The Scrimba Podcast

Meet Shaundai Person 🇺🇸! Shaundai is a senior software engineer at Netflix, but she hasn't always been a coder. She studied entrepreneurship and had a long, successful career in sales. After a decade in sales and running her own business, Shaundai discovered coding through customizing her business's Shopify website.

Shaundai realized she was ready for a career change to something she felt more passionate about. She also learned that you don't have to go back to school to become a software engineer and that much of engineering isn't NASA-level stuff. In fact, it's about listening to customers' needs and offering them solutions—just like in sales!

In this episode, you'll learn how Shaundai transitioned into the tech team of the company she was already working at. She leveraged her extensive sales experience and her passion for coding to create a personal brand within the company, building a reputation that preceded her. The key to a successful sale is believing in your product, and if you're learning to sell yourself, you are the product! Shaundai will teach you how to do just that while remembering that you're still human. Shaundai and Alex also discuss the often non-linear path to career change and why coding skills are nowadays a commodity (so you need to find a different way to stand out).

🔗 Connect with Shaundai
⏰ Timestamps
  • How Shaundai chose to study entrepreneurship (01:53)
  • "I had never been in a position where I loved the thing that I was doing" (04:41)
  • Selling software made Shaundai fascinated with software engineering (05:49)
  • How Shaundai eventually taught herself to code on Codecademy (10:17)
  • How Shaundai organized her studying... and went overtime (12:58)
  • "I could make money AND be happy with that I'm doing" (13:25)
  • "In this case, I'm selling myself!" (14:36)
  • There are always more decision-makers involved in hiring, and here's what to do about them (16:57)
  • Shaundai's strategy to win over her company's engineering team (18:31)
  • You're always in a more powerful position when people think that something was their idea (20:07)
  • Never start conversations with what YOU need (20:54)
  • Shaundai started submitting projects to the engineering team's personal development form... and getting challenges (23:50)
  • Put yourself in the shoes of the customer (26:02)
  • Managers can't go through every single line of code of everybody who's applied. Here's how to tackle that! (26:21)
  • Your coding skills are a commodity! Provide value instead. (27:31)
  • What's a commodity? (28:16)
  • If you're a career changer, you're a superset of a developer! (29:18)
  • How Shaundai eventually got to switch teams (30:19)
  • Shaundai started interviewing with Netflix less than a year into her new career, and it all started with a podcast (32:01)
  • "In order to stand out, I need to show that I'm a human" (36:27)
  • How to be human (38:10)
  • How to get outside of the goal (while still keeping the goal in sight) (38:55)
  • Sometimes we pick the more tangible thing, but ultimately you don't know what can help you in the long run (42:04)
  • How to cultivate self-belief? (45:07)
🧰 Resources mentioned 

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Creators & Guests

Host
Alex Booker
Host of The Scrimba Podcast
Producer
Jan Gregory Arsenovic
Producer of the Scrimba Podcast

What is The Scrimba Podcast?

Learn from inspiring developers about how they found meaningful and fulfilling work that that also pays them well. On The Scrimba Podcast, you'll hear motivational advice and job-hunting strategies from developers who've been exactly where you are now. We talk to developers about their challenges, learnings, and switching industries in the hopes of inspiring YOU. This is the podcast that provides the inspiration, tools, and roadmaps to move from where you are to work that matters to you and uniquely fits your strengths and talents.

Shaundai Person:
If somebody sends me a block of code, I'm a manager. Say I have a position open or I don't have a position open. I'm not going through every single line of code for everybody who's applied for this job because I just don't have the time.

Alex Booker:
That was Shaundai Person, senior software engineer at Netflix. In her past life, Shaundai was a successful salesperson, which would explain why she's great at selling herself to companies. She joins us today to give a masterclass on how to find companies who are buyers for what you are selling, which is your unique blend of experiences and capabilities. I'm fairly convinced after speaking with Shaundai that she can teach you how to sell anything, but there is one condition, you have to believe in the product. In other words, you have to believe in yourself.
Now, if you're newer to tech, that might sound not that plausible, but I assure you not only do you have a lot to offer, if you can learn to believe in yourself, that alone will set you apart. Listen on, because not only will you learn how to find opportunities uniquely aligned with your past experiences, whether those be technical or not, you'll also learn how to embody a mindset in which you believe in yourself and make others believe in you too.
I'm your host, Alex Booker, and you are listening to the Scrimba Podcast, a weekly show where I interview recently hired developers as well as experienced folks like Shaundai to help you learn the code and land your dream role in tech. Let's get into it. I'm wondering if it was always obvious to you that you would work as a professional developer or if it's maybe something you stumbled into a little bit later in life.

Shaundai Person:
Definitely something that I stumbled into later. In fact, it was something that I was probably vehemently against. One reason was that my dad is a mechanical engineer, and if I had thought of the coolest people in the world, I was like, my dad's at the bottom of the list. He is so uncool, he's such a dork, he's such a nerd. I love him to death.
I also had this idea in my head that engineers were stereotypically not people like myself. I didn't ever see a woman in engineering. I wasn't around a bunch of black women who were engineers, and I had this idea that engineers were not social people. I thought that they just sit in rooms with zeros and ones at a computer all day, drink a Diet Coke with their big glasses on. I was like, that's not me. I'm way more social. I need to be around people. So that's probably not the field for me.
When I was in high school, I thought that I wanted to be a fashion designer and the catalyst for me getting into engineering, it wasn't until a couple decades after high school. I first went to school for entrepreneurship, and the reason why I did is because my mom, who was a guidance counselor at the time, she told me that if I went to school for fashion design she wouldn't pay for my college. So I was like, all right, well I want to have a fashion design business, so I'll go to school for business. She was like, that's a good idea.

Alex Booker:
That's very entrepreneurial of you.

Shaundai Person:
Very entrepreneurial of me. I ended up being very happy with my choice because it gave me more options than just this narrow fashion design major. So I did major in entrepreneurship. My entrepreneurship professor told me that the best way to understand what it's like to be an entrepreneur is to start a commission only sales job. You're learning to negotiate. You're learning how to build a book a business. You're learning to communicate with people, listen to their problems and position your offering in a way that's useful to them. Those are skills that are going to be valuable not only from just the newbie, entry level salesperson, but all the way up to CEO.
All of your income and your ability to live financially depends on your ability to serve your customers. So I ended up in sales. I liked it. I liked the fact that I was dealing with people. I liked the psychology of it, listening to people and being able to learn how to articulate our offering in terms that were useful to them. Still, even when I looked at the career path beyond sales, I could have gone into sales management. I could have gone into sales enablement, I could have gone into a number of different things, but none of those paths were ones that I saw for myself.

Alex Booker:
Why is that?

Shaundai Person:
Sales was something that I was good at. I was really good at it, but it was one of those things where I was in it because I was good at it and because it was making me money. Again, this is my first job out of school, I had never been in a position where I loved the thing that I was doing and also was able to make money. Sales is an area where you have really tough times. You're dealing with unnatural levels of rejection.
I'm just barely keeping myself together a lot of the time. I can't be a sales manager and then keep a team together emotionally all the time and also deal with my own stress. As a salesperson, as an individual contributor, you're handling all this risk. As a manager, you don't have any control over that risk. It's like you're at the mercy of how well your team is doing. I was like, this is way too much anxiety and stress for me, but I didn't know what else I wanted to do.

Alex Booker:
How long had you been doing sales for when you started to think in this way and maybe start reconsidering your options?

Shaundai Person:
Not that long, like seven years or so.

Alex Booker:
Still quite a bit of time to be fair.

Shaundai Person:
During that time I had different sales roles, so I was like, maybe it's the role, maybe it's this company, maybe it's this product. I did have products that I sold that I was really fascinated with. Nail polish, for example, the nail polish that I sold in this example is a nail polish design pen, and so I was selling it at trade shows and I was doing designs on people's nails.
Another thing that I loved was selling software. This was my first enterprise sales experience where I was selling to these big companies. I was selling to Apple, to Google, to NASA. So my customers were actual rocket scientists. When I look back on my life, this was my first signal that engineering is actually for me. I found it so fascinating what they were doing with the software. There were some engineers who were using our software to build these big financial computations.
The software by the way is called MATLAB, so a lot of people will use it in school if they've gone to school for applied mathematics or computer science as well. Some were using it to get us to the moon, like building literal rocket ships. Others were using it to help farmers understand the best combination of chemicals to put into the soil to grow the largest oranges. I was like, wow, this is crazy. Those people all had these advanced degrees in applied mathematics, physics, astrophysics.
So I was like, I'm not going back to school to do this. I didn't feel like I wanted to start all over. That's what it felt like to me. If I went back to school, I'd be starting all over and I'd lose all of this career momentum and be wasting all that time. There's this sunk cost associated with switching careers, and so that was a huge fear of mine.
So seven years in, I'm having these thoughts, I don't know what I want to do next, but I don't want to lose all of the time that I've spent building career in this field. Again, I was good at it, so I'm like, this is a huge risk to leave a field that I'm good at, that I'm making money in. Maybe I can't do the same things that these NASA rocket scientists are doing. Maybe this is my forever and I just need to find a hobby and that's the way that I'm going to be happy. So yeah, I decided that I was just going to pursue my passions for entrepreneurship and leave the workforce altogether.
So I started an online business, which was a site powered by Shopify, and then I also, on top of that, I was like, I'm going to sell differently. I'm not just going to have my website. I know how to sell, so I'm going to go door to door to businesses and I'm going to sell them on all of the products that we have. I'm going to negotiate the best deals with producers of the products that I'm selling. So I thought that that was what I would find the most fun. Even though I was good at it, it actually wasn't the part that I was the most interested in.
What I found the most interesting was customizing my Shopify site. So I had to learn all of these skills. I wanted my site to be the best. I wanted marketing automation and I wanted it in my way. So I wanted to be able to customize and build little widgets that would send automated emails that let you know that your order was on the way or this is the tracking number, or responded automatically to the emails that were coming in, or a context banner on the top of the website that said, "Hey, we're having a sale. If you put $60 in your cart, you'll get free shipping."
So I learned Shopify's Ruby based language called Liquid so that I could customize my site and I would just go crazy. I was loving learning about it. I was loving coding and programming and making all these updates to my site, so much so that I was part of this entrepreneurial community and people would be like, "How did you do that? Could I pay you to customize my site in the way that you customize your site?" I was like, wow, people get paid to do this? I'm doing this because it's fun for me. So this was my first glimpse too, of the fact that a lot of engineering I feel is figuring out what other people's problems are and then just having the ability to serve them by creating solutions for that.

Alex Booker:
What year was it and you were just teaching yourself to code using this Shopify Ruby templating syntax?

Shaundai Person:
This was like 2015. I didn't know what I was doing. I remember I picked up a book, a book on Objective-C and Swift. I wanted to make a mobile app. I just did a quick search and it was like, you need to know Swift to be able to make apps for Apple. So I was like, all right, I guess I'm going to start with Swift. Then they were like, you need to start with Objective-C actually. So I was like, all right, I'll read a book on Objective-C, and that did not make any sense.

Alex Booker:
That's the really hard thing when you're teaching yourself. Apart from learning, it's knowing what to learn that's going to bring you closer to your goals. Did you figure that out in the end?

Shaundai Person:
I did. It wasn't until years later, so I ended up going back into the workforce and I went back for sales. The reason I did was because I'd gotten pregnant and in the United States our healthcare is tied to our employment, so I had to go back to work to get that health insurance. A couple years later, I had this bug in my head that I was like, this is really fun. I really like coding. I didn't know what to do with it. So this was 2018. I was like, all right, I'm going to start doing this as a hobby now that my son is born and I can spend more time on it.
I ended up coming across an ad for Codecademy. What I did like about Codecademy is one, that it was self-paced, and two, it was inexpensive. So I was like, this is just a hobby for myself. Sales is not a nine to five job. It's a 24/7. If your customer is overseas and wants to buy something and it's midnight your time, your income is based on your ability to sell, so you're going to get out of bed and you're going to take that phone call. So I have this demanding sales job. I have a newborn, so I needed something self-paced and I needed something that didn't require me to quit my job.
Also, when I saw that ad for Codecademy, there were comments. I think this is on Facebook. I saw a comment and it said, "I don't have time to go back for a computer science degree or I don't have time for this," and somebody was like, "You don't need to go back and get a degree. You can be self-taught and be an engineer." Oh, wait, what? People can do this without having to go back to school? That was where I first noticed web development and realized that not every form of engineering is the NASA rocket scientist form of engineering.

Alex Booker:
These days when I walk around London and I go to coffee shops, I see loads of people coding. I hear people talking about coding. Everybody I know kind of knows about coding now, but going back to 2015, they were like, "You work with computers," or, "Oh, this person works in IT." I'm just kind of bringing us back to that time where you started where it really wasn't obvious that you could make a career out of this much less if you didn't have formal education.

Shaundai Person:
I feel like around 2020 when COVID started, I feel like that was kind of the catalyst that forced everybody to go online. I switched careers in 2020. I do feel like that was a big point for all of us where we started to see... Or there doesn't have to be this big divide between actual world and digital world. This is accessible for everybody.

Alex Booker:
When we hear success stories and we hear about people conquering a tough challenge, like learning to code and getting a job, and we see ourselves in that story a little bit, we kind of realized it's possible, but until we saw that, we never knew it was possible. It's something about that switch where you know it can be done, therefore you will do it.

Shaundai Person:
Yeah, I didn't think of this before, but maybe an advantage that I had when I was learning in 2019, 2020 is that we even had the advances in the ability to learn. We had platforms like Scrimba, Codecademy, where you're able to learn self-paced and learn from home while also managing a family. I would give myself half an hour a day to just practice, and that would be my hobby, and I was so fascinated with it that I would be up until one, two, sometimes three, four in the morning every morning.

Alex Booker:
Very interesting.

Shaundai Person:
Yeah. At some point I was like, I wonder what engineers make because the whole reason why I am afraid, the whole reason why this feels like a risk to switch careers is because I don't want to again lose career capital. If the risk of moving careers is greater, I don't want to take that risk. I'd rather stay in the field that I'm in.

Alex Booker:
The reward has to be incentivizing enough, you could say.

Shaundai Person:
Exactly.

Alex Booker:
The reason why I thought what you said was so interesting is because when you were talking about sales, you were talking about making money, but not something you want to be doing until 1:00 AM in the morning. But just a little while later, you weren't making money coding yet, but you were so pleased to be doing it until the early hours of the morning.

Shaundai Person:
That was it. I was like, I could make money and be happy with what I'm doing and just get excited about it. That was the first time in my life that I've ever been able to actually see something like that. So when I did decide to switch careers, I finally made the decision after looking at what engineers make and seeing solid proof that I didn't have to go back to school for computer science in order to make the switch. I was like, all right, I'm going to start with what I know.
What I knew at the time was sales. Sales is a career built off of soft skills. I have good interview training, I have great networking training. I've practiced the ability to listen to somebody and their needs and to be able to articulate the value of whatever I'm selling. In this case, I'm selling myself.
One thing that I like to do outside of work is to teach other people how to do this for themselves and how to leverage the skills that they have, but also give them the sales skills that they would need to pass the interviews because it is sales. Every interaction that you have with somebody is sales. Sales is not the whole... I mean, it can be, but it's not the sleazy guy with a suitcase and briefcase coming out and never listening to what you're saying and just like, "Buy, buy, buy." It's so much more than that.
At the time I was working at this company, Salesloft. Salesloft builds tools for sales people. They build sales engagement software, so their customer is salespeople. So I'm selling to salespeople. I'm also using the tool that we sell because I'm a salesperson, so I am not only a customer, I am a seller. I wanted to get to the engineering team at this company. I love the company, I love the product, and one big thing for me in selling is that I need to be able to believe in the product that I'm selling. I'm not going to make an effective sale if I don't even believe the stuff that I'm saying. I'm not that type of person, period.
I really believe in the product. I loved using the product, it made my life easier. I was determined to sell our engineering team on why they should open up a junior position so that I could apply for it. So there were a couple of different ways that I approached this. One sales tip that I will give you all is that in sales, you can guarantee that the one person that you're talking to, the one person that you think you're selling to is not the only person involved in that sale. As the price of the product that you're selling gets higher, there's more people involved in that sale. I see you laughing, Alex.

Alex Booker:
Well, I'm thinking of, it's funny because when you say that, the first thing I think about is selling cars and how if a married couple are buying a car, you're not just selling to one of them, you're selling to both of them. In software it only adds more decision makers, stakeholders, what have you to the equation.

Shaundai Person:
You've got it. Exactly right. There are always people who are invisible buyers, and if you're only talking to one person, you need to equip the person that you're talking to with the skills and also the attitude that you want them to have in mind when they're going out and having those conversations. So you don't want them to go have these conversations, like say you're selling to just a married couple and you're only talking to one person. You need to equip that one person that you're talking to with all of the things that you want them to say to the other stakeholder in the situation.
So I was like, my goal is to spread this knowledge of how amazing I am to everybody who's going to be a stakeholder in this buying process. So if I'm the product and I want to make at least a hundred thousand dollars, I can guarantee that because this is such a big purchase for the company, there's going to be multiple people involved. I need to make sure that everybody involved knows me, knows how talented I am, and then is sold on the fact that we should open up a junior engineering position and I should be the person to fill that position. I also need to equip them with the ability to sell on my behalf. If I'm not in the room, I want them to be amplifying how awesome I am.
To do that, I needed to get to know people. Now, I had the advantage of being within this company already, so I was like, all right, I'm just, again, starting with what I know and using everything that I have already at my disposal to my advantage. I have this engineering team within my company. We have a Slack bot called the Donut, and this was my strategy at the time. What the Donut does is every two weeks, it pairs two people at random with each other and tells them to go out for coffee so that you can get to know more people in the company from different departments.
Now, if this bot matched me with somebody in finance or in marketing, I completely ignored it. If they matched me with somebody from engineering, I'm like, "Hey, let's go get coffee. What time do you want to meet? Let's meet at the Starbucks across the street." So I was having these very warm intro conversations with other engineers. I would ask them just like we're doing on this podcast, "Hey, tell me about your journey. What made you want to get into engineering? Did you switch careers?" Did you blah, blah, blah?
So I'm warming people up with like, okay, let's talk about you. Which I'm very interested in by the way, because I'm just a people person. Then I'm like, "Hey, you know why I'm asking these questions is because I've been doing a little bit of coding on the side. Could I show you something that I've been working on?"

Alex Booker:
At this point had you told them about your intentions to transition into engineering?

Shaundai Person:
No. I was trying to be really careful about that because I was afraid that it would be a signal to management that I was checked out of my existing job, so I was trying to balance the two. I want to show up as somebody who is really dedicated to their sales job and I wanted to perform above and beyond. So I kept the job that's paying me, but also in a very delicate way was introducing everybody to the fact that I could code. I was kind of putting bait out there a little bit. I wanted people to feel like they needed to push me into engineering, if that makes sense. I wanted them to be like, "Oh, you know what? She doesn't even realize how good she is at this. I think that we should encourage her to want to be an engineer."

Alex Booker:
Yeah, it's really next level, to be honest. You're always in a more powerful position when someone comes to you as opposed to when you go to them and ask for something. If they come to you because they think you can bring them value, you're always in a stronger position to sell in my experience. I think that's a pretty advanced kind of technique to be honest.

Shaundai Person:
Yeah, that's what it is. It's like you want to make people think that this was their idea and that's when they're bought in because they're like, "Okay, this was something that I envisioned for you, I need to sell you on why you need to be an engineer," and I'm playing coy like, "What? You think I'm that good?"

Alex Booker:
I think this happens a lot. People start a conversation with what they want and that tends to put people on guard a little bit, I think for various, various reasons. Maybe they just don't think they can give you what you want, even if they can, but you approached it from a place of genuine curiosity. I think even if this didn't pan out for you, my vibe is that you were still approaching it in a very authentic way, which is you're getting to know a person. You're telling them about your aspirations with no expectation really.
If it did play out, then that's obviously a good thing. People do that a lot. They write to people and say, "Oh, can I get a referral?" Or they write to people and say, "Oh, can you mentor me?" Or, "Oh, can I get a job?" That's just reality. That just rarely works. Whereas if you start a genuine conversation and you ask questions and you learn what they are struggling with or what you can do to help, that really opens up the range of things you can talk about and where you can maybe show your value.

Shaundai Person:
Yeah, I feel exactly what you're saying. From my position now, I do get a lot of requests where people are just first thing, "What can you do for me? What can you do for me?" That's not a human way to interact with somebody. It was genuine. None of it was, okay, I want to figure out how much I can get from you, because I felt like I could learn something in every interaction.
Not every conversation that I had with an engineer was like, oh, this person is going to instantly get me to where I want to go. I didn't have that short-term philosophy in my head. Every conversation was productive, but for a different reason. Some were productive because I got to learn about somebody else's journey and now I can take bits and pieces of their journey and apply it to my own, or they might have recommended a book to me that I wasn't thinking of reading or taught me about Git.

Alex Booker:
Can I ask you just a quick practical question?

Shaundai Person:
Yeah.

Alex Booker:
Salesloft you worked at, isn't that like a humongous company? I'm not sure if it was smaller at the time or I mean, how many people did you talk to?

Shaundai Person:
At the time, there were only 400 people total at the company. See, now I'm at Netflix, so it's a lot bigger. I talked to a good amount of people, but it was probably like 20 or 30 and it's like once a week it was my goal to talk to somebody new. Outside of that too, I was also starting to get active on Twitter and get to know folks outside of Salesloft as well.
I slowly but surely had not only friends, but also people who are advocating for me. I remember one person who I would meet with every week to talk about code was in the elevator with our CTO. He used that time to tell the CTO like, "Hey, have you heard of Shaundai?" The CTO was like, "Actually, yeah, I have," and he was like, "This should be our next junior engineer." I'm like, this is first of all, thank you for bringing my name up with the CTO, but also how great is that that the CTO knows who I am?

Alex Booker:
People talk.

Shaundai Person:
I thought that was awesome. I also found out through these conversations that I was having with engineers that there was this system that the team used to measure professional development, so they would submit these projects three times a month. Anything that you did that's related to learning more, you could have read a book, you could have gone to a conference, you could have did a side project or something.
You'll submit this Google form and it talks about all of the things that you learned and what you did, and then the response to that Google form goes out to everybody in the engineering org. You're supposed to do it three times a month because people want to see that you're still growing. I got ahold of this Google form and I started submitting my projects and the stuff that I was learning.

Alex Booker:
Before you were on the engineering team, even?

Shaundai Person:
Before I was on the engineering team. I'm like, yeah, so people are like, "Wait, wait, okay, sales girl, I see you read this book on object-oriented programming, or you built this side project." Again, I'm in sales, so I'm trying to sell it. I'm making demo videos of the stuff that I'm building, so I'm building side projects and I'm making these demo videos. I actually was able to track the analytics on the videos too because again, sales, I want to see when people are opening it, when people are forwarding it, when people are watching it.
I'm like, hey, this is where I put more emphasis on accessibility or I use these colors because blah, blah, blah. I'm using our company's API to build extensions of our tool because I'm like, I know your customers better than you do because I am your customer. I think the company should get into account-based sales, so I'm going to build an account-based sales tool for our sellers. Our company ends up getting into account-based sales around the same time and they're like, I saw this coming. I'm like, yeah, I did because I work with your customers.

Alex Booker:
I'm just absolutely taken aback by the parallels of selling and what you were doing because you know when you talk about buying a Lamborghini or something, people talk about the experience. It's fast, it's loud, it's there, but you enjoy... Then they were seeing you pop up in all these places. It was the Shaundai experience, like the efficiency, the tenacity, all these kind of things. They were getting a vibe for it. Then you have the demo videos, it's like you're almost giving a walkthrough of how you think.

Shaundai Person:
Yes, and this is another sales tactic. I'm putting myself in the shoes of the customer, and that is key. When you're selling anything, when you're going for interviews, put yourself in the position of the hiring manager or the recruiter or the person you're asking for a referral. How would you respond to what you just said or what you just sent? If somebody sends me a block of code, I'm a manager, say I have a position open or I don't have a position open. I'm not going through every single line of code for everybody who's applied for this job because I just don't have the time. So I'm making these demo videos because I want to be respectful of that person's time and interests.
I, as a human would be more inclined to watch a two-minute video where somebody's walking me through their product from the customer's side and why they made these decisions. If I'm a VP, I'm thinking about it from the business perspective. I'm not thinking about, oh, this person is able to write their own custom hooks. Isn't that cool? No, I'm thinking this person is going to save us from having to do layoffs because they understand the business, they understand our customers, and they're going to make decisions that are in the interest of the business and getting the most revenue. They have the whys. So in my demo, I am speaking to them. I'm talking about technical stuff like, "Hey, this is related to accessibility. This is where I'm using the colors," but I'm also like, "Hey, your customers are really interested in account-based sales. This is going to be impactful to the business in this way because," blah, blah, blah.

Alex Booker:
You're demonstrating that you get it as well. You get bringing value to the end user who ultimately pays you as opposed to actually a lot of people who started and only stuck with code. They equate lines of code with value, but that's not really how it works.

Shaundai Person:
Everybody is thinking that, okay, if I have the best React skills, if I have the best TypeScript skills that I'm going to stand out. That's not it. Your coding skills are a commodity. Everybody has the best, whatever that means, the best React skills. Everybody has their opinions on what is the best testing tool, but not everybody has the ability to see the business from the perspective of the VP or to be able to understand the customers, so I leaned heavily into that.

Alex Booker:
I'm only asking you to do this because you have a master's in economics, but can you define commodity? I think when you get into the definition, it's really interesting.

Shaundai Person:
A commodity would be something that is not as unique. It's something that is accessible to everybody. We could say that it's something that everybody has as a baseline. If we put ourselves all in a room and we're trying to compare what's unique and what's the same about different people, we could say we all are human. We all breathe air, so breathing air is a commodity. When you're thinking about commodities, it's generally things like milk and eggs and stuff like that, stuff that generally everybody has in their pantry.

Alex Booker:
You don't really care where it came from. You don't care where your milk came from or where your orange juice came from. It's the same exact product basically that you get at the end. The line of code could be a commodity. It doesn't really matter who wrote it or why they wrote it that way, but you're describing this context around the value that you bring with the code you write and understanding the business, and I think that's really cool perspective to bring.

Shaundai Person:
Thank you. I gave a talk a couple of months ago about leveraging my transferable skills. I mentioned that in the beginning I was afraid that switching careers and not having this extensive history in engineering, which sounds backwards, but that's exactly the way that it is sometimes, is you have to have 10 years of experience before you can get your first job. I used to think it was a weakness.
I reframed it for myself and I was like, I have all of the technical skills. I can code just as well as anybody else, even though I don't have a computer science degree, even though I'm self-taught because it's a commodity. Again, you don't care where you got that from. I would consider myself a superset of an engineer. A superset in software engineering is an upgrade, which can do everything that the base can do plus more.
I was like, I can code just like everybody else, but I can also sell. I can also look at the business from a high level perspective. I can also provide value because I ask the questions in order to figure out what is valuable to our customers, and I'll act in that way.
There was one day, again, I'm submitting these projects multiple times a month and people are starting to give me challenges, coding challenges, and they're like, "Why don't you build a server for yourself? Why don't you do this? Why don't you do that?" I'm like, okay, bet, in a week I built a server. Just keep on adding to it because I'm getting challenged by managers. One day I got invited out of nowhere to our engineering all hands and I was like, this is interesting. They were like, "Hey, you busy right now?" I'm like, "Nope, not that busy." So I showed up and they gave me an award.

Alex Booker:
What?

Shaundai Person:
Yeah, they gave me an award for being the person outside of engineering who submitted the most projects and also were like, "We are opening up a junior position and we want to invite you to apply." It was a huge accomplishment being an opportunity to switch careers in itself, but this happened in 2020 when we had done layoffs a couple of months before. Everybody was doing layoffs. We were losing big sales, which was so scary because I was still in sales. We were losing big sales and they were like, "We're opening up a junior position," and I ended up getting the job.

Alex Booker:
They make you interview for it for real?

Shaundai Person:
Yeah. They actually made me interview for it. The one thing that was different was normally they'll have you do a take home exercise. Because I had been building these robust extensions to the tool, they were like, "Just use that as your take home," and then I went through and did the actual interviews and talked about my code and all that good stuff.

Alex Booker:
Congratulations. That must have been such a proud and special moment when that all fell into place.

Shaundai Person:
It was big. I probably cried, but I cry over everything, but it was a big deal.

Alex Booker:
Once you joined the development team, you worked in that role for how long?

Shaundai Person:
Officially, 11 months I think, but I started interviewing with Netflix a couple of months before that, which is kind of crazy. It seems very fast.

Alex Booker:
Did you use any of these sales mindsets to succeed at Netflix as well?

Shaundai Person:
Yes. Still to this day, I'm using all my sales skills. Somebody approached me at Netflix and was like, "I need some sales skills. Can we just have a conversation?" So it comes in handy even as an engineer on the Netflix's team. This person is very tenured. I think over a decade at Netflix. Sales is a career on its own, but it's built off of soft skills, so it's not like you have to spend decades in sales to be able to be a good sales person. You have to have emotional intelligence, and I learned a lot from just interacting with people as well, but reading books on sales and business.

Alex Booker:
Could you tell us a story about how you got started at Netflix, how the opportunity presented itself and how things progressed from there?

Shaundai Person:
I didn't think I was ready for that. It was only a couple months into my engineering career. When I was learning to code, I was immersing myself in everything, anything that I could around engineering. So part of that was listening to a podcast called Front End Happy Hour, which is led by some folks at Netflix as well as some folks at Atlassian. I was obsessed with it because it puts together two things that I'm interested in, which is coding and whiskey, and I was like, oh, I love this podcast. I binge listened to it and I ended up tweeting at one of the hosts who I found out later is a manager at Netflix.
I ended up really liking and taking to him because of his management style and the stuff that he talked about on the podcast, and I was like, oh, he would make a great manager one day. There was no concept of FANG or anything like that in sales, so the whole Netflix aspect of it didn't appeal to me much at the time, but I really wanted to work again with a tool that I could stand behind and then also like the team that I'm working with.
So this person, Ryan Burgess, had posted up this job that was a UI position using the tech stack that I am using, React, TypeScript. GraphQL I had never touched before, but that was part of it. With the manager that I really wanted to, and then the team that he was working on, which is this platform team, productivity team, so we built internal tooling. That was all right up my alley. So I'm like, everything is perfect, but the timing isn't right because I've only been in this for a couple months. There was absolutely no way I would be able to get a job like this. So I talked myself out of it pretty much before I even applied.
I was still curious and I was like, okay, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to email this manager and I'll be like, or not me email, I DM'ed him on Twitter, but I was like, I'm going to DM him and I'm going to be like, maybe you have some other positions opened up in a year or six months even. I know I can learn fast and I'll ask him what kind of stuff he's looking for on his team so that I'll be ready for that next role. He was like, "Oh, sure, we can have a conversation." At the end of that conversation, he was basically, "Shoot your shot. I really think that you should apply. The worst thing that can happen is that they'll tell you no, but the way that Netflix works is that we're going to give you feedback on what were the reasons why we said no."

Alex Booker:
That's great.

Shaundai Person:
You'll get all the answers to your questions and it's good practice interviewing. I'm like, of course I would be devastated to hear no, but who am I, if not somebody who's going to take a shot and get rejected? So I go ahead and I apply. I'm like, I'm going to go full on because I don't have to do anything.

Alex Booker:
The stakes are higher, by the way. When you are selling some other product for a company, you'll hear no a lot, but this time you were selling yourself.

Shaundai Person:
I know. It could hurt a lot. It could really hurt the ego, especially this early into the career. One thing that was I guess a little comforting to me was the fact that I knew it was very early and it was pretty unlikely that I would get this thing, so I would be devastated of course to hear no, but I would be understanding in the fact that, okay, I haven't been doing this that long.

Alex Booker:
Classic emotional management strategy where you floor your expectations so you can only be surprised. You can't be disappointed.

Shaundai Person:
Exactly, exactly. So one big thing that I did too is I wanted to know what I provided that was unique to the team. I imagine that if other people have the audacity to apply at Netflix, they also have the technical skills. Again, that's a commodity. I'm like, I'm going to show them that I can really code because I need to code above and beyond what other people are doing in these interviews, which is hard, but I know I'm a great coder.
I love this thing and I'm obsessed with it, but in order to stand out, I need to show that I'm a human. So I was using videos, I was sending demo videos when I did my take-home exercise, I made it into a video. I'm like, again, "This is why it's beneficial to your company." This is where I'm thinking of the stakeholders and this and that, and I'm also peppering in my personality. I'm showing my jokes and just being me. It ended up paying off. So I ended up getting that job.
I'm so grateful, but that was another moment where I was crying. It was beyond belief because I'm like, wow, being a human can actually make a huge difference in the way people receive you. So people ask for my advice. My advice all the time is just be a human. I can't tell you how to do that. I can't give you a bulleted list because that's not human. It's not human to do the bulleted list.
Take a step outside of... The engineering aspect of it is important. The code is important, but you have to take a step outside of that and recognize that in anything we're dealing with humans. Your computer is not the one that's deciding whether or not you get the job. It's a team of people. So remember what it's like to be human and yeah, stop thinking in binary all the time.

Alex Booker:
I think a lot of people when they hear advice like that equates it to being charismatic and being likable. Is that what you mean necessarily?

Shaundai Person:
It's not. It's not. Be you. I hear a lot of times that I'm funny and I hear that I'm very likable. In my head, I don't think the same thing. I'm getting there slowly, but I have insecurities like everybody else does. I leave conversations just like, oh, why did I say that? Oh my God, and I just think about it over and over. So I come off as confident, but I don't feel like that all the time in my head. It's something that I've practiced. What I mean when I say be human, and again this is going to take practice, is just stop and think about what other people are feeling and experiencing. Get outside of the goal.
I feel like a lot of people will have go in with this exact goal in their head, "I need to get this job. I need to get this referral. I need to learn this concept," and that's the only thing that they can think of and they're blind to all of the other things on their path. I'm using analogy, so in my head, I'm in the woods right now and I'm just going on a path. The destination is this job, but I'm ignoring all of the beauty that's happened on this path, all of the trees that are changing color, all the flowers, all the little bugs, all the little forest rodents and stuff. I'm ignoring all of the beauty all along the way just to get to this point. I end up missing out on all of these opportunities to network and show great things and to find joy.
It's hard to articulate how to do that. It's just like don't have the blinders on only to the goal, because guaranteed, if you do, you're going to miss something very valuable on the way. You're going to miss an opportunity to network. You're going to miss an opportunity to showcase your skills and all of those little moments, even though you may not be able to draw this exact connection to how this is going to get you to the goal in the end.
If you think about video games, there's all these little side quests and little trinkets and things that you can pick up. You don't figure out why they're valuable until you get to the end or you fight the big boss. It's like, stop and pick those up and you'll figure out what it's for. At some point it's going to be useful. All those little trinkets, all those little interactions with humans and those little side quests and all the everything, you're going to figure it out in the end at some point, but just don't disregard it.

Alex Booker:
I think often when it comes to learning how to code and you ignore all those things on the way to your destination, it's because they're actually quite hard. I think that when you're learning to code, you can watch another Scrimba module, you can listen to a podcast. You know you can do that. You can't fail at that, but it's those times when you take a chance on going to a meetup or scheduling a coffee chat or putting a vulnerable social media post out there that says you need help. Or even facing a harsh reality about yourself, which is that maybe you're technically excellent, but you're not as emotionally aware as you could be, these are the kind of things we tend to ignore because they're really hard to face maybe. I would just speculate that when you [inaudible 00:41:02] those things, that's when you make the most progress, when you risk failing at something.

Shaundai Person:
Oh, that was a great addition, and actually that's something that I needed to hear today as well because I'm working on this workshop. I've been working on this, not this workshop, but I'm working on a course and I'm starting out with just a workshop. It's on TypeScript. I announced that I was doing it two years ago. Then I stopped because it was something that was hard for me and scary for me and scared of the rejection. Which is surprising because I've jumped into so many things, but this is something that I am scared to fail at. It's been something that's so daunting when I think about, okay, this is the end goal. This is where I need to get to, that every time I get started I'm like, oh my gosh, I am overwhelmed.
Yeah, I can totally understand getting your first job or getting your next job, getting your job after you've been laid off. When you get knocked down, it's hard to get back up. It's hard to get up in the first place though, even before you've gotten knocked down. You're exactly right in that sometimes we pick the easier thing or the one that's more tangible, the one that's easily measurable or the one that we can instantly see that this is going to get me closer to this goal or this is what's going to get me to that goal exactly. Then we miss out on so many other small things that could have gotten me there.
When I think of my path, my journey, none of it was linear. Nothing was something that I could attribute to, oh, this was a hundred percent that if I had not done this one thing or if I did do this one thing, then that would've changed everything. It's been the product of very small interactions, the accumulation of all of these little things, little Christmas lights versus floodlights.

Alex Booker:
You kind of put in a lot of hard work and then you wait for someone to give you that opportunity or give you that break, and that's maybe the sliding door moment, which is like, if that didn't happen, I wouldn't be here. You are not willing to take a chance on that. You are led by your values and your integrity, and it's all these little lights. I'm not sure how to connect that to a path necessarily, but equally it's about showing it consistently and going in directionally the right way. It wasn't down to any one sliding door moment. You were going to be successful one way or another.

Shaundai Person:
That's exactly what I like to tell myself. No matter what, I would've gotten there. There isn't one big door, I guess one big castle door. It's just all these little interactions along my quest. There's not going to be one big break. I have a goal in my head, which is great because I know which direction I want to get to, and then if there's anything that steers me away from that path in the wrong direction, I know, okay, no, I got to course correct and get closer to this path. It's not going to be a straight linear thing. It's going to be a little bit windy, but generally I'm going north and as long as I stay in this general direction, I'm welcoming in any new opportunities.

Alex Booker:
It's robust. You're not dependent on one thing. You've got a compass, like a direction going in the right way. If you had a map, great, follow it line by line, but we don't. Shaundai, I just love getting an insight into the way you think about these things. I think it's been a real privilege in an episode like this where we get to hear you talk about your story and there are ways you present, but you're not unwilling to peel back the presentation layer and show us how you think and a little bit of vulnerability in doing that.
I'm going to let you go in just a second. This is one of those episodes where we've gone way over time because we've been enjoying ourselves. I just wanted to draw on this one thing, which is that throughout the interview you've talked lot about, I guess belief. Believing in the role and more importantly believing in yourself. You only want to sell a product you believe in. So you do believe in yourself, and yet, I don't know, when you were fighting for this opportunity internally to change roles, you didn't necessarily have external evidence that you could be successful in the role.
You believed in yourself, and then when you went to this new opportunity to do with Netflix, you almost talked yourself out of it a little bit. So a bit of duality there, which I thought was interesting. I think a lot of people are able and should go for opportunities, but they talk themselves out of it when maybe they should believe in themselves a little bit more. How do you cultivate that self-belief? Why is not believing yourself not an option?

Shaundai Person:
There's a couple of reasons. So one is the more recent thing is that I'm surrounded by people who will not let me think bad about myself, which is amazing. I do these audits of the people that I have around me pretty often, and I'm at the point in my life where I just don't accept people who are bringing me down. I can provide myself with as many negative thoughts. I'm a generator of negative thoughts sometimes, so I'm like, I don't need anybody else adding to that. So I just don't have the space for it. I don't have any space for negative attitudes. What's happened is I just have been surrounded by people who are just like, they just believe in me blindly and they're like, she has something special. She's got this, she's got that, so let me get involved with her or let me get her involved with this. I'm like, I don't know how it's happened, but I'm like, wow, wow.
I'll tell people stuff and I'll be expecting them to be like, "Yeah, I can understand why you feel kind of scared to do that, or whatever," but they're like, "No, you've got this. I don't know what you're worried about." I'm like, okay, fine. I guess I'm not worried then. Another aspect too is my parents, they have just always instilled in me that I could do things, but in the way that I can receive it. I'm a words of affirmation type of person. I need people to tell me that I'm in their good graces constantly. Otherwise, I'm like, you absolutely hate me. My parents are pretty tough on me sometimes because I'm the eldest of four, and they're just practically just, "Stop it, figure it out."
There's this one thing that my mom has said to me that I keep coming back to. So when I went to get my master's, I was like, I am going to be 30 by the time I get this master's, so I probably shouldn't do it because I'm going to be so old. I'm like, 30 is so old. I was telling my mom, I don't know what I expected, but she was like, "Shauni," this is what she calls me. "Shauni, you are going to be 30 regardless. You can be 30 with a master's degree or 30 without a master's degree. What do you want to do?" So that resonates with me. I bring that to me every time.
Anytime something happens is... Even this morning I'm like, okay, after I record this podcast, I have to go back and start to work on this workshop, but I don't want to do it. I should have a day of rest. Trying to make every excuse in my head. I'm like, you know what? Tomorrow's going to come. I can have something to show for the day, or I can't. Or I could spend all tomorrow feeling guilty because I slacked off or not. That's pretty much what I tell myself every time now is just like in a practical sense, how do I want to feel tomorrow and give myself no option other than to at least try my best and see how it turns out. I can't complain until I've actually tried my best.

Alex Booker:
Shout out to your mom. I love that mindset. Talking about your parents, it's funny, isn't it? We started the episode with, you mentioned about your dad working in engineering and how you veered away from it only to come back. It's funny. It's funny though, isn't it how we tend to revolt against our parents and we tend to end up in more or less the same place however many years or decades later.

Shaundai Person:
We are them. We are them.

Alex Booker:
We're our parents. Shaundai, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a pleasure.

Shaundai Person:
Thank you for having me. This has been amazing.

Jan Arsenovic:
Next week on the Scrimba podcast, marine biologist turned developer and educator, the coding mermaid, Monica Fidalgo.

Monica Fidalgo:
I broke my leg in a really hard way. I wasn't able to move because the injury was so bad that I needed to just be laying down. It was a hard time, but it was also a time where you discover yourself. That I think it helped me a lot when I was doing that career change. It wasn't easy to do a new course, something that I wasn't comfortable with, learning something new, but I was always thinking, okay, you were able to overcome this. Why aren't you also able to do this course?

Jan Arsenovic:
That's next week on the Scrimba Podcast. So if you made it this far, please subscribe so you don't miss the upcoming episodes. You can find the show wherever you listen to podcasts. If you like what we're doing and you'd like to support us so that we can make even more of these shows and interviews with inspiring guests, the best thing you can do is to tell somebody about the Scrimba Podcast. You can do it in person, on Discord or on social media. If your LinkedIn or Twitter posts contain the words Scrimba and podcast, we will find them, and you might get a shout-out right here on the show.
The Scrimba Podcast is hosted by Alex Booker and produced by me. I'm Jan Arsenovic. You can find both of our Twitter handles in the show notes and make sure to check them for the ways to connect with Shaundai, timestamps, and resources. This was the Scrimba Podcast, episode 160. Thanks for listening. Keep coding and we'll see you next time.