2025 EES HackerRank: Emerging Trends and System Design: AMA

I love that music. It just makes me want to dance every time I hear it. What’s going on everybody?

My name is Cam. I’m from the CodePath Career Center team and we are 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. Relevant to the session means no LinkedIn, no GitHubs, no links to your mama’s Shopify website. I want to see any of them in the chat.

Please also take a minute at the end of the session to give us your feedback. With those reminders out of the way, I’m excited to introduce this session, emerging trends in systems design, an AMA with Treval Williams. This is a great session.

I was just talking to Travel. I’m super stoked. Y’all should be stoked.

But if you’re curious about how today’s biggest systems are built or worried about emerging trends around tech interviewing, bring your questions to Travel Williams, a senior product manager at HackerRank, for a lively AMA on the trends shaping tech and the art of great systems design. We’re gonna have real talk, like very real talk, and practical insights with a focus on what’s next in tech. A little bit about Traval.

As a product manager at HackerRank, Travel productizes connections between the platform and applications across the internet. With experience across product and engineering, he focuses on creating value and solving real problems. He’s currently based in Houston, Texas with his partner and enjoys roller skating, learning about solar technology, and working out.

So please give a warm w a round of applause or welcome to Treval Williams from Hackerite. Oh man, how you doing? Can you hear me?

Yeah. Yeah. Thank first, thank you for that awesome introduction.

No problem. Great. Great.

So, if y’all are ready, I’m ready. Let’s jump in. I think anytime I do a presentation, it’s very important for me to establish credibility and I like to share my story.

And I’m definitely going to kind of going to open up in the AMA if folks have questions about this, but my engineering journey started at a really interesting time. I was in a software engineering boot camp during 2020 and we were in person. Unfortunately the world shut down and at the same time the George Floyd riots happened and my boot camp had to go online.

So on the left of your screen you see a photo of all the things I was thinking about and trying to build during that boot camp and on the right probably two to three miles from me. This was the scene within the grocery store, after kind of that whole situation went off. Which makes for an interesting story.

And what that moment taught me is just like how to make sure that I’m just telling folks keep going even through adversity. But what happened of that is during that time I wrote the most important code or piece of code that I ever would in my life. Our team was I was working at PayPal and our team was struggling with refunding bulk refunding transactions on the support side and working as someone in technical support I had seen this issue.

I was super annoyed and I thought it was really really important. So I built like a simple UI. You would input kind of these credentials that you needed to hit our API.

And you would upload the transaction IDs that you needed to refund and just click the submit button and you would get kind of this list of transactions that had been refunded. I didn’t know that building this application would propel my engineering and product career to like crazy heights. So I went from being a technical support specialist to moving on to a API specialist team to becoming a software engineer at PayPal.

And I got a chance to be on two teams. One was a developer ecosystem engineering team where I built tools and SDKs for developers. The other was a API migrations team which was simply migrating and importing sensitive payment data in and out of the company.

From there I really caught the product bug. I love building things but I got such a thirst and energy from establishing a vision, gathering people around me and charging forward. So, I moved on to become a payments integrations PM at Recurly.

It was super cool. I got to build an integration into the Korean banking system, which brought us $16 million in additional transaction processing volume. I got to secure $33 million in transaction processing volume by taking on this huge compliance project.

And I thought that was as good as my career could get. I was having a blast. But then I moved on to hackerink where I sat in this role for now three years and I’ve been able to do so much from building and scaling our integration ecosystem that connects our customers to so many tools all over the internet.

I’ve been able to fly all over the world. My favorite place outside of the US is Bangalore, India. Beautiful city.

Cuban Park is amazing. And I’ve been able to see how AI has reshaped the industry and be a part of that story for the developer community. So, I want to kind of do this.

Does this sound familiar to you all? And probably it may kind of resonate if you’re going through this right now or in this kind of loop. So my guess and I’m getting the sense that many of you are applying for jobs and the process looks like you do the application, you talk to the recruiter or hiring manager, you take a technical skills assessment, you do all the applications, you talk to the hiring manager or recruiter, you take the technical skills assessment, do the application, you talk to the recruiter or hiring manager, you take the technical skills assessment, and you finally get the job.

So, yeah, this probably looks familiar. Throw a one in the chat if this sounds like the journey that you’re on right now. Cool, cool, cool, cool.

I love that. And our I I bring this up because I think about this process all the time. We think about it a lot at HackerRank.

And even though we’re known for being the assessment platform or assessment vendor at the front end of the hiring process, especially during that technical assessment period, our big mission is to change the world to value skills over pedigree. And what that means is these factors like your zip code, the color of your skin, whether you’re a man or a woman, should not take precedence over the actual skills that you have and the value that you can bring to the work that you’re going to do on the future. And we want to ultimately build a world that matches every developer with the right job.

So when you’re taking a HackerRank assessment or see our logo at the end of the day, this is our mission. And right now we have 2.3 million unique candidates that we engage every single year. We have 2500 customers.

15% Of them are in the Fortune 500 and some of you probably are applying for roles that they have. And even bigger, we have 24 million developers in our community just like you who are skilling up on our platform trying to get through to the next role and the next opportunity. Send this is our platform.

We have a ecosystem of connections. We have tons of products from that we do in the B2B space, but we also have the community product that I’ll talk about a bit later. And so this is how I’m going to run the flow of the session.

I want to arm you all with data and talk about what we’re seeing in the market, what we’re seeing with developers applying to roles and jobs. And it should create discussion where we could also talk about ways you can approach applying taking assessments intentionally. And then I want to talk about the next generation developer.

So right now there’s a really solid idea of what a software developer looks like. I want to talk about what the next generation of developers will look like once we all continue embracing AI. And then I want to jump into tools that we’ve built to help you prepare for interviews.

And I finally want to open with a discussion AMA where you all could bombard me with feedback, questions. I want it to be a very lively chat. And and I think we’re going to have a good time together.

So, put two in the chat if this is an agenda you feel align with. I’m excited to dig in and let’s go. So, the developer report is a report that we do every single year.

We do tons of research. We talk to so many developers. We talk to those 2500 customers and we take all of those inputs and provide the market and the industry at large with our insights and what we’re seeing.

So one of the first insights that we see is even though tech hiring has come back, landing a job still feels impossible. Developers are like really really frustrated by the layers of just hiring and it just feels like there’s friction. So you all probably are experiencing ghost jobs being posted that you’re applying to companies taking too long to respond, hiring processes feeling like they’re a mess.

Doing six, seven, eight interviews after someone’s confirmed like that like hey you’re the best person for the job. And in this we also see that a lot of that hiring and the recovering seems to be favoring more toward senior talent. You can see the year-over-year hiring activity breakdown here where lead developers are up 22%.

But if you look at entrylevel hiring, it’s a flat 7%. And like I said before, I want this to be a generative conversation. I want to arm you all to approach this intentionally.

I don’t want folks looking at any of this information and getting scared, disheartened, any of that. So the second key insight is that developers aren’t just working jobs anymore where you’re like either freelancing or you know on Fiverr or doing kind of these projects. Developers are building actual careers and this is a huge shift from what we’ve seen before.

And you have most developers saying, "Hey, layoffs are happening, but I’m really really prioritizing how I can continue to advance because that’s one of my biggest concerns, which is interesting because advancing in in one’s career has more precedence than work life harmony from what we’ve gotten from the inputs from developers And in this kind of prioritization re well well let’s call it a reorganization of prioritization. In this we also see this trend where you either pay developers correctly you either challenge them or you risk losing them all together. At the tippy top of developer priorities are making sure that pay and benefits are aligned.

So that’s first and also at the same time there’s unsatisfying work drivers or there’s this condition where unsatisfying work is driving developers out. So even if the pay is met, we see developers saying like hey this doesn’t really feed me. I no longer can do this kind of work.

And so in this the third insight that we have from this report is that we do see developers asking for pay, asking to be challenged but also leveraging AI to code faster and you have developers not choosing just one AI tool. They’re beginning to stack. So for example, when ChatGPT came out, I remember a lot of people were just like going ham, going like hard as they can on just like using everything that ChatGPT was to handle all of the tasks that they needed to do as a developer.

But now we see this host of other tools emerge. And we also see a lot of variation when it comes to the choice, right? So there are developers who who say I’ll probably generate a UI or prototype in v 0ero and use that react code and play around with it and end up adding it to my application or I’ll go to cloud code generate that same UI and React code and use that instead.

We see developers making choices with the the numerous AI tools that are on the market and they’re beginning to combine them in unique ways. In addition to this, we see AI isn’t just helping developers. We also see it generating a significant portion of code.

So, and and you shouldn’t look at this as like, oh man, I’m going to write less code when I get into industry or developers are writing less code. We should look at it as there’s AI assistance kind of generating what I would call a skeleton of what a developer is trying to attempt to do like solving the general problem within a DSA. But then you have developers leveraging their own skills to shape that skeleton or shape that scope sculpture to be scalable and to meet the needs of the business or the project that they’re jumping onto.

I also want to like put this out there. You have you do have a a class of developers who are just like, I’m not dealing with AI at all. I don’t have time for it.

It’s not it’s not real coding if you’re generating code with AI or if you’re using AI to write your tests. And so there is the AI acceleration gap. You have early adopters of AI tools and folks who are leveraging AI tools who are getting gains in their productivity, meaning they’re building things faster, they’re shipping more products, they’re able to do deeper analysis and and their system design and really clarify problems.

And then you have a class of folks who are just lagging behind, keep trying to keep up with the speed at which these tools have folks moving. And with this speed is increasing. What folks are able to ship within a short amount of time is increasing.

But what it’s also doing is raising the expectations across the board for what we expect developers to be able to produce and do. So you can see the productivity expectations of developers on the left at 67% and you also see on the right productivity expectations of managers being at 84%. So managers are like hey you have these tools and there’s a wide range of them you have the skills for the role you should be able to be more productive.

I’m not going to say do more because just because you’re doing a lot of stuff doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being productive. What these tools are enabling people to do and I think I see this happening even within myself is we’re really really clarifying this is a problem I’m trying to solve. This is the one, two, three things at minimum I need to do to advance the needle on an objective and that’s more than enough.

Versus you know I need to like design in Figma, I need to build in curs or I need to do all this stuff like no what productivity means here is that we’re seeing people be able to accomplish more in a short short amount of time or add more value in a shorter amount of time. Excuse me. The fourth insight is those same and I would think of those early adopters too in this.

We see developers taking control of their learning. I will add this has always been a kind of staple of developer communities. One of the things I love about being a developer is that you could go and just learn the discipline, learn cloud, learn React, learn so many different libraries, engage in open source documentation all over the internet.

So it’s it’s already a community where we’re really aggressive about learning and advancing. What we see is an acceleration in that and developers are beginning to create and choose their own learning paths. So you could see 61% of developers without learning opportunities plan to leave.

So, it used to be developers seeking a lot of these learning opportunities outside of their jobs, outside of their roles, and now this has become an expectation that developers have at work, which throw probably a yes in the chat. I’m curious about this if you expect that your workplace or the company you end up working for or currently work for should be or or will be a place of learning. I’m just really really curious about this.

Cool. Cool. And continuing in that again picking up these different paths, we also see developers beginning to like initiate themselves and prioritize certain skills within particular domains.

I keep saying React 75 you see 75% there with React but Spring Boot which some of some of you who’ve been computer science students you probably encountered this in your Java class probably like that second Java class working with Spring Boot one of the interesting things that I see with backend is this growth in NodeJS which is really really cool because the JavaScript ecosystem JavaScript TypeScript that whole ecosystem has just like popped off and it’s really cool to watch in real time and developers are embracing it. And and typically I mean as you probably would assume you see a lot of ML development being prioritized when it comes to the data science and machine learning track even more than data engineering used to be. I remember when I was a software engineer at PayPal, I thought data engineering was the coolest thing.

I was obsessed. And other people too who were into like APIs and large scale infrastructures were also kind of data engineering geeks. But what has happened there’s more and more emphasis and focus on ML development especially with the emergence of generative AI and developers embracing more AI tools and AI development pathways.

And fifth developers feel gap between hiring tests and real world skills is too wide too wide. I want to know this from y’all. And be super honest.

And this is what I want. And it may be too like too honest, but it’s cool. If you feel and if you’ve taken a an assessment in the past, let’s say six months, technical skills assessment, and you feel like it didn’t match up with the actual job posting or the real world skills you think you would need in the in the real world, say in the chat something like that was a waste of my time.

But if you feel like, you know, I took this test, I got through this hiring process, whether or not you got the job. If you felt like those assessments were linked to real world skills and how the job will actually be, say, I can’t wait until the next technical skills assessment or something like that. Again, we’ll use some of this in the in the Q&A.

I’m just really really curious what where folks are. And you see this has become developer sentiments toward assessments in general. At the tippy top, folks are saying assessments should focus more on problem solving and less on memorizing algorithms, which has been a long-standing critique of the developer community.

This one doesn’t feel super new. I remember at some point taking DSAs and being just like why though you know so the sixth insight and this is the last one is that and particularly for companies what we’ve learned from all these inputs is that attracting developers starts well before the job post. Already finding the job for developers is hard but also finding the right candidate is hard too and it doesn’t get easier when it comes to the job posting.

Applications are broken. Hiring feels like a budget game. Sometimes processes feel too slow.

It feels like tests maybe aren’t measuring the right real world skills that folks should have. And the same pain that we get and sense from the developer community, we also sense and feel with a lot of our customers at the same time. So it’s like everybody’s in a state of pain right now and trying to figure this out.

And so with that, I want to talk about what the next generation of developer needs to look like. This is something we’ve been thinking about a lot at HackerRank. Were actually revamping and adding so many goodies to the product towards this idea.

There’s a next generation developer. And so here’s the evolution. There’s a software development life cycle where you have requirements.

You begin to design a bit of a system. You may code and implement that system. Do some testing and you finally deploy.

And that the whole loop or how this rounds itself off there’s a bit of maintenance that happens and there used to be a situation where there was a role assigned to each of these. So you would have a product manager giving requirements. You would have like a software architect designing the system.

A software developer implementing and writing code and an engineer a test engineer or QA engineer dealing with writing the test deployment automation cases all that stuff. And you have a a DevOps engineer actually managing the deployment and everyone within that whole loop concerned with how do we maintain and continue to add value. And now what we see is that a single developer with tons of access to the AI tools that we have today are able to perform a lot of these roles or take on a lot of these responsibilities within the software development life cycle.

So for example, you may work with notion AI to craft and refine the problem statement and requirements. You may use something like eraser AI to do a lot of your technical design before even beginning to write. You might use cursor as your IDE and leverage models within cursor to generate the code that you need and refine what you’ve written or refactor what you’ve written.

You may use something like code rabbit to like generate or automate your PRs that are written and before you deploy and even deal with testing in some instances. And you’ll use Azure AI for managing your deployments and data dog AI for just being able to monitor maintain the system and make sure the application is continuing to function as expected. And we believe because of this, the next generation developer will have to have these four dimensions met.

First, as I’ve illustrated, you need to be able to work with AI across the entire software development life cycle. So now that we know productivity gains are happening and folks are embracing AI, all of those different roles, all of those different responsibilities and requirements can be taken on by a single developer. And you also need to get a sense of the fundamentals of the role.

So being able to if you’re a cloud engineer, understand what that means. If you’re backend engineer understanding what that means while still again using AI across the SDLC and there is a requirement to have a working knowledge of AI concepts and not in the sense of like in a in a X or Twitter kind of way where people are like oh my god AI has taken over I have a view of what’s going to happen in the economy because of this or whatever what I mean by this is this is understanding transformer architecture. This is being able to do a bit of context engineering.

This is understanding how MCP servers interact with applications and how to like minimize the latency. And finally, this is my favorite of course because I’m a product manager. There’s a lot of taste and business acumen being required of developers at this point.

So you can’t just like be a code monkey like generating this code and shipping it. The expectation is you’re able to have a bit of a product sense. You’re able to know how to shape the code, shape the application, shape what you’re working on to be actually delightful for a customer or user to use on an ongoing basis.

And you’re expected to be able to provide inputs to the team that you’re working on when it comes to this. So this is what it looks like. We have these capabilities, four capabilities that I’ve illustrated and each of them have these kind of skills within them.

I’m not going to go through all of them because I want to go through some of the other sections of the presentation because I really want to hear from y’all. You have fundamentals of the role, knowledge of AI concepts and taste and business acumen. So, this is where I want to show y’all what we’ve been working on to guide and help our team is so dope because we understand that preparing for interviews and even just navigating the process is annoying.

It’s often expensive to get a coach. It’s expensive to buy all these books. It’s it’s it’s a lot of work to even craft a learning path for yourself.

So that is why we have been working on prep kits. And what these prep kits are is it’s the full range of tasks, challenges, activities that will prepare you for a engineering role or what technical role you you want to take on. In this I’m going to show you all well let’s scroll through and look at this right quick.

So you have practice challenges with arrays, you know, dealing with strings, all this type of stuff. You have mock tests. And these are built in the same way HackerRank assessments are built out.

You have mock interviews, which is my favorite like thing that we built for this, and I’ll jump into them in a minute. And then you have role certification, where you can actually go on a path to get certified in that role. So, my favorite thing is mock interviews.

And this is because we’ve set it up where there’s a coding DSA round and there’s a system design round. But what make these mock interviews amazing is that these are powered by AI. So I’m going to start a mock interview right now for system design.

And I won’t get through it, but here’s how it goes. So you can see on the left what we have or throughout the entire experience we have an AI agent that is functioning the same way an interviewer would in a system design interview. So, I’ve done systems design interviews, both on the side of a candidate and as a person who’s interviewing folks.

And this is so great because you can already see it’s asking me, tell me a bit about your background and what interests you the most about systems design. I’m going to kind of, don’t judge me. I like building APIs.

That’s great to hear. Building APIs is a crucial part of a scalable system design. Of course, in an actual interview, you would put a lot more into this and that would be my recommendation if you use our AI interviewer.

But you can already see is dialogue and back and forth with you. The same way like I would or any other system design interviewer would take on. So, I’m going to do a bit more of this and then I want to go back and we’ll open up for discussion.

But any particular challenges or interesting problems you face while designing them? Yes, there’s always an authentication problem. There’s always a problem with latency.

I’ve worked on payment and HR APIs. Cool. Cool.

Now it’s going to continue to ask me different questions. It’ll give me the prompt once I get through kind of going through this whole thread. And the cool part is once you end the interview, what it does is it generates feedback.

So what it what what the cool part is it takes the inputs from the whiteboard. It takes the inputs from the chat and you’ll see it’ll generate a summary of how I’ve performed in all these different areas. So let’s see how I did.

Dang, I probably should have like went through the whole thing because a zero out of five for someone with my background is a bit embarrassing. But you can see like scalability, fault tolerance, technical design, communication, and collaboration, which this looks similar to the the scorecard I’ve used at other jobs when when interviewing candidates. So yeah, if you all are I’m going to stop sharing my screen.

If you all are interested in checking this out. Definitely go I’ll drop a link to our AI interviewer and the hacker community. It’s free to create an account.

I will also drop a link to our support team. Because if you’re inter if you’re interested in the prep kits definitely want to connect you with the product team that built it. And definitely want to make sure you all get access to it.

So okay cool and this is where the presentation has ended. I want to open up and hear from y’all. Hey, Cam.

Hey. Hey. Oh, I think you’re on mute.

Or am I on mute? No, I was saying I think that you were dropping gym, so thank you so much for all of that. Cool, cool, cool, cool.

No worries. Awesome. So yeah, y’all.

This is my favorite part actually of the of coming to the summit. Any questions? What are y’all thinking?

What is top of mind? We got some great ones in the chat so far. The first one up votes up votes count.

The first one from Aisha was how can student engineers effectively and quickly learn systems design? What are your favorite resources? Is it a topic you think is best learned on the job?

Yeah. Okay. So, this has changed over the years for for me.

Here’s what I’ll say. The best book that I’ve read to help you with systems design interviews is a book called Web Scalability for Startups. And that book is so good because it considers web and mobile applications, which pretty much that’s what most people in the industry are building.

And it’s a end to end kind of book. So, it’s not just like how you handle the UI, it’s how you handle the backend. How do you handle situations where you got to process a lot of data and have low latency?

How do you deal with security? How do you deal with scalability? And is they like there’s a chapter on each of these.

So that’s the first thing that I would recommend. But being an engineer and having done this work for a while, I do think system design is best learned in the field. Like the more things you build and the more different things you build and the different kind of jobs you have will begin to shape a deeper understanding of systems.

So for example, last year at Hackerank, my team took on a huge engineering challenge where we built a unified API. And if you you don’t know what that is, basically it’s a piece of infrastructure that’s supposed to process and connect with so many different applications over the internet and keep the data in sync. And it was one of the most difficult engineering challenges in my career.

And also as a product manager and it and a lot of what I know now about system design has changed because we we really we went we ran into some weird stuff. It was just it was just like it was it was given escape room the whole time. So so maybe if I like wrote a book it would just like it it would be different from from that web scalability book but that’s where I would start.

Nice. I also think I agree with you like you know like learn by building and like systems design is one of those things that like the more systems you build the more you kind of recognize certain patterns and things like that. I would say and add to what you’re saying too that like another great resource especially on the cloud computing side like AWS or GCP have a lot of great resources on like just the overarching cloud infrastructure.

So you can learn about like the networking going on behind the scenes and you know what are the sorts of tools that you use in a cloud computing environment are the same no matter who the vendor is. They just have different names. Yes.

So spend some time on those sites and reading some white papers on that could be a great use of time as well for for entry level for person. Yes, I love that. Another question for you.

Seeing that entry level roles are not increasing hiring rates and some companies do not even seek entry- level developers, do you have any advice or resources for new grads in the current market? Yeah, I would I mean I would do it this way. If I had to enter into like the industry at this point, I would not center myself on explicitly having a engineer a software engineering role.

What I’m seeing from my vantage point is that what engineers and what technical people are able to do are needed all over the business. So for example there’s pre-sales engineer roles where you will be providing technical expertise or system design expertise and scoping out a solution from a technical perspective during the sales cycle. So literally selling technology next to the sales team that typically is like this kind of sales guy with a suit and tie who’s just trying to get the contract across.

They always need like a nerdy kind of code person to be able to jump in there and and push push a lot of the the technical understanding across. I would look at probably taking on like support roles, technical support engineering roles. When I was at PayPal, what was cool was our engineering team hired from within and we had robust mentorship programs.

I went through several of them and because of that, I was able to keep make money first off. I was able to be in a company where I could continue to network and the same folks that had mentored me while I was in technical support and going through these programs ended up becoming my peers eventually. So I would I would definitely recommend looking at companies that have some sort of pipeline from non-engineering roles into engineering roles if that’s something you’re trying to do.

Yeah. And I just want to point out a couple dope things you said because they also address a couple other questions. Somebody later had asked like what are some good ways to build business acumen?

And I think that what you just described is actually like a great way like sitting next to some of the folks that are like in the sales side or the marketing side. And being present in those parts of the business operations even though you’re a technical person. And then the second thing, because I’ll let you respond to that because I’m sure that that triggers some thought, but also, you started talking a little bit about like what you would do if you were to restart your career.

And, one of the next questions was about if you could restart your career in product management. How would you navigate the market? Because you also mentioned earlier when you talked about your experience, you made a pivot from software engineering to product management.

So, one I guess maybe you could ask like what made you decide to really make that switch and go from software engineering to product? You talked a little bit about the the big experience that maybe shaped it, but what made you decide, hey, you know, actually, I’m going to ask for that next role to be product management. And if you were interested in product management as a student now, how would you navigate that interest in the work?

Oh man, y’all are asking like the tough ones. Because I didn’t I didn’t put that much like thought into building my product management career. It just became accidental.

But the way I would navigate the market, I wouldn’t a I would not want to go into a product management role right out of school. Especially in this atmosphere because the expectation of product managers at this point has gone beyond you just kind of just building the product. You are running the full gamut.

So you’re so for example let’s just say my job at hackerink I do a lot of work with the sales team I’m like writing documentation I am doing the go to market I’m working as my own data analyst in some instance I’m with the engineering team I’m with designers and what has allowed me to be able to be flexible and versatile enough to perform and be a part of all those functions is because I have have had so much experience before this. So I’ve worked in support, I’ve worked in engineering, I’ve even worked in banking before this and I’ve been a data analyst. So I would I would focus on this.

I wouldn’t align myself to a specific role. I would say there’s specific challenges and problems I want to take on and make a part of my career. So, at the beginning of my career, I actually was just like dead set on being like there should just be no poor people in the world.

How can we solve the issue of poverty? How can we like build solid economies for people? And that’s what led me into banking and then American Express and then PayPal.

And once I got in and I learned that that interest and those challenges could like I could be a fraud analyst taking on that problem. I could be a product manager taking on that problem. I could be an engineer working on that problem.

And I realized that’s not really what I cared about as a problem I wanted to solve. And then I found a new problem I wanted to solve. So if you want to be a product manager, that’s what I would do.

I would get like a robust kind of set of experiences across the gamut so you can actually be able to do the job and not come in and and fumble fumble trying to ship things. And then I would get dead set on what kinds of problems and challenges just like light my fire. So the stuff I showed y’all, I’m like, you know, I I like to smoke hookah in in Houston.

I’m like at hookah at 1:00 a.m. Talking to people about like APIs and infrastructure and scaling careers for developers and stuff like that. So, if it’s not a thing you want to talk about at 2 am, I don’t think you should build a career around it.

Yeah, that’s man, you’re dropping bars. I that answered a couple other questions that were in the chat. Oh, man.

You know what I’m saying? I’m trying trying to weave them up. Hopefully, I’m I think you are.

I think you are. Somebody asked about like, you know, like what your advice would be for people with not a lot of experience. And I agree with what you said like you know try to align to problems that you are interested in and take your career like more broadly in the direction of hey you know I’m starting my career trying to explore solve this problem that I am interested in you know tackling and I’m curious enough about it that I’m willing to like do this research or spend time you know talking to people about it long term etc. I think that was great advice.

One other question that came up, let’s take it back to the systems design portion of stuff, right? Yeah. How is how are y’all seeing AI affecting systems design?

Like in terms of like I guess both in the ways in which it’s being utilized to solve systems design problems, but then also maybe like how AI is now a part of the new system, right? Like in your API interview support bot, right? You have a a you have some API reaching out to some AI model doing some work on the side too.

So maybe talk to us a little bit about what you’re seeing both from the the trend of like systems design questions and interviews and things like that or AI interviewing and then also like systems now relying on AI like what are some trends maybe y’all have noticed? So what I’ve seen is this system design used to be about predictable outputs right if I build these components if I build this infrastructure in a particular kind of way I can expect a system to perform as expected especially if you add like monitoring alerting you can always identify like this is the reason why our system is underperforming or this was what’s needed to scale it or these are the the bottlenecks and make the adjustment to get the outputs that you need. But that’s not how transformer architecture works at all.

I was so like I kind of was confused because like there’s all these people who like have PhDs and artificial intelligence and all this stuff that aren’t able to explain why we get the outputs that we get from LLMs. And I think that’s become a huge part of integrating LLMs into systems that they do have these unpredictable outputs. And I don’t know if you all like follow open AI, but what they have is a whole framework for what’s called evals eval performing evaluations on like the prompts you provide, the outputs you get and all this other stuff.

What I’ve seen is eval become more a part of the work that I do and it’s something that I look at alongside the traditional work of building and scaling a system. So that’s one end of it. But then I want to address kind of in my domain specifically I I specialize in application programming interfaces.

And I think we’re moving to a a moment where like everybody is beginning to align around this concept of model context protocol. So MCP servers people call this like calling tools or or whatever language you want to give it. But that’s been the other thing I’ve seen just like more towards connectors being a part of products and AI models or AI experiences that are being able to call other applications and AIs from from all over the place.

So those are the two kind of trends I see and the big kind of things with systems. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I feel like the the best practices for AI development are being made right now.

So it’s like it’s like the time now to learn it because you’re just experimenting and everyone’s learning for the first time. But best practices are being established now which is an exciting time to join any technology when it’s in the middle of figuring out some of those things. One question for you about the AI to keep it on that trend is based on like what you’re seeing one like we’re talking to employers who are doing who are working with HackerRank and like you know trying to do assessments of engineers.

What are the sorts of skills that like employers are saying the employers focus on AI are saying they want to see students have on their resume? Oh man. So I would say those four dimensions, like being able to demonstrate them, like you can’t just bottleneck yourself.

Bottleneck is not the right word. You shouldn’t pigeon hole yourself into just saying, I’m just a software architect anymore. I’m beginning to see the expectation that you’re able to work across the entire software development life cycle.

Even if you’re not able to fully do the work, there is this expectation that you know what’s going on. So if you’re like you know trying to get a job somewhere and you think that you’re going to just be able to code the expectation sometime most of the time now is you know how to write the test you know how to deploy you know what’s happening once you deploy and how to add monitoring and alerting. So it’s not it’s no longer like you’re just working in a silo.

The other aspect I see and I love that there’s that business acumen question is that there is an expectation that you are able to think beyond just being a software engineer at this point. And this is an expectation that we have of the engineers at hackerink for example. We no long in our hiring kind of loop we now look for a a product sense.

There’s an entire round or there’s been entire interviews that I’ve conducted where I’m just interested with, do you know how to craft a product? Do you know how to delight users? Do you know how to solve a problem?

And and this should be something that you’re able to think about and do in parallel with building the system, building the application, and and driving kind of the effort across the software development life cycle. Yeah. No, that makes that makes a lot of sense.

Like being able to understand the value across all of these different systems first is like where now we’re trying to insert AI to like operationalize on that existing value. So knowing like the the original architecture is still super super important. Yeah.

Last couple questions in in here and I want to bring like circle it back to talking about some of the resources that y’all are offering at HackerRank for students. One question that is pretty simple up here is back to the HackerRank prep kit. Is it a free resource?

Where can students go get it? If so or what other resources would you say are great for students to take note of today from hackerink? Yeah, thank you so much for this question.

So, it’s free to have an account on our community and we’ll give you a token to try. Once you’ve tried and you want to continue kind of going through the experience, there is a pricing plan that you will end up having to pay for to continue using this stuff. So I’ll give you all like the information for our support.

Actually, I’ll put this in right now. Hit up supporthackarang.com. Tell them you came to this session at CodePath.

You’re interested in trying the prep kit. Like I’m in the support queue. I look at this stuff.

I’ll I’ll definitely be like I think I’ve seen this person even though I don’t I probably can’t see a lot of y’all. Yeah, definitely rip that support person for that email right now. I tell you.

Yeah. Yeah. Listen, listen.

Let’s like let’s like get five loginins right now. Just like Oh man. Well, I think it’s awesome the resources that y’all are offering for students and like the fact that y’all are on a mission to make it easier for students to get prepared for this type of work.

There are a couple questions about like just like just general like HackerRank principles as like employers are using them. One person asked a question specifically about like HackerRank use in like data science roles like why do you think data science roles require HackerRank? But I want to extend that question more to why do you think certain roles are used still using technical interview questions and HackerRank style questions nowadays and like you know what do you feel like are like the best like understanding it from the interviewer’s perspective why might employers still be really focused on that?

Yeah. So, one, I think it’s been battle tested. When you think about these large organizations, they’re they’re con they construct skill taxonomies of just these are the things you should be able to have and do across the board and then there’s a whole role that those skills are mapped to.

And then it’s a huge effort to find a platform that can speak that language, that can facilitate a process. And that can make it kind of even on both ends for employers and developers alike. Which, you know, that’s the way we’ve always done things, but HackerRank, we’ve created this market.

We know this market. We’re the leader in it. So, we continue to innovate.

Our perspective is that’s the way things are done now. It will not be the way that things are done moving forward. So, you do have several companies that are re-engineering the entire process.

So, you may start, for example, a project in a take-home assessment, come into an interview. That same project you’re continuing to build on top of within the interview, and it’s becoming more real world and providing more insight. So, yeah, that’s what I think is happening.

Did you do one when you joined the company, a hacker assessment to join HackerRank? So, I did a hack rank assessment, but I wasn’t required to. You could like do a trial, free trial to be able to to do this because, at the time for PMs, we had to run a whole different gamut.

I actually think the interview process for product managers is way crazier than software engineers. Now that I’ve been on both ends, as a product manager, they’re asking you like all kinds of crazy stuff like build a teleportation. This didn’t happen at HackerRank.

This happened, I think this was meta or somewhere. Anyway, someone was like, build a teleportation machine. First of all, where do we start?

Right. Like, is let me just off my experience from school real quick. Exactly.

Exactly. Exactly. Let me let me just resurrect Nola Tesla and what we could figure out type of situation, right?

So, yeah, last question for you is more about yourself and you know, I know you’re blogging a lot and doing some really cool stuff on LinkedIn, but where can people follow you to keep up with like all your experiments and and things that you’re doing? Yeah, definitely on LinkedIn. I’ll drop my LinkedIn in the chat.

LinkedIn LinkedIn system architecture gota get growing too. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh man. I hope Listen, we’re gonna crash.

Listen, listen. Do y’all wanna Do y’all want to help me crash Twitter? Let’s not even start.

Can we but yeah, hit me up on LinkedIn. I definitely want to follow y’all’s journey. Definitely want to learn more about y’all.

No, LinkedIn is not ready for us at all. I’m not ready to be honest. All right.

Well, with that, I think we’re right about ready to close. Can y’all get up for Traval? I mean, just all these nuggets of wisdom.

I really appreciate you for taking the time to be here for us today, bro. And hey y’all, we’ve reached the end of the session. We like to thank Travel and Hackerang for this engaging presentation and discussion.

Please drop your love and appreciation in the chat. And yeah, before we wrap up, we’re gonna hear one brief video from our host, Bobby, and take it from there. I know.

I know. We’re getting to the end of the summit. Ah, emoji to your eye face.

I feel it. But guess what? I’m more than excited and happy that you all have gotten to the end of our event here because let me tell you one thing.

It’s one for the books. And I hope you have a chance to see everything. But if not, I got some information that’ll help you.

So this brings us to the end of the 2025 CodePath Emerging Engineer Summit. We want to say thank you for attending, for learning, connecting, and engaging with us across these past three days. We hoped you enjoyed it.

We’d like to extend a special thank you to our EES sponsors, which includes Base 10, Bill, GitHub, Microsoft, Pluralsight, PWC, Service Now, Snowflake, and ZS. Also a big thank you to all the companies who joined us across the week sharing their knowledge, expert advice and opportunities with our attendees. We hope you got a chance to connect with them and learn about the opportunities.

Now don’t forget all sessions have been recorded and will be shared via YouTube and I hope you all look out for that link. We’d also like to share a link with you to complete our feedback survey. Remember how important feedback is, right?

And your resume will also be added to the EES 2025 official resumeé book which we’ll share with all companies who took part. Watch out for the link. Upload your resume and let us know your experience here at the summit.

We hope you enjoy and leave feeling inspired with new connections and access the opportunities that will help you achieve your goals. Until next year, I’ll see you soon. Holl at your boy is Bobby B.