In Dan’s first campus job interview, he was floored by the question.
“What do you look for in a job?”
Instant anxiety.
Dan Halabe remembered thinking “How am I supposed to answer this? I didn’t study this.” How do you know what to look for in a job, if it’s your first real job?
Palms sweating, he searched his memory and found in it the Accenture brochure with the tagline: “Where the people make the difference.”
He dutifully answered, “I think it’s the people that make the difference.”
Want to know what happened next? Keep reading to find out or catch the full podcast on Apple, Spotify or Youtube.
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If you’re lucky, you’ve had a teacher who made a big impact on you. A teacher who made you sit up a little further in your seat. Who shaped your character or interests well beyond the semester or year you spent in their classroom?
For me, it was Mr. Wiffen, the mathematics teacher who helped me and a class of 25 students finish their entrance exams 2 years early.
Mike Engber and Dan Halabe probably don’t even identify as teachers–they’ve had long, successful careers in tech–but somehow I reckon their students think of them as one of these impactful teachers.
I sat down with them to talk about teaching Computer Science at De Anza College in Silicon Valley, Mike’s storied career as a developer at Apple, and Dan’s experiences as a developer, and technology consultant, and his time working with the team who wrote the first client-side browser applications EVER for Netscape. Here are some of my key takeaways:
- Staying current with technology trends
- Maintaining hands-on involvement in critical technical decisions
- Balancing time between management duties and technical work
- Building credibility with engineering teams
Career Decision-Making Framework
Dan and Mike outlined their approaches to making major career decisions:
Key Questions to Ask
- What will I learn? Every role should teach you something new
- Who will I work with? The quality of your colleagues matters more than the company name
- What problems will I solve? Meaningful work leads to career satisfaction
- How does this fit my long-term goals? Each role should be a stepping stone
Red Flags to Avoid
How to ace an interview without even talking
After Dan’s answer “I think it’s the people that make the difference,” the interviewer agreed. The interviewer in fact spent the rest of the interview pitching the job to Dan and told him he was hired.
Success!
This is an extreme example, of course. Reading the brochure isn’t a repeatable interview strategy, but it reveals something very important about job interviews:
Hiring managers are not simply looking for the best technical skills or the most well-crafted answers. They want to work with someone who will contribute to the culture of the workplace. Who they will enjoy working with.
Dan was doing something called paraphrasing. He took the words used to describe Accenture’s ideal candidate and reflected them back to the interviewer. This is an important influencing skill and a great way to show someone that you are listening to them and that you share some key opinions or values. The hiring manager felt comfortable with Dan, partly because he reflected back what they were looking for.
How to pick the right classes at university or college
Is it enough to just look at the class roster and decide based on what your friends are doing?
Mike Engber thinks you should pick classes based on the teacher!
“Look around at your school and see where the really good teachers are. And even if it’s a topic you may not be interested in, if the teacher has a real passion and a talent for teaching it, it’s probably worthwhile taking it.”
Initially, Mike wasn’t interested in databases at all–“that was boring, right?”—but University of Wisconsin had world-leading database experts on staff, which meant that the database classes he took were fascinating.
For Dan, it meant taking a class on Computer Vision at Northwestern University that was unrelated to the rest of his classes but was taught by an inspiring teacher.
“And vision was cool and it didn’t matter because the guy was such a lovely guy. It was a guy called Paul Cooper. And I would have studied whatever he was teaching, you know, and it turned out vision was also a great subject to learn from. Find a teacher that you feel good with and learn what they’re teaching.”
Why everyone should write their own compiler
Mike thinks the recent shift to focusing on only job-ready skills is misguided.
He said that Computer Science students should practice the fundamental skills while they are studying. Once you’re on the job, you may not have time.
Even though it’s unlikely to come up in a job–at Apple, “someone got to do it for Newton. We wrote Newton’s script…someone got to actually write a parser for it, but that’s like, you know, a one in a million opportunity.”
It’s easy to get caught up in the toolkits, frameworks, and languages. But if you can focus on the basic problem-solving skills that cut across development tools, you’ll be able to figure out the frameworks on the job.
He said “I can’t believe people can get out of an undergrad in CS nowadays without having written a compiler…That was a very satisfying project to do as an undergrad. And it pulls together lots of different pieces of computer science. It pulls in some of the stuff you learn in computer theory about regular expressions for the lexing and grammars for the parsing.
I think it’s important to do stuff like that while you’re in school. You get the opportunity to do that. And once you’re out in the business world, yeah, you’ll learn the details of CSS or whatever application framework you’re working on. That’s fine. You’ll learn that on the job.”
How to pick your passion
If you’re a CS, Engineering, or Tech student, there’s no need to discard your other passions.
These disciplines are needed in every industry, and it’s perfectly possible to be an engineer focused on games, or health tech, or music, or the law.
Dan’s advice: “Take classes outside of the engineering department, find out what’s exciting outside of the engineering department, and then go back to the engineering department with that interest intact. And then I think you’re going to find not only, a lot of fun, but probably more than enough employment.”
Dan himself worked at Intuitive Surgical developing surgical robots. If you’re interested in surgery or medicine, you don’t necessarily need to study to be a doctor. But as an engineer in this domain, it was key for Dan to build an understanding of the domain, of anatomy, of how surgeons work, to build tools for them.
It’s okay not to have a plan
For Dan and Mike, they both loved Computer Science but didn’t have a clear goal in mind for their eventual career path. They looked at the opportunities in front of them and picked the ones that were most interesting at a given time.
Here’s how Dan puts it: “You don’t have to go find your true love. Mike didn’t grow up saying ‘I always wanted to work on handheld devices or I always wanted to work on, you know, video editing systems for the professionals’. He just found it.”
Shipping early web projects
When Dan was leading tech teams at Accenture, he got to work on projects at Netscape in the early days of browsers. He describes himself as like the Forrest Gump of the internet.
Netscape gave his team a kind of “side project”: to build applications using the new tools Netscape was building.
So they got to build “the first registration system, the first email-based marketing system, the first online store, the first use of Java on the client, the first use of JavaScript on the client, the first use of cookies. ”
All this in service of demonstrating features that were being put in Netscape’s products. As Dan puts it, it was a “good time to be involved in the internet,” figuring out new systems from first principles.
Their final advice:
Get around people you like being around. Everything else is gonna go okay.
If you’re an educator who wants to get in touch with Dan Halabe or Mike Engber, shoot us an email at hello@jdoodle.com.
Chapters
00:00 Tech Careers and Computer Science Education 03:00 Balancing Technical Roles and Management in the Tech Industry 05:47 Early Web Projects and AI Systems: Precursors to Modern Technology 11:22 Teaching Programming: Challenges and Rewards 58:13 Final Words and Advice
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