How to identify projects that are truly full-stack - Rishabh Jain

00:00

When I talk about my flexibility is that I can take care of the backend for two months. Then maybe after two months, the manager or somebody says that you need to work on the front end, I'll be very happy to move to it. I will be having second thoughts about it.

00:21

How would you describe your relationship with work?

00:27

So from a very younger age, you can say from teenagers, when you are a teenager or something, so as any other teenager from the '90s, from the early 2000s and on who are just getting to know what computers are, what mobiles are and all that. So my curiosity just developed out of the classic gaming. Just computer is a gaming machine, you can have fun and you can just stay hours and hours together, and I used to play with my friends and online, going to their house. And then that developed the interest in me, trying to program, how to program small software and all that, how things work. Very much obliged by my school because they had courses which were properly dedicated to coding, so I did my bachelor's in India and then went on to work in Cognizant for two years.

And that way, I was very lucky you can say starting off directly from a very big organization. So I was able to see how, from a small part of work, what you do and how it affects in the bigger. Then I just thought of, if possible, I can do education wise, maybe learn more about design, learn more about web engineering exactly. So that motivated me to try and get a master's degree, so I came to Italy for doing my master's year in 2015 at Politecnico di Milano. And that opened my mind about what exactly how a product is made, just building up solutions for the web. And now in the course of time, I have realized that the web has transformed in so many various ways that you cannot have biases for languages or biases for the front end, back end or anything. You should be able to do and understand either ways anything, and how a system is totally designed and how it works.

02:46

How does consciously deciding that you want to work on the full stack impact how you go about finding work?

02:53

What I have realized in the last three months or four months of me trying to find work, so always, the company which comes to you, coming out like they're interested in my profile and all that, but what I realize is that from a company's point of view, what I have understood is that they are looking out for somebody to fit into their organization, to solve the problems that they are facing. So first thing they'll see, whether I have relevant experience or not, and then whatever interviews or whatever they are testing me on is all the knowledge that I have on my experience. So for them, the experience matters the most because that's the only thing that they can test me on.

So if I have some experience which is exactly same as what they want me to do or closely related to what I am doing right now, I think that is good enough for them to at least initiate the process of testing. I also didn't think maybe 10 years back that I will be a full stack developer. For me, it's just a problem and it's just a solution that I am supposed to find.

04:03

What's different about the way that you go about finding work compared to someone who's a backend developer for example?

04:11

When I talk about my flexibility is that I can take care of the backend for two months, then maybe after two months to come, the manager or somebody says that you need to work on the front end, I'll be very happy to move to it. I will be having no second thoughts about it. And also the same thing with mobile technology because I work on mobile applications also. And now you can say mobile and web, the worlds are almost merging like anything. If you know how to create a website, you can now even create a mobile application. There are companies out there who are looking out for specific backend developers with specific experiences. Maybe there are banks who are looking out for backend developers working on various protocols that the banks only implement, and it has nothing to do with maybe something like me who just creates websites, general public usage websites and all that.

05:15

When someone's interviewing you, they have a problem that they're trying to solve and they'll be diving into your experience to try and understand how your experience can solve that problem. How do you go about understanding the problem that they have? How do you get under the skin of that situation and really understand what problem they're trying to solve?

05:42

Those five or 10 minutes that they give to me in the end of the interview to ask any question, I ask them like that. The first question what I have is obviously I'll ask them for any advice they want to give me for working in XYZ company that they are working in. The second thing I ask about is the role that they are looking out for me to fulfill, and especially whenever there is a company which is having a broad variety of use cases that they are looking out to solve. So I'll ask specifically which use case or which kind of project or which kind of team that you are going to put me in and all that.

So if I get any keywords out of that like at least the use case which they are targeting me for and something like that, that gives me a very good idea overall. So sometimes, obviously some of them will give a very detailed answer and they will clear my mind, all that. Some of them, most of them will just give me keywords so then I will have to look out for myself or connect the dots by myself on what exactly they are looking out for.

06:58

How do you work out whether the environment that you are going into is going to make use of your flexible strengths as a full stack developer?

07:09

I, again, understand what they are looking... Or if they out and out, they say that they're just going to use me for one specific part of this thing, so I'll ask them, will there be a possibility that if I can switch on to some other side of work and is there a possibility of doing this thing? And always with organizations, no matter how big or how small they are, I would like to always know what is their plan for themselves, for the organization, what they're looking out for and what they are going to do, and what is their plan in case if I am going to join their organization. So do they have a mapped expectations and goals that I must fulfill in order to grow in my career and all that.

08:00

As a full stack developer, what data do you use in order to decide where to work next?

08:06

The most important thing is what kind of industry they are, what kind of clients they have, what kind of use cases the other company has. Like right now, with the company which I am working for is mostly into real estate companies and all about buildings and people living in the buildings and solutions for all home solutions and all that. So whenever I'm trying to find something else, I'm always trying to find something else which does not involve this, totally something different, something new. Will be very nice if it is something that I've never heard of, that I'll have to Google it, what exactly it is. Curiosity, that is the thing that drives me, you can say.

08:52

How do you take an engineering mindset, a logical mindset, and how do you apply that to a decision that's actually quite emotional and personal?

09:07

My personal decisions or engineering mindset, so I always look out for something new or what is going on and trying to find the best solution. Like for example, two years back, we had to start this new project of developing a mobile application. I've developed many mobile applications before using Android and iOS and everything. But then this opportunity came, I could have had gone ahead, taken three months, four months and developed the whole project using whatever technologies I knew, and I thought that it would be a very good opportunity to just start off with React Native. Let's give it a try. Whenever you're at starting position of any project, you can just give it a try. Sometimes it is good, sometimes it is wrong. Sometimes you just see.

They say that there's something called a learning curve in programming, so sometimes the learning curve is steep, sometimes the learning curve is... Because obviously, everybody has their personal lives, everybody has their personal motives in their careers and all that. There are some people who are laid back and they don't want to learn anything new. They are fine with what they have learned and they're saturated there. Then there are some who are always ready to learn something new, and maybe you can say sometimes choosing people for my team also, I have been always trying to find people who are not the best, maybe in the sense of they're not the best coders or programmers, but they're always curious and they're always ready to give as much time as they want to go that extra mile to find a solution, and always ready to learn and improve themselves.

10:50

How does that growth mindset come out in physically finding work? Is it a conscious thing that you do?

11:00

This mindset, what I am talking about right now is that rather than being narrow about your technology and going deep into it, my mindset, I think so like long time back when I was working in India, somebody has pointed out that you are trying too many things in a very short period of time, so you're going very wide. So you learn a little bit of this, learn a little bit of this, learn a little bit of that and then you are going very wide. So you don't know deep knowledge about everything, so it's like you know a lot of things but it is not that much. I can handle that and I like doing that way that I can go wide. And because if I try to just focus on one thing for a very long period of time, I think I've realized after working for one year on the same thing, I realized that this is the same thing and it became monotonous, and everything what you're doing just becomes redundant.

12:07

I'm interested to know how all of your philosophy there comes out in your own choice and where you decide to work? How does your broad mindset and your desire to want to do lots of different things practically change the way that you go and find work?

12:34

First of all, it all comes down to the company's profile and what they're looking out for, because obviously there are companies who will directly specify exactly what they're looking out for and what kind of technologies that they want that person to be experienced within. Like you should have two years or three years of working in GoLand, so I don't know GoLand, I don't have that much of an experience also so I will not even try to get that thing. Then there are companies who will just ask for exactly what I have done or part of what I have done and all that. So that way, that ticks the first box for me, you can say.

Then the second part or the further the things come on is the company's profile, what kind of company they are and what they have done, what they are doing and what kind of use cases they have, what kind of client they have and everything. Before applying also, I want to make sure that whether I and my profile both are aligned with their... Not just me but my profile and my thinking are aligned with what they're looking out for, because they'll write for a anonymous person who should meet all these requirements. So do I meet all that requirements or not? If I meet majority of them, then I'll apply, or else I don't want to waste their time also.

14:12

Rishabh, thank you so much for breaking down how you approach taking a slightly broader mindset to finding work in the first place.