MICHAEL C. LIOU LLC
MIAMI BEACH, FLORIDA

I’m another thoughtful software engineer looking to improve himself and hoping not to rain on anyone’s parade. Making my way one step at a time. Feel free to follow along! I started out thinking I was bringing a certain value add to the process (actually doing in depth screening based on cultural requirements) but I learned fairly quickly that this may or may not be a commonly required case. But there still might be value added by the way of a technical screening process by an engineer before applicants enter the job process. The hard part so far has been figuring out what a recruiter of a prestigious tech company is thinking, and how to communicate with them. I do believe that for the most part, they would appreciate having an additional source of qualified candidates to interview. The main takeaway I’ve gotten so far is that cold emailing is not easy. A lot of times if you sell your service too hard, people are probably turned off, to the point that they don’t know what to say. You’ve got to really empathize with your customers (right now, the recruiters, later, applicants) to figure out what their hesitations might be. My hope is to gather feedback from internal recruiters of companies to help isolate some time saving screening questions for the positions that they’re hiring for. On the applicant side, I want to take away some of the pain from the application process. I think for a first run I want to err on the side of caution. If having a personalized email account, and a nicely formatted squarespace site helps me get considered a little more seriously by another person, then I would think it’s worth it. I’ll probably get better with future iterations in figuring out what is a necessary cost, or how to validate without anything to see. But who knows, in this day and age with all this noise, maybe the bare minimum to be considered seriously actually is a squarespace site. I’ve been working on learning react lately, and so I think it would help if I start outlining what I’m learning about it. Part 1 will cover what it takes to get basic components rendered into an app, and then maybe also cover how to do routing. I want to start big picture first.