 Good morning everyone, so we have a special guest speaker here today, it's our undivided attention to Paul. Well thank you, so appreciate it, good morning everyone, so I'm Paul Schwartz. I'm going to do a spooze here with my colleague Julian Huff, and appreciate getting a little bit of your time. So if you give me just about ten minutes, I'm going to tell you about some exciting opportunities we have, because frankly I'm here to recruit. And what we're looking for is people who have a real passion to learn, and want to come work at a company that's using technology in a number of different ways across all areas of our business. Someone who wants to, looking for a full-time program, but also makes a few bucks this summer, right? And so what I want to do is tell you a little bit more about that, but if we, sorry, I have control. Just to cover the agenda, I'm going to talk a little bit about myself, talk a little bit about US Foods and why after 28 years I'm still excited to come to work every day. Do that. It's true. And talk about some of the opportunities, specifics around the job roles in the app. And then finally the process and see if you have any questions. Alright, so a little bit of history about me. Yeah, I'm old. Alright, so I started in high school. Everyone had that one teacher that had a real impact on you, I think, probably. I'm an industry professor here. But for me it was my high school teacher, Mr. Murphy. Still don't even know what his first name was, but it was algebra class and he brought computer programming into the classroom. And I was fascinated by it. And I had two parents that wanted to encourage me, so they went and bought me a state-of-the-art interact computer. 1978, 2 megahertz processor, 8K of memory, 32K cassette type for storing my programs. The display was 17 by 12 lines or 112 by 78 pixels. You guys are really jealous, I can tell. I can just see it now. But I'll tell you, I was in thrall. I thought, wow, I'm going to write a game. So the first game, of course, showing my age again, was pawn. I'm going to write pawn, so I figured out how to put a die on the screen. And I thought, you know what, if I erase that die and draw it next to it, it looks like it's moving, right? Now I can use algebra and I can move in a line or I can use trigonometry and bounce it off a wall. And I was not dismayed by the fact that it took 30 seconds for the ball to get from one side of the screen to the other. Little slow. But it was really exciting and I was hooked, right? I wanted to be a computer programmer. I wanted to build great things like pawn too, right? But I'm not going to go through and worry with my career, but I will tell you that getting experience while you're still in school is really important. And it can be really powerful. I didn't have the benefit of an intern program or at least didn't know they existed. So I went and had to kind of hustle myself. And again, about the only thing I can show you is that I've learned a little bit about business. I did a fixed bid, one of my first fixed bid contracts while I was in college. And it's exactly what it sounds like. You offer a certain amount of money to do something and it was a piece-rate payroll system for a company that was doing work with a handicapped. And I bid $2,000. It took me two years to develop and about 1,500 hours of work. So a little more than a buck an hour, right? Not very good, but great experience. I'm hoping to talk to you a little bit about the experience. You can get it at U.S. Foods and hopefully make a good bit more money than that, right? And really, I think next, I just want to talk about the company itself and give you a background on U.S. Foods. So how many people have even heard of U.S. Foods? Quite a few. That's great. So food service distribution, that means that we just simply buy food and distribute it, right? To anyone who prepares food away from home, schools, hospitals, restaurants. Very large company, 10th largest private company in the U.S., about a quarter million customers. You can see the stats there. So big company, a lot of technology. The IT organization is about 500 folks. There are six organizations essentially here. Strategy and Planning, that's the governance. Decides where we make investments. We have three business-facing functions where we face off to the business, and we have IT people that understand the business side. They work with business people to come up with ideas for how to drive their business forward, create new services for our customers. And then the application development team, they're the ones that actually develop the programs that we put into production. And then finally, IT infrastructure and operations, that's my department. That's the help desk. It's database people, network engineers, middleware, Linux. The people that move programs into production. The people that support the network take on the calls, manage the national data centers here in Phoenix. And although we're just starting our intern program, we've been doing it in Chicago for three years and it's been very successful. And so we decided to bring it here because we have almost 200 people in my organization and we think there'd be some great opportunities for some of you there. So just talk a little bit more about technology. And although food service may sound pretty simple, you buy a case of tomatoes, you give it to somebody else, you sell it for a little more, you pay for it, you make a profit. It's a lot more than that. And while we're not widely known outside of food service, I was surprised to see the hands they did. Within food service, we've been leading in technology for as long as I can remember. We've had the first mobile ordering app by far in a way. We were ahead of the competition. We have built applications like Chef, like menu profit builder we call it, where a customer can take their menus and cost out the profitability of each item. Where's my truck application? The first one that came out like it in this industry, where we can tell exactly where the truck is, project delivery times for our customers. We're all over social media. And we even have a chef's store here. I don't know if any of you have seen it. It's on McClintock in Southern. It's really for restaurant owners, but the public can go there. And it's one stop shopping for a restaurant to get their food and food related products. And there's some new technology there as well. So as you can see, we're really doing a lot in this space. In fact, in 1999, we built our first website. We were doing over a billion in sales in e-commerce. We're one of the largest internet retailers in the world that no one ever heard of. And this is our latest mobile app. I want one detail just to tell you that lots of new features. We're constantly churning them out. It's some of the areas I'm going to talk about how we need some help in doing that. So let's get into the opportunities, because I think that's what you really want to hear about. There's essentially five positions we're trying to fill right now. If the program works out well, we'll expand it next year. The area of DevOps, have you guys even heard the term DevOps? No, so I see one hand. So if you're a programmer, you're building something that eventually you want to go into production. And in a typical world, the way that happens is in a very standard, staged approach. So you test, when your programs are ready, they get put into a release. Somebody QAs them, they get moved into production. It could take several months from the time someone has an idea on what they want until the time it goes into production. It's a long process and along the way there's handoffs to my team in operations. And that can take too long and there can be quality issues when we work well together. What DevOps is all about is automation and doing it faster. So you hear about companies like LinkedIn or Facebook, they're putting out new releases two, three times a day. Now in food service, we don't need to get that fast, but today we do it probably every three or four months and we're trying to get to do it in weeks or months. So that's one area. Business analytics, I'll talk a lot more about that, but we have some opportunities there, especially on IT operations. We've got IT operations itself. As I said, we have the data center here in Phoenix. We also have the Tempe office where most of the people work, where you'll come work and that's where our command center is. It's where we watch all of our enterprise systems keep an eye on things and we have some exciting things going on in IT operations. Project managers, we're also looking for to actually help drive the projects we're going to be talking about here. And then finally, for those of you that have the knowledge of Linux, we're looking for people to do scripting and other things on that platform. So a little more details on this. In business analytics, we're doing a lot in merchandising and sales areas, right? You know, you get those targeted ads, you go into Facebook and it's like, wow, I googled that. How come I'm getting an ad for that now? All that kind of analytics stuff we've been doing for quite a while now and I want to use those same technologies against IT operations, figure out what's the cost of downtime, predict when we're going to have a failure, those kinds of analytics. And so we're looking for people that know analytics like Tableau or Snowflake or SQL, have some of those skills for that kind of position. IT operations, this is a picture of the command center. We're building dashboards. We're looking for people that have some programming background or scripting knowledge to help us build these dashboards, customize them. Again, some of it's scripting. It could be, again, using tools like Tableau or monitoring tools. And if you have an ITIL background, that's also something that would be interesting for this position. Project management, I talked about already. We have the standard what's called waterfall approach where we do a project from beginning to end in a step-by-step approach. And then we have Agile for fairy rapid development, prototyping and turning things around very quickly. And the project managers will have an opportunity to probably do both of those kinds of projects. And then finally, the last two are really around that DevOps. We're looking for people that know scripting. They know how to build Linux environments. They know how to maybe run Bash or Perl or Python. There's so many of these new names. Chef, Puppet, I think someone's making up these names. I don't know where they come from. But they are all the kinds of new programming that we're really trying to get. There are people that already work for us to do better with, but we'd love to get some of you involved in some of those things. And it's both Linux side and middleware. The reason that is, is when you're spending on things very fast, you actually want to build a server, build the application, put it in the production, shut the server down so you don't need it anymore for testing. All that kind of automation is this DevOps work that we're talking about. So let me tell you a little bit more about the program now. So we've done it three years in Chicago. We've been really successful. So we're going to follow the same program. We're a little behind in terms of what I would have liked to have been out here several months ago. But we're here now. We're going to move forward, but we have to move quickly. So if you are interested, I would say, and there's information we have for you to go out on how to apply for it. Do it in the next week if you can, because we're going to move quickly. We want to start probably a week or so after your school's out, which I think is the first, second week of May. It's a full-time position. We're looking for up to five people right now. You're going to work on real projects. We're not going to give you, you know, go get me coffee or go read these reports and look for the errors. These are going to be real business-impacting projects. You're going to have help. You won't be on your own, but you're going to work on real things. And you're going to have some real support systems. So we have the program includes a mentor and a buddy, someone like Julian who's a manager, maybe your mentor, but then you have a buddy who will be someone in the group who knows the technical aspects of what you're trying to accomplish, as well as just kind of giving the lay of the land in a big corporate world. We have social events where we bring interns together so you can kind of share ideas of what's working with them. At the end, you get to present to the IT leadership team, which is my peers and my boss, the CIO. It's no pressure. It's really just about a little pressure, right? No. It's really about giving you an opportunity to give feedback on what you thought was good in the program, what you learned. And then, you know, if it works out, you know, if you're a junior and you got another year, there's opportunities for part-time work to continue in the next year or full-time as well if you're graduating. And we're looking for both of us. So that's really it. I've got information on how to apply. I went through it pretty quick. So I want to see what kind of questions you have. Do we have time for a few questions? Yeah. I know I can talk fast. So what kind of questions do you have? Yeah. Is this located in Arizona? Tempe, Arizona. It's the ASU, Old ASU Research Park. So we're off with Elliott and 101. Oh, OK. You know where that's at? Yeah. How many folks think you might be interested in that? No? You got something else? Yeah. Is this thing about Tableau? Yeah. And then, you guys, do things like map reducing to do? Yes. So, yes, absolutely. So I should have talked about that a little bit. So we have an exadata, Oracle exadata, massive day of our house engine that we used and do our reporting with Oracle Business Analytics. But we're finding it's not fast enough and we can't do the kinds of things that Hadoop can do. But actually, the tools I'm talking about for the business analytics, that is using those technologies. So we're using Hadoop. We're using, so we're looking for people that might have experience with Amazon Web Services. We're using S3. We're using Hadoop. We're using Snowflake in the cloud running at AWS. So, yeah, those are the kinds of technologies in that role that we would love to have some help with. Yeah. I asked a similar question to a USAA recruiter in one of our classes. But if you were looking through resumes, what would be something on a resume that would have a wow factor? Oh, wow, this person did this, or this person completed this project that would really make someone stick out? What would that be? Yeah, so I think, first of all, some real-world experience, delivering something. I think it says something. Obviously, just going to school, we're looking for smart people who have gotten through class. I think my first job, although I had experience, was just, wow, if you can get a degree, and it's a hard program like this, you must be smart, because I will tell you the technologies are going to change. So by the time you graduate a year from now, you're going to be learning something new. I was working on network protocol handlers. We didn't think TCPIP was going anywhere. Right? So things change very quickly in the afternoon. Learn on your feet. So we'll look for someone who can really deliver something in the technologies we're interested in. So in the middleware DevOps space, if you'd use Chef to automate code deployments, or you wrote scripts to build Linux systems from scratch, those are the kinds of examples I think we would look for in the resume. So even if we didn't know something like Hadoop or another language, would you still consider us? Absolutely, I think we're looking for the concepts more than the ability and the ability to learn, because most of what we're talking about, by the way, I have a pretty big database team. They've not used any of these things. They're going to be working with you too, and they'll be learning too. So one of the things we find is one of the reasons I get excited to come to work every day is things are always changing. We get to work on new things. So the people we're looking for are the ones who want to learn that stuff. But I think you have to have some principles and knowledge that you can demonstrate. I've used some kind of an analytical tool, or I at least know how to use pivot tables in Excel. If you understand that concept, you understand analytics. So it doesn't have to be the exact technology, but if you have one of those skills, that's certainly going to be helpful. Yeah? So are you recruiting just for summer internships, or are you... No, so I'm sorry if I wasn't clear. The greatest success is if I hire every one of the interns. We know that's probably going to be a little bit of a stretch, but that's our goal. So it is a summer program. That's what we have right now, but it will turn into, in fact, we have hired our interns out of Chicago, and the plan would be to do that here for successful. Are you doing... I know you mentioned part-time work. Are you hiring directly into that? So what we're doing is the intern program right now, but at the end of it, we'll have a conversation. If there's a good fit and you have another year to go, we'll talk about, wow, we really love to take you on. Can you do 10, 20 hours a week? One of the things we found from our intern program in Chicago was some of these folks got in the middle of things and became critical. It's like, what do you mean you're going back to school? We can't afford to lose you. And I'm not kidding, it happens pretty fast. You pick something up and you're the expert. And we always joke about that. You touched it last year and now you're the expert, right? Because things change so much. So yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if we're just trying to push you to do more of that and hopefully still let you finish your degree. I'm curious. So what are more aspects to the Linux? Because you were talking about fashion, pearl, and I know C, but some of these new ones I don't know, right? So I used to have a HSE plus class. But in many, many years, so I don't know the languages as well as I used to, but they're more script oriented for building operating systems or moving code. Things around Chef has its own language. I think if you have good programming background, you've taken Java and C. These other languages is going to be giving me a manual. I mean, it's really not going to be that hard to pick up. I think we're going to trade. But we've got to have some basic skills. On the Linux, let's say Red Hat operating system or Inlet logic or web server. So there's got to be grounded in some skills that we feel like you'll be able to pick up what you're lacking. Does that answer your question? Yeah. I'm currently doing a bash scripting class. So I'm interested in actually the bash. Oh. I said it because it was written down there. So I don't know what bash is. I don't know if it's, you know, really have no idea. Rather than I know it has to do with scripting for our Linux system, the manager of that group told me that that's one of the key words to look for. You'll see it. When you go online to see the postings, we have all the requirements there in that qualification so you can see it. And don't get dismayed when you see, you know, 17 things there. You're not going to have them all. But you've got to have something there, hopefully, that you can apply for. Because we recognize we're getting interns. That's actually what we want. We want to try and bring in some fresh talent people that are new into the industry. Because, honestly, typically up to now we've been hiring people with many, many years of experience only. And we find that, you know, we're missing something by doing that. Yeah. As a junior in computer science it's like a lot of options in front of us in terms of working. A lot of really cool options. Yeah. I don't know, like cyber security or some cool social media startup. Okay. It sounds like you're really working at US Foods. So I wouldn't really consider food service like the sexiest option. Like where you work. So what would you say to convince us of taking this over something a little bit more? Well, a couple things. One, that this sexiness comes in the technology and how the business is really using it. So I mean you can get really excited about cyber security or something. You know, if you're interested in hacking, that's one thing if you're interested in seeing how business can differentiate itself in the marketplace, we're doing that. The company that's twice our size we are really differentiating because of technology. In fact, we're trying to take the public and they talk about that in the industry, how much we are ahead in technology. And when you get into it, it's hard to explain if you don't understand food service. But just to give you an example of what happens at night, a restaurant owner is on their mobile app and they place an order at 5 p.m. That order has 42 different products on it. Freezer in the refrigeration and the dry. That all is going to end up on a trumpet three in the morning. It's going to get routed during the night along with 20 other customer orders. It's going to get picked. It's going to get substituted if it needs to. There's voice technology. So these guys are walking around and they're not typing anything. They're talking to a computer over voice and the computer is talking to them. Telling them where to go. Did you get to the right place? Because they walk up and go check one, two, three. Yep, you're in the right place. I mean that kind of technology is there. There's technology then to figure out how to build the truck in it. And then there's POD. So this is something else we lead the industry or most of our competitors don't do is. UPS does it, right? You walk up and you can sign and get a real-time invoice. We have that as well. One of the first in the industry to do it. So if you understand food service, it's really, really exciting. Yeah, it's not necessarily as groundbreaking with some of those other areas, but most of you are going to end up in places where you're using technology to actually drive a business. And I think this is one of the best places to do it because you're going to see every type of computer and every type of technology. We've got mainframes. We've got the non-stop. We've got Linux. We've got HP Linux. We've got Windows. We've got AS400s. We've got legacy. We've got new. We've got logic farms. We're running buses and deck of product search. I can talk for hours about the technologies we're running. I'm not an expert on a half of them. And that's why it's exciting. When we built this data center, it was 1990. There were two computers in the data center. Tandem and IBM took up the entire data center, 10,000 square feet. Guess what? We're still in that same data center. Probably got 5,000 servers in there. We've got a lot smaller, more complicated, a lot more moving parts, but we're still in that same place. So constantly evolving and changing. I think that's what's exciting about it. You're going to be around a lot of really smart people, too. And I think that's one of the fun things about what an open office environment, there's no cubes. I don't have an office. Nobody has an office, right? But nice and low and open. It's all about collaboration. And you're going to work with groups to be at least smart people. And that's where you're going to be. So I think that's what's exciting about me. Good question. All right. I think on that, let's thank our speaker. Thank you.