 All right, well, well, that's not turn it down. Just a hair Welcome everybody. I appreciate you all being here for the session. My name is Clyde C. Posad I am the head of the training and certification group at the Linux Foundation and We spend a lot of our time actually all of our time thinking about talent and the role that the people side plays in the broader ecosystem, so Elapsed are really exciting place to be right. We have 700 plus open-source projects ton of committed developers lots of excitement at the end of the day still people need to be involved in doing the code in standing up the systems and running the systems and the more and more we're hearing this drumbeat of How are we going to get fully staffed? Where are we going to get fully staffed? Wow, the competition is fierce, you know I keep losing people out the back as fast as I'm bringing them in the front and so the The question is what are we? What is the new normal look like especially as we come out of the pandemic with remote work and remote hiring? and what are the implications for how we think about the talent pool, you know industry and the Thing that I got to thinking about last night is It's a little bit like the Little Red Hen you guys know the story of the Little Red Hen The Little Red Hen goes around Plants the corn asks people who wants to help with the corn nobody wants to help plant Time to reap the corn she asks who's gonna help reap the corn nobody wants to help She grinds a corn nobody wants to help grind the corn. She bakes the bread. Nobody wants to help break the bread When time comes to eat the bread a whole bunch of people show up. Hey bread Talents like that. I think we've all gotten a little bit lazy that we kind of show up and it's like oh talent And it's just not true anymore. I mean, it's never really been true, right? I Keep joking with folks And it's sort of gotten to be not funny actually that you know if you if you're feeling bored Even if you're in Some random field just put the word kubernetes on your LinkedIn profile and give it 12 hours and All kinds of interesting inquiries will start popping up for you I'm not just a reality of the world. We live it right everybody is on the hunt, but Like the Little Red Hen We all want the bread kind of fully baked, you know, it's sort of like well I prefer to have somebody with three years experience and just slide them in so I well If you can find that person that is Fantastic, and if you can afford that person that is even better, and if they're still here 12 months from them. Well, congratulations Yeah, it's like a win in the lottery talent is really a Serious thing and I think the thesis of this talk is sort of life lessons from the Little Red Hen is We need to do more to kind of build the talent right this idea that you just go out and and source it on the market It's never really been true, but it's less true now than it even used to be I Guess I was I want to stop there before I go too much further Up is anybody in the audience seeing anything different You know, we have a view we've done some surveys we have some data any Different perspectives on talent, especially given the pullback and the markets in the past Several weeks No, nobody's stumbling into giant untapped pools of talent out there Like the talent shortage is real you guys have seen the stats 93% of hiring managers say they're having a tough time 100% of the people I've talked to at this conference have said hmm. Yeah, not so easy Especially to get the talent we want on some and it's tough enough on the on the core stack Of you think of sort of public cloud infrastructure when you start digging into that for you know Edge networks IOT AI machine learning, you know the deeper you get the harder it gets right and so even at the basic level of Cloud-native familiarity there's not enough and the more the more specialized you get into the your particular application that the tougher It actually gets to actually find what you want And then of course unemployment is is lowered, you know, there's cutbacks. We're seeing cutbacks at this morning I saw Netflix did another cut back. You know, there's definitely some shedding a talent happening. I don't think it It's very unlikely that we end up in a situation where there's so much cutback on technical talent That it's a whole ton of people looking for jobs and life suddenly gets easier and we can all staff up every open rec I think that's very unlikely to happen just given the extent to which people are trying to pull talent into the market And it is a global talent shortage. This is one of the really dramatic shifts I think over the past 18 to 24 months A lot of companies have gotten comfortable with this idea that they can hire talent that's away from sort of the core office site and That's great news if you're not in the Bay Area or Bangalore or Chicago or Dublin Or one of the sort of big centers because you too can now tap into some of those great salaries that have been available and People are looking and willing to consider you as a part of that talent pool The bad news is everybody discovered this simultaneously The idea that you can go pick off talent and some of these you know historically sort of lower temperature markets is Exactly not true and if you look at you know They were the chart represents as the percentage of people who feel comfortable and they've planned for their talent needs out Through the next 10 years and of course the answer is very few people have done that in part because very few people have really started to think about How am I going to build some of this talent? How am I going to put some skin in the game to help grow that next generation of talent instead of kind of harvesting it all at the end and The current pipelines are just not big enough right if you look at the folks who are coming out of Degree programs associate programs whether you look at it at the US level whether you look at it at the global level There's just really not enough coming out of that sort of traditional talent development pipeline And that's before you get to the question of other people coming out of the traditional pipeline Ready to work any microservices cloud first She's couple of head shaking. No, I The first week I came to Linux foundation My wife is a professor here at UT Austin and I asked her to make an introduction to the head of the computer science department Kind of rolled in and say hey, you know What are you guys thinking in terms of how you modify the curriculum in the age of you know Open source sort of coming into its own and Linux as operating systems and he sort of rocked back in his chair and said well Here's the thing By the time we teach the things we need to teach to stay accredited It takes all four years And when we ask around nobody wants a five-year degree So we teach the things we need to teach to stay accredited and we hope the students fill in the blanks with the other stuff That they need the first day they go to the job and Remember leave in the office thinking wow that is Kind of scary. They know they're not teaching what what people want them to see they want on the job But they're stuck in this accreditation Sort of treadmill where they can't get off and it takes years and years Actually recently went back and met with the new head of computer science and sadly the story is unchanged because my question was well It's been eight years. Have you guys updated the standards for accreditation? So There's two problems, right? There's a the people coming out of the formal education pipeline aren't necessarily getting the breadth of exposure And I'm generalizing there's some places in a Portland state and others will do a really nice job Trying to integrate open source into their curriculum and to the day-to-day experience but as a generalization the formal programs aren't doing a great job and the informal programs are Not coordinated and then there's not a really good pipeline sort of coming in so there is kind of this global challenge of Where's the supply going to come from our folks who are Experienced in working in these technologies and have comfortable comfortable working the technologies all of which means that you know The easy things to do which is what have we done before that has worked, you know? I made the joke about LinkedIn earlier. It's already a joke people are LinkedIn has become just a Circular firing squad for hiring right you find somebody great somebody else finds one of your people great And you just basically do the musical chairs thing and sort of round-and-round right and meanwhile you're paying the recruiter What how many months a salary to go find that person's like? Yeah, hundred thousand dollars between the finders fee and the onboarding fee and then you you know by the time they show Up somebody else is gone and you stop the whole Cycle again. It's just yeah, LinkedIn was great. I remember when it first came out and everybody was like, oh It's so awesome. I can go find talent in places that I've never fished before You know everybody else figured it out. So it's not a great hidden gem anymore Word of mouth is great. You know, I'll talk about this a little bit later. I think people could do more of that Traditional degree programs You know, there's only so many grads coming out of these things and there's a bunch more companies trying to compete for them Even if you go to some of the areas globally and you know across North America in our case where maybe the Big tech offices have not been it's just it's tapped out And it really is tapped out in terms of where you're gonna get talent from from those pools coming in And so what do you do? Right? What do you do differently tomorrow than you're doing today because? Yeah, we all have projects. We're trying to do including us at the Linux foundation And then we look at the open rex. We think oh man if only we could fill those three rex We could actually dent this backlog and get some of the road map stuff accelerated, but the other challenge of course is The people who you have need to be fully deployed working against the backlog who's gonna interview You know spend hours combing through the last position we opened 12 hours later. There were 84 applicants and I'm looking at the hiring man. Just saying so the good news is you have 84 applicants Bad news is you have 84 applicants About you guys, but somebody's got a comb through You know the stash and figure out kind of you know who you're even going to bring in right and you know You all know like interviewing is not like a half an hour process, right? It's multiple people It's just you know, it's a multi our commitment times 10 candidates It's just it's a lot of investment, right? It's a lot of investment in dollars and time and then you know Did you actually fill the gap or in the three months it took you did you lose somebody else to the team, right? So it is a it's a really tough treadmill So one of the questions is can you can you buy a way out of it, you know, so It's interesting with the The data and you know the 10th jobs report came out. We announced it here at this event we've done out this is sort of the hot off the press research couple thousand people responding and People have raised P and you know, I show our hands whose companies have raised pay in the past 12 months or so It's one of these things it's sort of like necessary but not sufficient because we've all raised P It didn't really make a dent it helped stanch the bleeding a little bit, but it didn't move the ball really followed and you know, it was interesting because we've been doing the survey for 10 years now and People had always been a little bit coy when we asked the individual side of the survey Where pay ranked it was always sort of like number two or number three and I always looked at the data and thought Really though this year was number one and not even pretending anymore like pay is important But it's not going to be sufficient because you know unless you have an awesome VC Just pouring money into your gas tank. You cannot outbid the market for talent and use that as your sustainable strategy for Filling the needs you have it's just Yeah, the tide is kind of risen with it and so you know base is gonna go up But it's not really gonna be a lever, but it is something you're gonna have to talk about it It's something you're gonna have to do But it's probably not gonna be a major part of your solution to just say well I'll just pay more and and bring these folks in because the Everybody else is doing it and including in some of these untapped markets, right? So again We're hiring and and we had a candidate who is in a pretty low-cost rural part of the country and He sent in his expectations and I thought Can I get my head around paying somebody? You know, I mean the Bay Area I get right you're sharing with 12 guys in an apartment for three grand a month You know even in the low-cost areas, right? People know they know what talent is being paid, right? So there isn't a lot of arbitrage opportunities going on There's still pockets, you know, you hear you know Before recent events, you know, Ukraine had a lot of developers. I think they're all in tech You know the Poland's got a lot. You've got some pockets in South America. So there are places where there's a little more momentum Building believes Costa Rica, but they're just not a ton of those places, right where you can get an arbitrage of the salary It's just you know pays just it's really Not enough and it's all of the above, you know, it's Sorry as font is a little small, but it's flex work. It's training the talent It's providing bonuses end-of-year bonuses spot bonuses productivity bonuses for getting targets and getting projects out on time Encouraging people to Spend time on code development, right and you know rewarding people who make commits upstream to a project, you know what it really speaks to is a What we call the all of the above strategy, right you have to try a little bit of everything and you have to be mindful of The relationship side of it, right? Do you understand what makes the different folks tick because some people might prefer the flexibility more some people might need the pay somebody else might have Be super passionate about an open-source project or contributing to You really have to and this is what I think one of the challenges, right? I think for HR and for engineering leaders and for software development leaders I Will generalize and say that it's not always been the highest sort of EQ In terms of working with folks and understanding what makes them tick But but it's going to be important understanding what makes the different folks tick and being able to do some adjustments as you go to try to make sure that this person who has this set of priorities is Getting their needs met and this person who has a different set of priorities is getting their needs met You know, it's an investment in that relationship, right? And so getting to know the folks getting to understand what makes them tick having some flexibility in what you offer them instead of You know, here's the deal everybody gets it. We're all off on Friday. We're all getting quarterly bonuses You know, the more you invest in the individuals and understanding what it's going to take to keep them happy The one thing I can guarantee you is they're going to get job offers, right? And the other thing I can guarantee you is you're not going to have a hundred percent retention There's just no universe all the loyalty and all the relationship building in the world is not going to Make it so that people don't leave because they get a phenomenal offer from somewhere else What you've got to do is figure out, okay, I Can't be at a hundred percent. I Don't want to be at ten percent So what are the steps I can take to get my retention from ten to twenty to fifty to sixty and keep nudging it up You know, if you can hang on to your folks and you know, you're getting eighty percent retention year over year You're probably going to be in the top quartile in the industry in terms of retaining your talent right and growing your talent And so you have to be realistic because you're going to have to an over and you're going to have people go for great opportunities somewhere else but It's a numbers game. I have to plan for the fact that people are going to turn over and If you think about what that means for your talent pipeline is you have to have a bigger base of talent kind of coming into the organization Which is challenging because one of the things I said at the start I think it's true, which is we all want to hire that guy or gal who's got a bunch of experience and It'd be great, but we're probably going to hire have to hire Two or three guys and girls that are a little bit more junior and invest in them over a period of time Right, just the patience of saying it's gonna, you know You know, it depends on the individual right might take three months before they start being productive It might take six months depending on on where in the cycle they came in but you have to commit to that Yeah, you'll see the last slide which says it's a marathon of not a sprint, right? It's just it's a day after day just deep commitment to get more talent into the organization And by the way, not just more talent in Discovering the talent that you might already have right people who might be in your organization not necessarily in a technical rule Can you guide them into a technical rule, right? At least, you know, there are known quantity. They understand the company culture So, you know really thinking about the talent when I think I might be my next I'll have one more side get there. You know, everybody's thinking anew, right? Yeah that One of the side effects of the pandemic was people had a lot of time to think about what are they doing with their life What's life like when I'm not commuting to work? You know What gets me up and excited out of bed in the morning and I think in tech It hasn't been the great resignation that we've seen in the service sector where just tons of people left and I've just never coming back But they are reevaluating they are certainly telling us pays the most important thing They are saying that they want flexibility in their hours They want to be able to maybe work and discover new technologies They maybe want to go work on a project. They're passionate about Yeah, this is not yesterday's talent pool This is today's talent pool and and they're a little more insistent about what you know, what scratches their itches And so, you know for those of us running departments driving hiring What are we gonna do differently? You know, I think you know, it's the old definition of insanity is you do the same thing and expect a different result If you do the same thing the results will get worse and worse over time Right because everybody else is gonna start to figure out how they're adjusted their strategies on talent And so for all of you in the room and all your organizations and folks joining online What you know, what's the all-of-the-above strategy that says yeah You can't stop doing the things you were doing last year and two years ago, right? You still have to be on campus recruiting you still have to be trying on LinkedIn You still have to be getting job fairs and come into events like it's not that any of that stops It's that you do that plus you do all these other things to try to figure out How can I get some more talent into my organization, right? It is all hands on deck fire up the afterburners because You know, there's gonna be some attrition, right? so you've got to keep filling the bottom of the organization and getting talent in knowing that you're not gonna keep all of it and Developing skills in-house, you know, this is I say this somewhat selfishly because that's what we spend our time on is training but the reality is It's like the little red hen, right? You got to plant it. You got to nurture it. You got to grow it You got to figure out what does that model look like with internships with people coming out of high school with folks coming out You know, we're military veterans, you know You really have to think about all the potential sources of talent and how can you get them into your organization? What's the coaching piece gonna look like, right? Who's gonna mentor the folks if they're coming in with less experience, right? So now you're asking more of the people within the organization That you know that could have been Flat-out, you know pizza under the door working on code and now say hey, I need you to spend time Training this person and helping helping them get up to speed. But if everybody is not part of the solution You're gonna be you know, the whole just keeps getting deeper, right? And so this is not This is not an exercise in hey HR You're doing a crap job go go do a better job of finding me talent, right? Every technical person in the organization in addition to their technical duties is now a recruiter Is now a developer is now a trainer because you just how are you gonna get there otherwise? if you don't build some of your own talent if you don't go to the you know, they the Help desk or the call center and see those folks who are sort of geeking out and say hey You know, why don't you come do a rotation in this department? Let's see if you've got the potential to train up on this, right? if you don't go to the local high school and try to get some of those folks in the robotics Club if you don't go to you know, the The workforce adjustment offices for people who are looking for jobs and try to get those folks in you know, you're never gonna tap into that that broad base and the Responsibility to develop some of your own to build your own talent, right? It's kind of It's the IKEA model It's a lot of steps right to assemble the couch, but ain't nobody gonna come do it for you You're gonna have to figure out what are we doing on training? You know, what can I do with things like certifications to demonstrate that they actually have developed the skills that I've acted that I was asking for and Who's gonna be responsible and the answer is we're all responsible, right, you know Even the junior person is gonna have to then bring the next more junior person along because they just went through it last year in terms of How are you engaging with folks? How are you pulling people kind of into the talent pipeline? the training training training right training in non-traditional audience which Yeah, the reality is When you go to your existing workforce and you say hey I need your help bringing these folks in and helping to coach them There's gonna be eyes rolling and people are busy they have projects do you but If everybody doesn't pitch in it just gets harder and harder, right? And so it's a change from a cultural perspective. It's a change in the expectations We have a four technical teams that Their responsibility is to help bring that next generation of talent along. This is not an HR problem This is not a hey. I just need a better recruiting film problem This is not a hey if only management would let me raise my salaries problem. This is a All hands on deck Everybody pull every level problem because it's the only way you're gonna get to something like fully staffing to be able to work on your roadmaps and yes It's a cultural Expectation change that everybody is mentoring and training somebody else It's a cultural expectation change that everybody who is a manager is now be expected to spend a little bit more time with every employee Figuring out what can we do to build loyalty? What can we do to build retention? You know, what would make this person? Happier than where they are today that might be different than what would make this person happier than where we are today You know, it's a much more engaged future if we're gonna get to where we need to get to in terms of the talent pool I talked some about this right just Find it. Yeah, and I'd love to get these these are some that come up in conversation And you know folks in this room might have other perspectives on you know Where to go find that next generation of talent? Does anybody doing anything non-traditional in terms of how you try to identify talent pools? Poison girls clubs, I don't know Any thoughts from the audience on other ways to identify the next generation of talent? If not here's a list you could start from You know geography matters less and less I think has everybody sure of hands has your organization been doing more removed? post-pandemic pretty much everybody My wife's an engineering professor and at the start of the pandemic she was like, oh, no, just can't do it You know, these are engineers. They have to like work on the lab and now she's going in two days a week everybody People who said it was absolutely impossible have realized that well actually it's not absolutely impossible and by the way traffic's a lot lighter and Austin Because not everybody is coming in every day And so on the days you come in it's actually more pleasant because my guesstimate is people are doing three days a week in the office for the ones who are coming in but It doesn't matter where they are anymore, right? You can you can really go tap some of those talent pools. You can really think about you know We're all we're all doing pipeline-based work now So if people are doing real-time commits into your integration pipeline, does it matter even which country or which time zone they're in? You know in fact, there's something to be said for a follow the Sun model on development And it's always been true right the big organizations have always done that right they've had teams across You know Europe Asia America's small organizations can do that I mean we're a relatively small organization as the foundation right just over 300 people our engineering team is for training is Some in the America some in Europe some in Asia and we gripe about time zones And we have to do meetings at 10 o'clock at night because it's early in Japan Guess what? That's the new normal It's like if you can get great talent take it and if it means there's the odd five o'clock a.m. Call and the odd 10 p.m Call That's just kind of what you got to do right? Is it you find a talent where you can find them? Unleverage your networks. I think Most companies have you know Referral bonuses and things like that. I'm not sure how heavily they lean. Does your company have a referral bonus? Is it heavily used? You can lean into it They I know it's true for us as an organization You know the resumes I read first at the referred ones because I at least know that somebody who understands the organization's culture Who understands this person has a relationship with what with them is kind of vetting that then that there might be a good fit there I think those those Relationship-based referrals are awesome and one of the benefits when you expand your geographic footprint is you now start getting Referrals in country. We're about to hire somebody else in Manila that came from a Manila person that we recruited about six months ago In a different department and she was looking at the board. She saw it and she said oh actually I Know somebody who might be a good fit for this role in actually a different part of the organization It's a great way to take kind of get those tentacles reaching out further and further into some non traditional talent pools And nurture the relationships, right? I think from a cultural change perspective. I imagine this is going to be the heaviest lift getting every Engineer every developer to think about themselves as part of the talent generation Solution is a pretty different place than where most organizations have been but Everybody grab an ore. I think that's kind of where we're at is We're all gonna have to Jump in and help paddle this thing because yeah, it's a little red-hand analogy You can't show up at the end. We've got to build build build a talent in-house Non-traditional sources to supplement what we've been doing. Otherwise, we're gonna just keep having open recs And we're gonna keep having road maps that that can't be delivered In the time that we'd like to be able to deliver them or you know Bugs in the code that we can't remediate or customer satisfaction issues that we can't get to because All the code in the world isn't sufficient and we're still Until the machines come for us We're still very much dependent on people to get a lot of the stuff done and there's just not enough people to go around One last point on diversity this also came up in the in the survey right there Pretty much every organization has a diversity and inclusion policy Are you really living it right because especially the younger cohort? that they're very Tuned in to they come to a staff meeting and they're looking around table They come to a zoom meeting and they're looking at the the thumbnails, right? The better you do on some of these dimensions particularly for that younger workforce The more it's gonna get Noticed I know it's true for my kids who you know my teenager is Dialed in to like every room of like hey is this a representative Audience and so as you're bringing that new talent pool in it's more than lip service right here the more representative your your talent pool is of The community that people live in the more likely you are to be successful and conveying those people kind of into the organization So, you know, it's not a slogan. It's a lifestyle. I agree the beggar. We open the funnel at the top You know, we know there's gonna be breakages We go through so we got to make that as wide as possible to get talent in Because that's the only way we end up with enough senior and mid-level talent within our organizations over the long term Strap in right this is not changing. You know, it might actually get more intense As more and more, you know, I give the analogy all the time they at the start of the pie that pandemic we had this great little Chinese restaurant close by where we live and the guy worked in the back and the lady stood up front and took orders and she would actually write the orders down by hand and She had one of these little pulley things and she'd clip it on and she'd send the pulley back They closed you in the pandemic and when they reopened they had a website and with ordering online ordering It's the next time I went in I said, yeah, and she like When you guys get like a web ordering and fulfillment system She's like well Was the only way we could reopen because the customers didn't actually want to come in and sit around waiting for the orders to be ready And so we found a guy who was specializing in Standing up online ordering systems for small restaurants and we paid him 15 grand and he put it in and now we're all Using it so you know, she's now an e-commerce business But at one point they won't eat they've only taken cash when they first open I say, you know, that business is now an e-commerce business with a technical solution partner So, yeah, the the usage base footprint has expanded Which is part of the reason that the talent shall you know war has has gotten worse, right because you know they Asia cafe is now an online business Blows my mind, but you know multiply that by tens of thousands or millions of use cases, right? It's just a ton of use for the for the especially for some of these cloud-based type technologies So, you know, we're in it grab a no and start rowing. That's all I had guys any questions comments so Yes, a lot of we do a ton of stuff for free today, right? So we've had over 2 million people take free training courses in the last several years and And Some of our paid catalog is also available under CCD Y license so that people can reuse it I think our bigger challenge is people don't know we have a training arm The next Academy doesn't exist and people still mistake us for the next Academy A life as an organization has been known for code for so long But I think we we're still not on people's radar as a source for for talent development material because A lot of our introductory stuff is super popular right like the basics like Introduction to Linux introduction to Kubernetes We have one called introduction to cloud infrastructure Which is basically a giant glossary of all these tombs that people here thrown around right unicorns and microservices and pipelines And you know, we're open to more ideas for other topics that would be helpful We're doing one right now Tim who's our director of training is doing a course on what is quantum computing And why should you care? Sure, you know to try to create more awareness and on ramps right so on ramps for people to be able to discover these technologies So tell your friends like go to training at all There's a there's a ton of free resources in there And if there's other resources that we could be developing that would be helpful We're always happy to Listen because yeah, our whole goal as a group is How do we make sure that lack of people isn't the reason that great code gets used and deployed and built on so we're constantly looking for what are ways to break some of those trade-offs and part of the part of what we're trying to do with awareness with these types of sessions is get the Developer and user communities to be more engaged and have been to grow some of their own talent Like you know, there's a piece we can play and you know from a relationship building perspective and from a career coaching perspective A lot of that's gonna have to happen, you know at the cold face where people work There's another question back here Sorry Yes, thank you First of all, thank you for your presentation is very insightful so my question is do you think this is going to be a Problem that becomes worse and becomes a cycle as it gets worse because just as people Started just just as everybody started Doing the LinkedIn route as people start pulling all the levers they see here And start raising the bar of expectations across the board at the same time I don't think we see the demand for talent ever decreasing in fact Just probably always increasing because of the pace of innovation and adoption of open source technologies I guess do you see that cycle? Happening and getting worse. Well, I think what's gonna happen is the same thing that's happened that has always happened in technology which is Places get reputations as great places to work because they've got great technologies or they've got a great sort of position in the market If you go back even five years Nobody was asking is the culture this organization great They were asking what's the stock options look like and how underwater they were asking Does this look good on my resume so I could go jump to the next thing more and more? I think people are asking Through the pandemic. It's just a place. I will be happy working and so, you know There's no happiness index. Let's say that your people are better You know a happier here than there if they I think the key thing will be does your organization have a great reputation as a place to work and You know the better that reputation is the more likely you are to be able to bring talent in and hang on to it Other places will also be great places to work So, you know, it probably is true like it's always been that the bar will continue to raise but it's also true that the sooner you get a Enhanced reputation the longer that reputation has been out in the market You know, you you are able to maintain this in some extent you're able to maintain Kind of brand equity if you're the first ones there if you're early ones there so Unfortunately, yes, it's probably gonna continue to be tight But the the sooner you start investing in because what this is is basically Your reputation as as an employer and a place to work right and how how broad you can open the funnel How welcoming you can be how much you're investing in giving people a talent development experience that they couldn't have Anywhere else and the better that story is and the longer that story has been happening The more likely you are, you know success breed success, right? Sorry. There's another question here Yeah, thank you for an excellent talk I work at a university which traditionally doesn't pay as excellently as a lot of other people at the conference but Historically the benefits have been amazing and even for myself like, you know, I was able to leverage as a tuition benefit So I'm just wondering do you see benefits? I mean, you know, you talked a little bit about that But is that a really a large portion of what offerings could be? Yeah, I think it gets back to this idea that It's a It's a Menu of things right so people clearly are saying now that pay is more important where they used to maybe be a little hesitant to say pay is Important, but it's not always the most important and I will say look at Linus foundation For example, because you know what we don't have stock options Profit and so you think about in you know pulling tech talent in without stock options Feel like a feels like a bit like a hand tied behind your back certainly the public sector I know We have had discussions with lots of public sectors from different countries including, you know things like you know Departments of defense and they think oh I'm not really at the top of people's lists of a place to go to work to be you know a great tech environment But if you can have you know the mission of the organization as part of something that draws people in if you can have other Benefits that draws people in you know and if you can invest in building those relationships and getting some of those non nontraditional talent pools in you know you got to fight with what you have right and and that you know if If pay is a limit and the public sector Sometimes limited by statute right? There's only so much you can do there's formal pay scales Then you got to go lean heavily on the other elements Sorry one question in the back Yes, sir, I'm still like formulating this in my head um, I guess a Question that I have is like if you're having like like let's say you're in a position of like Being a manager and you help or you're helping advocate for your team to get like raises and stuff like that If you like kind of building off of the last question that was asked Like if you're having a conversation with them an employee where they're like referencing Well, like oh if I go to Amazon or I go to Microsoft They're willing to pay me like X amount and you've already implemented all of those incentives Is there a strategy like do you have you found that there's a strategy to bring those people? Back into the fold and like help them realize the benefits and difference in culture or if an employee Has already made up their mind that like pay is what's like deciding their Willingness to stay is that just like kind of a write-off at that point Yeah, it's a challenging question right and If it gets to the point where you're hearing about it for the first time when they've gotten another great offer You're maybe a little bit late to the game, right? So this part of this whole spiel of Invest in building relationships with employees is is to try to have that conversation six months before right to be able to Say well, you know if we get you cross-trained on some of these IOT technologies I could justify a pay increase for you right and so, you know and and the flip side of that is It's a lot easier to go to your manager or your manager's manager and and advocate for Pay adjustments if you can also say I'm not asking for this because this person is now competent on this new piece of technology And implemented it on this roadmap item, right? And so, you know Yes, the the training of the talent is important for you to get done what you want to get done But it also actually then reinforces your ability as somebody responsible for that group to be able to advocate for them to say hey We need you know more pay or we need some different type of benefit because They now have the skill that they did not have 12 months ago All right, and they've been able to deliver this value to the business and so part of your Responsibility is getting in early and figuring out what they're interested in and how can you provide that at opportunity to learn that new skill? because As a generalization people who work in tech like learning new stuff They get excited about this new tool this new, you know opportunity to develop something cool and so what you know historically we've we've sort of Asked the employee to drive and not everybody's confident enough to go to their boss to say hey I need it, you know, I need to go two days to take this course to learn it If you open the door to that conversation and you open that door a few months before the hey I got this great Amazon offer your chances are a lot better than I got this great Amazon offer What can you do for me because at that point? It's you know, you're you're you're in very transactional Type mode, but if you're able to see oh well, you know what? Finish this project so you can develop this new skill We've been working on and I'm gonna try to put in for a raise for you now. You've got better odds Yeah, perfect. Thank you so much Okay, so I think we're about out of time here So if you do have a question you guys can talk in the whole whatever. Yeah, but thank you so much. Thank you