NOTE: aliases are used here in place of people's names
This is easily one of my most action packed weeks. So much happened that the blog description doesn't even come close to capturing it all. As an overview, I:
- played soccer with friends (very nostalgic! we used to play every day at lunch in high school), watched Obsession, and got extremely jumpy that night,
- helped a friend with driving practice and was an unpaid parking instructor for a few hours,
- did group coffee chats as part of a job application process for new grad roles and reflected on myself both before and after,
- went crazy on Claude Code to develop my suite of personal productivity apps and deploy them on Vercel with Nextjs so I could finally use them on my laptop and phone,
- went downtown to learn more about tech in trading at banks and then met a good friend Thomas from my time at Scotia for lunch,
- met another friend Sam who has a small software consulting company and talked about the skills that make you excel when AI can do so much in tech, as well as what we're seeing on the ground now that I've got my own freelance work on the side.
Massive list, yeah? Honestly, it's another reason that I'm so grateful to have this summer off. As a side note, Thomas and I were talking about AI in writing and he said that the use of "genuinely" and "honestly" are often key indicators that something was written with AI (specific to his job, not necessarily generalizable although I would not be surprised if it was), which makes me cry because I've always loved using those words. Though to be fair, I'm sure that if I did look back on my writing, I would have used them less before AI came along. It's a shame that good writing conventions/techniques (rip the em-dash) are branded as a sign of AI...
Standing out
What did I learn this week? In terms of myself, the group coffee chats were a fantastic way to reflect and practice delivering descriptions of what I've done and why it matters. I've been thinking a lot about how one can stand out in these calls. My calls had 5-10 interviewees per, which makes it very difficult to catch the recruiter's attention. I honestly wish I had a recording so I could do a play-by-play analysis on my delivery and critique myself properly on if I explained my points well, gave enough context, didn't leave any details hanging, etc. It also became clear which of my experiences I had gone over more because I confidently explained them, whereas experiences that I thought fit a question well but I hadn't practiced enough now made me feel like I might have left important details out. It's an important skill in the workplace that comes out here as well -- being able to know how much context your audience has and appropriately give context where necessary to make your point well understood.
In my second call, I realized that I forgot to bring up the fact that I won Co-op Student of the Year from the first and it would be a good way to showcase myself from the start. The only issue is that I then forgot to mention my fun fact about learning mandarin for more than 1150 days :(
Where efforts are seen
Related to these interviews, a friend of mine told me that that I've been putting in so much effort, so surely I'll get in. But the recruiter only sees what I've shown them in the call. I've put a lot of effort recently into making my LinkedIn reflective of my experiences and growth, but who's to say that they'll look deeply at it? I've talked to a lot of people at these companies, but unless they've mentioned me to the recruiters, how would they know the efforts I've taken to learn about the roles, go to conferences, and continuously better myself? I believe that my efforts in those domains are the best for my own growth, but they are certainly much harder to showcase when it comes to job recruitment. Which makes me wonder how to get the "hardest hitting" facts that showcase oneself well in a shorter call. I have a feeling I'll be pondering this one for a while.
Slop in the workplace
All that said, I did have some wonderful chats with Thomas and Sam. Thomas brought up AI slop and how he's noticing that so many people don't even bother writing their own emails anymore. It's things like this that save the person utilizing AI time, but certainly can come off as impersonal on the other end. And given that interacting with people is core to most workplaces, I believe authentically presenting oneself to be extremely valuable. Needless to say, I won't be sending AI-written emails.
People really matter
With Sam, we had a fun talk about tech in general, updates on his business, and then sharing my personal apps that I've been working on. A fun takeaway was us sharing how we see projects changing as AI is increasingly adopted. He told me a good story about how he had a client that had two developers working on a project, and one was never in the update calls because they lived in a time zone that made it unrealistic. That dev was also far more experienced and suited to working on the project long term. When the time came to scale down to only one developer, the client specifically asked for the dev who was always on the calls because they "valued how involved and personable" that dev was. That stuck out to Sam because "personality" was valued so highly by the client, and it seems to be a recurring theme with other clients.
Experience matters
Outside of what clients value, we also discussed the shifts in our work. For example, there are some clients that don't have the time/energy/resources and will look for developers that can do everything for them. On the flipside, some clients want to do most of the work that they can with AI, and come to a developer when they get stuck or as a final verification. The difference between developers with lots of experience (or even just some educational background) is more clear, because those give you the tools to recognize problems that other devs and AI wouldn't see. For example, you're building an app for a client that uses some customer data. Because of my education, I know there are certain data privacy laws in Canada like PIPEDA that I would have to account for. AI would not, and someone using AI who has never run into this before or doesn't have the same education wouldn't even think to give AI the context that would help it realize this.
This is a clear differentiator that both Sam and I see as extremely valuable in talking to clients so that they understand why our expertise is needed and also where. After all, they can save lots of money by doing most of the grunt work themselves with AI. But Sam gave me many good examples (I'm actually keeping a running list now) about situations where AI failed and human expertise was needed to stop it from going in a loop or implementing destructive "fixes". Such as blocking vital functionality of the app because it fixes the issue that AI was told to fix, yet would ruin other aspects of it.
So, lots of learning, sharing of experiences, and also fun stuff this week. I've got backcountry camping coming up tomorrow for the long weekend, so I'm excited to turn my brain off and further reflect on my growth and where I want to direct my efforts in the last month of my summer off.