The Recruiter Who Reads Your CV in Eleven Seconds
Bilal interviews Farida Noor, a technical recruiter who has screened more than 20,000 applications, about what gets a CV past the first glance and what quietly sinks it.
Zainab's First Week as a Junior Developer
0:00 / 0:59
This episode is for members. Sign up free or log in to hear the whole episode.
Show notes
What the first week is really like
Zainab Farooq went from a nine-month bootcamp to a product team at a logistics startup. Bilal asks her to describe the first five days honestly: the setup that took two of them, the first ticket, the first review comment that stung.
- Why nobody expects you to ship anything in week one
- Reading a large codebase without panicking
- How to ask a question so a senior is glad you did
- The review comment that felt personal and was not
- What her manager actually measured in month one
If you are starting soon, this is the episode to send to yourself.
Transcript
Good morning, this is Merge Request Mornings and I am Bilal Mirza. Every week I sit down with one person and ask the questions we normally only ask in the kitchen at work. Today it is Zainab Farooq, who finished a bootcamp in Lahore in February and started her first job as a junior developer in March. I wanted to catch her while the memory was fresh, so this was recorded in week three. We talk about the two days it took just to get her laptop working, the first pull request, the review comment that made her want to quit, and what her manager told me she was actually measuring. If you are about to start, or you are hiring someone who is, listen with a notebook. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts. Chai is poured, let's begin.
Open as text