When at a conference, everyone is hiring!

The article comes from my personal experience from a conference I attended in Bangalore, India. called ‘Future of Work’ by YourStory. The conference was very well organized with eminent industry leaders talking their hearts out.

One of the most peculiar things I have started to notice at similar conferences was that every company/startup I spoke to, was hiring.

It was a bit peculiar since a lot of programmers always believed that there was a shortage of opportunities out there. I’ll try to explain it from the perspective of a programmer. I’ve been coding in Python for about 5 years now and have a full-time work experience of about 2 years now.

So, how can you explain the uneven market? I think it is because startups need more than just a programmer. A startup ‘CEO’ I recently met said: “Programmer toh galli galli mein 10 milte hein”(“You can find tens of programmers on every street”). In my opinion, startups are looking for more than just a programmer. I think companies and startups are always looking for someone who understands both the product and the tech behind it. A programmer with an understanding of the customers and the market will always write better code than someone who doesn’t.

And this was also the agenda of the talk by Amod Malviya around their hiring process at Udaan and how engineers should start focusing on polishing their understanding of the products they are working on.

If you are a programmer, here are a few tips to get there. This is just my opinion derived from my own experiences and suggestions are welcome:

1. Spend some time working on independent projects: Each and every one of us notices numerous problems around us which can be very easily solved/analyzed using programming. Pick one of those and try solving it with a colleague/friend. If you need motivation/problems to solve, attend meetups around you. If you are a data scientist, pick up an open dataset and writing a blog article could be a very good start
2. Mingle with the Sales/Marketing/Fulfillment/Product teams at work: This will give you an understanding of the problems these teams face during their process and can point you in the right direction. If you never talk to these teams, you never get to know where your code is being put to use or is it actually being used the way it was meant to be or otherwise!
3. Put yourself on the map with conferences and meetups around you: Regardless of your choice of programming language, there are meetups around you featuring talks from people from different companies. Some of them are invited by the organizers and some approach the organizers on their own. Be the latter. Most conferences have a CFP(Call for Proposals) which let everyone add proposals and invite the most promising ones to speak at the conference. By submitting proposals, you are both putting your ideas forward and understand how people brainstorm and come up with cool ideas.
   Break the idea bubble and work with non-tech colleagues/friends: Expressing your raw ideas to someone who doesn’t code is always difficult since you usually discuss them with fellow coders only. This will help you put an intuitive understanding of what you are building and will also help you dive into some fundamental assumptions of your codebase. This has always helped me improve my communication skills and made me better at conveying my thoughts at talks.
   Last but not least, build a nice portfolio for yourselves and these cool projects will make all your conversations very interesting and leave something hanging for the other person to talk about.

I tried listing a few things which crossed my mind when I think about how I’ve always liked to build products and solve problems with my code. I love it when I use data to help different teams make data-driven decisions and make their lives easier.

Do drop your thoughts about the same and add any points to the above. I’ll leave the comments section open for any debates.

So let us all build cool things and make this world a better place!