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