DEV Community: Jacob Simon

Three Tools to Help Your New Remote Team

Jacob Simon — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 05:32:56 +0000

As companies across the world continue to take precautions against COVID-19, many teams find themselves "suddenly remote" and adjusting to a new set of challenges on top of their daily work. At Exponent, we've been operating as a remote team for most of the past year, with engineers, designers, and PMs spread across several time zones—not to mention thousands of users around the world who are part of our Slack community and Interview Practice forum.

While we don't have all the answers, we wanted to share a few of our favorite tools that we've been using to keep our team together:

1. Tandem

The largest obstacle to progress as a remote team (or any team for that matter) is the lack of direct communication between team members. When you work in an office, you know when people are around, you can tap on someone's shoulder when you have a question, and you feel like a part of the same team.

Tandem gives you back some of this convenience in the form of a lightweight 'remote office' where you can instantly chat and share your screen with coworkers. To be honest, the always-on nature of the app is a bit off-putting at first (read: lots of mouth-sounds), but it's so much faster than setting up a conference call or pinging someone on Slack to see if they're available.

2. Figma

Another major problem with working remotely is that it's hard to communicate visually with teammates on rough ideas, sketches, and designs. Figma was a game-changer for our team in the way that we iterate and share designs at Exponent, allowing us to quickly gather feedback and create a source of truth for final design on our team. And even though Figma is technically meant for user interface design, we've found it to be useful as a more general collaborative workspace, where we can share inspiration and organize various projects that we're working on.

3. Notion

There are tons of products for writing and organizing docs—Google Docs, Paper, Coda, etc—but we've found that Notion has the best balance of organization and ease of discovery (you'll learn to love the Cmd-P search bar). It's not perfect for everything, but it's quickly become our home base for meeting notes, product specs, and even drafts of blog posts like the one you're reading. Plus, we love the ability to quickly publish beautifully formatted docs online and share them with anyone.

Do you have any tips or favorite tools for remote work? Share your thoughts below in the comments!

Interview: How Levels.fyi Brought Salary Transparency to the Tech Industry

Jacob Simon — Tue, 10 Sep 2019 07:47:50 +0000

As part of Exponent's interview series, I interviewed Zuhayeer Musa, co-founder of Levels.fyi, to discuss careers in tech, launching MVPs, and negotiating salaries.

J: What motivated you to build and launch Levels.fyi?

Z: Around 2 years ago, my co-founder Zaheer and I were chatting about what I'd do after college. I was looking at companies to apply to and had just joined an app called Blind (an anonymous community forum for chatting about the workplace). Zaheer was in the middle of looking for a new job and was complaining about how difficult it was to compare titles across companies. As we scrolled through Blind we noticed several of the same types of questions, "At what level can a Senior SDE/Level 63 at Microsoft be placed at Google?"

We realized this was a common question and decided to build a simple visualization to compare software engineer titles across companies. The next few times a related question came up on Blind, we shared a link to our site. In a matter of days, traffic picked up as other people began sharing the site in response to leveling questions. A few months later we began collecting salary data after noticing the same gap in knowledge. The site naturally grew as we shipped features to make career decisions easier. Since then, we’ve expanded into Product Management, Software Engineering Management, and Product Design career tracks!

What was your background before starting Levels?

I previously interned at Uber, graduated from UC Berkeley in 2018, and then eventually started working on Levels.fyi full time. Zaheer graduated from UC Irvine, where he worked on his popular app, TagsForLikes. After graduating he started at LinkedIn before joining Amazon Web Services (AWS).

How did you build the first version of Levels, and how have things changed since launching?

At launch, Levels.fyi was a completely static website with leveling info for just 3 companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon). We quickly realized crowdsourcing information was the only way we could scale and grow. We developed a process to continually review and refresh data on the site as users contribute career ladders and submit salary data.

We’re strong proponents of shipping the minimum viable product (MVP) first and iteratively adding features across the site. Most recently we added a dedicated page for compensation data where you can slice & dice our data (ex. product manager salaries). We found that users loved our website even when it was super minimal. A pretty website design is worthless if you can’t unlock significant value for users in the process.

What’s next?

Our vision is to bring transparency for employees and employers making career decisions. The market moves fast and companies are incentivized to keep information obscure. Employees have the lower hand. We hope that Levels.fyi can help level the playing field, but our work is far from done.

Right now, we’re working on regionalizing our data and visualizations. We have a significant user base outside of the Bay Area, but some users believe we’re only focused on the biggest tech companies. Although we do collect city information, we previously didn't normalize the data or offer any filters. Along the same lines, we’re working on sourcing data for more companies. I once heard, “Your best customers are the ones you already have.” Although it primarily was encouragement for up-selling, it’s quite relevant to traffic as well. Optimizing your landing page and maximizing conversions from existing visitors is far more efficient than advertising.

Software engineering and product management are increasingly popular careers. What advice do you have for people who are considering careers in tech?

Anyone can do it! Even if you don’t have a formal education, it's possible to get into tech by demonstrating your skills and that you’re willing to learn on the job. And a great way to do that is to work on fun side projects. Demand for employees in tech is at an all-time high and as more traditional industries become tech-enabled the demand will only increase.

Do you have any tips for negotiating a higher offer?

When evaluating opportunities, make sure you also properly evaluate yourself and know your worth. Nearly every employment offer can be negotiated, and you can probably command more compensation than you think. Fifteen minutes can earn you 5% or more in compensation (hat-tip to Geico). Having competing offers is usually the easiest way to negotiate but even if you don’t, do some research on salary bands and just ask. Not sure what the salary range for your position is? Check out Levels.fyi!

Originally posted on Exponent's Blog. Looking for help with your product management or software engineering interviews? Exponent offers courses and 1-1 practice interviews that help you land your next role in tech.

What are your favorite open source projects?

Jacob Simon — Sat, 24 Aug 2019 06:57:50 +0000

Top Open Source Projects in 2019

According to GitHub, these were some of the top open source projects in the past year, based on the number of contributors. It's amazing to realize how many people are actively contributing to all these projects around the world; the VSCode repository has nearly 200 open pull requests at the moment!

What are your favorite open source projects?

What projects deserve more attention or contributors? Let everyone know in the comments below!

Stay in the loop! Follow me for more posts about software, tech, and more. Check out Exponent for help with software engineering interviews.

The 3 Sins of Software Engineering Interviews

Jacob Simon — Sun, 18 Aug 2019 03:59:35 +0000

In my time as a software engineer, I've interviewed hundreds of candidates for front-end, full-stack, and backend developer roles. Here are some surprisingly common mistakes that you should avoid to improve your chances of passing the interview.

1. Using a language you don't know

Forget what language is trending right now or what the company you're applying for uses—always use the language you know best. If you love Ruby, just use Ruby!

Why? Because time is of the essence in a technical interview. If you choose a language that isn't second nature to you, you're going to waste precious mental cycles trying to remember which functions to use and gloss over obvious bugs.

2. Only coding in your IDE

You may not realize how much you rely on the help of your IDE to autocomplete your code on a daily basis. Unfortunately, autocomplete doesn't work on a whiteboard. And some languages (cough Java) can be quite verbose and slow you down in an interview. This isn't a showstopper, but it means you should practice in an interview setting (in a text editor, on a whiteboard). If you want real-world practice, you should also check out Exponent's mock interviews.

3. Not taking a hint

Getting stuck in an interview isn't the worst thing, but interviewers hate it when candidates veer off track and ignore their suggestions. Learn to recognize when the interviewer is trying to help you. If you find yourself answering vague questions—like "Why do we we need to do X?" or "How do you know Y?"—your interviewer may be suggesting you try to find an alternative (or simpler) solution. Use this hint as an opportunity to step back and think about your approach. Don't forget that half of the interview is about your communication skills – how well you explain ideas and how well you listen to feedback from the interviewer.

Want more help?

Want help practicing for your interviews? Check out Exponent, where we match you with experienced mentors who've worked at top tech companies like Google, Facebook, Uber, and Dropbox. Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more helpful tips and videos.