Landing Your Next Developer Job

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Renaud Bressant (Head of Product), Nathanael Lamellière (Head of Customer Success and Solution Engineer), Nouha Chhih (Developer Experience Manager) will be looking at the different developer jobs that you can accounter when looking for your next developer role. We'll be explaining the specifics of each role, to help you identify which one could be your next move. We'll also be sharing tips to help you navigate the recruitment process, based on the different roles we interviewed for as recruiters, but also as candidates. This will be more of an Ask Us Anything session, so don't hesitate to share your thoughts and questions during the session.

This workshop has been presented at React Summit Remote Edition 2021, check out the latest edition of this React Conference.

FAQ

The main focus of the webinar is to explore various developer roles and to provide guidance on finding your next developer role. It includes discussions on different responsibilities in front end and back end roles and how these roles help in smoothing operations between teams.

The webinar mentions several team members including Sadek, who is setting up the webinar, Francois W., who is involved in business operations, and Nouha, who works with a team called developer experience.

Nouha works with the developer experience team, which operates between developer relations and developer experience. This team focuses on enhancing how the product functions for developers, improving documentation, and providing feedback to the product team to improve both the product and associated resources.

The webinar discusses several roles, including Solutions Engineer, Documentation Engineer, Developer Experience, and Growth Engineer. These roles are chosen based on the interests of the participants.

A Solutions Engineer in the context of the webinar is described as a role that bridges the gap between technical products and customers. They assist the sales team by providing technical expertise during the pre-sale cycle, onboarding, and post-sales processes. They work on developing custom demos and supporting proof of concept stages to demonstrate how products can meet client needs.

The webinar encourages participants to discuss and ask questions about various job roles, emphasizing a personalized approach. It suggests evaluating roles based on personal interests and skills, and provides opportunities for participants to learn more about specific roles they are interested in.

Sadek Drobi
Sadek Drobi
Nouha Chhih
Nouha Chhih
Francois Bohyn
Francois Bohyn
121 min
10 Jun, 2021

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Video Summary and Transcription

The Workshop discusses various roles in software development, including solution engineering, documentation engineering, growth engineering, and developer experience. It emphasizes the importance of finding the right fit and aligning personal interests and skills with job opportunities. The speakers provide insights into the recruitment process, salary negotiation, and the value of collaboration and learning. The Workshop also highlights the need for transparency and communication during salary discussions, as well as the importance of prioritizing personal growth and gaining relevant experience.

1. Finding Your Next Developer Role

Short description:

The webinar focuses on finding your next developer role and explores different roles and responsibilities within the industry. The speakers discuss their experiences and the skills required for various roles. They also encourage the audience to ask questions and share job preferences. The session starts with an introduction to Solution Engineer and emphasizes the diversity of skills and opportunities available to developers. The speakers aim to challenge stereotypes and highlight the wide range of roles that developers can pursue.

React. React. React. React. React. React. React. React. Okay, so hi, everybody. The goal, well, the topic of this webinar is finding your next developer role. And so, what we've been looking at, I don't know if you can put the camera on me because everyone is looking at Phil and I'm the one talking. People like to look at me, I've been told. You can do the intro. Yeah, okay. Back. There we are. Oh, no. Okay. Back to me. Cool. I guess I'll do the intro. Yeah, so the idea of what we're doing today is more of a kind of a workshop about, like we were talking about developer roles which are just front end, back end kind of roles that plug gaps between teams and kind of help companies work smoother and the different roles that that might exist and what the responsibilities are and that's why we've kind of got a kind of a mixed crew here. We've got Sadek who's currently getting us all set up. We've got Francois W. who's more in terms of business. Yeah, business operations. Yeah, and Nouha something very similar. You can maybe explain that a bit better yourself. Yeah, so I work with a team called developer experience. So we do something between developer relations and developer experience. So work on how much the product works well for developers and trying to bring as much feedback as we can to the product team to try to improve both the product and the documentation and everything that's around the product. But we'll look a bit more into it. Yeah, that means that because Luha does that sort of role, she works very closely with myself who is on the education team. Yeah. And we kind of try to bridge the gaps that exist between the developers and us here at Prismic. We try to get that information as quickly and as efficiently as possible to you, the users, so that we can make that process as smooth as possible. So that's what we're going to be talking about. So, it's all those different roles that you may do and what exists in it, and then we'll move into what we've learned in our process of hiring and also the people that are being hired, the things that we've learned over the years and how can we give that information to you and answer any of your questions that you have in regards to any of that stuff. So, we selected some of the job posts that we think might be relevant to you, but this is more meant to be a discussion, so if you have any question feel free to ask and we can also talk about these roles and answer any question that you might have about any other role. So, Daria shared with you a little type form, I think today, asking you which roles you'd be interested in knowing more about. And so the first ones that we'll be talking about are Solutions Engineer, Documentation Engineer, Developer Experience, and Growth Engineer, which are the ones that those of you who answered wanted to know more about. So, we'll look a bit into these. Each person will explain what their team is doing when it's a role that is related to their team. And then, of course, you're free to ask any question. So, should we start with Solution Engineer? Let's go. Let's go and talk about Solutions Engineering, Solution Officer. Saadiq, Saadiq is joining. So, no, the meeting is not specific for Prismic. We're talking about jobs in general, jobs that are also related to some of the stuff that we're doing, but it's not specifically about us, it's about the job in the industry. Yeah, I'm waiting to get a camera on me, but the thing is the idea is, I mean, I'm, and so basically I'm a developer and I felt that sometimes, ourselves we stereotype ourselves too much, and especially the industry gets to stereotype us into like, okay, developers mean write code for like 24 hours, seven days a week, and that's all about it, right? Code, code, code, code which I find that is not true. Absolutely not true. I mean, all the developers that I knew, they did something else in their life, right? They did music, they had guitars, they, my sound, I should speak here, yeah? So, they did something else. They had their, they were passionate about music, about image, about video, about so many different things that that was putting them into some kind of category and I hated that. And I was always thinking like I'm a developer but I can understand a product, I can understand this, I can do more, why should I be in this role? And front end or back end, I didn't like that kind of choice. It's too much, too few for me. So, myself, I evolved into different roles and I'm a software architect and I got more interested in the product and then I became a CEO and all of these kinds of things. But now, in the company, when we're doing this, when we're doing Prismic and building Prismic, we're discovering that there's so much horizon for developers and not as horizon as in things that will be paid less. Actually, things will be paid as much or more, but you need to have some skills and it depends who you are. Some people have some kind of good communication skills. Well, that's great. Developer plus communication or developer plus finding solutions or developer plus growth. This is something that Francois could talk about. Being that person that would care a lot about the business, about how it goes and how can we get more adoption and it will be about numbers, but still a developer, you need to do so much software to get this right. Then you get all about relations, people that can build good relationship, content creation, writing, so many skills that a developer is at the center, of course, at the center, like a company like ours, for instance, it's at the center of everything. But there's a big horizon of, spectrum of jobs. And the idea is let's talk about these things. Maybe people are not aware of them because I wasn't aware that they existed. I don't know. Right now I can maybe right away say like 10 roles in the top of my head that today we have in developers. So this is the idea.

2. Understanding the Role of a Solution Engineer

Short description:

Let's talk about different roles and their importance. Some roles are related to personal interests and skills. The webinar aims to provide a perspective on various roles and help participants find a good fit. The discussion is not limited to Prismic and covers product companies in general. The speakers have interviewed people from different companies to gain insights. The first role discussed is the solution engineer, which varies depending on the company. Solution engineers help sell technical products to engineers and work in pre-sale, onboarding, and post-sales processes. They handle technical tasks, such as custom demos and proof of concept, as well as customer interactions. Solution engineers need to understand the ecosystem and find solutions to customer problems. They play a consultant-like role, bringing value to the sales process. Success in this role often comes from a background in agencies. The scope of the role may differ based on company size, with specialization in pre-sales, onboarding, or post-sales as the company grows.

Let's talk about these, explain what they are, and what's important about them. And then maybe you will find, like, oh, this looks more or less like me. I like that. I want to know more about it. Right? And some roles are really related to who you are and what you like to do. So we try to also touch a bit on this and try to give you a perspective on the personalities with whom we work. And for you, it will maybe be a good opportunity to see which one could be a good fit for you. And so just to answer Juan's question about the fact that maybe this is related to Prismic. I don't think it's related only to Prismic. I think it's for all kinds of product companies that have their product, but also have lots of different rules related to selling the product and talking about the product. So the idea here is not to sell Prismic or anything like that. This is certainly not the idea. The idea is we thought let's share what we know about these kinds of different jobs and let people know that they exist and that they can search about them. This is the topic. Yeah, we also interviewed a lot of people for these kind of jobs. So we learned not only about how we do it, but also about how other companies do it and what we should develop.

So maybe we can start. So yeah, I saw your question, Prabhu. Would it be possible that you post it on the Q and A so that I don't miss it? But yeah, of course, we'll touch on this. Prasad, do you wanna go ahead with solutions engineer first? Yeah. So that was the most requested one during the poll that you ran yesterday or today, I don't know when, but about this discussion. So solution engineer is kind of a really wide role and depends a lot on the company you're working for. This is a role designed for SAS company, especially technical one where you are dealing with developers in the sales process, meaning that developer are going to buy or use your product, but also work with less technical products that are not meant for a developer, but that have some kind of technical implementations. Try, for example. It's not meant for developer, but there is a huge technical. They are used by developers at some point. Yeah, exactly. So it's a role that is starting to be a lot more present in the industry, especially in SAS as a whole, company like Tridio with Datadog having a huge team of solution engineering, but the real question here is what is the solution engineer? And as I told, it really depends on the company. So I can give a lot of examples of what it is, depending on the company. And basically, the main point of the solution engineer is to help sales team to sell the technical product to engineers. So it's working a lot on the pre-sale cycle and in some companies, it's also part of the onboarding and also on the post-sales processes. So in the case of Prismic, for example, the solution engineer is working during the three phases, so the pre-sale, onboarding and the cruising, so the post-sales. And they're doing a lot of technical stuff. At the beginning in the pre-sale, there's going to be a lot about custom demos, how to build a demo that is going to relate to the prospects the lead needs. Also helping during the proof of concept because a lot of these highly technical products have a proof of concept phase at the beginning. Should I talk in this one? Yeah. All right. So I'm just going to move a bit. So working on proof of concept, we're basically trying the product in the real life scenario to see how it's going and how that product can help the prospect achieve what they want to achieve. So that's a highly technical profile, but there is also a huge part of the role that is about business. No, no, go ahead. Which is about business. And that's, is also a customer facing type of role, meaning that you are going to talk with customers a lot on a day to day basis, in the pre-sales, especially where you're going to learn more about the leads, about the potential customer, what they want to achieve with the solution. And then a big part of so, is understanding an ecosystem, because if you take the example of Tribe, Tribe is going to be part of a huge ecosystem in the company. If they want to use a payment system, they will have to integrate it in the framework. So you need to understand how the framework works, how you can integrate that in the framework, how are they going to push the data, maybe in all the solutions. So that's where comes the solution engineer name. The fact that you need to solve problems and find solutions to customer problems. Something that it makes me think of, is that it's close to like the work a developer could do in an agency. I know that some of the people you interviewed are like developers who were working in agency, so they have experience thinking about all the different solutions that they want to integrate and make recommendations for clients. So it's kind of similar role, except that you don't really do the project, but you just give advice on what's the best way for the implementation and maybe it recommend specific tools for them. And be more like some kind of consultant. Yeah, exactly. It's being the consultant in the sales process, so bringing value, not trying to sell, just trying to sell by bringing value to the prospect. And that's a really, a more and more demanded job on the market because we realized that having this kind of profile in sales cycles will help close more deals because we are bringing value. So it's like developers, but still they need to be able to sell, right? Sell in the sense because most of the time, solution engineer are going to be... Yeah, I'll continue. This one might change. We are working with account executives, account managers, so these people are going to handle the whole communication, the whole closing, how to make an offer and everything, while the solution engineer is going to bring the technical knowledge to just help close that deal. So they are more seen as a valuable contract material, more than the salesperson. So as you mentioned, we saw a lot of success when people coming from agencies because in a product like Prismic, for example, you are seeing a lot of different use cases and also we integrate with a lot of different solutions. So having that agency background give you the ability to first understand the code, understand the frameworks and as well the ecosystem. So that's a bit about how a solution engineer works. As I told you, it really depends on the company and the size of the company. When you're working in a smaller company, the scope can be super large. As I told you, it's about pre-sales onboarding and also helping customer success to basically bring value in post-sales process. So when the company grows, we see more and more specializations, this type of profile. So people that are going to be more focused on only pre-sales or only working on the sales cycle with a count executive. Other who are really specialized in onboarding and others more specialized in post-sales. So after the implementation of the products, So what you mean is that like if someone goes to a large company and tries to join as like a social engineer, they might only work on the very first moment where the client is trying to decide if they want to use the solution.

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Second, it's just as important to decide what you are not going to learn as it is to decide what you are going to learn. You could jump into countless things — and there are successful people who are polyglot programmers, but I can't speak to that a whole lot. All I can tell you is that in my experience, focusing on specific things that I want to be truly good at has worked out great for my career. That doesn't mean that I closed myself off to other things. With my website rewrite, I have been doing a lot of dev ops-related work and a lot of back-end stuff that I've typically not been involved in. You want to keep your head up on what's going on outside of what you're doing so that you know what direction to go in when you come across problems you need to solve. However, finding a focus on what you want to be good at has helped me a lot. That way, you feel a little less stressed.
And the third one? Learn how to learn effectively. It's a three-step process: you consume, build, and teach. The consumption of newsletters and Twitter and whatever inspires you, but you don't want to spend too much time doing that — implementing it into actually building something matters. This happens naturally if you work at a company, but maybe you're not making the things you want to learn, so you may want to start a side project. The building phase is where you get experience, but you also want to solidify that experience. How? You start teaching. You don't necessarily have to teach it to people, it could be stuffed animals. The goal of the teaching is to retain in your mind what you've learned through the building process.
What are you working on right now? The big thing I'm working on right now is a rewrite of my website. It'll be much more than just a developer portfolio — I'll have user accounts, and there'll be fun things that you can do with it. And because it's more than just a website, I'm using Remix, a new cool framework in the React ecosystem. I'm also working on updating my material on TestingJavaScript.com and a TypeScript course as well. 
So, whatever I'm working on, it ends up resulting in lots of opportunities for content.
Do you have some rituals that keep you focused and goal-oriented? I have a notepad where I keep all of my notes of what I'm going to do for the day so that when I'm checking things off, I'm not distracted notifications. I've tried apps for that, and that does not work well for me. 
I also am a firm believer in inbox zero. I have my work inbox and my personal inbox, and I keep them both at zero. And I kind of use that as a to-do list. 
And if I'm not feeling excited about working for some reason, I will often hop on my Onewheel, which is an electric skateboard that only has one giant wheel in the middle. It's just a total blast, and I'll hop on that with my backpack and a charger, and I'll go to a Starbucks or a park just to declutter my mind.
What things in the React universe are you excited about right now?React version 18 is coming out soon. The experimental version is out there, and it's fun to play with. I'm just really thrilled that it's no longer a concurrent mode but concurrent features that you can opt into. Cool things like that will enable React server components in the future. 
But the biggest thing I'm excited about is Remix. That's huge. It eliminates a lot of problems that are solved well other tools, but when I'm using Remix, I don't have those problems, so I don't need those clusters.
You already said that teaching is an integral part of the learning process, and you stand your word since you're also a full-time educator. What inspired you to enter this field?I have been a teacher for as long as I can remember. I grew up in a church where you talk in front of your peers from a very young age, and my mom was an elementary school teacher, so teaching has just always been a part of me. 
I really just enjoy sharing what I'm learning with others. As far as teaching technical topics, I gave my first workshop when I was still a student at Brigham Young University. With my fellow, we taught how to use AngularJS, and I got Firebase to sponsor pizza so they would show up, and that was pretty fun.
Then I started teaching on the side at egghead.io right after I'd graduated. That was when I first got a paycheck for teaching. And I realized that teaching could be quite lucrative and support my family and me as a full-time endeavor. So I did it — I quit my job. I'm a very risk-averse person, so I'd done teaching as a side hustle for four years just to verify that I could make this work.
When TestingJavaScript was released, and I got that paycheck, I realized that I didn't need my PayPal salary anymore. I could just focus my daytime on teaching and give my evenings back to my family, which was a nice trait.
Apart from that, how has teaching impacted your career? Earlier I mentioned that pretty much all of my jobs came because I was perceived as an expert. After the first job, where I was an intern and then converted into full-time, I never applied to another. I worked for four different companies, and they wouldn't have recruited me if they didn't know who I was and what I was doing. My content is how they knew who I was — I just made it easy for them to find me. Teaching made that impact. It made my career. 
We talked about React and Remix. Are there any other open-source projects that you'd recommend keeping an eye on or contributing to?I have some myself. React Testing Library is probably the biggest one that people are familiar with. And if React isn't your jam, then other framework versions of the testing library. 
React Query is also really popular. If you're using Remix, you don't need it, but if you're not, I strongly advise using React Query cause it's a stellar, fantastic library, and Tanner Linsley, the creator, is a stellar and fantastic person. 
What pieces of your work are you most proud of? Probably the biggest thing I've ever done is EpicReact.Dev. It has helped tens of thousands of people get really good at React, improve their careers and make the world a better place with the skills that they develop. My whole mission is to make the world a better place through quality software, and I feel like I've done that best with Epic React. 
There are things that I've built at other companies that are still in use, and I'm proud of those cause they've stood the test of time, at least these last few years. But of everything, I think Epic React has made the biggest impact.
Effective Communication for Engineers
TechLead Conference 2023TechLead Conference 2023
36 min
Effective Communication for Engineers
Top Content
Today's Talk covers the four building blocks of communication: people, message, context, and effective listening. It emphasizes the importance of considering the perspective of others and tailoring messages to the recipient. The Talk discusses different types and channels of communication, and the need to align them with the intended message. It also highlights the significance of soft skills in communication and provides techniques for effective communication and assessing soft skills in tech interviews. Cross-cultural communication and the impact of bluntness are explored as well.
A Career As Software Engineer
React Advanced Conference 2022React Advanced Conference 2022
24 min
A Career As Software Engineer
Code will be imperfect and perishable, so testing and debugging are crucial. Building relationships and being generous with code reviews are important for teams. Code ownership should belong to the team, not individuals. Prioritizing functionality over consistency can lead to more efficient development. Growing into a tech lead role requires building relationships and coaching skills.