Prepare to join Leading U.S. Firms as a Remote Developer With Turing.com | Developer Town Hall #07
Good morning. Good evening. Good afternoon depending on where you are.
Okay. Where's everyone from? Ghana, Brazil. What else? I see that we have Mongolia, Ethiopia, Turkey. So nice to have you guys here. I am Fernanda, community manager here at Turing.
I have been, driving so many projects, initiatives for our developers community at Turing for the past year. almost now. I have had the chance to meet, onboard and orient many Turing developers from all over the world. It's been a great journey. . The main purpose of this of our top 1% developer town hall is basically to go over some very frequent questions that you have for us.
Right? So there are a few things that we always like to talk to you about. How can you boost your matchability in our system? How can you increase your chances of getting matched to the job you want? Okay. Ultimately, this is also a great opportunity for you to get to meet our Turing team We're going to have three folks here talking to you. So without further ado, let me start sharing my screen so we can officially start So Let's just start by today's speakers panel. Today in this town hall, we'll have our head of matching at Turing, Matko, along with Igor and Pedro.
So one of the things that we like to do in our town halls is have our Turing developers, developers who have been through the same process that you guys are going through, uh, gone through tests and have been matched to one of our partner companies and they are now enjoying a great remote, job with one of our top US companies, right? So they are going to have two Turing developers joining us on stage Igor and Pedro. Igor as a full-stack developer, hired through Turing. And Pedro, is a senior software engineer who is working with our internal team. We will start by covering some top very frequently asked questions. One important thing is that if you have individual questions, you might want to send those to support@turing.com. We have now a large, big vibrant of developers Turing developers that have been successfully matched to our top US partner companies and are now enjoying the perks and benefits that the remote work setting brings to us.
Right? Uh, We are growing fast. It's a great moments to be part of the Turing family, the Turing community, and we actually conduct surveys on a regular basis to find out the key reasons why developers love to be part of our community and also to find out ways for us to be better every time and serve developers better,. These are basically the top reasons why developers are sticky and loyal to our platform.
Key reason there is quality of work, as you can see, we also have better compensation, ease of collaboration as great reasons and less downtime between gigs and opportunities. One thing that we like to say is that once you join Turing, you never need to worry about finding a next job again. We are all about giving you the opportunities you deserve. So let's go over to top three most frequented questions that you guys usually have. The first is, I have completed my technical Turing test and pass the coding challenge, what's next? Well it's important that you know that we have an entire matching team actively, and tirelessly working on finding the perfect matches and jobs for you.
But you have to be patient because this can be a time taking process. It depends upon multiple factors. Sometimes the process is really fast, but other times it can take longer, maybe two three weeks, sometimes more, sometimes less. The next step is you are invited to what we call an onboarding or a non-technical interview where our team will discuss a few things with you like the projects that we have, salaries, your rates, your availability. Having this information, we can then find a suitable match for you.
In the meantime, if you have any questions you can always reach out to support@turing.com. Another very frequent question that we get from your guys is, how do I increase my chances of getting matched? Well, one of our goals in this event is to talk to you about a few things that you can do in order to boost your matchability. And for that, we have Matko, one of our speakers today Head of Matching at Turing. He will be joining us here and talking to you guys a bit more about this. There are two key things you can do.
One is do some research to see what's the average rate per hour of the positions you are looking for and maybe you can do some adjustment. That would be good. And then also complete additional tests. Like the more tech stack test you take the better. Okay.
Last, but not least, can I get feedback about my application? Yes, definitely. You can message us at support@turing.com. It's important that you know that in some cases, it might take a little time to process all the applications before they can provide us with some feedback, but our team will be, working on giving you some support on that sense. So always reach out to us at support@turing.com. We'll get back to you as soon as possible.
When it comes to every developer's journey in our platform, we have basically three phases that a developer goes through. Phase one, which is the one you have passsed. Congratulations you guys for going through this phase. That's why we called this event top 1% developer town hall.
Because if you are here, it means that you have been through there. Now you are in phase 2. that's the phase that most of you guys here today are going, through where you're supposed to finalize your resumes, take additional tests if possible, keep improving your skills and hopefully getting job offers. When you're matched to a client, then you are on phase three. Meaning that you are billing active, just like Pedro and Igor, our Turing developers.
So they are already working with our partner companies. In order to talk to you a little bit more about this phase two process, I want to call Matko on stage so he can introduce himself and start guiding you guys through the most important aspects of this phase. Hi. Matko just to introduce myself briefly my name is Matko and I'm leading a team of people responsible for selection and success of the developers that we have registered on the platform with our clients.
Hopefully you're seeing me and hearing me speak for the first time. That would mean that we did some good job with previous attendees. If you're hearing me for the second time, we'll try to figure out what's wrong. Let me just quickly share my screen. Right. And As I said, I lead a team of people who are responsible for your success uh, and there's a bunch of us and we do a lot of work with a lot of clients, month over month.
But if it were only just us, it would never be possible, right? Considering the number of developers that we have on the platform and considering the number of client requests. So the invisible player in all of this is our matching algorithm, which has a large part, in how things developed from this point. And I 'll try to explain briefly how this thing works, because right now you are at the stage where you need, in gaming terms, to beat the matching algorithm. So whenever a client gives a request to us, they have a position they want to fill, or they have several positions they want to fill, they put in their requests through the tool that we have provided them and that request gets passed through the matching algorithm. And that specific matching algorithm does some sort of ranking.
We have a bunch of talented data science guys and data engineering guys working in the background as well who are responsible for maintaining, this ranking algorithm. And whenever the job comes in, all of your names get pulled through the algorithms and my team, takes look at the selection, at the shortlist that the computer made and we make a final decision. Why are we doing this? Because no algorithm is perfect at this point and we still have to verify.
So in order for this matching algorithm to work, we need data. And the only people that can provide this data is you. And the data that we are looking for at this specific point, is what do you know and what did you do? If you are here, you have been through our testing. right. Uh, Some of these relate to you, some of these, not, some of these are within your area of expertise, some of these are not, but still, this is something that you do know.
You either know AWS or Node or PHP or whatever. And whenever you take a test and you pass the test, it gets flagged as something that we as human team and our matching algorithm is confident. Thing is client requests are never really that simple. Whenever they are inputting their request, they will rarely input just PHP or just React. They are usually looking for experienced people.
And they are expecting from these developers to know many things, regardless of whether it's a front end role or backend role or dev ops role or any other kind of role, they will rarely look for just a single technology. And even if they are looking for a single dedicated technology, like React or PHP, they will also look for what we call supporting technologies. Things like Next JS, or WordPress or Firebase and so on. And many of you, when you come to these tests, you take one or two of these tests and the platform lets you to proceed further because essentially you pass the minimum requirements that you need to go through.
But at the later stage, when we pull in our matching ranking, it doesn't work so well because if you have, let's say two tests passed and the client is looking for five, in the current list that will be deployed, you will be done ranked essentially. So the point of this is to go back and to take as many tests that you can. Firstly it will help you go higher on our algorithm ranking. The second thing would be that once the human team looks at your profile, they will see what you did and how well you do.
One thing to keep in mind is not to go back and take any test that you can imagine. So the point of this is to be taking only tests that you have professional work experience with, not just the test that you did some side project with, but the technology that you have worked in professional capacity, in a team, in production environment. Let's say that you went back and you pass these tests.
You spend some time, you pass five or six of them and you end up top of our list. The next thing that will happen is we will go through your profile and see, do these tests make any sense to what you have been doing in the past. So we will go through your resume and we will see whether these things align, whether these things match. So usually we see resumes that are not very well written or that are incomplete. What happens after that is that we are not really sure whether the tests that you have taken have any relation to your specific career path. In that case, we will sort of skip you and we'll try to find someone whose experience has been properly written.
There are other components to these resumes because resumes have two meanings. The first time someone comes in contact with your resume is our team. The second time is the client. But the client resume needs to be slightly different and our team will help you out in writing that one, because we are aware that many of you probably don't enjoy writing things in English or your English is not your primary language and we need these resumes to be as detailed as possible.
We will help you out with this. We will style it, we will format it, we will guide you on how to do it and what you want to focus on and so on. The thing that I want to draw your attention to is this. So when you register on the platform, you'll just probably upload your CV and that's that.
That CV came from some point in your life. You did not specifically tailor it to Turing. You have used it for a while in your job hunt. And it's usually not enough.
Based on what we see day-to-day, these CVs need a little bit of additional work. In most cases we get things like this. And you can also see that reading these texts, the person who is reading or the algorithm who is reading, has no idea what exactly these people did on the project. We'd have no idea what kind of language they used, what kind of framework they used, what kind of role they were in, what kind of responsibilities they had, what was the outcome of the project. And this does not really fare well in terms of ranking.
Neither computer ranking, neither human ranking. After you're done with your test, you'll need to go back and spend some time. These two examples come from people who are currently working with our clients. And as you can see, they're different than the ones I showed you before.
Skills are properly tagged here. So algorithm can read what exact skills are you referring to. There are screenshots.
Screenshots are fairly important, especially if you are a front end or a mobile developer, and most of the clients want to see how you handle a UI and UX and how you design pages if you design pages at all. Reading the text itself, it's fairly consistently written, and it's pretty obvious what this person did and what technologies they used. So you can see here about the role they had in the company. You can see the other thing here that also serves two purposes. One is for us and one is for the clients.
So this is the outcome of the project that you have been working on. Everyone loves the metrics. So numbers prettier they are, the better. So if you have improved something on a project, or whatnot, the best thing to do is to write about it in a metric sense. So give us some numbers if you can.
When you think of these resumes and things that you have been doing and some of you have been in IT for quite a while, there's a lot of it to write. So the keyword that you need to have is editing. You can see this resume and this is a single project.
Granted it lasted two years, but still it's a bunch of texts. It's not a problem for an algorithm. But when this comes to a hiring manager, chances are he'll just skip it. Because resumes are not different than any other writing, especially when we are talking about sales here.
And don't mistake, you are trying to give a sales pitch. These resumes are sales pitch to the client. And no one likes a long sales pitch. So resumes need to be brief, need to be on point and need to cover what they need to cover. Just to reinforce what I meant by resumes need to cover what they need to cover. Write about your specific role and what exactly did you do on the specific project that you have worked with the company.
Their goal, the skills that you have used, even the ones that you think of not important. Don't just tag them, write about them. Talk about them. Let us know what was the exact extent of your usage of these skills and provide us with some metrics. What will usually happen, people will go write about the project itself, about the business value that project brought to the company or to the domain in general. In terms of resume, in terms of algorithms, in terms of matching rankings and in terms of hiring managers, this does not have much value.
It has some value, but not much value. So avoid writing about the project. Focus on writing about your work. I hope I made things clearer a little bit.
So thank you for listening. Thanks Matko. Thank you.
I am sure this was a useful, insightful and helpful for developers here. Okay. So um, one amazing thing that I am so happy to talk about in this town hall events, is that we are now a large community of software developers who have been successfully matched and are working with our customers.
I think we have developers, distributed in over 56 different countries. And we do have some fun. Turing is not just a jobs platform. Definitely not.
We are a careers platform in a sense that we like to provide developers with opportunities to grow their careers and keep developing, learning, sharing. We have some amazing events. We have chess tournaments, photography, contests, I have been super happy to organize those and engage developers in those events. Our last hackathon was in partnership with Open Treatments, which is this great amazing non-profit organization that is on a mission to enable treatments to patients who suffer from rare diseases. So we do believe in the power of software to cause global impact in a positive way and solve many of the challenges and problems that we have today.
So by joining our community, you'll definitely be involved in these projects with amazing people from all over the world. Right. I want to invite on stage now, Igor and Pedro both. Please guys, why don't you join me? So you can talk to these folks here about your story with Turing. So everyone, Igor and Pedro, they are great software developers hired through Turing. Maybe we can start by you Igor.
You can start by just introducing yourself a little bit, talking a little bit about your background, how you came across Turing, go through our tests and our vetting process and was matched to one of our customers. Hey everyone. Thanks for having me here. It's a pleasure to be here with you. I am 20 years old, and I was born in Rio de Janeiro, the city that previously hosted the Olympic games uh, and I've been professionally on the field for almost five years now.
That might sound strange because how young I am, but I learn how to code very young. I was about 12 years old and since then I never stopped. A friend introduced me to Turing.
The process of registering and going through all the tests and everything was pretty smooth. Since I was a kid, I've always loved technology, computers, video games. And I think a lot of you guys that are here today can relate to that. I was trying to figure it out how things work, trying to create my own version of the games that I played, at the time. and I never stopped.
The first time I saw someone using something that I built was when I knew that was the thing I wanted to keep working and doing for my life. It was amazing, that feeling. Like someone is enjoying using something that I built. But I wouldn't be able to achieve anything I could until today without persistence, because I think persistence beats intelligence, persistence beats luck. Persistence is the most powerful tool that we have. Because when you can be persistent about something, means that you value that thing.
That you want to achieve that goal however you can. because Who hasn't spent all day and night looking to learn a new piece of technology or trying to debug something that looks very hard? And that's a lot, that's all about persistence. That's nice because we have had many developers participate in these Town Halls, and it's a very diverse pool. We have all sorts of ages, different countries, nationalities. It's a very diverse community.
But I think you are the youngest to be here right now. And I think this shows that to us at Turing, what matters most is not only how experienced you are, how passionate you are, but also how willing you are to keep growing and keep persistent, improving yourself. In case are not there yet, what can you do to keep improving? Keep going better. One thing that is interesting, I think you and Pedro have in common, you both, had a little bit faster than average process after you cleared the tests, until you were reached out by our team. Pedro how was your process? My process took about a week.
Getting into the platform, taking some tech stacks, being interviewed in the live code challenge, and then getting the job offer. And so about a week, two weeks at most. And then I was in a vacation trip. So I finished my job offering in a vacation. That was really nice. Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. uh, well, Igor is working with one of our partner companies. What's your field and industry with your customer Igor? They do auto re-financing, vehicles refinancing. Awesome.
And Pedro ended up being invited to work in our internal team, right? Yeah. I work at Turing platform, but right now I'm doing a side project with the beverages company, big beverage company. Awesome. That's great. Fantastic you guys. Uh, Igor, how was the process like? Who contacted you first at Turing? And how was the onboarding calls with the your customer? How was this process? I don't recall exactly who contacted me first.
I think it was my matching manager. The process was quite fast I think for me at least. I know that might not be the case for everyone, but since I did the tests and passed the technical vetting interview it's like two days to get my first match and that first match was amazing. I had an interview with a company, the company I'm working on today. And I loved that.
And my experience with them, their onboarding experience with them was amazing. To be honest, I think this is my best work experience I have ever had. Amazing. I'm so glad to hear that. I think another thing you both did, you took different uh, tech stack tests, right? When you were going through the test process, is that right? Yeah. I think one of the best things on Turing are the technical tasks.
They can sound boring sometimes because you enter there and you see that screen with a bunch of different tests and maybe it seems scary. I, I feel its a very, very powerful tool to allow companies to know what you're capable of without having to go through technical tests on every single interview that you have. Of course, sometimes you will be required an additional test, but most of the times they already know what you know, because you already passed the test. I did a lot of tests when I joined Turing. I did every test that I could because what I thought at the time was, maybe the knowledge that I currently have on this piece of tech and what Turing can evaluate of it might, not be enough for a senior position.
But sometimes this is enough to accomplish the client needs. Yes. That's a great insight even if you don't master any specific piece of tech or a specific skill, go there and try.
Maybe take some time to do some preparation, study a little bit and try it again. Because maybe as Igor said, the level you have is enough for the customers. I think you did the same, right Pedro? You took many tests as well.
Yeah. I took many tests and it's pretty much like Igor said. You don't need to master all of them. But I think this set of skills that you say that you have experience in and prove it through tests, plus the resume, all that that together builds you, builds how the company see you for each job.
Now I can be a master in React plus Node. But if I don't know some kind of databases or some other tools that help me as a whole for the jobs, it doesn't matter. if I can take 10 of 10 questions in one tech stack, but I need other skills. I need to prove to the companies that I know. That's why it's, it's a better strategy to take a lot of tests and prove that you know what you say you know. You dont have to do all the tests at once.
Take some time between them. Take a deep breath, do some refreshing a memory, and the concepts and do the test. Yes, absolutely. Igor is there any other thing other than being persistent, any other thing that you would recommend everyone? I have a bunch of things.
I think humane things. I see friends of mine making the same mistakes and a lot of people that I bump into making the same basic mistakes while being on the job market Like the first one is about your resume. Turing helps with that a lot because Turing had that space for you to fill your previous work experiences and I think that helps a lot. Do provide the most context that you can there.
And of course, try not to be over extensive, but say, what you helped the companies or the jobs that you had, what were the challenges that you faced and how you and your team overcame that challenge. And also there's space for you to be free. So if you already have like a big past experience with many years of work, select the most relevant ones and put there. And maybe even write a little small texts about what you did there, or what you accomplish there and reserve some space also to talk a little bit about yourself. Not too much, just a paragraph maybe, and say some things about yourself. What motivates you to do what you do? Things like that will help you to be a highlight between a bunch of other resumes that the interviewer or the company are looking at.
And I think that's very important. And the last tip that I have is when you are being interviewed. One thing that I see a lot is the person being interviewed is quiet and only answering questions and they look like a robot.
And they are serious. Don't do that. Smile. Smiling is more powerful than you think. Because when you smile, you will help the interviewer connect with you and they will know that you're listening to them and that you were interested.
And don't only reply to the questions, but ask questions yourself. Do a little search before the interview about the company and ask things about the company, the projects, the challenge that they're facing. That will help you and your interviewer connect aside from the technical aspect. Be sure they are not only hiring you because you're a good developer.
You're a good engineer. You're good at data science. They are hiring you because you're a good professional at all. Fantastic.
Igor. Yeah. I couldn't agree more as community manager, I have been in touch with so many developers helping them with their engagements and definitely communication skills is something so important for modern days remote developers. It's not only about being a great developer, it's about being a great communicator. It's about being an effective communicator and showing yourself as a person. We at Turing like to say it's part of our culture.
We are people. Although we work with technology, artificial intelligence, we are all about people here. There's always people behind everything we build, everything we do. So the very first question I have here is from Drew. I have been matched for two jobs over the last three weeks, but I haven't been called yet for interviews, even though I completed the availability form twice during this period.
What's the feedback you can give? Well it's simple and not simple. Regarding the availability form, whenever we match you to a job, we tend to recheck this availability because everything around this is fast moving market. We want to be sure that you are available before we match you to the job. Regarding not having any feedback after you have been matched. We are working live with the clients.
Sometimes things get delayed for any reason. But if you have been in touch with some of us, please reach to whoever you've been in touch with and we'll try to figure out what's going on. Amazing. Now Shubham has a question. What's the average to take for us to get matched after completing the testing pass? Yeah. So as you heard from our developers here, for them it was fast.
For some other people, unfortunately it's not. The only thing at this point that you can do to improve is to go back and do some more testing or work on your resume and we'll move as fast as possible. So right now the idea is I will repeat myself again to beat the matching algorithm, to show up in the search filters. And once you are able to do that, we'll find you a job in no time.
So just to be concrete about a question, anywhere from one day to six week. Amazing. The platform is a living thing, so new features will be available. Keep updating your information, your skills, new technologies that you're learning, doing new tests. Keep your information rolling up so that the algorithm will check that you are working on it. And maybe you can overcome it.
Now we have Arun here with a question. How many companies are there with Turing to offer? Currently, we have almost 200 partner companies and this number is getting bigger and bigger every day. We were scaling a lot and we have from small startup companies up to very large enterprise sales companies.
Many of them, I am sure build products that you use on a daily basis and they are companies that you probably have heard about. Thanks for asking Arun. I'm going to go with Arindam's question.
He's asking, are there opportunities for fresh graduates at Turing? Igor was probably a fresh graduate when he joined So in a sense, yes. We can say we have opportunities. But what really counts is your practical experience and other qualities that you might have. Yeah. it will be difficult to land a job with one of our clients as I mentioned. But internally and with some clients, especially if fresh graduates or even people who have not graduated but are doing very well on the testing part, can have an opportunity to work for us either internally or outside of the platform.
On my side that I see is most of the clients want an engineer who can hit the ground running. Like you're going to enter, you're going to start contributing and it's okay for you to have the ramp up process and everything. But you have to be able to start delivering value to them. That makes sense. Thanks Igor. Well this was super fun time flew actually.
I I would like to thank my teammates Matko and Pedro, thanks for joining me again here. And I special shout out to Igor. Thanks so much Igor. It was so nice to have you here.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. My pleasure to be here. Guys if you have more questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to our team.
support@turing.com. Your success is our success. We want you guys to get matched. We want you guys to get amazing jobs. and I'll be seeing you soon.
2021-09-06 05:58
