2025 EES BILL: Code to Cash Flow: BILL’d Your Career in Fintech

Hi everyone, my name is Josie and I am the support coordinator for the career center at Copath. We’re excited to welcome you to our next breakout session. Before I introduce the session, a few reminders.

Please utilize the chat and keep your comments relevant to the session. Please also add any questions you have for the build team to the Q&A tab. It would be helpful if you also take a minute at the end of the session to give us your feedback.

That’s how we know whether or not you like the session. With reminders out of the way, I’m excited to introduce this session, Code to Cash Flow. Build your career in fintech with Hakee Salah and the team from Bill.

Hakee is Bill’s early career recruiter with a background focused on engineering recruitment. Please join me in welcoming Hakee and his team to the stage. Awesome.

Thank you for having us. Sweet. Well, let’s go ahead and kick things off.

Hello everybody. Thank you for joining our breakout session. So this QR code here, if you guys can take a moment and scan it with your cell phone and plug your information in, if you decide to apply at Bill now or even years in the future, it’ll tell us that you attended this conversation and, we can kind of prioritize your application, for a very long time.

So, thank you for joining us and basically I’ll leave this up for a minute and I’m just going to give you guys a quick intro on what is fintech first and foremost and then I’ll tell you a bit about Bill and then the team we have here today are all in engineering so much more technical than me and they have a lot of cool stuff to share from their careers that is really going to be relevant to this audience here. So okay I think that’s enough time for folks to scan this and we will go ahead and get started here. So so code to cash flow that is the the title of this little talk we’ve got here today and so who’s Bill?

So bill.com was founded back in 2006 and we originally started as an invoicing platform. So there’s really two types of payment companies. There’s payment companies that do small point of sale transactions at your like local retail stores and then there are payment companies that move big stuff in the background and that’s really what Bill’s focus initially was.

So we made it easy for companies to send and receive invoices, have easy payment options attached to those invoices and then fast forward to today we do a whole lot more. So we went public back in 2019. And since then we’ve acquired multiple smaller startups.

And these startups gave us all kinds of capabilities. We now have the ability for our clients which are mostly small to midsize businesses across the US. To have financial insights into their accounts receivable, accounts payable.

We help companies with their tax documents for their contractors. We provide spend and expense programs for their internal employees to spend money and keep track of those things. We are a commercial lender.

I could go on and on with all the different products we offer, but the best way to kind of summarize who we are today is we are just a one-stop shop to take care of and help automate all that boring back office stuff that a lot of small and mid-size business owners just don’t have the time to do. So we make it really convenient to take all these products that you could get at a dozen different vendors and combine them into one platform, one customer service team to reach out to one membership, one login and it just makes it really easy for these companies to keep everything organized, save time, save money, and focus on their business. So we currently have about a half million customers and we move over 1% of US GDP every year.

So we have about 200 employees. Roughly 700 of them are in engineering. And we’re split up between our headquarters in San Jose and then we have a beautiful office in Draper, Utah.

And Bill is made up of, you know, we’ve all kinds of different startups that have merged together. So we have, I guess you could say like the the safety and security and the resources of a larger publicly traded company, but you also still have a lot of opportunity to make an impact as an engineer here here at Bill. So with that said, I will stop yapping and we will head off.

Actually, I lied. We I’m going to yap a little bit longer. So just wanted to highlight some of our clients that you would recognize.

Bombas. I’m wearing some of their wool socks right now. Bori, really feels like they’re dethroning Lululemon right now, so I’m sure you’ve heard of them.

They’re not on here, but one of my favorite customers is Dr. Squatch is a customer. Love their ads, love their soaps. So these are some of our larger customers.

But you know, a lot of our typical customers are just like, you know, a lot of engineers that freelance and need a way to build their clients. Or your local small business when you’re walking around downtown, they’re using us to keep track of all of their expenses, using us for their payments, things like that. And then fintech as a whole really just refers to any company that is enabling financial transactions.

So like the traditional fintexs are your big banks like Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Chase. But over the last like 10 to 15 years, fintech has really grown to include all kinds of stuff. So, bills of fintech, you have these buy now pay later companies, you have a lot of more established crypto companies could be considered fintexs.

So it’s really a a huge field at this point. And I would say that it’s a great career path compared to other areas of software for a couple of different reasons. Everything you’re doing in fintech is meant to be done at scale.

So you’re solving real world problems at a large scale. Some companies are focused on individuals, customers. Some companies are B2B focused on businesses and communities.

And I guess one thing that’s unique is everything’s really high stakes. Like people get very emotional when you’re moving their money. So it leads to I I guess just higher attention to detail.

Well, there there’s more at stake here when you’re an engineer at at a fintech company. And you’re making a big difference in people’s lives. So, as far as innovation, like a lot of the new technology that comes out in tech in general comes from the fintech space.

So emerging payments technologies and AI, crypto security, fraud detection, that’s all really led by the fintech industry. And then the opportunity in fintech is massive. You know, fintech is global.

Everybody has to transact to get, you know, what they need to get paid at work. And it it really gives you a great opportunity to develop a unique skill set that can be the basis for your career. Sweet.

With that said, I already introduced myself. So I’m our early careers recruiter here at Bill. I’ve been a technical recruiter for about seven years.

And then would love to introduce the rest of our speakers here. So let’s start off with Sarah, then Gus, then Tiffany. If you want to share a little bit about yourselves and we’ll go from there.

Hi. Yeah, I’m Sarah. I’m a software engineer here at Bill.

I am a junior engineer and I work on the back end on the rewards and reconciliation team. I just graduated with my master’s degree in software development last December and I’ve been working here ever since and loving it. I’m Gus.

I’m also a backend engineer on rewards and reconciliation. I’ve been here about four and a half years. Graduated in 2020 with a major in information systems and a minor in computer science and have loved it.

Love being here and and love working in Elixir and programming with these two. I’m Tiffany. I am both their bosses.

So, I run the rewards and reconciliation team. So, hopefully they’re not just saying that they love working at Bill because I’m in the room. I joke, but yeah, I’ve been at Bill formerly DBY.

So, DBY was one of the startups that Bill bought. So, I’ve been around for I just passed my sixth year anniversary now. I actually was an English major.

You brought up majors. So, totally different. Taught myself how to code.

Was a front-end developer at the beginning and kind of got into management after a while. Awesome. Awesome.

Thank you for those intros, folks. I was originally going to ask each of you this question, but since you’re all on the same team, Tiffany, could you summarize like what does your team work on at Bill? Like what product does this support?

What does it do? Uhuh. So, our team rewards and reconciliation.

So on one hand we own the rewards space. So just like any other credit card the spend and expense bill card provides rewards every time you do a transaction. There’s different rates for transactions for different types of transactions.

So that’s one part of the area we own. And the other area we own is reconciliation. Now what that translates to is essentially the transaction space.

So we own post swipe. So you swipe your card and what happens with that transaction, how it gets categorized where people are accounting for that money, that’s kind of what we handle, which is as you can imagine for a credit card, kind of the core of the product. So that I think would cover our squad.

Okay. Awesome. Awesome.

And can you each tell me how did you decide to go into engineering? Yeah, so I actually had a career change. My undergraduate degree is in hospitality management.

I worked for Marriott for a few years and the problem solving that I was doing at that job just wasn’t super interesting to me. You also work really bad hours in hospitality. So I decided to do a career change.

I actually did Harvard’s CS50 class that they put online for free. Anybody can go take it just to see if I liked programming and I did. So I enrolled into the University of Utah’s Master of Software Development program which is specifically for people who don’t have a background in computer science.

And it’s really intensive program where you learn everything you need to know to be a professional software engineer. And yeah, like I said, as soon as I graduated, I got my job here. That was my journey.

Awesome. So I when I was a lot younger, I was always kind of interested in programming. Did some, I guess enough HTML and CSS as a kid to realize I never wanted to do that.

But like, I always was interested in like tinkering with computers, gone the classic route where I have a bunch of Raspberry Pies that were once going to be projects, but I never quite got around to it. But I just I knew I always wanted to work in computers and just the problem solving of it and the abstract elements of just you know like trying to wrap your head around like in this case like how a credit card is processed in you know is just so like weirdly interesting to me and yeah so I you know like took a AP computer science class in high school and then knew that that was the the way. So yeah, I actually took a very roundabout way.

As you can imagine, English degree. I was actually working in nonprofits for a decade. So my main motivation was I was poor and I did not have healthcare.

I wanted to make some money. So I saw that coding at the time was how you did that. And I also thought, wow, that’s a great work life balance.

Now, I’d always kind of like dabbled in computers. For some reason, I’d never really thought I’m a little bit older than these two, but it wasn’t like a thought that entered my mind. We didn’t have AP computer science when I went to school.

Like women in tech wasn’t really like an automatic like path that you would think of at the time, but I’d you know taken some computer classes in high school back when you were coding with HTML and Flash which is embarrassing aging myself but yeah so I took a roundabout way and kind of ended up teaching myself how to code and landing that first job like pretty much 10xed my salary and got healthcare and have been very happy with the results. Awesome. Awesome.

Thank you all for kind of sharing all those very unique ways you decided to go down this path and kind of related to that question and some of you already touched on this but how did each of you land your first full-time job as an engineer? I had a couple of internships during school, but this job at Bill was my first real job. I went to a career fair at the University of Utah where I was going to school and actually met Tiffany, who’s my manager now.

Made a really strong connection with her and then, leap coded really, really, really hard for a few weeks so I could pass the technicals and yeah. So I, if you did the math on how long I was here, I graduated, graduated in April 2020 and then started here in February of 2021. And so I had about nine months of trying to claw my way into a job.

And one of the things I found very useful at least getting my foot in the door and getting that first interview was just like reaching out to people on LinkedIn and either you know if you have inmail credits like that was super helpful but also just like in the connection memo thing like putting a little blurb about why I want to connect and was able to actually I saw with Divvy someone had reacted to a post on LinkedIn that was a engineering manager here saying that they were hiring and I reached out to him and like you know did everything I could to to try to get an information interview and then got into the process that way. So yeah, so I think for me like the the the key was just networking like crazy and it sound like with Sarah as well. Yeah.

My first job was actually at Purple, the mattress company. And I had applied to probably like a hundred places and didn’t hear back from any. And finally someone, you know, reached back out to me.

And I just focused really hard on interviewing and practicing over and over and over again and also like learning the most upand cominging technology that like was barely being used at the time. And really focusing on that so that I could have like a futurelooking kind of interview to show that I’m like fresh and new. And I ended up crushing the interview and got the job essentially.

Nothing too fancy. I didn’t really network for that job. Again, this was, you know, 10 years ago, so a little bit different.

I would highly recommend that you network now for jobs. But also, yeah, I think just applying to literally every single job I found. Not if if I was 50% like meeting the requirements, I would apply the job.

So, yeah. And one thing I would I would add too is what helped me out is I like I didn’t track my application super closely, but just keeping an eye out on like where it feels like I’m falling off the interview process. And like for me, a lot of it was the technical challenges.

I’ if I could get an information interview, I could usually get to the technical challenge, but I usually couldn’t get past that. And so instead of, you know, trying to get my resume looking better or or focusing on other stuff, like really identifying what specifically was holding me back and leaning into that, I think helped a lot. Awesome.

Awesome. I guess I’ll chime in from a recruiter’s perspective real quick. Like this market is insane.

I mean I wish you could land a job with a hundred applications and that is just not the reality right now. So I’m always telling folks like yes you want to have a nice resume but that should be like 5% of your job search and you really need to get out there attend events like this. Go to every career fair you can join hackathons.

If you’re not comfortable joining hackathons, that means you need to do a couple weekends of leak code and just power through that. And it’s just the the bar is so much higher right now. But if you’re attending this right now, you’re doing all the right things.

So, kudos to you for being here. And, I will get back to our questions. So, for you guys, thinking back to your first few months at your first job, what’s one thing you were really good at as a student that proved useful?

And what’s one skill that you had to learn from scratch? Yeah, as a student and in my previous career as working for Marriott, I think a big thing that I learned was owning up to when you don’t know something and being willing to ask somebody who does. As a student, obviously you have TAs and teachers who are there to help you along the way.

And as a student, I use those resources really heavily. And that has been huge. As a junior engineer, as a P1, you know, you’re not really expected to be writing the most code or really the best code.

They have more senior engineers who can do those things. As a junior engineer, you’re expected to be asking questions, pushing the senior engineers on their understanding, coming in without a bias that more senior engineers might have. And just really being a lot more involved.

So I think that was something that I brought in. Something that I had to learn from scratch was just about everything else. I didn’t know the language that I worked in.

We work in Elixir, Gus mentioned. It’s a pretty niche language. So, that’s not a requirement to get hired at Bill on the back end.

Because most people don’t have experience in Elixir. But that was new. Learning about distributed systems and asynchronous organization.

All of that was completely new from school. So you just really have to be able to stay on your toes. Keep a good attitude and be willing to ask those questions and make the connections you need in order to be successful at your job.

So one of the things, so I’m gonna echo a little bit on the the TA stuff. Like in college, I think I got pretty decent at asking questions because if I didn’t, I would not finish the project. But like just knowing how to ask questions, how to for me like a a big key was also like ask questions in a way that also shows what you’ve worked on so far and like what you’ve tried and what why you felt that those ways weren’t the the right paths.

And then one of the things here that I I never really learned in school, and I don’t know necessarily how you could, is just getting experience working in a large codebase with a lot of people and a lot of like most of my projects in college where, you know, you do it at most over the course of a semester, but usually, you know, a week or two and then you could start a new folder. And here, you know, you’re you’re building for other developers to work on as well and and you have to be a lot cleaner and more more clear in in your code. I think for me having a more non-traditional background getting into code for me what proved the most useful was I would say communication and tenacity.

Tenacity being, you know, from when I was learning and teaching myself how to code to not give up because I didn’t have TAs or other people. And there’s a lot of times where, you know, you want to throw your computer against the wall because it’s not really doing what you want. I think you run into that a lot more on the job because like Gus said, you are definitely getting into a big code base.

Suddenly, you’re not facing an easy problem like write a to-do list. It’s like writing a to-do list in a large app is in would be insane because you have to like pull in all the other knowledge from everywhere the styling and everything that you don’t have control over. So that was one thing and then the other is communication and I certainly think that that helped me land jobs and keep jobs and kind of raise rise through the ranks in my career.

Because without communicating you can be the best person at coding but no one will know if you don’t know how to communicate that properly. So I think that is like a really strong skill to keep. What’s what was the last part of that question?

Yeah what did I have to learn from scratch? Funnily enough the first thing that comes to my mind is Ruby. I was a front-end developer and get a front-end job.

And the first thing they had me work on were Ruby scripts to give discounts for mattresses. And there was no QA, no nothing. I was just going in there blind.

Which you should expect with your first coding job is pretty much everything will feel new. So again, I think I’d lean back on the tenacity because it’s kind of it’s it’s rough at first. Awesome.

Awesome. Thank you for sharing those insights. Now let’s talk about mentorship.

So mentorship and learning are important early in your career. Can each of you share a moment when a mentor or a colleague helped you through a tough technical challenge or gave you a piece of advice that you still use to this day? Yeah.

Bill has a excellent mentorship culture and program. I have mentors on mentors on mentors. Two of them are right here.

And one of the things that Gus in particular is really good about is when I would approach him with a problem, even if he didn’t know the answer right away, the way that he would kind of respond to that was, "I don’t know either, but I know how we can find out." and we could look through Slack or we could look through our codebase or we could look through our documentation or we have so many resources that are available and so many talented engineers that are so willing to share their knowledge so Gus’s approach to getting stuck made a huge impact on me and now if I ever feel like I’m stuck I know what resources are available to me and I know how to get myself unstuck other than just going to a senior engineer and saying, "Yeah, I don’t know. It’s not working." so that would be my answer. Answer.

So, yeah, the, I don’t have one specifically, not because there aren’t any examples, but just because like Sarah said, there’s such a huge culture of mentorship here and like I mean, everyone if they can help with something, they’re more than willing to. And it’s I think a lot of my like advice that I’ve received has been just like how to approach problems and how to both from like how to you know figure out something like like sometimes we need to like use a function that I haven’t used before like how to actually figure out how to use that how to investigate what’s going on with it. As well as like how to even just like start from square one on like a project and build out tickets.

I think a lot of I guess like a lot of how I how I’ve gotten to where I am at this company, this company at Bill, has been a direct result of just people mentoring me and showing me like I don’t know. Again, I don’t have like a tangible answer, but like it’s it’s just like the whole job has just been a giant mentorship program for me and you know, and just how willing everyone has been to help is is really helped me a ton. So, I don’t know.

I Yeah, I’m not sure. For me, two moments stick out. One from a mentor who was maybe not the best mentor which I can tie back to the tenacity piece.

I was building the new payments portal. So obviously the credit card company pay it back. And I built it by myself.

We were a much smaller company back in the day. And I had an MR out and I remember getting like a hundred comments from one guy on the MR, right? And I was, you know, my first reaction was like embarrassment like because this is public, right?

And I’m like, why wouldn’t he just call me if like it took him at least an hour to type all that out? But that kind of really pushed me in a way to like really understand a lot of the technical areas that I didn’t understand, especially coming again from a nontraditional background. So that it frankly wouldn’t happen again.

I didn’t want to have a hundred comments on my MR. And granted, he was very picky and I could have pushed back on some, but I did I chose in that moment to not push back because I was like, I’d rather just learn his little quirky nuances because he’s going to be approving my code all the time so I can get like, you know, around this problem and learn what is really important and what’s not and what’s an opinion and what is fact. And then the second time was a mentor who was actually a really great mentor and his feedback on my MR was very positive and it he just said, "Wow, I have no idea what’s going on here like contextwise, but I can totally figure it out because your code reads like a book." And as an English major, that really warmed my heart. And shows that communication and vocabulary are really important in this job, even if you don’t think it is.

So, awesome. Awesome. Love all those examples.

So let’s talk about how you guys stay up to date with technology because things are changing very rapidly now, especially with AI. I know that we are providing lots of different AI tools for our engineering teams, but how do you all stay current with the latest trends and tools in tech? Yeah, I’m going to keep my answer pretty short and let these guys talk about it.

Honestly, as a junior engineer, I’m focused on doing a good job at my job that I have right now. The whatever else is going on is great, but I’m focused on learning Elixir and doing my job really well. So, like I go home and I have a book about Elixir and I have a friend who works in Elixir.

So, we both read this book together and then we’ll talk about it. So, I I do things to be better at my job, but as far as staying up to date, I’m just trying to keep my head above water. Awesome.

I have found that, you know, one of the things that I guess there’s two approaches I take. One is just there’s always like maintenance tasks to do like up updating dependencies they’re always releasing new additions of Elixir and so just trying to help with that in any way when and like reading the change logs in Elixir. I also admittedly am a huge Redditor and probably to no surprise and following like forums on Reddit about the tooling that we use is actually kind of interesting.

The other approach that I take is just talking to other engineers at the company. So like when they started giving us like the AI coding tools, I frankly like didn’t really know how to use them like really well or or to a beneficial way. And then I talked to some engineers who showed me like their workflows around them and and that’s helped and like you know I’ve shared like just I mean like with everything in this whole conversation so far just like communicating with other people and sharing your tooling and then they’ll show you like you know something interesting that that can really I don’t know like leverage the fact that other people also keep keep up with things and yeah attend meetups and whatnot if if you’re interested.

Said, but just keep an eye on the news around around whatever language you like and talk to people about it. Yeah, I would add hacker ink or hacker ink hacker news to Reddit. I’ve never used Reddit for coding purposes, but yeah.

So, Hacker News is I think actually pretty useful and frankly like they were saying just being in a work environment. So if you’re not in a work environment, it would be a lot of online reading and a lot of meetups and workshops which these two take a lot of advantage of. The workshops when you know AI was down the pipeline we all took AI workshops we all started like just diving into it and I think that is kind of how it works.

Like you hear a buzzword and then you just have to go do a Google deep dive, read documentation. You know, the learning never ends for this job, which is a blessing and a curse. And you know, the whole industry is forwardlooking, especially in the front end.

You know, you’re writing code that the browser can’t read that you’re like like transposing into something else. So, I think yeah, just staying on top of buzzwords and then taking the time to research is a good way if you’re not in a work environment. And also one of the things when I was like trying to get, you know, a job out of college, I did wind up going to I guess at the time they’re mostly virtual, but I’d go to meetups and go to like you know like local conferences if if I could get a ticket or something.

But like cuz you know half the people there or at least probably have jobs and are likely looking to hire. And so if you go with like genuine curiosity, attend a talk on something and and you know have like properly like genuine questions that’s a great way to make a connection with someone and maybe get your foot in the door somewhere. Yeah, conferences is a really good call.

I would also say you can attend them virtually to learn. It’s crazy what people are doing with the technology that exists that you don’t even know like people can do until you attend these conferences and kind of get into the more niche areas of languages. So yeah, call out.

Awesome. Awesome. I’m going to switch to some leadership questions for Tiffany.

So based on your lengthy career and and observing others move through their careers, what should early career engineers think about when picking their first job? Yeah, I would say don’t think about it when you are picking your first job. Apply everywhere and take whatever you can.

When you start thinking about your next moves is your second and third job. So for me, my first job, I was there. Don’t listen.

12 Months and then I was at my next job for a year and frankly that’s how you get paid more. It’s how you get more experience and it’s how you build your resume. So I think it’s a little different if you enter into a large company like Bill or Google or Amazon or something.

There’s a lot more upward mobility. But for your first jobs, oftentimes you’re working at odd places like a mattress company that you never thought would even have a web team, but suddenly they do and you’re one of four people working on a mattress website. But that’s what gets your foot in the door.

So, I would look for weird opportunities like that that maybe you’re like not really stoked about, but know that you don’t have to stay there forever and you don’t have to stay there long and it will help you find the next job. Love that answer. Yeah, a lot of students that I talk to kind of ask that question and I mean it sounds counterintuitive, but you really can’t think about it too much.

You just got to grab that first job, learn as much as you can, and good things will happen. Exactly. And then network with everybody at that job.

A lot of people think, "Oh, I got to network with like the people above me or people at the companies I want to go to, but your peers, no matter where you are, even if you’re a student, your classmates, like those are folks that you can passively keep in touch with for decades and and that turns into job opportunities." And that’s actually how I ended up at Bill is somebody I worked with six years ago hit me up because she had an opening on her team. So, definitely take advantage of that first role because, the other early career folks are probably in the same boat, maybe not thrilled to be there, but you’re all going to go off and and do big things afterwards. Fantastic.

So, another question for Tiffany. What qualifies you? What qualities do you look for in a candidate beyond just technical skills that indicate they’d be a great fit for Bill or just your team in general, no matter where you are?

Yeah. So, I actually might be different than a lot of my peers, but I focus more on soft skills in my in what I look for. Obviously I want there to be a propensity for technical knowledge and understanding but my feelings are that you can teach technical skills if the person ha like is a good student.

So that’s what I look for. I look for people who are good at learning. Because you can like I said teach technical skills but you can’t teach communication in a way that will not take a lot of time and a lot of hurt feelings.

And the same kind of goes for other soft skills like arrogance, humility, right? Like those are things that we want to balance on a team. So I I think that’s what I where I land.

Awesome. Awesome. And then this is our last question for all three of you here.

So if you could give one piece of advice to these students about making the most of their first job, what would that advice be? Yeah, I would say your networking doesn’t stop once you get your job. Our team in particular is really good about talking to people across the whole organization.

We’re in office three days a week, so Gus gets to his desk about an hour late every day because he stops and talks to 10 people on his way over. But it’s great because you’re building those connections with people who are super talented engineers that then you can go back to and say, "Hey, I need a little advice or guidance on this problem." and they’re going to be a lot nicer to you if you talk to them a little bit more. Not that anybody’s mean here.

Yeah. I would just say you kind of have to keep that mindset of building your network, growing connections even once you have the job. There’s also something to be said about you know, people churn all the time.

So like Keem said, he had someone reach out to him who he’d worked with six years ago. There are plenty of engineers who I’ve met now who I would love to work with again in the future if we go separate paths. So yeah, just get to know your organization at large would be my advice.

Yeah. And in a further defense of my my approach to visiting the office, I would just view your your first job as a continuation of your education in a lot of ways. And like, you know, there is it a lot of times it feels like you’re still in the classroom learning tools, working on stuff like it feels like group projects.

And, except you’re getting paid instead of the other way. And it’s I’ve learned so much from just like asking people or like you know there have been times where like if you’re like okay well I don’t know what like Kafka and Flink is but we’ve been using it on our team and I’ve been you know like trying to avoid working on it because I’m not super clear on it. Like lean into that and actually like message or talk to someone on your team and say like hey I don’t know this technology.

Do we have time for me to take on this project? And and then find the people in the company that can teach you about it. You know, set up maybe a a weekly training for other people that are interested in it.

Like really just treat your your company in a way, I guess, as as a community. And you can really learn a ton and and I personally find a lot more fulfillment in learning than than I guess whatever the alternative is. Yeah, I would say for the first job, really just lean into understanding how to work in a workplace.

You likely don’t know how to do a pull request, in the way that your company does it. You likely never had to use a conbon board by yourself, or Jira or Confluence. I would say reading the documentation that exists in your company will do a lot for you because you will learn a lot of things in the background that a a lot of people at the company might not even know because they haven’t taken the time to read the documentation.

That also sets you up to like seem like you understand a lot of things, right, that are important for your job. And then the second thing I would say is find a mentor. If you find a mentor, usually that will help the transition.

And a lot of good companies will give you an onboarding buddy or someone who will mentor you through this transition. But if they don’t, find one and take advantage of them. Not in a bad way.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you for all those wonderfully nuanced answers here.

I saw we had a request to bring the QR code back up. So, I am going to move that back onto the screen here and then we are going to do some Q&A from the audience. All right.

And I believe the CodePath team is going to share those questions. Awesome. Does Bill hire international students?

I’ll take this one. So, we unfortunately are not sponsoring for our intern roles and the vast majority of our engineering roles right now unless it’s something very, very niche. And I’ll just read these out loud and if it’s something I should answer as a recruiter, I’ll go ahead and do that.

And if it’s more engineering related, we’ll have our team answer that. So, first of all, I want to thank you guys for the valuable insights. The question is someone who is going into fintech as a software engineer, what specific languages would you recommend learning?

That’s a great question and not for me. Yeah, I honestly wouldn’t know to answer that because front end and back end, it depends where you like to be. Front end, you can’t go wrong with JavaScript, React.

I’d say most places are in that space. Angular obviously on the back end we work in Elixir which is very niche but very large in our area. So I would look up like the companies around you and what they’re looking at but I see a lot of Java.

I see a lot of Ruby. I think those are pretty safe bets that translate to a lot of different languages that might be more niche. So stand out in my mind.

Do you have any other? Yeah, one thing I would suggest is whatever language you go with like pick that language and go all or go more you know like focus in on that. At least like I mean obviously with Elixir not a lot of people I mean would be surprised if anyone like learned it through school.

So like a lot of if you try to learn the language before the interview with a company, you’ll just lose your mind trying to learn every different language. But if you go in and say like, "Hey, like I know you’re a Python shop. I know Java really well.

Let me do this coding challenge in Java." And then like be prepared maybe to talk about how you might how I always like the phrase and it’s kind of cheesy but like well I don’t know Elixir but I can learn it. Like be able to talk about how you would approach entering a codebase where you didn’t know the language. One of the things for me in school, we had a a class where the the assignment for the week was in a different language than a language we had learned before.

And so, like I would focus in on how I approached that. But yeah, just I would just pick a language that is kind of what you’re interested in and focus on that and get good at that versus, you know, being able to do hello world in a bunch of different languages. Yeah, I agree with what they said.

I don’t think there is an answer to what specific languages would you recommend for someone who wants to go into fintech. Could be any of them. I don’t know.

It might be worth looking into. We’re at Elixir. It’s a functional programming language.

Maybe just seeing what the difference between object-oriented programming and functional programming like what those key paradigm differences are. So, you could talk about it in an interview. But I agree with Gus.

I I wouldn’t try to learn a whole bunch. I would know one really well and show that you can be really good in a language and that you can learn how to do it somewhere else as well. Awesome.

Something I’ll add to that as a recruiter is you know, take a look at companies that you really admire and see what tech stack they’re working with. You know, if they’re winning in this market, there’s a good chance that other companies are going to try to adopt that tech stack as well. That’s kind of what happens in big tech.

But another thing is, you know, if you’re into the startup world and you want to start your career at a startup, like take a look at the big startup accelerators, like A16Z or Y Combinator and look at their portfolio and who’s winning there and who’s heading billion dollar valuations and see what tech stocks they’re using as well. And a lot of this stuff is public. It might not be easy to find, but it is out there.

If you read through like glass door or levels.fyi, you can find a lot of this information and there there’s a lot of open source stuff out there as well. Awesome. Do you have any advice for someone who’s coming from the front end into a fintech space?

It doesn’t seem like there are many opportunities for people who focus on UI. Yeah. I think I’m the only front-end developer here, so there are less, but just because there’s less doesn’t mean there’s any.

I would say, like I said at the very beginning, focus on the latest and greatest in the in the language. To show that you’re really keeping on top. That shows a few things.

It shows that you read, which is important, and also that you can learn and that you take the time to kind of polish your craft. And there’s a lot of people that might feel comfortable with a lot of the different front-end languages, but that kind of separates kind of the meat from the potatoes, if I mind. Yeah, you go.

I I will say as someone who is incredibly averse to working in front end, we do have a decent amount of front-end engineers and I think there you know I don’t know any like percentages at all or anything but I but there are definitely there’s definitely a place for front-end engineering in in fintech for sure. Like on our team, I have 10 people on our team and three and a half I say three and a half because one person is full stack. So they that is kind of the breakdown.

Three and a half are front end. Something I will add to that is going back to communication. One place that front end kind of differs from backend is really your reliance on communication because you are the first point of contact.

If something goes wrong, support’s reaching out to you. Your manager is reaching out to you because the customers that’s where they find the problems. And so there and you also have to talk to a designer.

The back end often doesn’t have to talk to designers. You’re talking with QA. So there’s a lot more like relationship building that you have to do on the front end and keeping track of all of that.

So I think communication skills are really important for that. I’ve got nothing for front end. Good luck centering your divs.

Yeah. Awesome. So, how would you recommend students structure their personal projects to better prepare for the workforce or interviews?

Portfolio sites. Do a portfolio site. It’ll show you know how to code.

It is really easy. I always open people’s websites. I would rather look at someone’s portfolio site than their LinkedIn any day.

Because it shows that they’re taking the time to update it. I can click through their things. I can see kind of how they think in a different way from how they lay things out.

And kind of where their passions lie in a different like sterile space like LinkedIn or the resume. The biggest thing I would say for personal projects is just make sure it’s actually something you’re passionate about and you can talk about because that’s what comes through in an interview. It’s a personal project.

It doesn’t really matter for like how you built your well no your architecture does matter. I don’t know. I would just say if you’re going to sell a personal project, make sure that you can back it up with why it’s important to you specifically.

And that’s what’s going to make the difference in an interview. Awesome. How do you balance using AI code to generate tools with writing your own code as an entry-level engineer?

And this is coming from one of our previous interns. So, thanks for chiming in, Jason. I would say I would say just like from from my experience so I I started before the era of AI code generation tools that were tuned at all for Elixir.

But I think one of the key things with using those tools that I have found to be critical really is to still know the code like you wrote it and be able to talk to every element of it. Read like give it a pretty thorough code code review on its own because like at each organization they’ll have different styles of doing things different approaches and you know I think it it could be very easy if you’re not careful to just depend on that and not actually learn what the code that it is writing is actually doing. I’ve found that they can be can be helpful tools, but you I would argue it would be doing yourself a disservice if you don’t really learn what it’s doing and use it more as a I mean really use it more as like a pair programming outlet and less as a someone to delegate your code to.

I don’t know how how have you balanced it either of you. Guess you don’t write code anymore. I am I’m pretty anti-AII code generation for junior engineers.

I just think if you can’t you need to be able to write these basics. And if you are relying on an AI to do what a junior engineer needs to do, how will you ever become a senior? I also think again it’s an opportunity to network within your company.

If you’re stuck, go ask a senior engineer. Senior engineers will also have more context. Senior engineers who have been around longer will be able to tell you.

Like for example, I went to one of our senior engineers because I didn’t understand our email process and he was explaining it to me and I went, "This doesn’t make a lot of sense. This actually seems like really bad practice." and he went, "Yeah, it was." But this was the business context around what was happening at the time and why we made those decisions. And it made way more sense to me that like, oh, they were in a tough spot and they were working within these constraints and that’s why it was built like this because it didn’t make sense originally and you won’t get that kind of information from an AI.

So to be a little bit more diplomatic, I would agree with Gus and just say just make sure you can explain it yourself. But for me personally, I would say make sure you know your stuff before you rely on an AI for it. Oh, Hakee, you’re muted.

Sorry about that. That’s embarrassing. Okay, so we have another sponsorship question.

So the blanket answer for any type of sponsorship now or in the future is we are unable to accommodate it unfortunately. Gosh, I wish we had something engineering related to end us. But hey, that was a great Q&A session.

Thanks everyone for attending and then I know a bunch of you connected with me on LinkedIn, connected with our engineers. It’s been a pleasure hanging out here today and I believe the CodePath team is going to play us out with a video here and that is it for the day. All right.

Well, we have reached the end of our session. Thank you so much for the bill team. This is such an engaging presentation and discussion.

We really appreciate you. So, everyone drop your appreciation in the chat. Visit them in their company booth during the booth time.

And to close out, we’ll now go to a brief video from our host, Bobby D. Now, wasn’t that a great session? Oh my gosh, these breakout sessions are fire and I want to encourage you to attend as many as you can.

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