 Hi, this is your host, Sapin Bhartian. Today we have with us once again, Clites Super Sad SVP and General Manager of Training and Certification at the Linux Foundation. And today we're going to talk about the 10th annual open source jobs report. Clites, first of all, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks, Swapna. I appreciate the opportunity to be with you. This week is open source summit. And of course, this topic will keep coming up. So first, let's talk about, you know, what are your expectations from the event? Getting people back together. It's been two plus years before we, since we've had the opportunity to gather together, both in person and virtually. So really looking forward, there will be well over a thousand people on site and starting to work our way back towards a new normal where we're able to meet and exchange ideas in person. Based on this report, what are the biggest challenges, you know, either for employers who are looking to either recruit or retain open source selling, or from the folks who wants to find jobs. So is there still the huge supply and demand gap? Yeah, I think we are continuing to see that. The adoption of cloud obviously accelerated during the pandemic. And what we're seeing now is once you get into this mode of not hosting your own infrastructure, there's no going back. And so while a lot of new apps got created natively on the cloud, there is a massive amount of legacy infrastructure sitting there that you can't, I tell people that, you know, there is no magic pixie dusk to containerize your old infrastructure. You have to go in app by app, line by line, refactor the code. And so the amount of engineering that's going to have to be implemented to move those is significant. And at the same time, more and more companies are moving to the cloud, you know, even really small companies. And so you have this, you know, demand that has spread out. And geographically, because more companies are more willing to hire other than at their office sites, what used to be some pools of talent that weren't directly in the big sort of tech areas, those are now getting tapped more and more as well, right? So you have folks in, you know, in the US and Indianapolis, right? Getting recruited much more heavily because increasingly you can work from anywhere. And while that plays to the strength of some of the larger employers who are able to systematically recruit the talent regardless of location, that does put pressure lower down the stack, right? On those, quote unquote, local or regional businesses that were previously well set in terms of the regional workforce. Excellent. Now, since we're talking about pandemic, yes, it did accelerate folks, you know, digital transformation journey or move towards the cloud. But it kind of also created another set of challenge that we are seeing now is great resignation. What kind of impact do you see there on the industry? You know, I think from our technology industry perspective, we haven't already seen a great resignation per se, but there has been a fair amount of turnover in the jobs report this 10th version. About a third of folks have changed jobs in the past year, which is a little bit, I think, higher than normal. The counterpart to that is we're seeing a lot more activity by employers to hold on to the folks that they have. And so because employers have been more proactive, I think they've prevented some of the turnover that might otherwise have happened. As you said, you know, that employers are trying their best to retain developers or, you know, engineers. First of all, if you can share with us, you know, what have you seen, what are they doing to not only retain the existing employees but also attract new ones? Of course, one candidate is that, hey, remote work, you can work from wherever you can. But what are the other things that you're seeing that they are doing? Or from your perspective, what? Because you have been doing this report for so long and you work closely with industry. You do have a lot of insights what they can do to retain. So I'm asking both sides what they are doing that you're seeing and what they can do. The two biggest levels that we've seen being utilized are remote work. So people having, being able to work from different locations. And if you think of some of the high cost locations, you know, the San Francisco Bay Area, the area around Bangalore, it's certainly attractive to allow people to work from other locations just in terms of the cost of living and that sort of, you know, impact on your real earnings. But the second has been pay. There's been a fair amount of pay increases flushing through the system. And, you know, historically in the report, pay was a factor and it might be at number, you know, three, number four. It is clearly now the number one thing from an employee perspective in part because they have so many opportunities popping up in their inboxes, right? More and more recruitment pressure. And so companies are being forced to, you know, play offense and defense at the same time, right? Paying more to attract new talent but also having to pay more to retain the talent that you have. And I think that probably feels at least a little unfamiliar to many companies where historically there's been more focus on what the pay should be for new employees coming in the door and maybe not as much focus on what's the pay for retention. I think pay for retention has clearly moved up the stack in terms of something that really needs to be top of mind. This question can be interesting because we're talking about what they can do or what they're doing to retain. What are the things they should avoid where you see it triggers, you know, employees that they look at moving out. So have you also seen, hey, these are the things you should not do? Yeah, you know, there's a few things, right? One, of course, is company reputation. I think in general over the past several years you've seen a lot more, especially in the younger generation, a lot more awareness of the employer and the employer reputation. So that certainly is something that is taken on and enhanced importance. But also the other one I would say is the idea that the burden is on the employee to figure out their path. I think the company that pushes off the responsibility and is expecting every employee to figure out for themselves what's the next technical skill they need, what's the right portfolio of skills they need to move up to the next level. That's going to turn folks off. And we have seen that reflected in, for instance, the share of companies actively investing in training their workforce and certifying their workforce. I remember when we started doing this report, company hiring managers would just flat out tell you we don't really invest in training because that's just going to encourage folks to go out there and find another job. And so we're going to invest this dollars and somebody else is going to benefit. I think that mindset has really changed to one of saying, well, if you don't train and encourage and develop growth, employees are going to go find that somewhere else because yes, pay has become more important, but how do you invest in the relationship but how do you invest in the relationship? How do you create loyalty with that workforce? And that requires an all of the above strategy, right? So just pay alone is not going to cut it. There's this whole basket of factors, including how are you investing in me and my career, including what's the company reputation, including pay, including things like flex time, right? And so really being able, if you do not take a holistic approach to the employee engagement, you're going to find yourself on the wrong end of the equation. Yeah, and as you were saying earlier, the image, I think earlier it was seen as two separate things, but then especially in the tech or other space also, culturally folks are becoming more and more aware, so still actually Leading Foundation, you folks have been doing like, when we go to even open source summit, you folks take care of the moms and the dads, it's an event where the whole family can come. So you are aware of inclusion, diversity. So that's also becoming effective where folks are like not comfortable working with companies who do not kind of share the views that they have in terms of inclusion, diversity, and being a welcoming environment as well. So that's where also we are seeing some movement there. Yeah, and that falls into the whole reputational piece, right? Being committed to a diverse workforce is something, again, particularly for that millennial generation, it's something they're very keenly aware of. What kind of skills you are seeing are most in demand? It's the things you would expect, right? And so anything related to cloud native is obviously hot, everything related to cybersecurity is very much top of mind. And as a general context, DevOps and GitOps, this idea that there's what used to be these clear walls between the developer crew and the implementation crew just continues to crumble under the weight of the new expectations. This has kind of leading foundation and laid path for this next question, but it is, if somebody wants to pursue a career through open source, what is the right way? Because first of all, there are a lot of projects you can get started on your own, but you do need a very concrete plan and strategy or some help also. So talk about some points there to help folks. Everybody should get into the Git environment and become familiar with this idea of how modern code gets managed and how you don't have to start by doing. You can start by simply observing a GitHub repo, seeing what pull requests look like, seeing what the velocity looks like, looking at what some of the comments are, and then pick something, right? It does not matter if it's small. Pick like your pet peeve of the thing that you don't like in the interface and get in there and see if you can make a contribution towards making it better. The goal is not necessarily to say that you've made a thousand accepted pulls, it's to get used to this workflow and to get yourself into the dynamic of working collaboratively together on code. And everybody is a developer now, right? And so it used to be that folks who were more on the engineering deployment security side would hesitate to go look more closely at the code because the idea was that that was the realm of the developers. And the same was true with developers, right? In terms of things like scalability. And as that wall has really broken down and this idea of DevOps and GitOps and everybody's responsible for the code collectively, it's really opened the door towards folks getting exposed to what the code is and how it gets managed. And then opportunities to contribute, right? It can be a really small one line edit. But if you can get yourself into that workflow or into that world of how code gets collaboratively developed and implemented, that's gonna light the spark for your career. This is the 10th annual report. You have been doing it for a while. If I ask you, if you look back at the years of this report, what kind of evolution you have seen of the job market in general? I would say really three things, right? One is the talent pool has become really global and that's a function of organizations spreading out and having more locations. And that's now particularly a function of more remote work being possible for a lot more employers. And so that's probably the biggest change is you don't have to go to the job anymore in some real sense, the job comes to you. The GitOps DevOps revolution is the second one, right? The barriers between the different groups within organizations, right? You remember the old way, right? There was the developers here. There was the QA folks in the middle and then there was the folks who deployed on scale. I would challenge anybody to find an open job rec for a QA engineer, right? I think it's just, it's gone away. It's gone away because these things have collapsed much more closely together. And so now you would see things like site reliability, which is a function of, you know, what's the code coming and how stable it is, as well as, you know, how are the clusters set up and can we scale it? So I think that change has been really big, right? This idea that the skills are now much more of a continuum where there used to be very discreet buckets. And I think the third big one is we've really in the age of cloud computing gotten to a lot more commonality in the stack, right? You look across every major cloud provider and they're running Linux as the OS Kubernetes as the orchestrator. I think that's great news for your career if you're starting out in IT because you used to have to pick a layer, right? Hey, I'm gonna be a, you know, a .NET guy. I'm gonna be an Oracle gal. Now, because you have this really broad common denominator in how the infrastructure stood up, I think that really allows for this next generation of talent to come in to get comfortable with the core architecture and then have a lot more opportunities available to them in terms of how and where they take their career. It's really been striking how much more evenly balanced the tensions are between the technical workforce and the employers. I mean, this is true throughout the economy, right? You're seeing this in the service sector, but it's come to tech. I think people maybe thought, oh, what is service jobs? And, you know, they're standing on their feet dealing with people not wearing a mask, but it's come to tech too, right? The pay is going up, the pushback on quality of life. Clyde, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about not only this report, but also kind of reflect on how you have seen the evolution, what industry and, you know, of course, Organization of Living Foundation doing to help folks retain talent and get new jobs. You're actually handling both side of the problem, employees and employer side, which is excellent. Yeah, so thanks for sharing all those insights and I'd love to have you back on the show soon. Thank you. As always, Thwapna, thanks so much for the opportunity to be here and share some thoughts with your viewers.