Welcome everybody. I'm Zubin. Welcome to the easiest said than done and how to do it podcast. And today I'm really excited. I've got someone who I've gotten to know, you know, over the last several months on the show and on LinkedIn, you know, dare say that I consider Jade even a friend. Like when I go to the UK, I'm definitely going to look up Jade and see where she, you know, where she is and catch up with her for a coffee for sure. So I've got Jade Wilson with me here today. And Jade is an extraordinary person. Her effectiveness on LinkedIn and helping people has been nothing short of, you know, absolutely extraordinary because she speaks from the heart. And yeah. So Jade tell us a little bit about yourself. Hi everyone. It's great to be welcomed. Welcome to this channel. Thank you so much Zubin. And one funny thing actually is the way that we met was a little bit, I guess, like unconventional. So Zubin had done a great article on how to get in, like switch your careers and get into Google. And I was really, really apprehensive on this article because I thought it was going to start saying about Leetcode and how you need to solve all these things about Leetcode. And so I started reading the article, like being quite pessimistic, but as I was reading through it and I was like, no, actually this is pretty good. And this is, this is great. And I lost the article because LinkedIn does that thing where it just like refreshes the, the, the, the feed and I couldn't find it. And at the time I wasn't really posting content, but I really wanted to know who wrote the article. And so I'd just put a little post on it and I'll try and link it. And so, so Zubin can add it to the, the, this podcast. But yeah, that was how we met. I, I posted a thing saying great, great article, would love to know who the author is. And then a few people tagged him and that's how we met. Yes. I'd completely forgotten about that Jade actually. I, I, it's funny you mentioned that cause that particular article, I got so much criticism for it as well, but typically by people who hadn't actually done the move or, or, you know, gotten to their goals. There were people who had never tried, you know, they, they were basically like, Oh, you know, why are you talking about all this non-technical stuff? And I'm like, cause it kind of matters. It really does matter, you know, to, to get the, so I forgot. That's how that's exactly right. Anyway, look, I'm super excited to have you on the show because you have such an interesting mind. You are funny, you're dung in cheek, you're self effacing, you're extremely incisive. So it's not like you're funny for the sake of being funny. You're funny while making a really strong point, which is a rare, rare neck. Okay. Because there's real strength in what you're saying. I don't know how you do it. It's truly remarkable. I'm one of those people as well, like, you know, where someone like gives you a compliment and you're just like, please don't compliment me. I don't know how to take this. This is really, really awkward. You're doing a good job. We'll get you practice like everything else in life, including lead code practice helps. So we'll give you lots of compliments cause you definitely deserve them and we'll get you really, really well practiced in it. Okay. It's like CI/CD for you know, self-esteem don't worry about it. So it's all good. So look, you know, let's, let's talk a bit, a bit, a bit, a bit, let's talk a little bit about your background because the purpose of the show is to tell people that pretty much everything you want to try and achieve in life is going to be easier said than done, which means it's hard to do. So how do we do it now? You're currently in Microsoft as senior engineer in Microsoft, but tell us a little bit about some unexpected things that you experienced on your road to where you are today. Cause you've been in the professional 10, 11 years, I think. Yeah, just, just under 10, I'd say, I think I graduated in, in 2016 and I'd done a like internship before that. So about if you had them together, probably about that. You graduated in computer science. Is that what you mean? Yes. Yeah. Okay. So tell us about that process of getting into computer science school all the way to today, some of the things that leap out of you often the ones that first jump out at us are the best ones as being unexpected things along the journey of your life into computer science and coding. I think, I think the most unexpected thing was how much I actually enjoyed it because I'd gone from studying maths at university. So I, I went into university just saying I was going to study maths. I was really, really good at school and I was just naturally good at solving problems in that sense. And I did it, but I didn't really do. I didn't really do programming of the sort. I did it, but I didn't really know programming was much of a thing. I'd done some like when I was, when I was a teenager, I like, there used to be this thing called Pixar and I used to get the templates and remove the adverts from the templates. I didn't know that that was, I didn't know that that was like coding at the time. I just thought that was just something you could do. I thought I was being really naughty, like ruining the adverts. And so I didn't really know much about programming until I got to university. And I think that's an interesting point because I think a lot of people don't necessarily know that they're doing things that are related to programming. And then they like either they go into computer science or sort of shows them it or things like that. And they think, okay, actually this is quite related to what I like to do. So you might do things here and there. Like I did maths for example, but actually if you think about things like applying maths and applied maths, it's very, very, very similar to like computer science. And so I didn't really think about doing computer science as a degree until I'd met my partner at the time who did computer science and he was in like his final year. And I was thinking, okay, well I'm hating maths, I need to switch. So I thought, okay, well let's, let's look at the different things that I enjoyed. And I really liked psychology and I really liked IT. And so I was thinking, okay, maybe I could do one or the other. And then my partner was like at the time, he was like, well, you've got like an A* in maths at A level, why would you not do computer science? Because basically it's very similar to doing IT, but you just need the maths A level to be able to do it. So I was like, okay, that's fair enough. I'll give it a try and then start doing it. And I really, really enjoyed it. I think the things that really, really stuck out to me through actually doing my career is the amount of failure that you have to overcome all the time. That was really hard for me at the beginning because I've always grown up with a very, very, like, I've always put a lot of high expectations on myself when I was a child. Like I was the first child to go to university, like in my, in my family. And I really, really wanted to like, you know, show that I could do stuff and like get everything perfect. And when you become a software engineer, you have to change that like way of thinking. And I had to like, let go of a lot of, a lot of like, I guess, issues that I had like with being like a perfectionist in that way. And I know that's a really like cliche thing to say when people are like, oh, I'm a perfectionist, that's my weakness. That's not what I mean. But like, I used to get really like, you know, hung up on pushing out my work, showing people my code because I was scared of getting it wrong. - Yeah. - And you'd have to let that go. Like, and now I've got to a point where I'm quite happy to get a rough draft of something, push it to my teammates and say, what do you think of this? And that was, getting to that point has been a big, a big challenge for me and has helped me a lot. And I've gained a lot of confidence in being able to do that because I've seen actually, when I, when I was looking at my peers, I was seeing that they were doing that. I was seeing that they were competent to do that. And I was like, okay, well, if they're competent to do that, why can't I be? So that really helped. - Interesting. I mean, that's, so you've covered some two or three actually really important things there. One is that you were surprised at how interesting you found it, how much you gripped it. But at the, at the same time, it was bottle and dramatic in terms of the amount of feedback you were getting that was not consistent with your self-conception, you know, in some of the failure stuff, some of the setbacks that you had to overcome, especially I think as a high performing math student where, you know, often for people like that, it's, you know, tick, tick, tick, achieve, achieve, achieve. And then you have the situation where, oh my God, this is actually not giving me all the positive feedback I want. So you have the enjoyment and you have negative feedback coexisting uncomfortably, right? - And just to touch upon that point, I did, I did fail my first year at university in maths because I wasn't enjoying it. So I did kind of, I stopped going to lessons and things like that. So it wasn't like I was the perfect student, like up until uni maybe. But when I got to uni, I really, really hated it. And so it's one of those things where like, if you don't, but I knew that I was going to fail it because I wasn't trying. Whereas with computer science, I was trying and with software engineer, I was trying and that's when it was getting like, you know, that, that was the like thing that was hard. I think when you, when you put your effort into something and you feel like you're constantly like always not being good enough at it. - Yeah, super interesting you say that because, and again, just to go back to that moment where, you know, you're failing the first year at university, like when you get that level of negative feedback, the easiest, most rational thing to do is quit and switch, right? Like it's, it's quite extraordinary that you, you know, yes, you weren't doing that well at some things at university, but at another level you, and the thing you wanted to do, you were struggling to do well at that point, right? And that's often the way it seems to be where I think we'll talk about this later on is your intrinsic drivers for wanting to do the thing will matter at that point because it's going to happen. So I coach people on career change. One of my students just yesterday messaged me saying that, you know, she's got this, a paid internship gig, you know, and she's really excited. She started it. I'd actually known about this a couple of weeks ago. And I asked her, I said, how you feel about doing all the coding? And she said, I'm really surprised. I'll actually read it out now. She's like, it's quite astonishing. I'm smashing through all the coding stuff right now. And I feel really great, seriously. Like sometimes I sit, I stay three, sometimes five hours after work plugging away at projects because I actually enjoy and look forward to it. I never really had that in my previous life and job. I've blown way past my own expectations, right? And my reply to her is I'm really happy to hear that. There is a kick in the teeth coming by the way, you know, and when it does, remember that I've said there is a kick in the teeth coming and that's going to be your next cycle of growth. Like, would you agree with that? That is this constant cycle of, oh, I'm getting this, I'm getting this, and I get kicked in the teeth. Oh, I'm getting this, I'm getting this, I'm getting this, you know, do you agree with that? Completely. Like, for example, if it happens to me now, I like, so I would kind of shift his focus from previously we were doing a lot of like backend like work and infrastructure work in, in our, our team. And that's with the, like advancements in AI has shifted to data engineering and AI. And so there's been a massive learning curve that had to do with all, all regards to that over the last few months. And I don't know what I'm, I don't know what I'm doing. Like, you know, this is completely new to me, just because you're like a software engineer in one area does not mean you're a software engineer in another area. And so like, you have to, you just have to learn all the time. And that can be really like, especially those past like, like few weeks of learning it, or like you learn a little bit and you think, okay, I'm okay with this now, but then, you know, you, you run into an issue and it's hard. And the, that, those bits there is like, what's active is the hardest, especially when like you don't have a new one who can guide you or help you with it. I personally, I think that's the hardest part. I, I so agree with you, you know, and having the right expectations matters. Like I think people think that it's all about knowing a language. This is prevailing misconception that ultimately coding is about learning a language or learning a framework. And when I went to Google, I knew none of the languages I was going to write it. That's not what they tested me for, because obviously you'll, you'll have to learn different languages and, you know, apply, even if you don't know it, just write in them every now and then. It's more the concept of programming. The, the, the people talk about it as problem solving, but it's more the meta principle of this is the system. This is a small part of it that I'm working on. How does touching this impact all of this or vice versa? And how do I, I safely put changes into the system. That's kind of what the problem is, you know, and this thing about constantly having to learn on the job, but that's really quite hard because you always underestimate how much there is to know. And you always overestimate the relevance of what you know, in the context of the problem to be solved. At least that's the way it is for me. I always think like, yeah, okay, I'm getting the hang of it. And then I find that really, I've just scratched one surface. It's like level one in the video game. And I didn't realize there are 10 levels. I've just unlocked level two and the boss man's even bigger now, you know? So yeah. - I think, I think to be honest, like as someone who is quite a generalist in a generalist role, you just find like that you have to be like that. Like, like for example, like I would probably class myself as like a T-shaped engineer and that my kind of main skill is dot net and C sharp, but like, I just have to have a service level of knowledge over most languages just because there's no way that I could learn them all. However, what you can do, what I do think is, is true. And I put this on a recent video is that when you know the foundations of something, it's very easy to then apply it to another language. And because a lot of languages are very similar in how they work and how you need to do, how there might be some ways that I better find, there might be some practices that you need to learn, but in terms of like what it is actually doing that they're quite similar for like the majority of like at least web development. And so if you know one language and how to do it in one language, then you can transfer it to that other language. And so when I've been working with my mentees recently, that's what I've been kind of saying of trying to get comfortable working with your language of choice rather than trying to switch between them. Because you just find that a lot of people are just trying to find a service level syntax knowing of a language. literacy. Yes, they're going for the literacy as opposed to the skill in that, you know, in programming. You're so right. And I hope your mentees listen to this because I mean, it's the same conversation I have all the time with folks is that you've got to stay with a language long enough to notice the patterns in programming because it's the patterns that transfer where the language does not, right? It's the pattern. The idioms as we like to call it, which is a word that a lot of people quite rightly would not necessarily understand. So the pattern is how I sort of look at it. Can I ask you as a woman going through the computer science world entering the world of coding, do you think that presented its own set of challenges? Because I'm really mindful that a lot of my students who come to me are actually women. And I'm mindful that there's a limit to what I can experience that I can transfer over to them. What would you say to people who are thinking of switching into, you know, an IT coding sort of role, especially from a woman's point of view, what should they expect that they don't know to expect? I think, and this isn't the same for every woman, but this is just my personal experience. I just felt like quite I don't know, I've read, I don't know how true this is, but I've read a study about how like women feel like they need to be much more perfect than men when it comes to doing things. And so like a woman will typically only apply for a job if she meets all the criteria versus men who will apply if they meet 40%. That was the, I think the article I read that linked to a study. And I think that's the biggest challenge of overcoming that and overcoming that like perfectionist trait. And I think, I think a lot of that is just to do with anxiety. And I think from, from what I observed and from what I've read, women typically deal with that more. And so it's about, okay, understanding what that is, how, how that's translating into how you're feeling and how that translates into, into your job. And because you are constantly failing and because you are constantly dealing with quite personally, I dealt with quite rude colleagues sometimes that can be quite demotivating and, and, and was one of the reasons why I kind of moved out of it for a little bit of time. And, and because I didn't feel like I was good enough. I didn't feel like I was technical enough. And I don't know, like if, if it's just a confidence thing, but like for me, it's all about like trying to like build up that confidence with the women, men to use that I've worked with and just with women in general on LinkedIn. And because I do think that is genuinely a lack of confidence there sometimes. And it might, another reason might just be that, like there's more women who get into it later. So they're kind of surrounded with a lot of tech, tech people who have come in since an early age. And there's a lot, I don't know the exact reason for it. It's just what I've observed is it's more common within women. So I think that's the biggest thing. It's interesting because I've heard this a lot over the years. And to be honest, I witnessed it. Like I've been in the job force 21 years now in the workforce and I've seen the same, the same attribute. I think it's a social thing. I don't know if it's, I doubt if it's a space thing. And the reason, the first time I noticed this was when a colleague of mine back in India actually was really, she and I were going for the same set of interviews. We were at college, we're going for the same set of interviews for the law. And she was far more anxious about it. Not that I wasn't anxious, I was stressed out of my mind, but she was more visibly anxious by it. And she was way higher than me on the grades. Every bit as capable as me on the interviews and communication and all that. But the narrative she had in the head was different from mine. Mine was like, I'm expecting this to be terrifying and hard. And the odds are always going to be against me. Hers was like, oh gosh, my entire life depends on this. And that may have been her reality and not mine for whatever reason. That was the first time I noticed that very similar external circumstances are modulated by our internal narrative and circumstances differently. Like literally the filter we place on these things are different. That was the first time I noticed it. I looked at some of my male colleagues and not all of them would show their emotion. They'd go and smoke or they'd go and do something different to contain their emotion. Having said that, I also had someone in law school who was very calmly confident about everything. So I don't know if it's a gender thing and more of a socialization thing. I don't know. The other thing I've noticed is that when I've coached people and I've been coaching people even before I got into tech, I've always had to put in a lot more effort exactly as you say, to build up the confidence and mental models for women to ask for what they want. It takes a lot more effort to tell them, "Ask. If you don't ask, you don't get it." Whether you think you should ask or not is less relevant or whether the other person thinks they should give it to you or not because you're often just telling yourself things that aren't true or that you can't know are true. They may be true, but you can't know if it's true. I've seen this when I've been on the hiring side as well in every one of my careers, is that there's a male energy and there's a female energy to asking for things. I think it's more social. I've seen it in the law, I've seen it in business, I've seen it in startup, and I've seen it now in tech. I think it's a culture thing. I keep telling the girls that I have in my program, "You're probably the biggest obstacle and I can't speak for you, but I would encourage you to consider whether the biggest obstacle is the thoughts you're having about yourself. Are you literally getting in your own way here?" What do you think about that, Jie? Do you think there's a vestige of truth about being insensitive here? I don't think you're being insensitive at all. I think obviously there are going to be women who don't fit that narrative and I think that there are definitely a lot of women who I've met who are competent and it's great to see and I love that, but I also do think from what I've observed, there is more work that I need to do similarly to you as a mentee to build them up, to make them believe in themselves, to say, "Go for that job, apply for that role, you can get it." But yeah, I don't know what it is. I think there's a lot of things that happen as you grow up. There's a lot of differences in what women are told they need to be versus what men are told that they need to be as they grow up, especially in the UK. I imagine there's much different standards in other places in the world as well. So I think that is absolutely correct. Even just me, when I was a kid, my dad would be like, "Oh, you need to marry a millionaire rather than you should be the millionaire." Think comments like that. You are not the one who's going to be successful, a man is, kind of thing. Yeah. And I think I'm very blessed. I was raised by a single woman. So I think I have more of a feminine perspective on some of these things, but a lot of people that I knew, especially a lot of people that I saw coming into the law were doing it because they felt they had to be the masculine provider, that there were failures if they weren't extremely monetarily successful. Happiness be damned. There was that toxic, this is what you need to be to be successful and attractive to other people and valuable things. And I think it's weird, the world does that to people. It tells you this is your role, this is what makes you valuable and is different for people and cultures. I've seen it work out very differently in Japan and Indonesia and India and Australia and the US and the UK have not worked there, but anecdotally. And I think this is the thing, when we're overcoming obstacles, our culture and context plays a huge part because the same event will be interpreted differently based on what meanings we've been trained to attach to that event. Because we're meaning making machines, and often that meaning, there's an old saying, when it rains, some people enjoy the rain, some people just get wet. It's the same event, but it's a different meaning that we attach to it. And I think that's very true. Just for a moment, switching tracks, so you've talked about obviously being good at math, enjoying it, wanting to do computer science. Do you think it's actually, in your opinion, a necessary requirement? Is it important for somebody to be good at math to be effective at programming? I have a strong view on this, but I'd love to know yours. Not necessarily math as math is. I think you need to be, there's a lot of traits that people who are good at math have that help you as a programmer. So it's the logical thinking, it's the ability to take a, so very often in math, you're taught to take a problem and be able to apply it to a new scenario. If you think of a quadratic equation and you're given a new one, how can you do that, knowing the foundations that you've been taught from doing that. And those are the types of things really that are important when you need to learn computer science or software engineering, you need to be able to logically deduce information. I think that's the main skill that you need to have. And someone who is good at math typically is good at doing that. You've given me something to think about. I've never thought about it in those terms. I've always taken it quite literally as you need to be good at the math, the arithmetic and the algebra and calculus and all that, as opposed to the meta skill, which actually I'm kind of surprising myself. I didn't think of that because I'm so obsessed with meta skills, but the meta skill there that you seem to be referring to is the ability to abstract, generalize, extrapolate and apply to different contexts. Now that you put it that way, Jade, that may actually explain why I didn't, I mean, learning to program is hard enough and all that, but I've always felt that having a lot of world experience, including in law helped me a lot because you spot the patterns. Yeah. And this is where I think it's not necessarily just maths that you can do that, because if you look at things like someone who is a, like, I have a mentee who is from a mentee now as a job, so she's not my mentee anymore, but she came from like a translation background. So she knew a lot of different languages and like was able to like do a lot of like logical thinking with regards to switching different languages and doing that quite often. And that's a completely different kind of background as someone from a maths background. However, because she has to do a lot of logical deductions when she's like learning how to learn a new language is a great example of like, you know, doing very similar, like mental, like logic deducing, I don't know what's the correct word is to say that. No, I understand what you mean. Yeah, you're quite right. I had a student who's a translator as well, and I noticed the exact same pattern. It's that ability to abstract out and spot the patterns and lift and shift your mental models from one to the other, which is very much a learnable skill. So, okay, that's heartening. So for those people who constantly worry that you don't need to know, that you need to know math, well, I rarely use math directly and rarely have had to in any of my roles, but yeah, the structured thinking, the ability to sort of break down the problem into steps, that's definitely translated. And I think this is why I ended up really struggling at maths at uni, because it was no longer about like, for me, at least it was no longer about doing that logical deduction. You ended up having to do a lot of memorization of proofs, a lot of memorization of proofs and like writing. And for someone like me who doesn't really think like that, for someone like me, who just kind of, if you give me a problem, I can figure out how to solve it based on just like principles that I've learned. It was quite difficult for me and I wasn't enjoying it very much. So there's a lesson in there as well, isn't it? That sometimes the topic needs your own particular approach. Like you can't have a one size fits all learning style, because a lot of people who are able to handle the thing may not actually learn that way, which has definitely been my central learning in terms of how I learn as well. It's quite different from conventional education, which is why when I coach my students, I do a lot of auditing of their learning style before I sort of give them material, because that's the shortcut to learning hard things is learn it the way you learn it, the way your brain works. Can I ask you, so when you came out of uni and given that you've been so candid about not necessarily having the level of confidence you would have liked to ask for the things you wanted or sort of assert yourself with the workbook, how did you find your first job? Because I know so many people who have been to CS school and done all that, but can't land a job or been to boot camps. Most of my students, for example, are ex boot camp people, but you know, it's one thing to learn the skill. It's another thing to actually get the market to pay you for it. Right. What was your experience on that? Your first job search? So to be fair, I probably took a job that I wouldn't like take going back. I feel like if I know what I know now, I would have probably like waited a little bit and taking a job that was better. But at the time I was very, very, like, again, I said, like I said, I lacked confidence and I just wanted to get my foot in the door and learn at the time it was C# was what I wanted to learn. And the first job that I had, it was a really, really small team. It was like a team, like there was like me and another, another guy. And then there was a database path, like IT path as well. So there was like three of us and then the CTO as well actually, but he didn't really do any coding. And so like, I didn't feel like I got the growth that I wanted at that company. And I quickly realized I wasn't going to get the growth at that company as well. So I remember like mentioning about unit tests, for example, and like my boss just couldn't understand the reason why I would want to unit tests. And because I was junior, it was quite difficult to explain. And I was like, I knew there was something that I wanted to like, not quite right. And I knew that I wanted to make it better, but like I could, I didn't have the like domain knowledge or the skill level that I wanted to, to make it better. If that makes sense, because it was just such a, like, it was, it was spaghetti coding and it was very difficult to navigate. And like, I think a lot of my career has been kind of trying to figure out what it is that I actually, what the gap is, like, why is it that, what is it that I'm not learning here that I need to learn? And it transpires that that for me has really been, has been the architecture and the like technical leadership sort of skills that I want to learn. That, that was the gap for me. And that's what I've been like searching for in the companies that I've, I've worked at. - And so on that path, I know you also shifted, you know, for a while into Agile Delivery Lead and all that, like you've looking at your background on LinkedIn, I recognize certain signs and I'm speaking out of turn here because I haven't actually asked you this. The question is, looking back, was your career path weaving through your hypotheses on what you believed you needed to succeed? - Can you frame that? Cause I'm not quite sure. - Yeah, that was a question. Let me rephrase that. Looking back, if you were to connect the dots on the choices you made, were you for each next job looking to fill the gaps that you learned you had in your previous job, but you couldn't have known when you entered your previous job? - I think so. I think, I think there was like, so I'm a little bit impulsive and I've gotten better at that. So I think, I think a bit of that is that I am quite impulsive and, and I have, yes, yes, let's go do this. And you know, it's great for certain things. It's great for things like content creation. It makes you quite like, you know, creative and makes you quite thinking, but in terms of like jobs, it's, it's quite, it's quite difficult because, you know, like a like bad day can be like, okay, I hate this place. I need to quit and things like that. But like, so, so there's a little bit of impulsiveness there that, that, that doesn't help. But like in terms of like moving jobs, I, I knew like for the first job I knew I wasn't going to get what I wanted. The second job that I had, it was a locations thing. And I just moved from, from back from Kent to Hull because I missed. And so that, that was the reason I moved from there. And then in terms of when I was at APD, great place to work, I actually learned a lot of the stuff that I learned there. At the time it was a great place to work anywhere. I learned a lot of things about like agile and facilitation and school mastery and product ownership there. I learned a lot in my career at that company. But then, but then they got bought by another company and it just changed the culture quite a lot. And so that's when I was like, okay, it's time to move because I'd been, I'd been put on a, I don't know if you've heard the term cash cow before, which is basically a product that is a legacy of products, but it's not likely going to have much a new design or anything on it. And so I was like, okay, well, really I wanted to be starting to learn more cloud and like design. So I was like, okay, well I moved to, to a company that does that so I can learn, learn that. Hang on, hang on, hang on, jump, jump, jump in there. So when you say, so I decided to move into a company that does that, most people would kill to be able to have that level of control over their next job. Right? So I wanted this and I took it, you know, actually works though, is it? So tell, tell us, tell people a little bit about that process. Like as you, as you're more senior, it is easier to be a little more intentional and have a bit more control. Right? So let's set the expectations straight up there. When you're starting out, you have almost no control, you know, and this is something I teach my students a lot that try and get, you know, and I try and show them all the things that you can do to get three or four offers because optionality really matters. And then you can choose the next best bet based on the available options. Whereas if you only have one option, that's not an option. That's the default. Right? And so when you're starting out, it's hard to have more options. It's possible. I show people how to do it, but you know, as you get better, you have more control, more runs on the board, therefore more cache in the market. Right? So at this stage of career, Jay, would you say that you did have that level of control or did there also require a lot of extremely intentional work to get that next job that was cloud enabled and design friendly? It took, it did take work because I was product owner at the time and I wanted to go back into software engineering. And so I had to like get back more into coding because I wasn't doing as part of my full-time job. And so I had to just get, get back in and get familiarized with the things that I was doing, as well as that I had a professional Scrum Master II course I was, I'd been putting off. I failed it the first time because it was really, really difficult. One of the hardest exams I've done. So yeah, so, so people who think, you know, these PSM exams are easier than not, they're actually quite challenging. And so I put a lot of time into studying for that, for that as well. And past that I wanted to make, you know, I wanted to show that not only did I have software engineering skills, I had good facilitation skills. Cause that was my, that was my uniqueness, if that makes sense. So. Sure. And you grew aware of that enough to realize that you wanted to play to your specific unique selling points to differentiate yourself in the market. So not only was your strategy to rely on your existing core competencies, but to differentiate yourself, you found yourself adjacent to competency that would help in furthering your goal, right? Like, so you made investments in yourself to be the sort of person that would be attractive in the market. Is that fair to say? Yeah. Yeah. And, and I was a little bit lucky in that it was prime COVID at the time. And so like everything had gone remote. And so like, it was like, okay, there's a few remote, like, like options that were a bit further out, but like, you know, I could get them. So, so that was another reason why I was quite lucky at the time for that particular role. But like in terms of getting to Microsoft, that, that was, I think, like complete luck in that, in that I wasn't looking, I had a recruiter reach out to me and I say that it was complete luck, but I did do, I did do things. I did do things like, like I started, so the current company I was doing at the time was, was doing AWS. And my strategy was actually like, eventually I want to go into like, you know, contracting. That was, that was the goal. Like I was like, okay, well, I'm lead engineer now. If I do this for another, you know, two to three years, then I could have, you know, eventually go like as a contractor in the market, but actually I'm not a big fan of AWS. I want to do Azure. So like, I'm going to study some stuff to learn Azure. And so I'd done like the Azure solutions architect exams, which was the free or free, free or fab, another couple of different difficult exams. Don't recommend you do them unless you are like really, really, you know, willing to put the effort in because they are difficult. Like there's so much you just need to remember, like about a lot of different things. And for someone who doesn't remember a lot of different things easily, it was a lot of work. It was a lot of studying. So I did do things that raised my profile, I guess you would say, because one of the things that they were looking for for the role that I got was someone who was both a software engineer, but also had like architecture skills with like Azure. So. Perfect. Okay. So I mean, as always luck is ultimately, you know, preparation, meaning opportunity. That's really the heart of luck, right? So the opportunity has to come and you have to be prepared for it. And one thing I will say about like things like Azure certifications is they are useful. If you have the background experience, they're not as useful, like starting out just because they're not replacement for learning. No. In fact, there's a, there's some really good research. I think maybe by interviewing that I or somebody, I can't remember fantastic reasons that I share with my students all the time that shows the data is very clear, actually, Jade, that for people who are starting out certifications are an anti-signal because if you have no experience and you only have the certification recruiters immediately know that you have, like it, it, it brings home to them even more that you don't have any real world learning on it. And they're more likely to subconsciously sort of demote you in their heads because all you've got is a certification, which, you know, you can sort of pay and study for, but doesn't mean you can actually do the job. And so the, the study concluded that certifications probably helped. I think if I'm not remembering, if I'm remembering correctly, certifications help when you have background in that domain, that helps, but if you don't have any, and then you do the certification, it's often an anti-pattern or an anti-signal for recruiters. And they may not necessarily know, which kind of makes sense a little bit, you know, when you see someone with zero background, just saying, I've done all these certifications, you're like, yeah, it sort of makes me wonder whether the certifications actually mean anything now, because you don't have any experience. It's interesting. There's a few boot counts that have been like those certifications focused. And I think when you look at the like output, like when you look at the starting points of the engineers from the ones that have focused on learning versus the ones who are focusing for certifications, the starting points are quite different. I've had to put a lot more work in, obviously, well, the mentees who have done those boot camps have had to put a lot more work in self-learning than the ones who have like done like a boot camp that hasn't focused on certifications and has done a lot of like learning focused training. Yeah, I 100% agree. And that I think that's why structuring learning pathways in a way that combines mastery based learning with intrinsic motivation, which is how I started to do it with my students is you have to combine both and you have to find the sweet spot. It's like a cast-tier system. You have to find the sweet spot for all the dials for that individual. Did I just say cast-tier system? I think I just totally dated myself. Anyway, you sort of get what I'm saying there. So I'm just mindful of time as well for you, Jade, because I know it's nighted. One of the questions that I really wanted to hear from you is, you're nine, 10 years in, there were a bunch of unexpected hard things when you started this journey 10, 14 years ago, when you started your computer science journey and you know, your uni journey or whatever. And now you're in Microsoft, you've been promoted to senior engineer there. What are the hard things about actually being in the profession versus learning and preparing to be in the profession? Like what are the unexpected things that you wish you had known 10 years ago or five years ago about what you do today? I guess this is more like a personal, it's not necessarily a computer science related as such. I think this is one of the things that really like was a bit of a woe to me from someone who kind of grew up with without a lot of money. Like, you know, my mum was on 10,000 pounds a year, which is not a lot of money, 10,000 pounds. And then my dad was on sick because he has some like a lung condition. And one thing that's really like, oh, it's been quite difficult for me. It's just seeing how like easy people just throw money at things. So seeing how much waste there is with everything that there is, like seeing how much businesses waste money, seeing how like, you know, millions of dollars get just wasted on nothing, on millions of pounds, you know, seeing like, you know, you know, people like prime ministers and stuff like that, you know, they get a wage, but the wage isn't really the wage is it's like, it's, it's like a tip kind of thing. And it's things like that, like, getting kind of been brought up into that industry is quite a big, big shot, because tech is quite a big paying industry. And it's kind of a culture shock a little bit. In terms of tech, the things that has been surprising really is just the shift, like in things quite often, when I started it, everything was on prem. And when I started, like, you know, cloud wasn't really really a thing, you know, it was quite normal to have like, release cycles that were like six months or three months long. Whereas now, like, you know, you do daily builds and deploys. So just the speed of things and the way that you have to constantly advance is quite is quite a big shock. And I think, unless you've been like, at those places where like, you see software done that way, you just don't you just don't get it. You just you don't see how much the transformation these, you know, and so that's been the biggest culture shock. I think it's interesting you say that. So on the sort of financial splurgy profligacy side, that's a very tech thing, and especially pronounced in big tech. Now, I spent most of my career outside of tech, right? Well, it's coming on to now, you know, 75% of my career outside tech. And even today, like last week, a friend of mine was going to the airport, and she lives far away from the airport. And so the conversation was, do you drive with her employers with the CEO of that small business unit that does, you know, $40 million a year? Not a lot, like big tech standards, but it's a lot for a small business to do $40 million in revenue. And the conversation was, well, do you want to drive to the airport and park there? Or is it cheaper to take an Uber, which is cheaper? Right now we're talking about a difference of maybe 50 bucks. Right. But the conversation is still being had because that's the right thing to do by well, what's what's the most cost effective way? That's not a conversation people have in tech, unless it's tens of thousands of dollars. You know, if it's a difference of a few tens of thousands of dollars, okay, we'll have the conversation. But if it's a few hundred bucks, no one's going to talk about it, you know? And that mentality shift, most of the world doesn't live in the tech bubble. Right? Most of the world lives in low margin, difficult to survive businesses that aren't cash cows, you know, that don't have 80% margin in their product. Like that's not normal. And equally, I think a lot of people who struggle, I recently posted on this on LinkedIn as well, is a lot of people don't understand that the job market existed before LinkedIn, you know, and we think that the way to apply for a job is via LinkedIn. And so they get into this loop of trying to hit the button, the apply button all the time, instead of, you know, taking a systematic approach that you sort of did even eight years ago. Now, you may have used LinkedIn to actually go the final mile, but you did a lot of preparation to separate yourself out on the market. And, you know, presumably sort of had to build certain relationships and reach out. I think we're getting to a point where people are just thinking that hitting a button is what getting jobs is all about. And it's never been that way. Like these are some of the big shifts that have happened the last 10 years that never used to be there. We also have to evolve according to the industry we're in. And I think a lot of people don't really realize the game that's being played. And I use the word game, it's a bit of a crass word, but I don't mean it in that crass sense. I mean, there is a sport that is being played and has its rules. And those rules can often be eternal regardless of what gear you're using to play that sport. Yeah. So, yeah, no, thanks for that perspective. One last thing before I let you go, given that you've shared so honestly about, you know, the financial circumstances in which you grew up and you've come a long way. And with that comes your own mental models of the world and what's right and what's wrong and how money should be used and all that. This, I think is a really good question for someone like you. Should someone change their career and become a programmer because it'll pay them double? Is that a good reason? And it's going to be a long answer, I know that. It's an interesting one, like, because I, when I got into tech, it wasn't like, I didn't hear about like these insane salaries that like people are hearing about now because it wasn't as, social media was there, but it wasn't as much of a thing. And like, you didn't have like these tech influencers, like, you know, talking about like these, you know, killer salaries that they're on. What I would say is that the majority of, at least in the UK, most developers are on those, those killer salaries. Like it's just not true. And another thing I'll just say is that it's a lot of effort to get, to get it. It's not like, it's not an easy thing. Like, and like at the moment I'm seeing my mentees put in lots and lots of effort and they're starting on, on what, 25 to 30,000 pounds a year, which is a very similar salary to like finance. It's very similar to law. It's a lot like, you know, it's not like a instant, you know, money doubling thing. It takes a long time. And in order to get to those salaries, those top salaries, you have to be good. And it's hard. Like, I think it's taken me, it's taken me eight years to get to the, to the salary that I'm on. So like eight, nine years. So it's, it's been a long time to get to that point. It's not been like, you know, an instant, you know, after two years, I've got that. And most, and some people might be able to get it that quickly. They, if they, you know, very intentionally they study law, they just are naturally gifted at it. But for the majority of people, that's just not the case. Yeah. And I think, you know, markets matter. Like the UK does pay less than the US. There's nothing you can do about that. That's just the market. And increasingly, I think that world has gone because tech was going through a period of growth and this is not unique to tech. Every growth industry in the history of, in the post-industrial revolution history of mankind has done the same thing. During the growth phase, there's an insane surge in salaries. Then there's a consolidation phase where the salaries start to sort of stabilize a little bit, maybe even drop a little bit as the market's demand and supply rebalances. And, you know, we've just seen the growth phase with tech the last 15 years, since the last recession, which was 15 years ago. And now it's going to stabilize a bit. The numbers are going to be high, but it's not going to be that meteoric thing where someone goes from 50 to 150 randomly. You know, it may happen in some pockets of AI now, but it's, it's, it's not necessarily going to happen. And that's not the right reason, I feel, to go into this because it's the wrong, it's the wrong expectation of exactly to say what the journey like, it's going to take way more time than people realize. So what do you think of this claim about, you know, which unfortunately, all bootcamps do, which I don't fully agree with, which is, you know, you can learn to go to 90 days and get, you know, 100k. Like, I don't believe any of that, because I don't see that as being true. What is your... No, getting to 100k, like quickly, it's just not something that is achievable. Like, but I've got like, I've had seniors reaching out to me who, you know, are trying to get to that, and it's not something that happens like instantly. Like, I think, you know, a more respectable salary, at least in the UK is between like 25 to 40, depending on where you are. But as a starter salary, that seems to be the norm for like an entry level position. I know that's different in the US, and I think US pay a lot more, but I think there's a lot more things that you need to pay for, like outside, like, you know, medical care and things like that. You can't compare. We do get attached to a lot though here, which is another, a completely separate point. One thing I think it's always just important to remember with boot camps is that they are ultimately self-serving in that they are getting money to, you know, to train people. And that's okay in terms of, you know, it's a business, but what they're going to be saying to you is quite, you know, is in their best interests. Yeah, but isn't that true of anything in the marketplace? For example, the employers that your employer, my employee, they're all businesses and they're paying, and people want to get paid for their skills. And so on the employment side, they're going to present things to you. Like you look at all the fancy brochures, you look at all the, this is what life in this company is, it's marketing, right? It's telling you, this is what you can expect in this company. This is the kind of lifestyle we can have and all the rest of that. And we will pay you a good salary to work with us to come apply. Right. And I think, yes, Kana. Yeah, but I think like, that's where you have to stop treating, like, this is where I'm a bit funny when people talk about loyalty to a company or anything like that. You need to start treating the business and what you're doing is a service. You are providing a service to the business. And if you start thinking about it in that way, and you start thinking of it as a mutual, like, you know, benefit, your benefit in the business and the business is benefiting you, it's a completely different way of working, completely different. It's a marketplace relationship. And that's why it's called the jobs marketplace. There's a buyer of services and there's you, the seller of services, and that's a transaction. And it doesn't have to be transactional in the negative sense, but that is the nature of the relationship, you know, and that's perfectly okay. And I guess the question really around the bootcamp thing is, or not just a bootcamp, any claim, a course, a, you know, medium blog that says that has this reductionist in my view thing that you can learn a code in 90 days. What is your view about that unreasonable expectation? And the reason I'm asking this Jade is so many people reach out to me and say, can you show me how to become a coder in the next 90 days? Because I'd like to run a hundred games. And I'm like, no, I don't think it's possible. I just don't think it's possible. You know, what is your view on that? So I think there are definitely like, there are definitely candidates who I've seen come out of a bootcamp and they have just knocked out the part. They've been brilliant, but it's not the most common thing. So like there was a mentee that I had who came out of her bootcamp, you gave her a task and she just completed them. And you were like, I was just like, wow, this is great. But that is just- Did she have no prior background in code or design or any of that? No, no, I'm pretty sure she didn't. And so she was really good, but like she, you know, if you gave her stuff, she would just get on and get on with it and learn it and study it. So I think she put in a lot of effort throughout that time to do that. And so you could see, like, I think companies could see that if they hire there, like maybe she wasn't the best now, but if they hire there, like, you know, she would, you know, learn what they needed her to learn. It wasn't a, okay, she doesn't know, like, you know, the language is what we had, but she has great potential. But what is quite, mostly quite common is that they're leaving a bootcamp and they're going to have to do some self-study for the next few months before they get that job. And the reason is, is because you learn a really high level surface level of knowledge at those boot camps. And then, and then when you actually need to start doing that in real life after the boot camps, you quickly realize that you don't have that. So I think it's quite common for them to get the API for you to get like the test to help you with it, get the test up and running, things like that. And if you get like a take home tech test and you can't do that yourself, but things like that are going to get quite transparent and, and companies are quite, have quite high expectations. And the reason why they have quite high expectations is because you're competing with people who are graduates. And, of computer science degrees. And, you know, people can say what they want about computer science degrees, but I learned how to do software engineering projects. I learned how to do like a game project, graphics design project. I learned computer vision, AI, all of that in my degree. And I have three years of learning. Yes. And this is the point that I think I'm trying to get to with this, because I've had this conversation with Clement Miloski from AlgoXpert and other people. It's like people obsess on the 90 days or the, you know, six months or whatever. It's kind of meaningless because you're competing against people who did five to 10 times that first, you know, in terms of they've done a formal degree, the average competitor will probably have one year of work experience, you know, for those. A lot of times you do a year in an industry as well. Correct. You know, or, you know, people will compete for junior jobs in the zero to three category. Some of them will have two years experience and you don't. Like that's one aspect of the competition. The other thing is kind of measuring my days is meaningless because your student who put in the time in 90 days, she was probably doing nine, 10 hours a day, which equates to about 900 hours in those 90 days, as opposed to other people who did maybe five hours a day. Right. And that's 450 hours. It's not even comparable at that point in time. Those extra 450 hours is not comparable. So in six months, you can absolutely learn enough to compete in the market. If you're doing 10, 12 hours a day, you know, or eight hours a day, like if you're doing a solid job, but so many people think, oh, I'm going to do this two hours a day, you know, 10 hours a week, maybe. And I'm going to be ready in 90 days. And I'm like, how, how's the, how are you going to be ready in 120 hours? And I think the, the challenge is like, if like there are going to be like a couple of people who are really good and just get it really, really naturally, but the majority of people don't like the majority of people, it takes time and that is fine. That is normal, but like, not everyone is going to be like, you know, like it find a super intuitive straight away. And it just takes, it just does take hours to get there and practice and continuously like doing different things and trying new things all the time. Yep. And when my students ask me, well, okay, how soon do you think I'll be ready? And I'm like, I don't know. I honestly don't know. The only honest answer I can give you is I don't know. Right. I can tell you what you need to do to get ready in six to 12 months. I can tell you that I can give you the full plan, but are you going to be ready in that time? I don't know. Are you going to put in the work or maybe you need more than the average, or maybe you need less than the average. I don't know. You know, no one can honestly know that. It's really hard to tell. And I, I usually try and get like a baseline of like, of, of where the mentees I have are at, because a lot of them have come from boot camps and it's completely different. Everyone's at completely different stage. Exactly. No, a hundred percent. Well, thank you for all that honesty. I know I've taken a lot of your evening way more than I wanted to. In terms of those who are looking to change careers, and I know this is not entirely necessarily fair since you've sort of not come into the computer science world from outside the computer science world, but in terms of people who are looking to change careers, what would you say to them to help them set their expectations correctly about the competition they're going to face? I think, I think it's about identifying what the gaps are. I think the ones who, who succeed are constantly looking at, okay, what are these people doing who are getting interviewed and getting jobs that I don't have at the moment? And so like a lot of the mentees that I worked with who, who got jobs was like, okay, well, like I noticed that like, you know, the boot camp graduates who, who have got jobs pretty quickly have like STEM, STEM backgrounds, for example, and things like that. And so, okay, I know I need to like, you know, try and bridge that gap of what, me not having like having a degree or like one of my mentees recently had an interview and he was like, okay, I saw like, you know, there's a lot, a lot of us who, who had degrees, but then some of it, some people who were going into that, into that day who hadn't done any computer science at all. And so he was quite a strong candidate because he, you know, done a lot of preparation for it because he'd been a computer scientist. So it's, they, they identify like what it is that they don't have and they work on it. Yeah. So it's about closing the gaps between you and the competition, which is, I mean, I spent an enormous amount of time with my students in that because it is different in every market. So it almost doesn't matter. For example, sorry, let me complete that thought. It almost doesn't matter what you know, what matters is what everybody else knows because you've got to compete at that level. So for example, I have a lot of students, you know, came to me from Canada and other parts of the U S and the UK as well, in fact, and Australia now that I think of it over the years, but each market's different, right? What they require in that market is different. So cities that have fan companies, the overall bar is way higher than cities that don't have a company. And it stands to reason, right? So the gaps that need to be filled are great in, in these cities. So I'm glad you sort of, you know, sort of shared that perspective because it's one thing for, you know, me as a non-computer science graduate to say that, it's another thing for you to say that as well. So I think it adds a lot more credence to that. Yeah. And I think, I think I, especially like the UK market, like I typically with my mentorship that is helping candidates get jobs is the UK market. Cause I understand the UK market quite well. I understand what they're looking for with, with candidates. But I think, especially in like, like markets like U S and India, DSA seems very, very, very like important there. Like, where it's here, like they, they do, they do do it in a lot of companies, but nowhere near the, the skill. Yeah. In my experience, it's not, especially in a country like, in a country like U S and India, it's not as much as it, as social media makes it out to be. And this is the thing I keep telling people like social media will signal exactly as you said earlier, Jade, those outliers salaries seem normal on social media. They're not, you know, and that 300 K salary, somebody who's 24 year old is pulling out at least, you know, 60% of that is probably stock, not cash. And there are serious implications to what that means to you. End of your cashflow, you know, when you pay taxes, like people don't realize that there's all this hidden stuff in that, you know India is actually much more conscious of your professional qualifications than, you know, the DSA stuff necessarily, depending on the kind of job it's. And it's really hard to know the local market unless you spend a great deal of time investigating it and working with people through it. And it changes like stuff that was working two years ago, doesn't work. The job market's exactly like any other business. Things that worked two years ago don't work anymore. And so you need to constantly test, iterate, loop over and over and over to find exactly what you said, the gaps, and then evolve your strategy to fill those gaps in a way that's competitive. And it's one thing to learn the skills. It's a completely different skill to actually get someone to take a chance on you and interview you because it's expensive to interview. It's so expensive to run people through the interview process. And so to even get them to give you a chance to interview, it's a completely different skill from being able to write and build programs. It just is. But on that point, actually, if they're not ready, then the interview is pointless at that point, I think. Like if they're not ready for it, like you kind of have to have a conversation. We need to work on getting you ready for it because if you go into that interview, you aren't going to pass it and it's going to just affect you like morally. Yeah. So like, to be honest, I've definitely failed way more interviews than I've passed, even when I was ready. And I think I've just come to accept that when I was in the interviewing side at Google as well, I noticed that some great candidates just didn't have a good day, or they just didn't know the problem, or they just didn't reason through it enough, or compared to somebody else that day, they didn't rank that well. Yeah. It's so hard to know when you're ready, but you have to have a baseline level of readiness, a baseline level of competence to be able to do the interviews. And running into that prematurely is just going to damage your confidence exactly as you say. That's part of the reason I tell people, I don't know how much time it'll take you. Ask me in three months, I'll have a better sense. But you know. Yeah. I think those first few months of working with someone is like hard because it's hard to get a sense of like how quickly they learn, how quickly, you know, what their current baseline is, how they learn. It's a very, how much effort they're putting in. There's so many different things that you just can't judge at the beginning of when you work with someone. Yeah. And that's what I tell people when I'm like, give me six to 12 months, and you know, we will work on this together. Don't quit your job. We'll do it together because it'll take me at least six to eight weeks to baseline you. And they're like, hang on, but I can do a bootcamp in that time. And I'm like, then do it. If that's what you think is going to work for you, then do it. But I'm telling you to get professional level skills, you're kidding yourself if you think you can do it in eight or 10 weeks, you're just not going to be able to. It's a whole industry. Nobody pays somebody a good wage for something you learned in eight weeks. You know, it's just not likely to happen. And after that, you've just got to learn a ton of stuff that's industry specific as well. So thank you so much for your very generous use of your time. Appreciate it. And as always, I always learn something when I either read your stuff or talk to you about things. So I really appreciate you doing that. And yeah, I'll link to all the socials and all of that, but thank you above all for just wanting to help people. I think there's not that many of us who try to do this in a way that's, you know, that's sincere and honest, like, you know, and not hypey or not clickbaity and I really respect that. So thank you, Jade. And thank you for having me. It's been great. Honestly, I feel like I could chat to you about this stuff for so long. Like I just can't stop talking about stuff just because it's interesting and it's fascinating. We have very similar interests in terms of helping people get into the industry, I think. So it's just really interesting to talk with someone about this. Maybe we should get a bunch of us together and just have five questions and different perspectives on those questions and see, because there is no one true answer to any of this. If there was a formula, it'd be written somewhere and everyone would be following it. And the beauty of this is that it's so nuanced and the more people realize that there's a nuance that works for them, the better. So maybe I'll think of organizing something where four or five of us get together, address some of these thorny questions, or we can ask the community for questions. You know, they're burning. Just do one of those LinkedIn live things. Yeah. Okay. I'll put that together. That actions on me, I think it'll be fun. It'll be a fun conversation. We'll try and get some people probably going to be who I'm going to try and find people who disagree with me as well. Cause I think that that's a lot more interesting to sort of dive into those topics. You know, it'll be fun. I'll leave that with me. I'll find something for us. All right, Jade, get back to your family. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Have a great weekend.
