The tech industry has seen a significant change in the skills, qualifications, and titles listed in job postings over the past few years. What does that mean for companies — and for the candidates themselves?

On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, we talk to Maryam Jahanshahi, co-founder and Head of R&D at Datapeople, who breaks down the biggest hiring trends in tech, from title inflation to salary transparency and the skyrocketing costs of recruitment. 

Maryam also discusses how the storytelling skills she picked up from data analysis have improved her abilities as a founder.

Episode Highlights:

• (2:05) Introductions
• (6:13) Title inflation trend
• (11:00) Hiring trends: salary transparency
• (16:11) Bringing data to the recruiting process
• (21:55) How Datapeople is leveraging ML
• (27:30) AI job trends
• (31:30) The importance of storytelling
• (35:42) Maryam's advice for founders

Episode Excerpt

Conor Bronsdon: We are back on Dev Interrupted, I'm your host, Conor Bronsdon, and we're live from New York with another incredible guest. Welcome to the show, Miriam Jahanshahi.

Maryam Jahanshahi: Thanks, Conor. I'm excited to be here.

Conor Bronsdon: And I really love that you're here because we don't talk to data scientists that much, and you are not only the head of R&D and a data scientist at Datapeople, you are also a co-founder of that company.

Maryam Jahanshahi: I am a co-founder. I also work very strongly with engineers, so I'm always up in their code and in their pull requests and all the fun side of things. I guess that's one of the things when you get to be a technical co-founder, you have to run the gamut of all the different things that you do.

Conor Bronsdon: So yeah, it was fun talking to you as we were getting set up. And you mentioned you had this opposite journey where you really dove into the data side that were becoming like this strong data scientist, and then you realized you wanted to add these data engineering skills to the table.

Maryam Jahanshahi: Yeah, it was a, it's an unusual experience. I think part of the reason why I had to do it was to figure out the systems that we needed to analyze data to get a data-driven product, and so my role now is such a weird mishmash. I was talking to my co-founder about it the other day.

I'm neither like, nor do I run engineering, nor do I run like the data side of things. But it's almost a technical product manager.

Conor Bronsdon: You're the fusion between the two of them. 

Maryam Jahanshahi: It's like a weird mix of many different things, and so we're realizing that requires a certain level of skills and different types of agility, and so it was easier for me to actually write my data pipelines then have them write the spec to give it to the engineers to do. It's, yeah, this isn't so bad. So we realized very early on, like with these systems you, I think increasingly as the tools as our data becomes bigger, we're gonna have new classes of product managers, including data-informed product management. I'm sure things like ChatGPT are bringing that to the fore. But it's not just that; it's anything that adds a level of analytics to your dashboards and things like that. You want someone who has a business interest but also is able to run the SQL query to figure out what the hell went wrong with that dashboard. And so it's an interesting transition that. I don't know whether I'm crazy for making it, but it's what the organization needs.

Read the full episode transcript here.