A newsletter edition for these ‘strange times’

You are reading Compiler, a software engineering newsletter by Triplebyte editor Daniel Bean that delivers regular reportings and rantings on the industry's top news, trends and interesting players. 

Hello again, everyone! It’s been a while since my last edition. At least a month, right? Or longer? If I could put my finger on what day of the week it is today, I could probably say for sure...

Anyway, a lot has changed since I last pinged your inbox, so allow me to be the thousandth person to tell you that we are now living in “strange times.” And that means as I restart this newsletter as part of my new gig at Triplebyte, it’s going to be hard to get my hands to type anything that isn’t about how our professional and personal lives have been turned upside down by a global pandemic. At least for a bit.

But the truth is that a lot of people do need help right now, so maybe that’s OK. For the purposes of this newsletter, help could come as tips on how to best stay connected to your engineering team while you’re all sheltered in place apart. It could also come as a lead for replacing the dev job you were just laid off from. (That’s essentially what Triplebyte does, after all.) Or, on the other hand, maybe we could all benefit from something in our inboxes to read that takes our minds off of anything COVID-19-related in any way, shape or form.

In the coming editions of Compiler, I’m going to try to provide all of the above from week to week. But to figure out how I can best assist in “these times,” I’d love to hear what topics, stories and questions about the software engineering industry you think need more attention right now. Shoot me all of your ideas at [email protected] or through a comment or message to me here on LinkedIn.

For now, below are some things from the week that I thought were worth sharing.

News

DevOps companies are in best shape to weather this economic downturn. That’s according to a recent piece at Business Insider that polled venture capitalists on the topic. The tech investors said that companies like CircleCI, Honeycomb and Gatsby (among other deployment-based tools outfits) will excel in 2020 despite the overall tech industry headwinds. The reason: Their products help other tech companies become more efficient in these financially uncertain times by enabling them to “do more with less time" and even automate a lot of dev tasks.

"While most categories will take a short-term hit, DevOps will be as resilient as any category of IT spend moving forward," Ed Sim, founder and managing partner at Boldstart Ventures, told Business Insider.

Many U.S. states want to know: How are your COBOL language skills? As unemployment claims reach record highs across the country, states like New Jersey, Kansas and Connecticut are looking for more programmer help to process them. Of course, those who aren’t up-to-speed on a certain computer language from the 1950s – i.e. most fresh engineers in the field today – need not apply. "Many American universities have not taught COBOL in their computer science programs since the 1980s," cybersecurity expert Joseph Steinberg told CNN, which reports that several states were on the final stages of modernizing their systems before COVID-19 struck. Amid these states’ calls for experienced programming help, some long-tenured engineers like Twitter’s director of software engineering Kathleen Vignos have taken to social media to joke about their far-flung work with COBOL.

Perspectives

Some well-timed words of wisdom from a dot-com bubble survivor. Though we probably don’t have a lot of historical comparisons to draw for new grads entering the turbulent tech industry today, the turn-of-the century dot-com bust can probably teach some lessons. Built In CTO Peter Evans penned an essay this week about his inauspicious start as a programmer in 2001 and why he believes that, as they did for him then, things will get better for young tech careerists starting out today.

"You are not working from home. You are at your home during a crisis trying to work." I like this recent blog by business tech consultant Helen Anderson that tells us why it’s important (and shows us how) to be more human during this extended time of WFH. Take email and messaging conversations to phone or video calls more often and be overall more communicative with coworkers, she suggests. And on the other hand, we shouldn’t be afraid to set our Slack statuses to away and flex our on-the-clock hours to accommodate our in-flux personal lives. You can read the rest of Anderson’s tips over at DEV.to.

From Triplebyte

We are all doing remote interviews now. A recent blog posted at Triplebyte dishes some tips on how to retool an onsite engineering interview to a video call without missing a beat. Making sure to maintain eye contact with an interviewee, use plenty of aural feedback and go lengths to describe office culture are some of the important points we’ve learned from conducting over 28,000 remote interviews with candidates that have come through our platform. You can read more here.

Yes, tech companies are still hiring! Here are some prime-for-the-taking software engineering jobs posted on Triplebyte right now:

• Application Engineer at Instabase in San Francisco or New York City
• Front-end/Product Engineer at Heap (Remote position)
• Full Stack Web Engineer at Liftoff in Seattle
• Developer Tools Engineer at Palantir in Silicon Valley or New York City

Volunteering your talents

Ask any expert on the COVID-19 case and they’ll tell you that refining and gathering data on the spread of the virus is going to be incredibly important in getting to the other side of this pandemic as soon as possible. For software engineers interested in devoting some of their skills and time to that cause, the team at Triplebyte has put together a list of places looking for help:

• Coronavirus Tech Handbook
• Helpful Engineering
• Help with COVID
• COVID-19 Response
• 80,000 Hours

Triplebyte helps engineers assess and showcase their technical skills and connects them with great opportunities. You can get started here.