How can you maximize your potential as a software engineer?

Christian McCarrick Do you mean raw potential, career potential or salary potential? My first piece of advice is to try to find the right company to work for, with the right team and the right manager/mentor.  This is more important (especially early in your career) than salary.  Watch other senior engineers / architects and study […]

Maya Angelou Quote

A quote that applies just as much to leadership.

The Interview Process at Most Tech Startups is Broken

Everyone complains about how hard it is to find and hire great engineering talent yet almost no one spends the time required to build out an exceptional and efficient hiring & interviewing process.  To clarify, the HR / Recruiter portion is usually pretty good, but once it gets into the engineering hiring manager and team […]

10 Tips to for Working with a Recruiter to Find Talent

Working with a recruiter

As you know finding good talent is incredibly hard.  Using recruiters should be an important part of your talent sourcing strategy.  Having worked with many recruiting companies over the years, I have a few pointers to that will help optimize your relationship: #1. Create a hiring plan This is an absolute must!  Before you can […]

I've been interest in becoming a software engineer for a really long time but the only thing holding me back is that I'm not so great in math. Any advice in what I should do?

Christian McCarrick If you are truly interested in becoming a software engineer, I would not let your fear that you are not good in math stop you.  Most people who think they are not so great in math just have not had a good experience in learning it.  In some cases it is made worse […]

How is machine learning used in finance?

Christian McCarrick Machine Learning is also used in more Qualitative ways.  At AltX we were using machine learning to not only identify what news, blog and regulatory documents where relevant to specific Hedge Funds, but also to pull actionable information from those sources in near real-time.  The ability to identify specific named entities from those […]

Software Engineers: What are the pros and cons of your engineering culture?

Christian McCarrick Pros: Feeling that anything is possible Striving for excellence Insatiable curiosity Never settling / accepting the status quo Desire to always improve & learn more Great conversations More liberal world-view (generalization being made here) Incredible loyalty if you earn trust Building things from scratch that really can change the world Cons: "Brogramer" The […]