James Brady: belief

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…amount of like, actually we, I think we've accidentally defined AI engineering along the way as well, because you kind of have to do that in order to to hire and interview for people. The last piece I wanted to And the last thing I would offer to our audience is sourcing a very underappreciated part because people just tend to rely on recruiters and, , assume that candidates fall from the sky. But I think the two of you have had plenty of experience with like really good sourcing and I just want to give leave some time open for what is AI engineer sourcing look like? Is it being very loud on Twitter? Well, I mean, that definitely helps. I am really quiet on Twitter, unfortunately, but a lot of my teammates are much more effective on that front which is deeply appreciated. I think in terms of in terms of, maybe I'll focus a little bit more on active outbound, if you will, rather than the kind of yes, Marketing, branding type of work that that Adam's been really effective with us on. So the kinds of things that I'm looking for are certainly side projects. It's, it's really easy still. We're early on in this, early enough on in this process that people can still do interesting work pretty much at the cutting edge, not in terms of training whole models, of course, but AI engineering. You can. Very much build interesting apps that have interesting ideas and work well just using a, , basic Open API, Open AI API key. So, people sharing that kind of stuff on Twitter is always really interesting, or in, , Discord or Slacks, things like this. In terms of the, the kind of caricature of the grizzled principal engineer kind of a person, It's, it's notable. I mean, I've spoken with a bunch of people coming from that kind of perspective. They're fairly easy to find. They tend to be on LinkedIn. They tend to be really obvious on LinkedIn because they're maybe a bit more senior. They've got a ton of connections. They're probably expected to kind of post thought leadership kinds of things on LinkedIn. Everyone's favorite. And , some of those, some of those people are interested in picking up new skills and jumping into ML and, and large language models. And sometimes it's obvious from a profile. Sometimes you just need to reach out and introduce yourself and say, hey, this is what we're doing. We think we could use your skills and a bunch of them will, will, will bite your hand off actually, because it is such an interesting area. So that's how, that's how we've found success at sourcing on the kind of more experienced end of the spectrum. I think on the, on the less experienced end of the spectrum, having lots of hooks in the ocean seems to be a good strategy if I think about what's worked for us. So, it's, it tends to be much harder to find those people because they have less of an online presence in terms of like active outbound. So, things like blog posts, hot takes on Twitter, things like challenges that we might have Those are the kind of vectors through which you can find these keen, full of energy, less experienced people and bring them towards you. Yeah. Adam, do you have anything? You're pretty good on Twitter compared to me, at least. What's your, what's your take on yeah, the kind of more like throwing stuff out there and have people come towards you for this kind of a role. Yeah, I do typically think of sourcing as being the one two punch of one, raise the beacon, let the world know that you are working on interesting problems, and you're expanding your team, and maybe there's a place for someone like them on that team, and that can come in a variety of forms, whether it's, , going to a job fair and having a booth, obviously it's job descriptions posted to your site, it's obviously things like, In some cases, yeah, blog posts about stuff you're working on, releasing open source, Anything that goes out into the world and people find out about what you're doing, Not at the very surface level of here's what the product is, And, I don't know, we have a couple job descriptions on the site, But a layer deeper of like, here's the kind, here's what it actually looks like. So, I think that's, that's one piece of it. And then the other piece of it is, as you said, is the outbound. I think it's not enough to especially when you're small. I think it's, it changes a lot when you're a bigger company with a strong brand or if the product you're working on is more in a technical space. And so, therefore, maybe your customer, there's actually among your customers, there's the sorts of people that you might might like to work for you. I don't know if you're a GitHub, then probably all of your users and customers, , the people you want to hire are among your user base, which is a nice combination, but for most products, that's not going to be the case. So then now the outbound is a big piece of it. And part of that is, as you said, getting out into the world, whether it's going to meetups, whether it's going to conferences, whether it's being on Twitter and just genuinely being out there and part of the field and having conversations with people and seeing people who are doing interesting things and making connections with them. Hopefully not in a. Transactional way, or you're always just, , sniffing around for who's available to hire. But you just generally, if you like this work and you want to be part of the field and you want to follow along with people who are doing interesting things, and then by the way, you will discover when they post, oh, I'm wrapping up my , my job here and thinking about the next thing and, , that's a good time to, to ping them and be like, oh, cool, , actually we, we have maybe some things that you, you might be interested in here on the team and that, that kind of, that kind of outbound, but I think it also pairs well, it's, it's not just that you need both, it's that they, they reinforce each other, so if someone has seen, for example, the open source project you've released, And they're like, Oh, that's cool. And they briefly looked at your company and then you follow each other on Twitter or whatever, and then they post, Hey, I'm thinking about my next thing and then you write them and they already have some context of like, Oh, I liked that project you did and I liked.…

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