Episode 31

Anthony Saoud on The Critical Role of Networking and Evolving Dynamics in Hiring Data Talent

TIM: Anthony Welcome to the objective hiring show. Great to have you with us.

ANTHONY: Thanks for taking the time, Tim. I appreciate you being up so late. I know we're on the other side, like completely on the other end of the globe, so I appreciate the time. Thanks for having me.

TIM: No worries; my pleasure, and yeah, it's thanks to the amazing technology of the internet that allows us to do this in real time, which is pretty cool, and we'll touch on other amazing technologies later on the call, talking about AI and its potentially having as much of an impact on the world as the internet, and perhaps we could start with discussing The current challenges you're finding in hiring data talent Is there anything that's really a pain point now in the way that maybe it wasn't five or 10 years ago?

ANTHONY: Look, the landscape has changed significantly over the past five or 10 years. Like, when I started 10 years ago, we had pretty defined roles in the world of data, so you had a data analyst, you had a data architect—those roles I don't even know if those roles still exist. I'm sure they do in certain organizations. You had data scientists or research analysts; they called them back then because the technology, in my opinion, has evolved so quickly. We have these little intersects of talent, right? So, like a data scientist, in a lot of cases, they would share the same skill set as a data engineer. So think of a Venn diagram: you have the intersect in the middle; they all know how to use ET, how to build pipelines, they all know Python, they all know how to, in a lot of cases, they know how to write Scala, and all of that. So when we do a posting, for example, for a data engineering job, you end up with a lot of data analysts posting for that job. So it's really challenging to figure out who's who and who has the right skill set, so I don't know; from my perspective, that's the biggest challenge right now, and then there are loads of data analysts out there, so it's just when you do any kind of posting, all of a sudden you're getting inundated with all of these applications coming in from everywhere. Like we had one role with 800 people applying to it, and probably out of those 800 people, maybe two or 200 or 300 were the actual people that we needed, right? Because they're the ones who fall outside of the intersect that I was talking about. That's the idea, right? What do you think? How are you seeing it evolve over time?

TIM: Yeah, I feel like there was maybe a point in the past where there was a concept of like data as a unicorn where this one person was meant to do lots of different things, then maybe we divided the roles up a little bit into these more specific areas. And yeah, now I think you're right; it's interesting where maybe some of those roles still exist, but the skill set those people have has broadened so that there may be more independence. So it's not, Oh, I need to rely on a data engineer to get me the data that I could then build my model on the data scientists. Having those wider skills themselves Maybe it's because you also Some of the tooling has improved, like Python has so many packages to drastically simplify some of the basic things that maybe 6 or 7 years ago you had to write custom Python for. The libraries for data science didn't exist 10 years ago in Python, and now they do. All the stuff is on the cloud as well. So you can just do whatever you want with any AWS package with a few lines of code. Maybe it's just simplified a lot of these things as well, such that it's easier for your skills to broaden.

ANTHONY: Yeah, I also find while we're talking about this, I also find that it depends on the organization that's doing the hiring, and in a much bigger organization, the roles are pretty defined. Like a data entry clerk, we know exactly what that person is going to do; a data analyst, we know exactly what they're going to do. and part of it is because those organizations are so big they have teams dedicated to data engineering, for example, and that's all they do; they just do data engineering, and somebody else is going to handle the analytics, and our organization at Paystone is a pretty small team, right? Like we have a team of six under my leadership, and a lot of times we find people doing other people's jobs, like we have a data engineer who does a data science job or a data scientist who does a data analytics job, or we have those natural intersections over there, so by nature they have to learn; they have to do that stuff. So when it comes to hiring, I feel like the same thing is happening: the tech space has seen a lot of growth in smaller companies, so I think that's just flowing outwards.

TIM: The other thing you mentioned was being inundated with applications, many of which aren't really the ones that you want, like they don't have the right skills or experience. Some of them do, but just from a volume perspective, how do you practically deal with 800 applications? Do you still like reading them manually? Do you share them on the team? Do you try to automate that process? How have you approached it?

ANTHONY: Okay, so I'll tell you a funny story about this. When I first became a people leader, I think this was probably five years ago, or maybe four years ago. I got the opportunity to do my first posting, so they said, Hey Anthony, you're going to post your first role, and you're going to hire for this data engineer. I was the first person on my team. I was super excited. I was like, Oh, this is going to be great. I'm going to get the chance to interview. We'll do the whole process. It's like a great development opportunity. We posted it, and we had over 800 people apply, and then I remembered one of my mentors told me when I was applying early on in my career, I was applying for jobs. He said recruiters only take 14, or what was it, 10 seconds to read a CV, and then they just dump it in the garbage if they don't like it, so I thought I had to do that with 800 applications, so I just started scrolling through. I was like, This is not what I want to be doing. This is not people leadership. I do not like this, so I wrote a script in Python that just went through all the CDs and looked for the keywords that I wanted, and I spent more time writing that script than actually then I would have reading the CVs manually, but it was a cool little experience to figure it out. Oh, maybe there's a tool out there that can do that. So there are some tools out there inside our HR software or people experience software that look for keywords that look for certain applicants and rank them from highest to lowest, who's most likely to succeed. but these things don't always work because you can't just rely on a CV to assess somebody, right? So there's a process that we go through, so out of the 800 applicants on the code that I wrote to sift through this to find my perfect person, we ended up with maybe 10 or 15 candidates. We interviewed all of them. and then the person we hired—she's probably one of the best data engineers I hired so far, and it worked out really well, but again I probably missed out on other people because maybe there was a flaw in my code. I don't know, so leave it to the professionals; don't do it yourself. There are companies out there that do exactly this that solve this problem. but that's just one little piece of the whole hiring process, right? Like, you need to find the 800 people, filter them out, and then what? And we're doing case studies; we're doing Coderbyte assessments or LeadK tests. It's very people-debate-it; they're like, Do we do it? We do not do it. Is this right? Is it wrong? There's a hundred percent chance there's some automation. I would lose my mind if I had to read through 800 TVs again; that's never happening, and it also helps to have an awesome PX team or a person that people experience team and the recruiters to help you do that.

TIM: So basically you've developed your own skunkworks effectively to then do this process for you that you found painful. I think that's the classic sort of engineering mindset: to automate away the shitty bit of your job. I think that's a good thought process.

ANTHONY: it, but in retrospect maybe I should just have looked out and looked outside and found software instead of doing it myself. It's one of those build versus buy things; this was definitely a buy situation.

TIM: I think it's a good approach that you've done because I feel like maybe this is going to change very soon because I could imagine AI coming in to do this en masse, but most companies would still attempt to manually read those CVs even if it was only for a few seconds. Even if they didn't end up reading 800 of them, they would still attempt a pure manual human process, which I feel like is flawed in many ways, one of which is, of course, it's going to take you a lot of time, and B, it's going to be very expensive for your organization. but C I feel like the biggest issue is that the CV contains a bit of information, like it's got some information about the candidate's skills and experience, but it's got a lot of noise. A CV could contain someone's photo, their ethnicity, their religion, where they went to school, their age, and I'll give you one funny anecdote. So I remember hiring a product analyst a few years ago for the last company I worked at, and I got down to the hobbies section of this guy's CV, and it said he was a semi-professional footballer in Brazil, and he'd moved to Sydney, and we had a football team, like a five-a-side team, at our local university indoor soccer place. and we lost the grand final three semesters in a row. We just needed one extra player to get us across the line, and this guy got an interview with us as a product analyst purely because I thought he was like Ronaldinho, okay, and that is unfair for the other 500 candidates who did not have that on their CV. Now in the end we didn't hire him based on the fact that I didn't think he was the right product analyst, but that is so unfair, right? And if we have the CV as the start of the screening process, I just can't imagine how many people end up getting filtered out unfairly.

ANTHONY: There's this whole conversation happening. I don't know if it's happening in Australia or not, but at least here what they're talking about is the CV dead, right? Like the old school way of applying for jobs, like my dad or whoever, like my people from previous generations would say, just walk into the shop and drop your CV. That doesn't work anymore. It really doesn't. There are different ways of getting recognized or getting attention to your skill set as an applicant that do not involve the CV, so it's a two-way thing: one, people applying to us, and two, there's us looking out for people who are out there. So when you go on LinkedIn, I hate this word LinkedIn influencers. There's a bit of something to be said about that; there are the annoying posts out there about those. I wake up at 4 am and have a cup of coffee. 20 pushups and those are the people I turn on LinkedIn, and I feel like barfing because it's so ugly, but then you look at other people, and they're actually posting really cool stuff. The data community is amazing; they have some cool stuff about how to optimize your SQL queries. how to optimize your data warehouse There's this whole thing about data contracts that I love watching those debates. There's a guy called Chad Sanderson on LinkedIn; he's all about data contracts, and there's always a huge debate going on in all of his posts, and it's really, it's like really rich; it's not fluffy. It's like people are getting into technicals over there with engineering teams and software teams if Chad Sanderson If I ever had the opportunity to hire somebody, it would be Chad Sanderson. I don't know the guy; I just know him from his posts because that's something that he's doing. It's more effective to do that than to apply because there's a very small chance that you're going to get an interview by applying, and that's just the way it is because, like in our company, we're a small company, right? Based on the small companies, that's just the reality of the world. We're a small company, and we're getting thousands of CVS. Imagine the bigger companies. I can't imagine how many CVS the companies on Wall Street are getting; like, one number I heard one time CVS or applications for a job that is wild, so a hundred percent, but nobody's reading through those CVS. But, yeah, like you said, sometimes in my experience, looking at some of the CVs that are coming in, I choose some people over others because of what they said in the CV, like one person is a keynote speaker at this thing. I'm like, Oh great, let me talk to you, and then you talk to her, to that person. and they're really not that good. They're not good speakers, so it's a bit disappointing.

TIM: Yeah, that's I feel like the other main challenge, actually, of the CV is that, yeah, it's someone's pitch about themselves, which is the most biased thing you could imagine, and it's no surprise then when you get a candidate who on paper looks amazing, seems to have the right skills, seems to have the right experience. and then you get into that first interview and you're like, Is this the same person? Are you joking me? and there's this gulf between what they've presented on their CV and then what they come in as, and I feel like that's one of the root causes of the kind of screening issue is that we're relying on this document written by the person that we're interviewing. It's like the judge asking the accused whether or not they're guilty, so it doesn't work.

ANTHONY: Yeah, exactly. At the job fair, yeah, that could fly. I just find it difficult to see the future of CVS. At some point, some of these HR software programs are probably going to solve this problem in the next 10 years. I just don't know which one. I don't know how they're going to solve it. I'm not an HR expert. I just know that there is a It's not a sustainable method. let's put it

TIM: I agree completely, and yeah, you mentioned some recommendations for candidates, so to think practically, okay, if I am applying for a role at Paystone and there's 800 applicants, maybe you have a one in 800 chance; maybe it's a bit higher if your skills are a bit better; maybe it's a bit lower if your CV hasn't pitched you as well, but your odds aren't good at landing that role ultimately. And what would be helpful is, yes, some practical tips for them on how to stand out from the crowd, or another, like a reframing of how they should think about the problem you've just mentioned LinkedIn content, if they produced high-quality, consistent LinkedIn content and developed a brand name for themselves as authoritative; that is clearly a way to stand out. If you have seen any other ways for candidates to stand out in a good way or rethink how they approach getting jobs rather than just going down the same channel of I'm just going to apply to a whole bunch of jobs with a CV,

ANTHONY: There are a few methods that require you to step out of your comfort zone. One of them is networking in person. Networking, at least here in Canada, is most common in communities like Toronto, for example, or where I live in London, Ontario. There are these little community tech communities; London has one called the London Economic Development Corporation. There is a tech alliance that always hosts little events, and you can go to those events and network with people in your industry and then just be known in that little ecosystem that you live in. That's one really effective method. Like a few days ago, I was at one of the events, and this one person who works for LEDC came up to me and said, Hey, Anthony, we've been trying to reach somebody at your company, but I don't think she works there anymore. There's this one person I want you to interview. So that person wasn't even talking to me; it was somebody from that organization that organizes these things that reached out to me and said, Hey, talk to this person. Why am I talking? Why did she do that? Why did she come to me and tell me? Hey, I think you talked to this person. It's because that person went and networked really heavily with those people, and he became known in that to the organization, so they're naturally going to come and pitch him another person. They reached out to me a few days ago, and this person wasn't even looking for a job, by the way; he's just somebody who just started his own business. and he reached out to that organization and said, Hey, I'm new to the area. I started this business in data analytics. I'm just trying to network with people and try to get to know them. So one of the ones that John from LEDC reached out to me said, Hey, Anthony, I want you to connect with this person here. and let's get the ball rolling to see if there's anything you guys can work on together or if you can introduce them to people so people are still willing to do that. Right, people are there's a huge appetite for people to meet in person, and people really do want to help; you just have to talk to them. Don't be scared; the worst case is they don't help you, and the best case is you get a referral or you get somebody who knows somebody who works at another company that's hiring, so now you stood out; you're no longer a CV in an inbox. You actually have a name you want somebody to know to look out for you. I was at another method. Reach out on LinkedIn to the hiring manager. In most cases, the hiring manager is not posted on the job application for obvious reasons: people don't want to be flooded, but there are ways to figure out who the hiring manager is. If it's a small company, you can very quickly find out who the hiring manager is. I reach out; a lot of hiring managers are going to hate me for saying that because they're going to get their inbox flooded. Just reach out to somebody who reached out to me. Got an interview because it was like, okay, I have 800 CVs in my inbox. I'm going to talk to this person. She stood up. It wasn't an impressive CV, by the way. I was just like, you know what? This person is very—this person knows how to talk to people, and she knows how to start a conversation in the role that I'm hiring for. This person's going to be working with business stakeholders, with salespeople, with marketers. It just showed me a little thing that the CV might not show that she's able to reach out and talk to people proactively.

TIM: Yes, yes, and I think this is a really important perspective to talk about because I feel like in the world the dominant kind of narrative at the moment is one of wallowing and self-pity. If you're not doing well, it's like it's just the whole system that gets me. I have no autonomy; I can't solve any of my own problems. It's just that everything's a bias, which is partly true but also not fully true, and there are some things you can control, and clearly, as a candidate, You could decide how you approach your job search. And to craftfully reach out to people on LinkedIn or other mediums makes sense, but I think there's a lot of nuance in how you do it. And I can just think of some of the stuff I've received sending a generic message to me about a job that I don't hire for in a company that I don't control with a CV that's written in Portuguese and a message that's got eight grammatical errors in it would be a very bad way to do it, but if it's like a thoughtfully crafted, simple message to someone who doesn't normally get hundreds of messages about a specific job where you can add some value or you're a relevant candidate, then great, do that. That's showing a bit of hustle, as you said you've differentiated yourself, but you've done it in a tactful way. You haven't done it in an annoying way, or at least not too annoyingly.

ANTHONY: Yeah, because you have to remember we all have an inbox that's full of emails, and a lot of these emails are cold, cold pitches. Like, it's a cold—sorry, a cold call, or I don't know what we call a cold call for an email that is a cold call. It's a cold call. We all have those in our inbox. This company is trying to sell you the software. That company is trying to sell you the software, so on and so forth. You don't want to be another one of those. Put yourself in the shoes of their hiring manager. If somebody reaches out to you on LinkedIn, how likely are you to respond to them? What's the content that's good if you, if somebody's calling to say Hey, I think I'm going to add a lot of value to our company. Every single person who's reached out to me said that they can add a lot of value to my company, but that person who reached out to me did not actually reach out to say that she can add value to the company; she just started a conversation. She goes, I read one of your posts. Thank you. You're just like boosting my ego here. I love it. Let's chat now. It's obviously not how it went in my head, but I'm just giving you like a high level of like philosophically, what's happening is you're just having a conversation as a human to a human without a sales pitch involved. The conversation started as X, Y, and Z, and then it evolved and turned into something

TIM: I'd like to also share an anecdote from a guest that I'd spoken to recently who had mentioned that basically he is in a senior data leadership role, and he mentioned he hadn't really had a formal hiring process to get a job for about a decade. Last, I think two or three goals you've gotten were a coffee chat from someone who you already knew or you knew someone who knew them. And he was remarking how ironic it was that as you got more senior, sometimes the hiring process actually got simpler and shorter despite the fact that you're getting paid a lot more money and the risk of a bad hire as a director level is a lot more than the risk of a bad hire at a junior level, and so he's recounting this irony. We're talking about that, and I was thinking about how candidates—again, some candidates who may be in a negative mindset, very junior in their careers, maybe they haven't had a break yet—could look at that story and go Oh, that's unfair. Look at this guy. He got these jobs through just cronyism or someone who he knew or whatever. but that I feel would be the wrong thing. It should be that he's a guy who's networked for 20 years, who's been competent for 20 years, who's made a name for himself in his industry, has done really well, and now deserves to have a shorter hiring process in a sense because he's put in an investment for decades that you don't see.

ANTHONY: Yeah, no, 100% the job I got at Paystone when I got it, I wasn't a director; I was an insights analytics manager. There was no interview proper formal interview process. It was in the back of a very sketchy Starbucks, and we both drank waters, me and the guy. It wasn't there; there was no application. There was no CV involved. We just had a conversation, and the guy literally drew it out on the whiteboard. When he invited me to the office to come have a chat, he drew up on the whiteboard He said this is a problem we're trying to solve. What are your thoughts? We just had a conversation about the problem we were trying to solve, and then the CEO, Tarique, walks in, and he goes Hey man, you're going to love this guy who's talking to you, and that was it; we sealed the deal, and then I'm joining you guys.

TIM: and how did you get I'm interested in how you got that conversation initially. Was this someone in your network, or how did it come about?

ANTHONY: It was somebody I worked with at my prior company. That person was—we worked really well together, and I got to know him; he became a friend and all of that. And then when the opportunity came up at Paystone, he had left the company I worked at and went to Paystone, and then when he was at Paystone, he said, Hey, I know a guy who can do it. talk to him right, so that's why they say By the way, don't burn bridges. Always be professional about something. Don't burn a bridge, because in the future you might need that person, or that person might do something good for you, so always make people happy, even though you're going to struggle. by the way if this person Mo if you're listening to me I love you man I never had any anything against you but just in the event that somebody angers you it's be professional about it don't go burn the bridge because you might need that connection in the future the most valuable thing you have in your professional life is your network if something happens to you you're going to need your network that's what you rely on to get to your next role or to get you if you're in sales obviously like your network is what helps you get referrals and all of that so there's a very something very powerful about having a very solid network So treat everybody like you want them to treat you, and then Bob's your uncle.

TIM: Yeah, absolutely, and I feel like without making too broad a generalization for the younger candidates who started their careers maybe in 2020 at the start of COVID, where you're working from home for two years and it's this kind of weird environment where you can't really meet in person, and then you've maybe come into the office in 2023, you're in there with your earpods all day, you're maybe a little bit more introverted. I feel like that set of candidates is maybe missing out on something, and maybe they haven't laid the foundation for the next 20 or 30 years of their careers because they haven't invested in the people and the networks.

ANTHONY: There is a huge appetite for people going back to the office. Okay, and it's not necessarily like I'm not advocating for going back to the office. I love the hybrid system that I'm working on, where it's a bit in the office and a bit at home-type thing. It works great. and when you're in the office or when you're in person somewhere, it's awesome to be able to have a One-on-one with people, just go out for coffee and have a chat. Those things go a long way. You might not see it today, but you'll see it tomorrow. It's like going to the gym every day. You don't see your muscle growth in a day; you see it in a few years. It's

TIM: Yeah.

ANTHONY: Same idea.

TIM: Yeah, it's an investment, and I could also share a personal anecdote about the company I worked for before founding this business. I worked for them for four years. I like to think I did a reasonably competent job. I did my best effort for four years. They then sold their business, and now they're investors in my company. So that's like a nine-year time horizon to working hard, being not a dickhead every day, putting in your best effort, trying your hardest for someone, and then eventually something might happen; it might not, but it might. And that's the upside you have, yeah.

ANTHONY: 100% that's exactly it: just be genuine and do it.

TIM: Yeah, exactly, without expecting something in return, maybe that's

ANTHONY: Exactly. Yeah, exactly, because people catch up on it, right? People catch up on it, and they're like, Oh, what does this person want? So sometimes when people are not genuine and they walk up to me and they start a conversation, the first thing that comes up in my head is, This person wants something. I don't know what it is, and it's going to come out for you soon.

TIM: Exactly, and so that's again for the younger candidates who might be listening: Networking is not bombarding people on LinkedIn with generic messages. That's not networking; that's disingenuous. Networking is meeting people just for the sake of meeting them, like without an agenda necessarily at all. It's just knowing that you're going to need to rely on other humans, and you can provide something of value to them as well; like it's a mutual exchange, isn't it?

ANTHONY: Exactly, exactly. There were sometimes early on in my career I used to go to these networking events, and they were just brutal. Some of them were just absolutely brutal because the organizers would make you sit down. They call it speed dating or something along those lines, or speed networking. They say they force you to tell the other person what you want from them, and I would sit through the session wondering, What am I doing here? What is this all about? And guess what? I never talked to those people ever again. Not a single one of them remained in my network. I never had a conversation with them. The ones I had a good conversation with are the ones who I went out for a beer with or coffee with or just had a really good conversation at the conference. Not long ago, I was speaking at a conference in Montreal, and I ended up talking to some really good people and went out to dinner with them. And now we just, every now and then, we send each other a nice little message on LinkedIn or text message about how you're doing, how's the family doing, and all this stuff, and there's always a little message about something in the data field and whatnot, so like those connections are very important, right? It's not about what I can get from you right now because I have no interest in that. I have no interest because I have nothing to give you right now, so it's a weird relationship. That's not how humans are meant to communicate; it's just bizarre when I go to those networking events and you just tell the other person what you want from them. I'm like, No, that's bizarre. There are loads of websites you can do that on. I don't need to be in person to talk about this; this is bizarre.

TIM: Absolutely. What about changing topics a little bit? So when you're thinking about hiring into your team, whether it be for an analyst, an engineer, a data scientist, or whatever it is, how do you balance the soft skills versus technical skills? Do you favor one or the other? Do you feel like one is more coachable than the other? How do you think about that?

ANTHONY: So it really depends on what you're hiring for. If I'm hiring for a data engineer, I'm going to favor technical skills; if I'm hiring for a data analyst, I'm going to favor more soft skills. more business skills more communications, sorry, more communication skills, presentation skills, the ability to communicate upwards, or the ability to convert a technical concept into a very easy-to-understand concept in English, right Translating technical to English—that's the thing I'm looking for in the data analyst and the data scientists. We're looking for a mix of both. Now assessing that is part of the process, right? So we have the process where I said we go through the recruiting process. We have the 800 applicants. Those 800 applicants, the ones who are selected, they're going to go through a screening interview with our recruiters. After the recruiting process, they go do a little test online, and that test is very technical; it's solve this problem. After that, they talk to the hiring manager, and there's a case study that they work on with our team. So we put that person on the call on Google Meets called Jimmy's call or Zoom, and we make them solve a problem with us, so we have four people from my team—that's basically the entire team, myself and that individual—and we solve a problem together, and this is not about us seeing how they're coding or looking for if they're cheating or whatever it is; it's about seeing how that person is going to work with us. some of the most successful ones that worked on the engineering side outside of my team, some of the most successful ones are the ones who delegate work to other people on that call, so a hundred percent, because that's not what we want; that's the point of this call, because that person already passed a whole bunch of assessments. They already passed three levels of interviews in the process. This here is not to test their technical abilities; it is to test it, but it's also to test other attributes. It's a test. How do they talk to us? Are they going to try to solve the entire problem themselves? If so, I don't want to work with this person because they're not going to work well with other people on the team because it's all about them and their ego, and they look like they can solve this problem. No, it's really about you're stuck here. What are you going to do? Are you going to ask this person the question? Are you going to talk to the data engineer who's sitting right in front of you? Otherwise, everybody's just sitting there watching them, so in this interview, this is one of the most important parts, right? It's how well they work with other people on the team, because the team dynamic, at the end of the day, is one of the most important things for me. If the team is not working well, my team could fail, so that's where we pull this thing; that's where we fish for these little hints. Isn't it? It's in that meeting that, obviously, sometimes we do get it wrong. That's just the way it is. We do get it wrong sometimes, but in most cases this is a very important step to pair programming exercises.

TIM: And so in this stage, are they doing code as well, like they're sharing a screen and actually coding, or are they just talking through more like an architectural design of a solution?

ANTHONY: It depends on the team and the company. On some teams, they do an architectural design type thing, but it usually involves code. On my team, it's a coding exercise we have. We usually create a document, and this document says that in this folder in cloud storage, there is a bunch of data. We're going to take this data and convert it into a Delta table. Then we're going to take this data and then create a pitch deck for an external party that's interested in our company, and when I was talking about the pitch deck, we're not building a PowerPoint; we're just building the data points that go into that PowerPoint, so, for example, using this data, can you calculate our net retention revenue? Go ahead and do it so that it's usually an hour and a half max; we rarely complete the whole exercise, so again, it's not about completing the exercise because it's an hour and a half. Any data person knows that it's not going to be done in an hour and a half. What I care about is just observing how the problem-solving is going so everybody on the team has access to that one document, or that, sorry, that notebook, and we all work on it together if that person desires to work with us on the same problem if they want to share the load type thing.

TIM: I imagine you're at one of these networking events, and maybe there's a person a little bit earlier on in their career, okay, maybe a senior analyst who's about to step up into their first, let's say, manager of analytics role where, for the first time in their career, they're going to be responsible for actually hiring maybe a couple of people into their team. What advice would you have for this first-time manager when they're thinking about forming their team? What should they be thinking about, and how should they approach it, do you think? ANTHONY: People who survive long enough in the data field love data. You would not be in the data field if you did not love it. You love solving problems; you love getting your hands dirty; you love coding. Yesterday I was doing it; I loved it. I loved every minute of it, but if you're managing a team, you have to take a step back away from the technical and move on to actually managing a team early on in my career. I did not do that really well. I had to learn the hard way that doing that causes problems on the team because you become a micromanager unintentionally. You become a micromanager because once you have five people, if you're a team member on a team of five people and you get promoted, To manage that entire team, you will have that tendency of thinking that you are a team member and you are working with your team on a problem. The team does not see that you may see it, but the team does not see that all the team sees is this person is my manager. I have to impress them because at the end of the day, who's doing your year-end review? It's the manager, so you have to behave as a manager, and I don't like it. I don't want it to sound bad. It's not coming from a negative standpoint; it's more of you have to behave as a manager and take a step back and let the team solve the problems because they will become very nervous trying to work around you. It just becomes too much, so I learned that the hard way. I took a step back, and the second I took a step back, it took a little bit of time, but people's things started moving really quickly on the team. a lot faster than when I had my hands deep in code, so that's the biggest thing I can give to somebody who's moving into a managerial role: that's the biggest thing they can learn is to take a step back. Like my current boss, he told me, Anthony, you have been coding a lot. I need you to become rusty at it, and it took me a minute. I was thinking in the back, I was like, man, I love doing this stuff; why should I become Rusty? And I understood it; I figured out what he was trying to tell me: he was trying to tell me that your job is to set a strategy for the team, make sure the team is set up for success, and that you are communicating the team's wins to the organization because the biggest failure for data teams, or the biggest challenge for data teams, is that they don't necessarily tie to revenue. And in smaller organizations, what the CEO wants to see or the CFO wants to see is to justify the headcount, and the way you justify the headcount is through revenue, but because data teams inherently are just trying to solve internal problems that are not tied to revenue, if they're not building data software, for example, in finance, or they work on the sales and marketing team, for example, they're not necessarily tied to revenue. So you have to communicate their wins in different ways, and some of their wins are, We won a cost optimization here; we did a little market analysis here that led to X, Y, and Z, which led to a reduction in churn. For example, you have to be able to communicate those wins; if you don't communicate those wins, people don't know what you're doing. and it's not the job of the data analyst or the data engineer to do that; it's the job of the manager to do that, so as a manager, you need to be setting up time with stakeholders in the company at the C-suite, for example, or with the people at your level, for example, as a director, and talk to them about what their needs are, how your team is benefiting them, and so on and so forth. That's the biggest thing: you become a bit of a politician, unfortunately, so that's why it's like when people say I became a manager at the beginning, it feels like a promotion, but later down the road it doesn't feel like a promotion; it just feels like more work with less reward. but if you look at it from a different perspective, it's a completely different skill set that you're working on. You're no longer working on the thing that you love doing, which is data; you're working on data plus the politics of making sure that the data team survives. That was the big revelation for me when I became a manager. It took me a while to get used to it.

TIM: Yeah, and it's, as you say, a drastically different job with very different skills needed. It's almost a 180, actually. If you go from individual contributor data person to manager of a team, like, they're very different. I have to say, even myself, running my current company, I found this at times to be a struggle because at different stages of our size and development as a founder, you start off doing, by definition, literally everything in the entire company. Okay, and as a founder, you almost pride yourself on getting shit done and being the one to execute stuff, so it almost feels weird to not be very task-oriented and to start stepping back and focusing on longer-term things or slightly more strategic things or things that are a bit more nebulous because especially if you have a certain personality type, I find that it's almost like you feel like you're being lazy almost. Oh, this isn't the real work; completing a task, whatever that is, having a discussion, and making sure this person's happy and checking in with this person and whatever those things feel a little bit fuzzy and don't feel like, to me, the real work, which is obviously wrong, but it's still A natural bias or tendency that I find myself having ANTHONY: And there is a way to measure that, by the way, because sometimes you'll feel every now and then you'll cheat and go back into the weeds, but there's a really good way to measure it. Go into GitHub, go into your profile, and then take a look at the heat map that shows your contributions by day and month. You want to see that going down a little bit or a lot depending on who you work for; that's the measure of whether you're succeeding as a man. I would say succeeding, but if you're doing your job as a manager, if it's still very green and very dark, it means you're still coding and still doing contributions to the code base. but if not, then you're doing your job as a manager, which is not necessarily coded the

TIM: That's a great insight, and yeah, we've had a similar metric out of JIRA instead where we measure each stage of the development process, and yet there were points where I was winning some points competitions each month. I'm like, That's not a competition I want to win. everyone's failed, including me If I've just come first in this competition, that's not good; that's not the flex that I could think it is.

ANTHONY: Yeah, exactly, that's not your job, man.

TIM: Anthony I think we've had a really good conversation here today. I really appreciate your time and your insights and wisdom about a variety of different topics in hiring for data people and running data teams and some really helpful advice for new data leaders as well. So thank you so much for joining us.

ANTHONY: Amazing, Tim, and thanks for reaching out.