S1 - Episode #17: Josh Cole - CTO - InsideOut
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About Josh:
Josh is the CTO at InsideOut, an award-winning mental health platform for employees across organisations. He has worked in the technology industry for over a decade working on software engineering, team and performance management, cloud infrastructure, secure development lifecycles, hiring, and product development.
Interestingly, Josh has never studied in an engineering school. He explains that coding was always the thing he knew best and believes that schools and universities need to focus on the other aspects of the industry like innovation, management and hiring to widen industry skills. Josh graduated from the University of Portsmouth with a First Class Degree in entrepreneurship and innovation in business.
Synopsis:
In this episode of The Technology Leadership Podcast, Josh discusses creativity and innovation as pre-requisites to hiring in the technology industry. He talks about employee well-being and the steps companies could take to ensure their associates are in good health. Josh also explains the metrics for evaluating new candidates, including problem-solving, creative thinking and programming fundamentals. Additionally, Josh explores emerging programming languages and frameworks and explains how they compare with native languages such as JavaScript and what we can expect of them in the near future. Listen to this episode to learn what it takes to be a solution-driven engineering leader in today’s times.
Key Takeaways:
Learn why innovation and creativity are at the heart of engineering and why you should assess engineers in terms of their problem-solving, creativity, programming basics and values before getting deeper into code.
Understand the complexities of mental health issues in the workplace, how it impacts even the mentally resilient and males in particular who are less likely to be vocal about their mental woes.
How practising meditation, journaling, gratitude, and setting goals can greatly benefit your mental health and the value of consulting qualified therapists to help alleviate mental health problems.
Hear why TypeScript has massive benefits in terms of increasing productivity, reducing the number of bugs enhancing the developer experience, minimising testing and allowing quicker code development.
Learn how Go developers have to follow specifics while writing code in the language, the difficulty in understanding the language at surface level but the benefits of visibility.
Understand more about automated testing and why unit feature integration, end-to-end testing, UI testing and regression testing have to be performed to ensure code optimisation.
Learn the problem with the fact education in schools or colleges rarely ever teaches problem-solving and why its a necessary skill for engineers.
Episode Outline:
[00:40] Meet Josh Cole and understand his career journey
[04:41] The relevance of a computer science degree to a career in coding and development
[05:45] Skills needed to make a more significant impact in the world
[08:04] Steps Josh’s company is taking to help employees manage their mental health
[10:04] Why men find it more challenging to talk about mental health than women
[12:29] Josh’s InsideOut project and mission to innovate and create something different to help employees' mental health across the world
[13:43] Steps taken by InsideOut does for the mental health of employees across organisations
[18:22] Structure and process at InsideOut
[21:50] Josh explains his role in the growth of InsideOut
[23:57] Josh’s tech ecosystem
[27:04] The benefits of introducing TypeScript to their code
[29:44] Technologies or tools Josh plans on introducing at InsideOut in the future
[37:54] Will JavaScript be replaced in the next few years?
[40:24] The reason Go Developers are very specific about how they want developers to handle exceptions and errors
[45:30] The best practices and principles that Josh brought into his team to make it more streamlined and enable innovation
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