"Everyone's Waiting for Someone Else to Figure Out AI" with Sondra Maher

[00:00:05] Welcome to the Don’t Tell Me About Yourself Podcast. We're live at Unleash 2026 in Paris of all places. And we're sitting down with Sondra Maher from CoderPad. We're so happy to have you here. I'm super excited to be sitting here. It's great. So tell us what brought you to Unleash in Paris this year. Well, actually, I've been coming to Unleash for the last 11 years. So a seasoned veteran of this conference. I love it.

[00:00:31] And so as soon as CoderPad said that they were coming, I immediately put my hand up and I was like, please take me. I love this event. Wow, that's a fun fact. See, that one, that was a fact I didn't have prior to this interview. So my mind was blown. I mean, I'd be hard to find somebody else in this conference that's been here for 11 years. Well, I'm curious, like 11 years veteran, what makes you keep coming back every year? What is it about Unleash?

[00:00:56] Ooh, well, first of all, it's just fun. This is an event where people come and both the attendees and the people that are working the event are all here to meet people. And there's a lot of really cool activations. And so like the vibes are really good. There's also a great mix of people that are here. It's not just one certain type of person. So you have TA and you have HR and you have workforce management. So you really, I learn a lot every single year, every time I come.

[00:01:23] That's amazing. I love that. And for those that don't know about CoderPad and the industry that you are in, can you just talk to us a little bit about what you all are doing and what you're focused on right now? Yes. So we are a technical and AI fluency skills assessment platform. It's a mouthful, but generally we help companies hire engineers or anybody on the technical side of things through both take-home assessments and live paired coding type assessments.

[00:01:51] But we're also going into go-to-market roles as well. So think about if you're a salesperson and you're interviewing for a role, when you go in, you'll probably get a big book of business when you started a new company. And what we want companies to be able to do is to see, can this person coming in effectively use AI to go through this massive book of business and to be able to figure out what companies they want to work for?

[00:02:16] So not only does it help the organizations, and this isn't just in sales, like this is for your engineers, this is for your customer success as well. It's not just for companies to assess the candidates, but for candidates to get a real sense of what it'll be like to work for that company. An insight they might not have gotten before. Yeah, that's so cool. And thank you for sharing that description with us because over under, you've probably given that speech a hundred or two hundred times in the last two days. At least, at least.

[00:02:43] Thanks for letting us get one of those recorded. I really appreciate that. What are challenges or changes that you're seeing right now in your industry? This is going to be a common theme across every podcast you do, and it's how do people actually use AI? Yeah.

[00:02:56] Right? And if I pull it back into like what we see here at Unleash, you know, eight of those years have been spent, and this is any conference, eight of those years, people come with a good sense of what they want to find or what speakers they want to see, or they have certain challenges, specific challenges that they come here to talk about.

[00:03:15] This year, we're getting a lot of, we want to see the art of the possible, right? Like what are people actually doing with AI? What are companies doing with AI? How can I automate? But a lot of what we're hearing, and not just at Unleash, but in the industry is we want to know what other companies are doing.

[00:03:32] What are the leading companies like Meta and OpenAI, and what are they doing? But they're also sometimes asking the same question, right? So everybody wants to know what everyone's doing in the industry. And part of me wonders, is that going to slow us down a little bit? Like we need companies to just pioneer and just do the things, right? Be bold. Totally.

[00:03:52] Because somebody's got to start, and if we're all like that Spider-Man meme where everybody's just like pointing fingers at each other, we're not going to get very far. I totally, totally see what you're saying. Absolutely. That makes sense. So what I'm hearing is maybe one of the challenges is transfer of knowledge and understanding of what's working, what's not. And we're looking to maybe some of those leaders, those large tech organizations to share some of that. And when they're not, like a lot of us are just left to our own devices. Yeah. Personally.

[00:04:21] But there's also a fear around it, right? There's still fear around AI and how to use it. When I started with PutterPad back in January, right? So we now have AI injected into our platform as something that candidates can use in the process. But back in January, that wasn't the case. And I would say probably 80% of the companies that I was talking to were like, anti-cheat, lock it down, we don't want that. And then we had 20 that were like, AI curious, right? Yeah.

[00:04:49] But that's completely flipped. Interesting. We love to hear that. Yeah. There's music to our ears. It's unbelievable. So these companies that I was talking to in January, February, March, they were like, no, no, no. They're like, actually, we want to start using this in the process. And we want to start seeing what it looks like. And we want to start testing it out. And they're running with it. And it's just phenomenal to see these massive AI forward organizations making that transformation. We get to do it with them. And it's so fun. Yeah, that's really fun.

[00:05:17] That is fun. One of the big conversations that we had last year was with one of your partners, Amanda Perry. Yes. And one of the topics that came up on our podcast then, which was really popular, was talking about candidate fraud. And I think a lot of people are pretty uncomfortable about candidate fraud. But now, as part of the process, companies are assessing AI abilities and telling candidates when it's okay to use it and when it's not. How does CoderPad talk to clients about that? Like, how do you help people with that?

[00:05:49] Well, I suppose in terms of when we're talking to people and they're asking us, like, I come back to it again, but that's because it's what we're hearing is, what are other companies doing? How are they doing it? And it's like, well, if you give people access to something, they're more likely to not try go behind your back and do it anyway. Right. So I think you can totally mitigate candidate fraud or conversation just by giving them access to the tools that they're going to use in their day-to-day job anyway.

[00:06:16] And I think when you frame it that way, companies are like, yeah, of course. If our engineers are using it, we want them. So I was working with a large financial institution and we were talking about AI tokens and limits and things like that. And, you know, when you have certain packages for different types of customers, right? And they were like, well, we don't know if we actually want to limit their usage of AI because in our actual job, we're not going to limit them. Right.

[00:06:43] So why would we set those, impose those limits during the interview if that's not the realistic environment that they'll be in? Yeah. What's really interesting, and I think what I have observed and what you're saying and what we talk about a lot is that with candidate fraud, I think there was a lot of more fear than even just AI fear. But there's a lot of fear mongering. There's a lot of discussion. And I feel like with a lot of the things out there to try to stop it, it's like treating the symptom and not the disease.

[00:07:08] And I feel like if we were treating the disease, we would probably just be more transparent with people about what is allowed and what is not. Yeah. And if you do that from the jump, to your point, people are not, if you tell people this is not allowed, then they're not going to do it. But if you don't, and then you just punish people for using it after, you're just literally creating your own problem. Right. And then you're wondering why you can't find the right talent, especially in the technical space. It's a lot harder. People are holding on to their jobs right now. Yeah. This is the job market, so it's more difficult. Yeah.

[00:07:37] So this has been, I think, a couple of years in the making, right? In one of the other companies that I had worked with, we were working with an organization that were very forward on their jobs page. Yeah. Right. And literally right on their application page, they said, we use AI in our process. We expect you to use AI in your job. Yes. But this is where we don't want you to use it. Like, we don't want you to have a second screen where you're answering questions. And we're setting out this transparency now.

[00:08:03] And we used that job page. I don't know how many organizations I sent that job page to, to say, this is how you need to model it. Yep. So that expectations are managed. I love that. There's no ambiguity. I love that. Absolutely. So we've been talking about maybe some challenges, some negative, maybe not negative, but challenges. Yeah. Challenging things. I'm curious, like, what are you most excited about? Like, what's out there that's getting you going about for your industry, for CoderPad?

[00:08:30] So we actually built our engineers. Obviously, we're a company full of engineers, right? So we are literally using AI and we're encouraged to use AI. And there was another speaker earlier that was talking about kind of the four different stages of AI usage and where you sit. And as an organization, it's like, we need to use AI and we need to experiment with it. So I am so excited to be working for a company that encourages us to go out and do things and try things.

[00:08:58] We have a channel, actually, with the whole company that's just filled with AI. And we go in and we talk about what we're doing and how you're using it and what workflows are using. And we share skills and share agents. And I encourage every organization to do this because sometimes you're sitting in a silo and you're like, oh, well, my manager is telling me to use AI, but I don't know how to do that. Some people don't even know what a token is, right? I didn't know what a token was six months ago.

[00:09:24] And I thought it was wrong that I didn't know. I thought I'd be in trouble for asking, right? So of course I asked Claude what a token was. It's my go-to for everything. But I think that's what excites me most is the fact that we are sitting here in a place that we're all learning together. I don't care what company you work with. I don't care what kind of experience you have, what seniority you have. We're all starting from the same place. And I find that really, really exciting. It allows everyone to use their creativity and figure out how it's going to work best for themselves and their companies. Yes.

[00:09:54] So where can people find more information about Sondra Mar or CoderPad? Tell us where we can keep up with you. You can find us on CoderPad.io. You can come onto our website. You can see us on any socials. Like you type in CoderPad, you will find us. We can link to all that as well. LinkedIn. Yeah. LinkedIn, all those things. Amanda Richardson is our CEO. She does a lot of events, a lot of speaking. She's got some really great social out there. She's a fun, fun time. Yeah.

[00:10:23] Anyone we've ever met through CoderPad is extremely engaging, so friendly, intelligent. They're doing things right there for sure. We have a good time. Keep up with them. If you're not following along, you need to be. Thank you so much for coming. Thanks for having me. This was great. Enjoy the rest of the conference. All right.