 Here's your host, Jeff Frick. Hi, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in downtown Seattle. For really, it's been quite a week here. We've had LinuxCon appear this week in OpenStack Seattle and really a lot going on in Seattle. So we wanted to come up, give you a taste of what's going on. We're taking a little field trip to Blue Box Group. Recently acquired by IBM, Jesse Proudman, a many-time CUBE alumni, winner of CUBE Mountainous last March and we just saw him up in Vancouver as well. So we're psyched to come down and come to the office and our next guest is Jill Djibinski, the technical community evangelist. So welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. So it's got to be tough to be an evangelist when you've got Jesse kind of out there leading the charge. Well, if anyone can compete with Jesse for attention, it's probably me. Very good. So talk a little bit about the role of an evangelist. This is a very exciting time in cloud computing. We're kind of in the ground zero of cloud computing really started by Amazon and popularized by AWS and what they've done there and obviously Microsoft Azure is they're rebuilding the company, arguably Satya around cloud. And then you guys are doing an open stack and now you're part of IBM. So talk about the kind of how cloud is evolving in terms of from an evangelist point of view. What's your message changing from? Yeah, so one really cool thing about my role is that it's different than a lot of other evangelists. So I would say I work, I've known Jesse for years. And finally, when they got acquired by IBM, he reached out to me. He's been trying to recruit me into Bluebox for a while now, but he finally convinced me to do so with the opportunity that I was given for this technical community evangelist. And basically what that means to us, it's like a dual role. So I grew up in my career as a technical recruiter and a recruiting manager. So I know the ins and outs of those types of things. So my job is to help build teams but from a cultural perspective to be well known in the community, to travel to conferences, to blog, to speak at conferences, to know the who's who, to be friends with all of those people and to get the right people into Bluebox. While also letting them know in the community know how awesome Bluebox is and what great culture we have and how you should be treating your employees quite frankly. It's a cool story. You're a technical evangelist by title but if you look at your background, do you have your psychology and sociology and organizational psychology? But it's important because as you just said, it's really about people and teams and I think it's illustrative to say you can get involved in the technology industry and not necessarily be a technologist. Yep, completely. I'm very fortunate that when I started tech recruiting years back at Rockspace that I was really open arms accepted into this community. And I think that it's just because I'm like a sarcastic weirdo like a lot of other people in tech. So they're like, come on in. And so I just became this well known recruiter which doesn't happen. I mean that in itself is like a conundrum and so got to know people and really have been accepted and have flourished. It's been awesome. Yeah. And so, and now, you know, we talk often about people processing tech, people processing tech and tech is always kind of the driver, the catalyst that pulls everything together but really it's the people in the process that's the difficult part in terms of changing behavior, changing how people operate, getting people to do things. So talk about how you use that in your recruiting to help build these big teams. Definitely. So I always say that I'm like an advocate for my candidates instead of just like a seat filler. Obviously recruiting is about building teams but it's about building the right teams with the right people who have, you know, the right attitude and the right technical capabilities of course. But I treat everyone with love and respect. So love is something that's very important to me and it's kind of a weird thing to say in tech because I think we can be a little bit like coldish on the culture piece. And I don't know if that's because it's the majority of the people involved are men and that's like a stereotypical man thing. But I'm known for love and giving lots of hugs. And you know, I think that being able to speak to the community and let them know that when they work at Blue Box, you know, the company that I'm at now, they're going to be treated with respect. They're gonna be able to work on cool stuff. I just wrote a blog post about this. This is my like, my equation for hiring great people as engineers is, you know, that's who I cater to mostly but they wanna work at a company where they get to work on cool shit. They get to work with people that they respect and they get paid competitively or fairly. A lot of the people that, I mean, there's definitely people that are gonna wanna be paid that above and beyond, cause that's tech. But for the teams that I want to build out those three core pieces are really there. And of course there's things to add on top of that to make your company a really great place. But those are kind of like the core values. And I let them know from the get go that they are, they're not just a number to me. I'm friends with probably everyone I've ever hired. I know a lot of my hires kids. I babysat some of my hires kids. So it's a family tech. We all should be one big family whether we work at one company or another and be supportive of each other. That's like human nature as it should be. And that's what I'm here to give back. Right. So what about the change though now? The challenge organizationally when you go from kind of a small cool nimble startup with Jesse Alfront and doing cool stuff with the car and everything else. To now you're part of IBM. So that's good and bad in terms of the recruiting and where people wanna work. So how's that impacting your evangelism and your ability to bring people in? What are the concerns or issues that people are making that kind of a trade off? Of course. And so the last company I was at was DigitalOcean which is a very cool startup. And it was a great place to work. And I built out a great recruiting team there and passed the baton. But it's very different here at Bluebox because it's like some of the things that you said and there's a good and a bad. So with IBM we're back to 100%. They're letting us stay as we want to be and that's not just something they're saying and not doing. They're really letting us do that. Of course like from an HR perspective we're feeling some of like the paperwork and processes of a large company. So that's not as fun. But it is what it is. They're a 400,000 person company. So yeah. But I think that it's good things. I think that where we've come as technical community though in general is that people are starting to tire of the startup lifestyle where the expectation is that your work is your life. And it comes to a point in life where that's not always what you want to do. You still want to be super passionate about your job and excited but you're allowed to do things outside of work. And that's what fulfills you as a human being. And so being able to give people that as opposed to just pool tables and beer on tap which actually we have both here. So it's a little bit of a mixed bag but you can also have hobbies outside of work and that's what I'm able to give people. So that's why I really felt excited to come to Blue Box because I was able to do the mix. Okay. And then you're at Rackspace before. So you've been involved in open source projects. So how does, you know and I think it's really interesting in open source about how people get so much personal fulfillment in being a contributor and being leading an effort. How has that impacted your recruiting effort and how does that play out in terms of a company? And I always go back to this. You know, if you have people contributing to open source and they're getting a lot of their personal mojo from that at the same time they got work to do for the company. How do you sort that out? How do you manage to kind of cover both sides of that? Yeah, it's an interesting dynamic. And of course with developers too a lot of their outside of work hobbies are their inside of work hobbies but just on a project basis on their own. But yeah, so I mean we definitely want to hire people who are supportive of open source. Obviously we run our open sack and that's our bread and butter our biggest open source project that we contribute to and support. But we want people who want to give back to the community because if we weren't giving back in general then we wouldn't be where we are today. I mean, that's why blue box is blue box. That's why rack space is rack space. So it can be a bit of a double-edged sword though because we want people to do that but then it is like at rack space what we used to do is they would say you could have like 20% of your time to contribute to open source projects at work. And then it becomes 20%. So for some roles, it became, I mean that sounds amazing. That's a big number, it's one day a week. But then it gets a little bit tricky because like how do you draw the line in the sand? Like when hours in the day are those 20% and maybe some teams are getting to do it more than others. So I think that here we don't have anything like that but we are very supportive and actually IBM sent us an email the other day to say that like if you are contributing to open source projects you can earn up to like $500 just for contributing inside or outside of work. And so like outside of open stack, you know? Not like all, hey, do this for the business and we'll give you some cash. Yeah, other things just because the community is super important. So last thing, you're obviously a woman, vibrant, a lot of energy, talk about crazy men culture of engineering that you've been successful in. So I wonder if you can share for people, you know, kind of your journey to go from psychology and sociology and really to build a successful career in tech and specifically if you can kind of couch your thoughts and your answers for someone who's just in college, just getting out of college, kind of getting started on their journey and trying to figure out, you know, can I get involved in this huge engine that's driving so much of demand for talent even if I'm not a coder? Yeah, and it's tough, I'm not gonna lie. I remember my early days at Rackspace when I was going to a lot of conferences and I got put on the spot a lot by men at conferences and I remember specifically being at LinuxCon, it was in San Diego years ago. I was in a group discussion with a couple coworkers and a couple people who didn't work at Rackspace and this guy was just like grilling me to see if I knew, if I was like up to snuff on tech, which I wasn't because I was new. I am not a coder like you said. And so it's really like getting past that point to acceptance. So yes, like you will face obstacles and barriers. There's absolutely no doubt that you will but you have to be tough in tech and it kind of sucks that it's like that but it is what it is now. And so I have a lot of friends who are female engineers and who are very accepting of me being in tech and not being an engineer. You know, we all have each other's back and we all go through a lot of stuff but it's getting a lot better. And I think that it's just that never give up attitude no matter what. So and be yourself, be yourself because that's how I found that the most people have accepted me. Like when I stopped trying to pretend that like I was fitting in in these circles because I was a techie. Like, I mean, I am in some aspects but not in the coding aspect. I take a couple of classes but they don't always go very well. But when I started just being a human and finding other reasons why we would get along and started connecting with people on a human level and that's when I really like, my career really took off. So I think that that's really important. Don't try to be someone that you're not. Right. Be yourself and don't give up. Yeah, for sure. And go. And tips and smile. Got a beautiful smile. Smile a lot, yeah. I love that you're perfect for an evangelist. You got to follow Jesse's. It's not an easy spot. Yeah, that's very true. Well, Jill, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. Really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you so much again for having me, my pleasure. So I'm Jeff Frick. We are on the ground in Seattle, Washington at Blue Box headquarters. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching.