Chapter 3
Understanding the Investment a Company Makes
IN THIS CHAPTER
Understanding why companies are risk-averse
Helping companies know that hiring you is a great move
Telling companies how you can help them
A company that hires anyone is making a long-term investment. Hiring a programmer is a particularly valuable investment because a programmer directly affects the products and/or services the company provides.
There’s a lot of money contained within the investment of a programmer. The company may have to hire a recruitment or job search firm to advertise for a programmer, and after that programmer is hired, the company has to pay that firm a commission fee. Even if the company hires a programmer using internal resources, including having other programmers as interviewers, the company has to calculate the costs of the programmers’ time spent interviewing instead of working on company projects.
After the company hires you, it doesn’t just give you a salary — it also gives you benefits such as health insurance and retirement savings plans. And the company has to send payroll and employment taxes to the federal government and to the state the company is located in. What’s more, it takes time to train you even if you’re really good. It may take a month or longer for you to get up to speed and be as effective as the company needs you to be to make a positive difference for the company.
All of this means that a company is going to be very risk-averse when it hires a new programmer. We start this chapter by explaining why companies are risk-averse and how you can show the company that hiring you will minimize the company’s risk. Afterward, we discuss how to tell interviewers what they want to hear: that you’ll be a hand-in-glove fit with their culture and that their investment in you will help the company succeed.
Knowing Why Companies Are Risk-Averse
Making an investment in a programmer or any new employee is much like being an investor and making an investment in a company. For example, if we told you that we invested in a hot, new renewable energy company that you needed to invest in too because it will make so much money even Warren Buffett would blush, you’d probably be intrigued and skeptical.
You probably won’t make any investment of your hard-earned money based just on promised results. You’ll want to research the company, the people who run it, and the technologies it uses thoroughly because you want to reduce your risks. Those risks not only include the loss of your money but also the potential legal harm to you if company executives engage in illegal activities. Part of that research is asking us a lot of hard questions to ensure that your investment keeps its promises of low risk and high reward.
Successful companies do the same when interviewing potential new hires, so a company will ask you a lot of questions during the interview process because it knows the risks of hiring a programmer. For example:
- Costs to hire a new programmer are high. They not only include the cost of salary and benefits but also the cost of time needed to train the programmer and the equipment and office supplies needed for the programmer to do her job. And there may also be payments to make to the recruiting firm that found her.
- The programmer may prove that he or she doesn’t know how to write code despite what his or her résumé says. It may be that the programmer knows how to fix some bugs and is knowledgeable about technology to pass an interview, but the interviewers weren’t as rigorous and/or knowledgeable enough to ask the right questions that would expose the programmer’s lack of expertise.
- Even if the programmer can code, he or she may write bad code. Or the programmer has a toxic personality that didn’t present itself in the interview.
- A company has to keep a programmer engaged and challenged. If the programmer gets bored, the company runs the risk of having the programmer leave the company for another, sending the company back to square one … and there are still deadlines to be met.
In the worst-case scenario, the programmer brings the productivity level of the entire team down — maybe even the entire company. When the programmer is finally terminated, the company has wasted the cost of the training, the cost of time needed to terminate the employee, and the cost to rehire and retrain a new (and hopefully better) programmer.
Different risks for different companies
The type of company you want to join also plays a role in how risk-averse that company is. Even though a larger company doesn’t like having to fire anyone because of the lost investment and the need to hire a replacement, it can absorb the costs much easier than a smaller company or a startup. (However, the person who hired the wrong programmer may need to look up some inspirational quotes for getting through hard times.)
A startup or small company is highly dependent on one or, at most, a few key products and/or services that it needs to be produced on time and on budget. Getting a product and/or service out quickly and beating the competition could mean the difference between a large investor investment to grow the company and bankruptcy. The founders or owners are at heightened risk if investors in the company want their money back.
So, when a smaller company hires, it’s in a bind: It has to be more careful when hiring a developer to ensure it hires the right one, but it also has to hire someone more quickly. Such time constraints increase the smaller company’s risk of making a bad hire, which could jeopardize the company’s future. Larger companies, on the other hand, have money in the bank (and, presumably, the confidence of their investors), so they can absorb the costs of firing a bad programmer and finding a better one.
Firing is hard
There’s a saying in business to “hire slow and fire fast,” but the catch is it’s not easy to “fire fast” today. If a company has an experienced human resources (HR) person or department, or is outsourcing HR to an outside company, then the risks to the company from firing someone are minimized because HR experts know the hoops a company has to jump through to legally terminate an employee.
A smaller or startup company that doesn’t have a dedicated HR person or department, or one that has inexperienced HR personnel, may not know all the federal and state requirements for firing an employee. The unforeseen risks of company owners or department heads making unintended mistakes could cause lawsuits and filings against the company by various government agencies.
Therefore, smaller companies are especially risk-averse when hiring because the smaller company will have to invest money — which it may struggle to acquire — to hire an experienced HR firm to help the company jump through those hoops and avoid legal risks and even more costs.
Discovering What Companies Are Concerned About
We’ve talked about the general concerns of different types of companies. But as we know, every company is different, and you have to find out what its specific concerns are about hiring a new programmer.
It’s easy enough to ask these sorts of questions at the end of the interview, because when you near the conclusion it’s common for an interviewer to ask if you have any questions. In response, you could say, “Hey, I’m just curious, but what are the biggest risks you have in hiring a developer?” If you’ve established a rapport with your interview team, they’ll likely tell you.
If the interviewers tell you about the risks they’re facing, you may want to follow up with some other questions to further inform your ability to assuage the company’s concerns, such as:
- Why are you hiring a new programmer?
- What is your biggest concern about hiring a programmer?
- Have you made any bad hires and if you have, what regrets do you have about those hires that you’re trying to avoid with this new hire?
Showing How You Can Help the Company
You don’t want to inundate your interviewers with questions about their concerns with the company, so you should have some answers already in your pocket when you come to the interview. The best way to learn more about the company’s concerns — and be able to then show the company how you can put these concerns to rest — is to network with other employees in the company, as we talk about in Chapter 1.
Your research into the company will inform the types of questions you want to ask current employees either online in a private LinkedIn message or when you ask to talk to a company employee one-on-one during an in-person meeting or mixer. Some questions to ask include:
- What new hardware and software technologies are you looking into and what challenges is the company facing implementing them?
- What is the biggest issue facing the company right now and how is the company dealing with it?
- Why are you hiring a new programmer and how will the new programmer help you overcome these struggles?
Your intelligence-gathering methods will pay off in two ways. First, you can tailor your cover letter and résumé so that they focus on the problem the company is having that you can help solve. Second, you can craft the messages you want to give to the interviewers during your mock interview and then have them at the ready during the real interview. For example, you can say something like, “I know you’re working on this new technology and here’s the experience I have with it and solving problems in this space. I can help you build and maintain the software and systems you’re working on. I can even help the marketing team with communicating the features so customers understand it.”
We can feel the Force flowing within you.
Explaining how you can help the team you’ll work with
The information you gather about the company can also inform how you’re going to improve the team you’ll be working with. There are several ways you can communicate that before or even after you submit your cover letter and résumé to the company:
- Create a website that shows off your work. If you’re not into web design, there are plenty of free and low-cost website builders, such as Google Sites (
https://sites.google.com) and Wix (www.wix.com; shown in Figure 3-1) that can help you get started. The website doesn’t need to be involved — just a place to show screenshots and give brief descriptions of what you did. Don’t forget to add information about apps you created or helped develop if you have them, and be sure to add links to your related pages. - Start a programming blog. One of the pages of your website can be a blog where you can write about programming topics and especially about how you solved problems with teams at another company. (You may need to tweak the parameters a bit to avoid transmitting confidential information from the company you worked for.) There are plenty of blogging platforms such as WordPress (
https://wordpress.org) and Medium (https://medium.com) that help you set up a simple, attractive blog. - Consider creating a YouTube channel. Record videos to display on your channel that show people how to program and how to become better programmers. The videos don’t have to be very long, either. If you have a good webcam that has 1080p resolution and a good microphone, you can find free and low-cost tools online to record good-quality videos, such as Free2X Webcam Recorder (
www.free2x.com/webcam-recorder) and Loom (www.loom.com; shown in Figure 3-2).
Source: www.wix.com
FIGURE 3-1: Scroll down the Wix home page to learn more about Wix and get answers to frequently asked questions.
Source: www.loom.com
FIGURE 3-2: Click the Get Loom for Free button to sign up for a Loom account and download the app for free.
When you maintain a website, blog, and/or YouTube channel, be sure to update them regularly. If you don’t, and one or more interviewers notice, you’ll need to explain why you haven’t been updating your online assets. For example, you could say that you were focused solely on improving one of your apps in response to customer requests so your customers could have the new and improved version as soon as possible.
Demonstrating how you fit into the company culture
If you’ve read any stories in your LinkedIn news feed or any business websites, you’ve probably noticed that company culture is a big deal with any business. When you network with company employees and you talk with interviewers, don’t forget to ask about and/or pick up on clues on what the culture is like and how it will determine who the interviewers recommend hiring.
For example, there may be people on your team who play a specific online game and they want all team members to be on the same wavelength by playing the same game. If you find out during your networking process that people on the team love to play a specific game and you don’t play it, start playing the game and become knowledgeable.
If you don’t know about the game until one of the interviewers asks you if you play it, tell the truth and say you don’t, but that you’d love to learn how to play it. Showing that you’re interested in the same things as your potential team members and are willing to connect with them could be what gets you the job offer.
Another company may want people who like the outdoors because employees bond by doing a lot of outdoor activities together during the workday, such as participating on sports teams that play on weekends, or holding specific outdoor events to foster connections within and between teams. If interviewers learn that you like being outside, too, then they’ll talk with you about all the outdoor activities they have available for employees. If you respond that you’re very interested in that, you’ve taken another step toward getting hired.
If you discover that Averagenaut SpaceCo does things you’re not interested in doing, such as playing an online game constantly, consider withdrawing your application for the job. Being the odd one out on your team could lead to you finding a new job sooner rather than later. You can spend your valuable time working for Spaceman Spiff’s Rocketry where you feel comfortable, and Averagenaut can find another candidate who fits it.
Offering examples that back you up
As part of telling stories about your technical chops during the interview, you need to include examples from your past experiences that show how you learned more about what customers want and how you can best serve them. These experiences can be at different companies and/or your experience creating software on your own (such as smartphone apps).
Even if you’re not going to be interacting with customers directly, showing that you’ve dealt with customers in the past and have at least some knowledge of what they’re thinking will only show off more of your value. After all, a programmer who’s customer-centric will put out a more usable product that will bring more money and customers to the company.
What kind of examples do you need to come up with? Each example has to show some kind of positive outcome for the company and/or the customer you worked for. Here are some ideas to get you started:
- How you helped your team improve its productivity and by how much.
- How one or two times you worked long hours to ensure a product shipped on time … or even ahead of time.
- How your technical skills were key to finishing a software project that made the company money.
- How you fit into the company culture by participating in different events the company put on so that employees across the company could connect with one another.
- How you took advantage of company training that turned into an increase in your own productivity, which lifted the productivity of the entire team.
Once you get your brain thinking about examples, you can list those in your notes you bring to your interview. You don’t need to write a detailed description in your notes — thinking about examples will (or at least should) jog your memory about what happened during every situation. Then you’ll be able to talk about them off the top of your head and enjoy the looks of amazement on your interviewers’ faces.