First…
… post in our shiny new Zenjob Technology Blog!
The Zenjob product provides a highly flexible solution to companies needing staff on a temporary basis and workers who want to earn some extra cash.
We want you to get to know the tech team here and learn about the challenges we face and overcome on a daily basis. If we’re successful in keeping you engaged, we hope you’ll take away some ideas to try in your own work. Inside Zenjob, we’re known as Product and Engineering, and the team also includes IT, Data, and Design, so expect to see content from across the full spectrum.
In this very first post, I’ll share a few insights into why I’m excited about this launch, and I’ll also introduce Natalye Childress, our blog editor, who brings the secret sauce behind some blogs you may have already enjoyed.
How it all began
When Fritz Trott — Zenjob’s CEO — reached out to me on LinkedIn in 2021 to see if I was interested in the vacant Chief Technology Officer position, his message included the following:
Our challenge: B2B lacks a flexible workforce & B2C has no smart access to sidejobs and income.
How: Predict demand, intelligently recruit, onboard. Match and staff shifts incl. payroll, invoice, training & education, career plan.
There was enough in this message to pique my interest, and the personal touch from Fritz as CEO shouldn’t be underestimated, but as a potential future employee of Zenjob, I wanted to know more to understand whether this job opportunity could be a good fit.
Despite having been in the tech startup scene in Berlin for the previous five years, I wasn’t very familiar with Zenjob, apart from knowing a couple of former employees via my SoundCloud connections. I did a bit of digging around online and found some great material on Zenjob’s career pages, which really helped me understand the company culture, but it didn’t help me learn more about the culture and approach to problem solving on the tech team.
Through conversations in the interview process with the likes of Cihan Aksakal (Chief Innovation Officer, and previously, the founding CPTO) and Florian Freudenberg (our Principal Engineer), I was able to really dig deep into what makes Zenjob tick, and in turn, I became really excited about what they’d accomplished so far, but more importantly, about what possibilities remained.
Even this early in the process, I was already thinking that Zenjob could really benefit from a tech-focused blog, which would’ve allowed me to digest this information before spending time with the team.
The long road to a tech blog
When I joined SoundCloud back in 2016 as one of the VPs of Engineering, the Backstage Blog had already been in place for a while, so I was lucky enough to see firsthand the benefit of this from both sides — initially as a potential employee, and then as a member of the technology organization. Following my experience in the interview process with Zenjob, I was immediately interested in understanding why a tech blog hadn’t been prioritized before.
Zenjob has four company values that are deeply embedded in the culture, starting in the interview process: Humble, Hungry, Honest, and Helpful. In the vast majority of cases, the fact that these values are lived by Zennies (our name for people who work at Zenjob) on a daily basis makes Zenjob a wonderfully healthy and successful place to work. Additionally, all four of the values really resonate with me and closely match up to how I aspire to behave as a leader.
However, as with any system of values, when taken to an extreme or too literally, it can be counterproductive. And two of these values happen to create accidental obstacles to the creation and running of a tech blog, so I’ll highlight them here, to illustrate my point:
Humble
→ Act egoless.
→ Fail early, fail often.
→ Recognize achievements and learn from failures.
Hungry
→ Take moonshots vs. potshots.
→ Be obsessed with user experience.
→ Do not tire until results are delivered.
For me, humility is critical to long-term success, but it can come at a cost. Humble can often be a synonym for hidden, especially in technology teams. People can be quick to assume that their work isn’t really interesting for others to hear about, so they keep quiet about it. Just as often, people can be suspicious of others who are too quick to talk about their small wins, seeing this as hubris.
Meanwhile, hunger is a vital value for any successful startup, as without it, success is unlikely to be around the corner, and you’ll fail to grab the limited opportunities that present themselves. The risk of a relentless focus on delivery of results can be the squeezing out of activities that are key to the longer-term sustainability of the team, including — in this case — employer branding.
How did we get here?
Introducing a technology blog is trivial from one perspective: Sign up on a blog site, add some company branding, post some content. But from a cultural point of view, it requires some big shifts. We’re right at the beginning of this journey, and I’m really excited to see how far we can take it.
One decision I made early on based on my learnings from SoundCloud was to engage a great blog editor. I started working with Natalye Childress more than four years ago, and I love her patient and motivating style. I’m now going to hand this post over to Natalye to share a few words of wisdom from her many years as a writer and editor, especially working with tech teams.
Interview with Natalye Childress
To help our readers get to know you better, could you tell us how you ended up helping tech teams with their blogs?
Everything sort of happened by chance, as these things tend to do. I’d studied journalism and English at university, and I was working as a writer and editor in a completely non-tech-related field when a friend of a friend contacted me to see if I could look over the copy for their iOS app.
They were happy with my work, so they contacted me again later that year when starting up a periodical about Objective-C development, and somehow, tech editing ended up as my niche. Everything sort of grew from there; fast forward nearly a decade, and while I have a few clients unconnected to this initial foray into the tech world, most of the work I do and companies I work with can be traced back to this initial client (whom I still work with)!
I never ever in a million years would have thought I’d be working in tech, much less enjoying it, but here I am.
What are the main reasons tech teams have blogs?
There are a handful of reasons why a company might choose to have a blog, but they generally fall into a few key categories.
Companies often use blogs to share what they’re doing at their company. This can be anything from showing off their expertise or positioning themselves as thought leaders, to talking about projects they’ve tackled successfully (or, in some cases, not so successfully). For those with a user-facing product, they might write blog posts about how they created new features or just to announce a new release. Many other companies also “give back” to the developer community by open sourcing tools, and a blog post is a great way to talk about the why and how of it.
Another reason for a tech blog is to drive recruitment. When companies share what happens internally — whether it’s the way teams are organized, how products are created and rolled out, or what the culture is like — this kind of transparency gives potential employees a look into how things operate. They can decide if the workplace is one where they might thrive, if the challenges line up with what they’re looking for, and more.
Finally, a tech blog helps build and grow a brand. Of course, a blog won’t always gain traction on its own, so marketing can help with getting the word out, but once there’s regular content being added to a blog, it becomes a place people bookmark and return to, and that helps build brand recognition.
What are the best ways you’ve seen to encourage more posts to get written?
The single most successful technique I’ve seen is making writing a requirement. Many people in tech are juggling a lot of different things, and writing is often seen as something that takes up valuable time that could be spent somewhere else, so the motivation to spend time on it is often low. But when top-down initiatives are put into place, such as requiring people to have a monthly writing day, or working blog post goals into their OKRs, it tends to be much more successful. Regularly writing also gets people more comfortable with writing, and people who are more confident writers are more likely to want to work on blog posts.
Another thing that helps is creating a culture encouraging people to share their work with one another. For example, internal blog posts, written retrospectives, weekly demos, and even daily standups help get people comfortable talking about their work, sharing ideas, and getting feedback. When these experiences go well, it creates a sort of positive feedback loop that makes it more likely that people will want to continue writing about and sharing their work — eventually to larger audiences.
I’ve also found that people who become “blog writers” are a self-selective group. What do I mean by that? Well, the ones who put in that initial effort to churn out their first post are more likely to write additional posts in the future. That’s because they haven’t talked themselves out of it because it’s too hard, or not interesting enough, or they don’t have enough time, or any other kind of excuse we make to not do things. Generally, most people who make it to the finish line with their first post realize that it was a lot easier than they thought it would be, and they start thinking about what they could write about next.
What advice would you give to an aspiring tech blog editor?
It’s OK to come from a non-technical background. When I first started as an editor in tech, there were a lot of things I just didn’t understand. All these years later, there’s still stuff I don’t understand, but there’s a lot I do know, and the longer I do this work, the more my knowledge builds.
I’d even say that coming into a tech editor role without a background in engineering or product gives you an advantage, because it’s easier to spot things that are unclear or not well formulated. Many people in this industry tend to assume that everyone has the same understanding of a language or framework or architecture or tool that they do, when it turns out that it varies a lot — and often that’s reflected in the writing. So your job as an editor is to determine who the audience is, what their base-level knowledge is, and how the writing can cater to that. And if you’re able to help your writers craft their work into something that even you — a non-technical person — can understand, then you’re on the right track.
I’d also say to be curious. This was something I learned in journalism school, and it’s true in my editing roles too. Look things up and ask questions incessantly. It’s not only your job as an editor to pick things apart, but it’s one of the fastest ways to get familiar with technical topics.
Conclusion
We’re being quite deliberate about our intentions for our tech blog. We want it to represent an opportunity for everyone on our tech team to be humble without being invisible, and to be hungry without losing sight of the big picture. We’re using this as a key tool in our employer branding, helping potential future employees gain insight into the company they’d join. In addition, if we can help others do their work better by sharing our ideas and solutions, this would be amazing.
We’ll also be measuring success via a couple of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):
1) Percentage of Zennies on the tech team who have published at least one blog post.
2) Percentage of our interview candidates who have read and enjoyed articles from our tech blog.
We’ll be successful if we produce high-quality content and also make sure the content gets sufficient reach. Neither is trivial, but often, the hardest thing is to get started, so I’ll end by sharing a Zenjob mantra: #GoZen!
