Ask a Data Mentor - Zach Wilson - Founder of EcZachly Inc.
ChatGPT, Career Advice, and so much more from Zach Wilson
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Zach Wilson.
I learned so much in this interview. And I hope you will too.
A quick introduction for those who do not know Zach. He was a Staff Data Engineer at AirBnB until March when he resigned to become an entrepreneur and proud owner of a boot camp to teach intermediate and advanced techniques to data engineers.
His social links and newsletter can be found at https://www.zachwilson.tech/
In this article, I will only cover a few of the questions that I asked him, so check out the podcast for the rest!
How did you find your mentor?
Zach found his manager through a rather traditional route by finding his way into Facebook. At Facebook, he had three groups that asked him to join— ads, integrity, and growth. The ads and integrity groups pitched him that he would have a great sense of impact. However, the last team, growth, pitched that he was going to have fun! And that’s the group he chose, and what he suggested — to make sure to have fun.
That manager from the growth team ended up being his mentor and guided him from junior engineer to staff engineer within four years within different companies. Bottom line? Find a manager that has the experience to grow you into the developer you want to be and have fun while doing it!
What would you suggest for someone who is starting out their career?
In his response, his top three suggestions were as follows.
His first suggestion is to ask a ton of questions. “Ask dumb questions. Ask a lot of questions. Ask so many questions that you are annoying them.”
He suggests working on side projects, especially on things that you absolutely love. In Zach’s case, he worked on websites in NodeJS on the weekend.
His last suggestion stems from the idea of the “happiness advantage.” This idea suggests that if you are happy with your job you are more likely to make money. He suggests that if you want to make money, you have to ensure that you are happy in your position. It is not worth sacrificing your sanity for more money. Instead, focus on being happy. The money will come later.
How did you get started with LinkedIn creation?
He actually started content creation on Facebook in 2009, but did not really started doing LinkedIn creation until about 2020. In Dec 2020, he had 2000 users and ended up gaining 8000 in the following six months. He then started to take LinkedIn seriously and gained 100k followers in the next six months!
In his success, he often wonders if his prose voice, or inner voice, has been forgotten in the sway of copy writer voice that the LinkedIn algorithm seems to love. But for this, he has a piece of advice to share.
The goal of posting on LinkedIn should never be about how much engagement you have but rather on how many conversations you are having with the people. What he did is actually crawled his LinkedIn posts and identified key people that would engage with his content and talked to them about what they liked and did not like. That’s how he improved his content.
[SARAH]: I highly recommend you to write and start building in public whether that is on LinkedIn, Medium, Twitter, or a personal blog. It only helps you in the long run. I only started writing last year because I was laid off and in the dumps. I was laid off 2x and the current position I have was because the person who interviewed me saw my writing on Medium. It will not prevent you from getting laid off, but you will be back on your feet sooner.
Final thoughts
These are only some of his thoughts that we covered. If you want to know what he is pursing now a-days, how he is handling his recent changes with his ADHD, or perhaps the story behind his website, I highly suggest to check out the full episode!