(electronic music)
- Hey everybody, welcome
to The Commit, Episode 29.
I'm Neal,
- And I'm Richard.
- [Neal] So Richard, what's new this week?
- [Richard] Two pieces of news for you.
So there's still time to apply for the
Launch Hackathon in San Francisco,
it's taking place weekend after next.
- [Neal] February 26th through the 28th.
- [Richard] Yep, great Hackathon to go to
if you're looking to create a startup,
looking to raise capital.
It's backed by Jason Calacanis's 
Launch Organization,
and there's definitely a
lot of seed money available
for companies that do
really well there, so.
It's gonna be a cool event.
- [Neal] Yeah it's up to like
a million dollars in seed
investments for four companies so,
it's crazy.
- [Richard] Yeah.
Could be great.
The second one that I wanted
to put on people's radar is,
I saw Jon Gottfried from
MLH post today on Facebook,
that MLH is actually helping
teams and student teams
get involved in a Red
Bull music hackathon.
It's taking place April 8th
and 9th in San Francisco,
so definitely check that out,
we'll put a link in the show notes.
- [Neal] Cool, it's like a continuation
of the music academy program
probably right?
- [Richard] Yeah, it's
I think it looks really cool,
so that's definitely worth checking out.
What have you got Neal?
- [Neal] Cool, don't forget,
we're also going to be at
MHacks this weekend, and
we're bringing our camera so,
come say hi, we might
even have t-shirts, maybe.
- [Richard] Maybe.
- [Neal] Probably.
- [Richard] Likely.
- [Neal] Almost definitely.
- [Richard] So if you've been
taking part of any hackathons
recently, you might have
noticed that we've been asking
some questions on the submission
form about recruiting.
So we've been doing some
research, and actually,
what we're going to do today,
was share some of that
information back with you so
you can get a sense of what
are the things we're learning.
So Neal, you wanna take us
through some of the things
that you've seen first?
- [Neal] Sure, so, we
asked hackers kind of like,
what's the toughest part
of the job search process.
And an overwhelming, well
an astounding 42% of them
said that customizing their
resumes and writing cover letters
was their least favorite part
of the job search process.
- [Richard] Right.
- [Neal] I can appreciate
this, I've sent out
resumes before, it's no fun to you know,
individually remove bullet points,
try to make it fit that one
page and then write these
astounding cover letters
to every recruiter
saying how much you wanna work there, but,
I don't see
- [Richard] It's hard.
- [Neal] another way quite yet.
- [Richard] Well, I think
it's also one of the key ways
you have to actually show
that company that you've
paid attention to the job,
that, what is the impact
you wanna create there.
I think it's the best
way of communicating that
right now.
- [Neal] Right, it doesn't
have to be super long, right,
I think three paragraphs,
even if it's three, maybe nine sentences
is probably all you need.
If it gets you to that first phone screen
or that first interview,
it's done its job.
- [Richard] Totally, what else?
- [Neal] Cool, so we asked
hackers how they felt about
hackathons and their
career, and if they felt
that there was a connection,
and the majority of hackers said that yes,
hackathons definitely support
our career development.
And they particular cited
how they helped them practice new skills,
learn new skills, how they
sort of get an opportunity
to get some mentorship from other people
and I think that plays really
well into networking as well.
So, you get to practice, learn
stuff, and meet new people.
- [Richard] That's great
- [Neal] That's exactly
what people are looking for.
Cool, so the third thing
was, what does it take
to get comfortable with the company?
So hackers told us
that overall
- [Richard] Interesting.
- [Neal] they wanna meet
between one to three,
maybe even one to four people at a company
to feel really comfortable
about working there.
- [Richard] Do you think you can meet
too many people at a company?
- [Neal] Yeah, I think
that maybe after about
five or six, you start reaching that
diminishing returns point,
especially if it all happens
in maybe one or two days, right?
You're meeting a lot of
people, it's a lot of faces,
a lot of names, and the
- [Richard] Yeah.
- [Neal] information you get after the
fifth, sixth, seventh person,
is probably not gonna be
a lot different from
the information you got
from the first three, but
I think that this extends
into recruiting and planning
your sort of strategy
as a sponsor or as a hiring manager,
when you go to a hackathon, or
you go to a college session,
or you're planning your
strategy in general, you know,
bring three to five people and
try to get every candidate,
try to get everyone that you talked to
to meet a few people from your team,
and help them get that experience.
And the more familiar they are with you,
I think that'll help you.
- [Richard] Yeah, it definitely helps
like show what the culture is.
- [Neal] Yeah.
- [Richard] So I've actually
been looking into areas
around internships, I found
this very interesting.
So one of the things was
that almost 50% of people
said that an internship
would be a major factor
in them deciding to join
a company full-time.
Which is logical if you
think about it you know,
because if you have a good
experience on the internship,
you're likely to be very
inclined to join that company
if they make you an offer.
- [Neal] Right, and if you
have that offer early on,
then boom, that speaks a lot to retention,
you're there, your like ok
great, I got this locked up,
I can focus on something else now and not,
again that job hunt process.
- [Richard] Totally,
which brings us into an
interesting question which
is how do people select
which internships to go to?
- [Neal] Assuming they have
multiple offers.
- [Richard] Right so we asked
people there if you had
to decide between multiple
internship offers, what are the factors?
So, the number three factor was culture,
what's it like to work there.
Number two factor was location,
And the overarching
number one factor was money.
How much am I gonna earn
during my internship?
- [Neal] Did you find that surprising?
- [Richard] I did slightly, yes.
I thought that maybe kind
of, location and learning
might have been one in
two, but it was interesting
to see that money was a really big factor.
I guess when you think
about it, that is logical.
- [Neal] Right, well you know,
it's like how musicians say
it's all about the music and then,
the money matters, you can't leave it out.
- [Richard] Yeah totally, I
saw the Grammy's last night,
there was that whole
speech about it right?
- [Neal] Of course.
- [Richard] Definitely,
well the other thing that
we looked at was, what
makes developers suspicious?
So, if you're gonna get
all these great people
to join your company, you've
got to be able to write
job adverts that developers engage
with and are interested in.
So some of the things that we found
that made people suspicious are
lack of honesty about compensation.
- [Neal] I think this is
probably the biggest point.
- [Richard] Absolutely,
so, are you being clear
about how people are
going to be compensated?
What's the mixture,
especially for startups
between equity and salary?
Think these things are really important.
Avoid buzzwords.
Buzzwords make developers suspicious.
So, you know, it may
sound like a little bit
of a MEAN stack comment,
but never the less,
buzzwords don't help.
- [Neal] But you're going for
a full stake answer though.
- [Richard] Yo, definitely,
you should be a,
you need to be a full stack
responsive lean answer,
but avoid buzzwords.
- [Neal] And be very Agile.
- [Richard] Totally.
The other thing is being tone deaf,
right, so you need to make
sure you're being clear,
you're being concise.
People don't want all of
the b.s. about your company
in the job adverts, they
want clear descriptions
of what it's like to be
there, what's the role.
- [Neal] Right and, even
speaking a little bit more
about the role, don't
say that you're hiring
a Senior Developer and then, you know,
ask for someone who has like
two or three years of experience.
And don't say you're
hiring a Junior Developer
and ask them for 10 years
of experience with Swift.
A, that's not a thing, yet,
and B, it shows that you
don't know where your job lies
with respect to who you're targeting.
- [Richard] Absolutely.
So we hope you found that
information interesting,
we'll share more as we learn more.
Neal, let's do staff picks.
- [Neal] Alright.
(electronic music)
Alright, my staff pick
this week is Tactile,
by Charlene, Grace, Chen,
Jialin and Chandani.
And what this is, it's a really cool OCR,
machine vision, slash hardware hack.
So what this team did was,
they created a realtime
text to braille translator.
So if you snap a picture of some text,
or it could be one of these notecards,
or it could be like a flyer or something.
It'll use Project Oxford to OCR the text
and then using a special
Arduino controller
that these guys built,
it will actually convert that to braille.
So you could put your hand
on a real braille reader
and it'll, you know, sign
out each of the letters.
- [Richard] That's a really
awesome project, I love it.
So I picked the Queen's Speech.
And this is from TreeHacks,
built by Ingrid, Joan,
Laura, and Apurva.
So it's designed, and
initially it's kind of similar
to a hack you and I saw at PennApps,
but it's designed to help people improve
their public speaking skills.
So you put on the VR headset,
and then you give your
speech to the audience.
So now 3D tracking looks and monitors
where you're looking at in the audience.
- [Neal] You know, sort of stay center.
- [Richard] Yeah, stay
centered, deliver each line
to a different person.
And then it actually replays
your speech and helps you
identify where to cut out filler words,
or where you've um'd or you've ah'd
or you've repeated a word.
Really cool project, and you know,
really showing lots of
great utility in your hacks,
that's what I'm really excited about.
- [Neal] Yeah.
- [Richard] Very cool.
So that's all we've got
time for on Episode 29.
If you're coming to MHacks come say hi,
if you're not, happy
hacking, wherever you are.
- [Neal] Happy hacking.
(electronic music)
