time I felt that way. I talked about it on the podcast today too. I'm like, it's just so sick. It's like so 2018. And you hear the story about how Drake found Ninja? By just watching Fortnite? No, he watched Instagram, like a highlight clip. Oh yeah. And then he looked him up on YouTube. Like just like what we do. Like some dope motherfuckers watch one video of mine. Whether he liked it or not, I don't know. But some dope motherfuckers watched it. You know, we're like 10 years ago that's impossible. But yeah, Drake said he's in the, in his house studio for 15 hours and on his breaks, he's just jamming on some games. 2K or Fortnite. So then he found Fortnite on Instagram. It was Ninja. So then he looked up YouTube and then he found him on Twitch. And then he, I think he literally just slipped in his DM. Said, hey, let's play.  Shout out to Ninja. I don't even know you bro.  Back to me getting the box from online coach. I made me so excited. Ladies and gentlemen, I already know what it is because I talked to Raymond, but shout out to Raymond. So we're going to just ruin the surprise. Just burst the bubble. Raymond has been putting it in work. He's created a sticky pad for your bench necessities. So we got this rubber. Pretty thick, pretty actually sticky. A lot of times rubbers, I've dealt with textiles in my life dealing with some of the companies like Slingshot that I worked with. So rubber can often be a slipper, you know. But this thing, it's sticking to this table and it's sticking to my hand. So laid down on the bench press at a commercial gym that doesn't have grip, like a competition bench and hopefully dig your traps into it. So we'll play with it today. Shout out to Raymond for the care package. And we're going to try it today.