How I got hired

Evil Martians, 2010

This was back in 2010 or early 2011, I think. I’ve met the founding team on a Ruby on Rails meetup where I presented a half-assed pivotal tracker automation service that my friend and I hacked together over a weekend. It marked tickets in-progress / closed based on Github pull request titles, [Closes PROJ-{XYZ}] kind of thing. Alexander had to be a smart ass and ask “Cool, we use Pivotal Tracker, does your thing do HTTPS?”. Anyway, I applied for their software engineer positions, and got a polite no thank you. In a few months, they’ve been looking for someone who knows Russian, English, and Ruby to translate between and help with sales and engineering, so they reached out.

They ultimately hired me into the role that requireds communications, execution, and half-decent engineering. By the time we had our interviews, I was in a mix of product / engineering roles at a Russian AWS clone, presented at conferences, and ran whole co-sponsorship program with the largest high load / distributed systems conference in Russia. Credentialed.

I only got hired because they’ve already seen me do the job.

Retail Zipline, 2021

I’ve worked at Evil Martians for a long time. I loved what I learned to do there! That team hit above it’s weight. By 2021, I’ve worked with several companies I was curious about, and at some point, two of them poked around the “Hey, do you want to join us full time?” topic. Zipline was one of them, Teleport was the other.

Zipline hired me to do what I already did for them for a year. Twice-a-week standups, supporting engineers on both Martian and Zipline side, driving product conversations, and owning problems end to end.

Teleport conversations happened for the same reason – by the time we talked, I’ve worked closely with their engineering and product managers, and contributed to their plugin ecosystem. Once again, I got into conversations and ultimately got hired to do what I’ve already proven to do well.

Airbyte, 2023

Then comes the most interesting part. After two years as a director senior eng manager with an overinflated title and understimulated brain at Zipline, I was out for new adventures, and I wanted to break into devtools. But if we follow the principle of “you get hired to do what you already demonstrated doing well”, who would hire me into dev tools if all I have to show for it is a few PRs in Go for Teleport? So I got to work.

Apple

Ah, let’s start with some prior history. I’ve had three years of interviews at Apple, that became a November tradition. First time, it was a referral into XCode Cloud team, with a potential relo to Vancouver, and I didn’t make a good impression on the manager, whoops.

Second pass was for a different team, with heavy open source presence, and I really, really wanted to get in. I love this team to this day, but, it didn’t pan out, after a long, and a really weird process. That was still 2022 I think, I was at Zipline. Rejection dysphoria is very real in this one ** points into own’s head ** so I got to work.

I have a whole Kanban board in Obsidian with mapping Apple’s open source projects, my contributions to them, issues I worked on, people I interacted with, and their teams at Apple. I’ve had a LOT of fun, and I’ve learned a lot, and I love Swift to this day, despite it’s perfectly fucked complexity level in concurrency model.

That work scored me the third pass of interviews, and several follow-ups, and another loop, and some very fun follow-ups. Fool me thrice, can’t fool me again.

Sentry

At the same time as the third pass at Apple, I’ve met some absolutely awesome folks at Sentry and started interviewing with them, and got an offer! My heart have never raced so much as on the call with Zach the recruiter when he brought me the news. Me! In Sentry! In a devtool company! And even remote! YES! And my future boss would also be an amazing human being.

I screwed it up ;) I said I needed some more time (to hear back from Apple), they said okay. I ultimately declined the offer because I was waiting on Apple, and had high confidence. Imagine my surprise when that footgunned me.

Sentry folks were kind enough to go back into a conversation, but for an IC role. So I started, you know, doing the only thing I know how to do — shipping. Oh yeah Sentry is source available under FSL btw, you can go fix bugs that annoy you. I fixed a couple. That worked, in fun ways — a few folks reached out, from different teams, and asked if I’d be interested in joining.

Airbyte

I was closing in on other conversations (dodged a bullet on one, for sure), and had a final company I thought I’ll talk to — Airbyte. 🖤

This was a full YOLO mode chat. I’ve had other offers, I wanted to meet great humans, and I interviewed with the guy who made Task Rabbit, from scratch, and sold the whole thing. So naturally I spent a day googling him and watching every video I could find. The interview was arguably my pilot run for my future standup comedy set, but seemingly, that worked. Brian asked what I was looking for, and I said what I truly meant – to support a lean and mean kick-ass team building opensource or source available dev tools with viable business behind it, and ship hella fast. I mentioned some credentials and contributions to SwiftNIO. He looked them up on our call, and with rounded eyes said “you call that A FEW!?”.

Anyway, in about 18 months of working together he said ”You know, I think I’ve head enough Natiks in my career”. Choo choo bitches.

Once again, I got hired to do what I proved I do well — communicate with engineers from other companies clearly, efficiently, and drive change in an open source project.

Lambda

Frankly not clear why Lambda sourcers reached out, but somewhat clear what clicked throughout the interview process. Clarity, honesty, directness, and showing that I can ship software, and support (a community of) other enginers. Having all my Airbyte work out there in the open definitely helped.

I don’t know if this helps anyone – this is really a story, not an advice on how to land jobs. This worked for me, and I believe the the principle behind this is solid. But it takes a lot of time to build up evidence of strong work. I don’t think there are shortcuts to this, or rather, I have not discovered them. It helps if you invest your time and work on things that compound together. If you truly like what you do (for fun / hobby / at work), AND it builds up your body of work that shows your worth – the cycle becomes much easier.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a LOT of luck throughout every career move I made, too. I can explain away that I’ve had public evidence of my work to my heart’s content, but ultimately, several people took a chance on me in situation where on paper in the resume, nothing guaranteed them I am actually good at whatever they needed.

If I was looking for a job today, I would not waste time filling out cold applications. If you’re in the market, work with folks you know already. If you absolutely have to start cold, focus on a few niches or companies and bring value by doing work in the open. Tech as an industry makes this feasible.