Interview: Tigran Sloyan — CodeSignal
We chatted with Tigran Sloyan, the co-founder and CEO of CodeSignal, about the gap between having skills and converting those skills into a job.
CodeSignal is a platform that uses a machine-learning algorithm to assess a developer’s coding and problem-solving skills.
“We help the world go beyond résumés, primarily in technical recruiting, by measuring and quantifying abilities so that companies don’t have to rely on what school you went to or what companies you worked for as a proxy for your ability,” Sloyan says.
You can become skilled in a particular field by learning and practicing it through free or affordable online courses — or just by teaching yourself. The problem, Sloyan says, is that, no matter how good you become, job recruiters won’t see your abilities. There are “lots of incredible people out there whose résumés just aren’t telling the full story,” he says.
Here Sloyan breaks down the process of converting skills into a career, understanding talent and ability, and the bridge to industry.
Tell us about the origin story of CodeSignal — not just how it came to be, but why it came to be?
When you look at my background, it’s hard to tell why I care, because I have all the pedigree that you might wish for on your résumé, from an MIT degree to working at Google. But one of my co-founders, Aram, didn’t actually have the same pedigree even though we came from the same place. We grew up in the same country; he was a big-time coding nerd as a kid, I was a big-time math nerd as a kid.
And our paths split up in which school we went to. Due to many, many different circumstances, he went to a local school in Armenia; I went to MIT. And that simple, small change meant a radical change in our career trajectories. Just because I went to MIT, I ended up being chased by every recruiter in the country by the time I was graduating, even though this was not an economic boom time. But an MIT degree got you really far.
From the inside, I got to see that not everybody who goes to a top-tier school is actually really good at something, right? You take everybody who gets a computer science degree from MIT, the range of ability is huge. There are some people who have been coding since they were 10, and then there were others who picked up computer science in college and then barely got through classes with some help and got a bunch of C’s, but they still got their degree.
And in the external-world view, it’s like, “OK, MIT computer science degree? You must be one of the best programmers in the country. No MIT CS degree? Well, be careful.” So one of my co-founders who didn’t have that same pedigree had a significantly tougher time getting his foot in the door even though he was always by far the best software engineer that I’ve ever seen — even after I went to MIT and worked at Google.
Why are we so bad at identifying talent?
It was just mind-blowing for me, I guess, to see how terrible we are at identifying talent. And as I dove into it further, I came to realize that this is far from just one example. The world is full of amazing people, but even though education is becoming democratized, there aren’t enough people putting hard work into gaining skill, gaining the ability. Because it’s still hard work, right?
I do not believe in born talent. There is no such thing as a gift of math, there is no such thing as a gift of being good at programming. It’s a skill that you develop and almost everybody with a healthy-enough brain has the capacity to practice and learn and, with education becoming more democratized, almost everybody also has the means to do it.
Well, one of the primary reasons why more people don’t do it is that’s not what is valued. Knowing that you can put in thousands and thousands of hours into developing a skill and then in the end be like, “OK, yeah, you can’t come interview because you don’t have the pedigree.” Guess what: At the end of the day, unfortunately, this society right cares more about pedigree than who can do what.
And I don’t think it’s because people mean it. The problem is that it’s a very noisy market, and in this noisy market, talent-acquisition teams need a way to say, like, “OK, who do we talk to, who do we not?” Because there’s only a limited number of hours you can spend on any given job applicant. And every role these days, even for a startup, receives thousands of applications. So we just default to: “OK, well if another company or another university has vetted this person, I’ll just use that as a proxy for those who are qualified.” This misses the entire pool of everybody else who doesn’t have those same credentials.
I was watching a recent interview with [Khan Academy founder] Sal Khan, who was one of my early motivators to understand how deep the talent problem runs, and he was literally saying that, “Hey, what we’re starting to run into is that, yes, we’re preparing the future of learners, especially outside of the U.S. — a lot of people are getting a lot of skills — but there’s no bridge between that and the industry.” There’s no direct correlation between, “Oh, I’ve learned this” and “It changed my life and my career.” Most of the time, it’s like, “Oh yeah, it was fun. I learned for the sake of learning. I have no way of passing this on and communicating it in any way to the industry.”
Which was motivating for me, again, because that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. Because if you can create a bridge between knowledge and valuing that knowledge and understanding ability, it’s going to have a transformative effect, not just on recruiting and talent acquisition, but on education and talent development as a whole.
How did you get interested in entrepreneurship, technology, management, and development in the first place?
At the end of the day, technology and entrepreneurship are a means to an end. And that end is making an impact and making a difference and making a change in the world.
If you think from an evolutionary and biological point of view, human lives are not meant to really matter. We simply carry forward genes, pass on those genes, and then history forgets that you ever existed, right? It’s kind of sad.
I love evolutionary books, I love Sapiens, I love books about how humans have become what they’ve become. But the more you read it, the more you understand that our lives — our entire existence as individuals — is just a blip in the universe and in history.
I’ve worked at big companies; big companies have their benefits. And some of them are: you get paid well and you get to work with a bunch of really smart people. What you don’t get is much impact because you’re one in a thousand and rarely, if ever, does what you do matter as much. Like, if you got hit by a bus, would it ever really change anything for the company? [laughs] Unfortunately, the answer is usually no.
In any field in human history, technology has the biggest potential to make a massive impact in a way that was never possible before. And then entrepreneurship is just going from, “Hey, I want to fix this. I want to fix the dominant problem that humanity has. How else can I do it?”
Everyone has a different path to success with entrepreneurship, but are there any necessary ingredients for someone who wants to be successful in these fields?
I disagree with Paul Graham on a lot of things, but probably the one that stuck with me from my early days reading startup blogs and literature is something he distilled down about what entrepreneurs should be like: relentlessly resourceful. Because you just gotta find a way, right? And it starts with believing that you will find a way.
There is a famous quote: “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you are right.” I really believe that to be true — that if you start off thinking that you can’t do something, there’s no way you can do it. There is just no way. So a precondition of being able to do something is having this sometimes-naive belief that you can do it, and then, with the belief, having the relentless resourcefulness to go figure it out.
It comes up over and over again: You don’t have enough leads or no one recognizes you or you can’t get to that investor or this investor. Every other day has some sort of weird roadblock that you’ve never seen, and on the face of it seems impossible to handle. And it’s really easy to be like, “Well, I’ve never done this before; I don’t know how to do it” — just give up. But the key to driving a company forward is to do the opposite — to say, “OK. Somebody must have figured it out. And if not, there’s gonna be some core principles behind figuring it out, so I’m just gonna dig in and find a way.” And if you persist long enough, usually you do find a way and drive the company and the mission forward.
For folks who are interested in building or managing these technology solutions, rather than founding or leading companies, are there any ingredients that you think are key to finding success?
I think it’s realizing that, first and foremost, it’s still about people. Yeah, sure, in the early days, two or three co-founders can drive a lot, but it still takes a lot of really great people to build something that can outlast you and make a much greater impact.
It’s kind of insane, for example, how little people value understanding psychology these days. To me — especially if you’re ever trying to be responsible for more than yourself, including kids — you still need to understand psychology. I mean, psychology has to be treated like reading and writing. Because psychology is the study of understanding humans, and most of us don’t. Most of us judge other humans based on what we believe to be true about ourselves, and most of the time we don’t know ourselves really well. [laughs] We have certain beliefs about ourselves and how we are, and usually those are not very true.
Understanding that different personality types exist and that different people are motivated by different things. What motivates humans to do certain things? What motivates them not to do certain things? What is emotional intelligence? What is a good way to communicate feedback? What does it mean to express your feelings and to talk about something instead of blaming things on others? I feel like at some point it will become a requirement, like, “Hey, you become a manager. Have you completed this and this and this in psychology to really understand humans?”
Because your work becomes humans. When you’re a programmer, you typically take a CodeSignal assessment to prove that you have the ability to communicate with computers and translate English into code. But somehow, when you become a manager or you’re leading people, there is no clear set of requirements of, like, do you have the toolset and the understanding to communicate, to lead humans in a way that inspires and helps them achieve their true potential, instead of limiting them because you don’t know what you’re doing?
It feels like a lot of people associate technology jobs with being focused only on the technology and inanimate product they’re making.
It’s one aspect of it. Sure, to build technology, you’ve got to understand technology. But then, very quickly — especially if you’re succeeding — you need a team of people building that technology, so your role becomes the team, not the technology, because you’re not actually doing the technology yourself anymore.
For high schoolers who are interested in business and technology, do you have any more advice for them: What to start focusing on now or where would you point them?
Absolutely. I’ve heard at least a couple of commencement speeches that mention this, but I feel like it still hasn’t been said enough: The concept of “follow your passion” or “chase your dreams” is a double-edged sword. I think some people read that as, “You know what, if I don’t feel constantly passionate about something, I shouldn’t be doing it.” And it’s not true.
Sure, I believe in the idea of dreaming big and believing in something that is much bigger that you can’t even possibly imagine how you could achieve that — and then going and getting it. But you become passionate about things that you’re good at, on top of just wanting to be able to achieve it.
And regardless of what you choose, it becomes hard. Just like working out, there is no shortcut to building great muscles and biceps — there is no magic pill, there is no “passion” way of doing it. There is the hard work, digging down, and then eventually that builds the muscle.
Your brain is like a big muscle — it’s probably the biggest muscle in your body — and you need to choose which part of that muscle you’re going to train up, and then put countless hours of what people call “deliberate practice” to train up that part. And then eventually you’ll get really good at a certain part of it, whether it be psychology, math, entrepreneurship, physics, chemistry, biology.
In sports, people realize this already. There is a reason behind why, if you want to become a professional soccer or baseball player, you don’t do an hour of baseball, an hour of basketball, an hour of swimming, and then be mediocre at everything until you’re 15 and then you’re like, “OK, now I’m going to be pro at this.” It’s not really how it works.
When it comes to the professional, white-collar fields, for some reason people still think it’s possible to become a high-end professional while still doing a little bit of everything. And I really believe it’s not.
I’m not minimizing the idea of well-rounded education. We do need people who understand not just one thing but many things. But you’ve got to choose something that you’re going to be pro at, it’s going to be hard, but you’ve got to keep at it until you build world-class skill. And once you do it, trust me, you’ll develop passion for it, too.
Just like you’ve never seen a professional sports player who says, “I’m just dreading this, but I do it. I’m the best in the world, but I hate it.” [laughs] It doesn’t happen, right? They love it. It becomes who they are. It becomes their passion. And things that you’re good at become your craft. You have to pass the barrier of getting really good at it.
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