Hiring Post 2020 Experiment - the results are finally in!

It's been a crazy ride in the past 1 and a half years. There is so much to learn in such little time, I absolutely love it, in fact I CRAVE it.

I will be sharing about 2 very important companies: Peerlogic and Solvestack. I literally ran 2 companies, which you shouldn't really do (according to investors), but I did it anyway both as an experiment and as my way of paying it forward. Here were my results! They're pretty astounding.

In June of 2020, I was working at Attainia, a small hospital equipment planning company. On the side, I created a free mentorship community called Solvestack to help people get exposure to code and ask dumb questions, so they can get through the hardest foundational aspects of coding. I had friends begging me to teach them because their bootcamps and online curriculums were filled with jargon. (I felt for them because 12 years ago, I gave up 3 times on learning to code. It wasn't easy but I eventually found my way, it was worth it. I have another LI blog post about that if you'd like to check it out.)

In 2020, as many people woke up and realized that they won't live forever, and asked themselves, "What is my work really like without all the camaraderie?" I had already had a bootstrap fund saved for leaving work and starting my startup, as I had dreamed of doing since high school. I had originally planned for saving it until I had a full 24 months of expenses.

In September of 2020, I also decided to help out a founder Ryan A. Miller here in Scottsdale on nights and weekends for some extra cash for my bootstrap fund. I had fun with this experiment. After a while, it became clear that my enjoyment working there was way higher. The autonomy is nuts.

When weighing the options of compensation, there are a couple of things that will keep you addicted to a company. One is salary. There are others, but the main lever is autonomy.

After my boss Alex Maskovyak at Attainia left in August 2020, the ability to complete work there got really difficult. I led a team of engineers, but yet we had a ton of rework to do every sprint because our product team had lost their engineering translator - you know, the one that translates the need into real value provided, because they break down the problem into individual steps, and tasks for others to work on, with sound architectural knowledge. I tried to fill his big shoes, but the product team had no understanding they needed this translation anymore. My individual autonomy KPI went from a nice even 60-80% satisfaction rate to a 10%. The only thing keeping it at 10% was my amazing engineering direct reports who I could count on to execute flawlessly, and solve tough problems as we discovered more issues with our requirements.

It turned out, the nice, sweet salary milk dripping into my veins was just not as appealing as the stronger stuff - autonomy. I could go as fast as I wanted, and get real feedback.

In addition, I also decided to accelerate my timeline to start a company, because I felt like I was dying inside working for the man. My flame was flickering. I'm so glad because today, my inner flame is like a badass bonfire.

At the end of September 2020, at the 3 year anniversary being at Attainia, I told Ryan, I was ready to join full time, as a co-founder. We were working through a Call Pop program to show patient information from the phone system at the beginning. Wow, our focus has completely changed since we were working on that.

Anyway, back to Solvestack. I started to see some real consistency with these mentees, some attending every week, desperately hungry. They were begging me for a job during the hiring freeze of 2020 - and some even asked to work for free. I weighed the options here. How do I get them the experience they need while the competition is so fierce?! And, do it ethically. As an early stage startup, you really don't have much capital available for top talent that was execute quickly on the right things, let alone junior engineers.

In November 2020, I had made enough progress with the foundational aspects of our REST API to hand it off to someone new to coding to pick up on the pattern and code it. Instead of working on what was more of a soothing, repetitive motion of making basic read endpoints for dental practices to securely get patient data on their screen from Dentrix, I thought, why don't I work on something else that needs a new foundation, and have someone else do this?

We did all within our power to make room for the mentees, and created a pilot of what I call true apprenticeship, coming back to the old days, when people would sweep the floors and learn from the experts at the printing press.

It's called Solvestack Apprenticeship Program. I'm a SAP for people who are determined to learn to code. Hah! It was a ramp-up program with minimum wage to start. And the job description started with 8 hours a week, in office, all of us with masks on when closer than 6 feet. Looking over their screen and directing them is much easier, I would have gone nuts with trying to help solve issues remotely. Just. Not for me. I also wanted discussions I had with one apprentice to influence the other apprentice - for example, by explaining something to one person on a whiteboard, unlocked concepts for both of them. Double whammy!

I created a coding challenge, and after that screening, interviewed 10 candidates some of which were Solvestack, others not. It turns out the ones best prepared for the interview and the best culture fit were from Solvestack. After 2 sweaty weeks of interviews (these kids, man they were nervous!), I hired 2 mentees from the free Solvestack Mentorship community in December 2020 into Peerlogic.

8 hours a week for a full month of December. One of them decided to show up and treat it like a full time job because she had the means to, even though we couldn't pay her. I witnessed her accelerate her learning by 10x, because of her consistency and continuity.

It was clear, that so far, I was right. I mean, yea, you bet, the first two months were super painful for all of us. The learning curve was a lot. But these two seemed to settle in and get the swing of it. Then in January 2021, we decided, it was worth it to have them ramp up to 16 hours a week. After two of those went by, we decided to have them at 32 hours a week.

Ryan and I made a plan to have them full time in a couple months, and planned their first raises for each quarter.

They moved from the backend into the frontend and back. Each time they worked with a new framework, we bought them access to a course on the framework. They worked through it and soaked it up like sponges. Then there was 2 weeks to a month of ramp for actually getting their feet wet with the new framework.

I won't get into the weeds, but I will say, the tech stack at Peerlogic during that time was vast.

• We had desktop application written in Electron.js, Nuxt and Vue.js to give front office callpop alerts when a patient was calling. And a brittle library for old Windows 7 machines to be able to give system notifications that broke when you used your own logo in it. (Yes, dental software is very far behind).
• We had a Dentrix REST API, a Call/SMS REST API & webhooks, and a Machine Learning pipeline to process call audio, using many natural language processing libraries.
• Authentication for all of these backends was atrocious as well
• We were in the process of creating an Inbox that didn't suck compared to our previous SMS offering. Think Hubspot for Dental office staff to manage conversations with patients, that lets you assign staff to the entire span of the conversation - including every type of interaction: call history, SMS messaging, fax, and voicemail.

Nerd mode, skip if not relevant:

We were teaching them Git, and to always pull down the latest code to your local machine before making a new feature or bugfix. To use comments. And spell out variable names. Early escape if statements and returns, instead of if/else indents! And most importantly, how to methodically problem solve, and use clear communication when describing systems and issues with other engineers.

Having them both in the office together was good because when I worked on the new Inbox product, met with investors, or fixed a memory leak in our Dentrix REST API's OBDC driver, they could at least have another set of eyes nearby to help each other figure out things and get unstuck from time to time.

We started having 1:1s every month, to get professional goals written down and worked toward.

And, in February 2021, remember my boss Alex who left Attainia? Guess who got bored of a semi-retirement and decided to join me. I sighed with relief after he said yes. I knew we were gonna be able to pull everything off.

Well, once we came aboard, he was an amazing resource for them. He loves explaining things.

It was still a balancing act, but as time went on, they were fully empowered to start work on a completely new analytics dashboard in March 2021, from scratch.

They divided up the components and worked on each one. They navigated team dynamics. One was very creative, determined, and sometimes trying to go too fast and missing details when we were stressed for deadlines. She picked out a template that was absolutely astoundingly beautiful for a first time UI. She was a great frontend architect for only a few months of being there. The other was methodical and slow, documenting her whole brain out, but steady, making progress every couple of weeks, like clockwork. She would be super stressed that she wasn't building quickly enough, but in actuality was working at a perfect pace for her experience level.

They complemented each other well. One would help the other slow down and get organized, and once doing so, see the solution, and the other would explain how sometimes you just have to try things out and watch it break or succeed in your test environment and keep trying and trying, instead of reading the whole internet.

These are normal flaws for junior engineers to have, but it seemed like in the Chaos of a startup, they learned their way out of them very fast!

I will say, it would have been faster to code it in the first 6 months of their training. July 2021, month 6 is when they felt more autonomous and I could really focus on the toughest problems with Alex and go ninja mode on other projects.

I could go on about their amazing progression. I tried to partner with a recruitment firm to see if we could get more mentees into such a program. They were initially excited but turned them down because the market was so stiff with exact needs still after COVID - a year of experience was required.

I will skip ahead to the best part. December 2021, like clockwork, like magic, the recruiters flooded my mentees' inbox. After the magical one year mark of working at a company, their offers were for well over $100,000. I am super proud of them and blown away. We could not match it at the stage we're at, and it's exactly what I would have done in their shoes with my shit wage.

My next batch of the SAP will include a few more rules this time - like, an Income Share agreement if you decide to bounce after a year. I mean, I worked really hard in the early stages to train them up to their level. It's gotta be worth it, and win/win for the company. And, mandatory one-on-ones, and a formal ramp-up program contract.

I will be doing another batch at companies who see the value of this program and who are stretched thin right now for talent, while my undervalued mentees are in a perpetual purgatory waiting for an opportunity. What. The. Fuck. The value here is obvious.

If you're not winning the talent war, what can you do differently?

If you feel called to try this at your company with vetted and quality mentees, let me know. I have a pipeline waiting.