 Great, so we're going to introduce our participants. We have Randy King. She's a talent manager for Metal Toad, and she has a lot of experience in hiring developers and technology employees. We have Mike Lamb. He's with us from Pfizer. He's a marketing technology director there. And we have Chris Bloom, a senior developer from Phase 2. And all of this is organized and led by our CTO, Josh Mitchell, and these are really great panelists, so you guys are in for a treat. Yeah, let's dive into this. For those of you who don't know, we did this two hours ago. So you're getting the practiced version. We're all going to be much more polished. And I assume we'll all have twice as many witty jokes because those of us on the West Coast are fully awake now. So Mike may be beginning to fade because he's joining us from Wales. So we'll have to play that by ear. Let's start with some data. We did a survey in July of last year that was really aimed at Drupal hiring and how that works in the community. We saw in that survey that 82% of hiring managers survey plan to hire Drupal talent within the next six months. And 40% of those hiring managers say they're in just this constant hiring Drupal talent mode. So I'm going to throw this out to the panelists. Is this your experience? Is this what you're... I'll say definitely I'm both. So planning to hire talent, and this has been continuous for us for a little while now. I think it's been continuous for us. And a lot of the Drupal shops we work with, as we've seen just massive growth with Drupal and deployments of Drupal in the last couple of years. We mentioned this last time that Phase 2 has been going through some pretty tremendous growth in the last year, especially in Portland with our new office. And I would definitely put us in the constant hiring mode. We kind of always have job listings up on our site. Yeah, we're always looking for really good people. And I would say we are in this...we're pretty much in the same boat. I think ours has kind of come in a wave. We doubled our number of employees last year, and that actually has happened for the last three consecutive years. So we're at 47 people right now with 20 to 25, or excuse me, 25 to 30 of those, our developers, and we're continuing to fill our pipeline with Drupal developers. Well, let's look at some more of those stats. So 92% of the hiring managers that were surveyed said there's not enough Drupal talent. So what has been your experience so far? I know for me that this past year hiring up a Drupal team, I was able to find a great team, but it definitely took longer in some cases. So what are the experiences you guys are seeing? At Metal Code, I would say that it's definitely challenging to find great Drupal talent. I think I mentioned this last time as well that our president, Joaquin Lippincott, has been in communication with several of the code schools in Portland in terms of getting a dedicated Drupal curriculum up and running in order to develop more Drupal talent from within. But other than that, yes, I mean, it's definitely challenging. And like you said, we've been able to do it, but it's taken some hard work. Earlier today, Randy, you were talking about it takes you roughly 30 days from the point of posting to the point of hiring. And would you say, Mike, Chris, would you guys say that's pretty typical for you? Is that 30-day mark something to shoot for? I know for myself it was a little bit longer than that, but we didn't have a dedicated... Yeah, I thought that was really impressive. So I thought that was really fast. So I think the interview process can take... Not the whole series, but it can take a decent chunk of time. But then I guess it also very much depends on the market you're working in. So in the US, I think it's common for it to be faster. Whereas maybe in Europe and some other regions, the notice periods people have with their employees are typically a lot longer. So it can be a many-month process to recruit somebody and have them transition into role as well. What's a typical notice period in the UK as a comparison point? Because I know there's kind of like that two-week minimum, but a lot of developers, especially if they're in the middle of a project, want to get that project done, so they might flex a little bit of time there. But what does it tend to be in the UK? So it's typically a minimum of 30 days, but more often than not, especially in senior roles, it's closest to 90 days. I've seen that several times in senior roles, when it's 90 days. That's when it can take a very long time to transition someone with that kind of notice period. Yeah, at Phase 2, we have a lot of rounds of interviews. We have multiple, multiple rounds. So our process tends to be longer, but we do put folks through kind of more early screening and then more rounds of like technical challenges and things like that. So it is longer for us too. Interesting. Yeah, I can definitely attest that both hiring for the association, and where I'd say it probably took us about 45 days on average, but also having hired in places like higher education and government where maybe those processes took a little bit longer, I had government hires that took 90 days from the point of posting to the end just because of the hiring requirements. It made it a real challenge. The interview process had to include technical tests and the technical tests had to be graded and then you'd go through another couple rounds and then every interview had to have like this cheat sheet that you had to check off all the boxes. So it definitely, we lost a few people over the course of the length of the hiring process. So when I hear about those really quick hiring processes, I'm impressed with that because it tends to mean that you capture the talent. You don't lose them to another opportunity. What's interesting about the hiring process, and I don't know if it's necessarily unique to us, but the Drupal specifics actually don't come in until later. The early rounds are more about fit and culture and just development thinking, that kind of thing. And the Drupal part kind of comes in like once we establish the base, then we can get into kind of the nitty gritty about Drupal and about the stack. Definitely. Let's switch over to the next slide. I want to go ahead and kick off one of the polls. Lauren, are you able to open that poll? Sure. So where are the best places to advertise? Where do you advertise? You can choose as many as you like from the poll options. While we're waiting for the folks who are listening in to respond to that, we're the best places that you guys have seen the developers are looking and what has given you the best value whenever you've posted things? I mentioned this earlier this morning, but Stack Overflow. I've seen their phrases. I actually wrote a blog about my experience using Stack Overflow Careers 2.0. It has been a really great spot because I feel like it's still pretty untapped by recruiters. And they've done a good job of setting up parameters and made it safe for the developers to respond to recruiters kind of in their own time and if they're actually interested and you're limited in terms of how many people you can reach out to as a recruiter. And I think I said earlier it shows their projects so you're able to have somebody that's super technical or who's one of your expert Drupal developers on staff look at some of their work and they can tell you right away if this person's going to be a good fit in terms of technical ability. We do a lot of on-site event recruiting. So a lot of the Drupal cons, like job fairs, a lot of in-person sort of event stuff. For instance, we have someone who's flying out here to Portland and going to check out the PSU job fair for new students or recently graduated students. We put a lot of effort into the face-to-face early on. Online channels, we've actually gotten great traction on Twitter. LinkedIn's kind of there. It's always a thing. Everyone's got a LinkedIn. But there's something about Twitter that's been pretty good for us as well online. But it's still mostly in-person referrals, very boots on the ground kind of recruiting. Excellent. For us, LinkedIn's been pretty successful. So LinkedIn for having our own networks, et cetera. So it's listed here as Drupal jobs. So we're excited about Drupal jobs because before we've been participating in groups and these kind of things, but obviously jobs is one focused area that we can go to. And certainly partners that we're working with are using that already. Excuse me. I'm seeing a huge list of others. So if you marked other and you're on the call right now, if you could drop into the questions, I know it's not really a question, but go ahead and drop in. What are some of the other places that you're using? We're definitely interested in collecting that and finding out where those other places would be. Okay. Lauren, I think you're going to need to close the poll and it should release and come back to my screen. There we go. It worked. We had a little bit of technical difficulty this morning as we were trying to figure this out. But that definitely worked a little bit better this summer. So what are some of the keys that you guys emphasize in your advertising? Something I've seen having launched Drupal jobs. We've seen a lot of great posts and we've seen a lot of very poorly written posts. So bad, in fact, that we've thought about making that feature to offer as someone to help rewrite job posts so that they're going to have a better conversion rate. What are the experiences that you have seen? What are the things that you emphasize that give you the best return when you're posting a job post on one of those services? We've included a developer, Bill of Rights, and that was written by our vice president of growth, and I believe Tony Rasmussen wrote that, and it really emphasizes basically just making sure that developers know that they're going to be taking care of if they come to Metal Code, that there's R&D time, that they have a right to basically work-life balance. Actually, you should take a look at it. I don't have it memorized. So there's 10 rights on the Bill of Rights, but clearly that if you come to Metal Code and you're a developer, you're going to be doing what you love to do, and basically the entire support team is there to make sure that all the blockers are removed from you being able to do what you're good at. Yeah, we also put a big focus on culture when we're talking about Phase 2, the company. We've got these seven values that we stick by as a company. They're up on our site, and one of them is one of the really big ones is fun. It's a work environment. It's enjoyable. People that are enjoyable. Yeah, we try to word that way to really get that point across about who we are at our different offices and what they can expect to find here. That's a similar thing for us. It's both culture and then also depending on the role, try and give them as much of a flavor as possible of the type of challenges that they'll be solving. There are certainly some unique challenges from larger platforms that we can talk to, but rather than just list out a job description, try and share as much as we can about what we're about, what it really is to come over to a team like this as much as we can in a job post. When we're talking, we've got 140 characters to describe a company. It's tough. It's really tough to get that point across. We do this thing where we just grab seven words about Phase 2 that we use everywhere. Those are dedicated, collaborative, smart, authentic, adaptable, fun. If that's the job post, if that's Twitter, if that's LinkedIn, it's a good byline to really get a point across really quickly. I think that helps. I think that really helps. That's nice. It's kind of like your value statement, and then you're applying it to your hiring process. Yeah, exactly. Excellent. I'm going to go ahead and jump to the next poll, which is really what's working for you. How do you actually hire folks? Lauren, if you want to go ahead and open up that poll. While people are voting on that, what are you guys seeing as the most effective for you? Is it word-of-mouth? Is it employee referrals? How are you having the most success whenever you put things out there? So for a metal toad, I think I mentioned earlier employee referrals are huge for us. Word of mouth is definitely working for us. We have our director of development runs a Saturday morning meetup and encourages all kinds of people to attend, people who are wanting to become developers. So maybe they're attending a code school right now, people who are already developers, maybe they're intermediate level, staff level, senior level developers. We even have some project managers that attend our Saturday morning meetup. And Dan is really, really passionate about teaching and making a difference with people. And I think that that just goes to kind of show the culture of metal toad and the respect and like Chris said, our value statement is really important. Respect, curiosity, helping people, all of those things, making, being a contribution. So being, creating value is very, very important. It's one of our values. And all of that helps in recruiting and being able to attract that kind of talent. Yeah, to tie into the referral thing. That is just, I mean, you know, having someone that you've worked next to for a long time, you've been down with the trenches on some projects together, come to you and say, like, hey, you should really give this guy a shot or give this person a shot. It's that right there. I mean, that's two rounds in an interview done. Like you just kind of like, all right, let's get you right to the right to the other parts of the interview process. Like, you know, nothing, nothing's going to replace a referral from somebody that you trust. That's a good point, being able to track down. I certainly agree with what's been said. Go ahead, Mike. That's just, I certainly agree with what's been said there. Probably the leading one on this list for us is events, specifically Drupalcons, whether it's talking to people who have had a particular session around an interesting topic or just networking at these events. That's worked well for us, just thinking through what was said earlier on. Maybe that's also because it's a good opportunity to do the first interview or screening in person as well, if you're hiring a remote team, then that's a little bit harder in the standard process. Obviously Drupalcon is a good opportunity to bring a lot of talent together, so that works pretty well. What would you guys say are the balances that you have between going through Drupal.org profiles and looking for people who are heavy contributors and basically going after them versus people responding to the ads that you put out there or connecting with you at an event. How much does that Drupal.org profile play into your hiring practices? That's a really tough one in that for a while, and I think it might still be around, we had that license to rock or rock score. Certified to rock. Certified to rock, thanks. That's sort of on the same line to me as trolling through a bunch of D.O. profiles and finding someone with a lot of activity and then reaching out to them. I think by the time someone's that deep into the Drupal world or that deep into contributing, it's almost counterproductive to go pursue, go reach out like that at that point. It doesn't hurt to open lines of communication and be talking, but generally by that point people are pretty entrenched where they're at. They're usually pretty happy. It's kind of a unique situation there, but yeah, it's almost like the cold call of the internet recruiting at that point. Randy, how about you as someone who's kind of dedicated. I'm sorry, Mike, I cut you off twice. I think we might have a slight delay. My apologies. Yeah, I think we've got a delay. No worries at all. This is the extra latency across the pond. We haven't really taken that approach of finding someone's profile on Drupal.org and then pursuing them specifically, but we do use that to learn about people if it's a particular module or a particular area and if we met them, certainly maybe try and start a discussion, but not really the cold calling. Oh, this person looks interesting. Let's give them a call. I haven't taken that approach. I will chime in and say that I think given my background in recruiting, I've always been pushed to do more of the cold call and I have no problem reaching out because I feel like if you can do it with a soft touch, then you're likely to at least get a response and especially, I don't know if everybody on this call is from Portland people listening, but no in Portland, it's definitely a relationship-based town and if you treat people well and respect them and touch bases just based on, like, hey, just reaching out and seeing where people are. I think if you do that, you're bound to cast a wider net and I have been amazed at the places that I have found a good Drupal developer hiding. Like, I just recruited somebody a few months ago who came from working for a CPA firm and he was the one, quote-unquote, IT guy, that's how they viewed him, but he had managed to build an entire learning management system in Drupal and he was severely underpaid and not happy and so we scooped him right up and I think that's been pretty phenomenal. That's awesome. That's very much looking outside of the normal places to track down potential Drupal talent, that maybe he doesn't have the same exposure as someone that's in another shop and you hear about the work that they've been involved in. Right, and I don't think I answered a question at all, but... It was good information, though. Lauren, did we share the poll results for that last one yet? I'm wondering if... Yeah, they're up. Yeah, we can get it. They're up? Okay. I can't see them. They didn't pop up for me this time. Okay. We had advertising at 17%, word of mouth at 17%, employee referral at 50%, events or meetups for 17% and other zero percent. Interesting. Okay, well, great information. I'm going to go ahead and pop over to the next slide here and see if this spurs some more interesting conversation. Interview process. We talked a little bit about the interview process a little bit earlier on. What are the intangibles that you guys include in your interview process, both from how do you sell your organization to folks, but also how do you pick up on the intangibles that maybe somebody is showing you in the interview process? We should let Mike go first. We keep cutting him off because of the delay. No worries. So the interview process itself, we talked about this a bit earlier on, but it kind of plays into the intangibles here as well. So we do a screening and there's a couple of rounds after that. This is why for the intangibles, it's good when you can do it in person as well, because it's much easier to have just a good discussion around the type of work you're doing and the culture and the way in which you do your work. You just get a feeling, I'd say, from those kind of discussions. So as much as we can do doing it in person and just having a good discussion around what it's like to work together and values and culture, et cetera. I was saying earlier as well that this, I found certainly it helps when, just when it's not practical to do an in-person interview and we're doing things remotely, just doing it over video, so Google Hangouts or something similar to that has helped me a lot in getting to know the person when you've never met them before. That's certainly helped with at least finding someone not just the right skills, but also the fit where they're going to enjoy working with the team. Yeah, I'll jump in here real quick. Yeah, the intangibles are, I see the intangibles as being the first couple of rounds of the interview, right? Those are the, you know, we can get to the nitty gritty technical details later, but that culture, if they don't click there, I mean, it's bad for them, it's bad for us, so that's usually something we look for right away. We see if the culture is a really, really good fit. And then the two things, attitude and passion, right? And those can be mutually exclusive and it's really interesting talking to folks to see if they're sort of, their love for development, their love for doing all things kind of Drupal is out very early on in the process. And generally, the more overt it is, it kind of tells you a lot about what's going on in the service. So that's that kind of intangible, that's got the passion. And it looks like their attitude fits right in with the companies. That makes the first couple of rounds of the interview process really easy. And I totally agree with what Chris just said. Looking for that passion and not even having the first meeting or to be about their technical ability, but really digging down into what makes them tick, what drives them, why are they passionate about Drupal. And also looking at, one of my favorite things about recruiting developers at all is that they are, while they're pretty analytical and they can be introverted, they're also really creative, which is fantastic to be able to talk to anybody in the development world and to really tap into what they're passionate about creating. And then leaving the technical skill evaluation for later in the process, exactly what Chris said. So speaking of technical skill evaluation, we didn't really touch on this in the first part of the interview or first part of the webcast. What do you guys do for technical tests? Do you have a process that you go through that vets a candidate and says, yeah, they know what they're doing or not? So far we ask for a code sample or any contributions that they've made to be able to take a look at that. I think we're moving as we continue to grow and become a larger company. I think we're moving into the direction of giving some sort of more formal evaluation, but for right now it's just reviewing code. What I've seen and what I've experienced, and this is probably also kind of industry standard in a way, is providing a problem and asking to be walked through the solution. Syntax is syntax when it comes to code. So watching someone think and seeing how they go through it can be as important as, do you know all the real specifics of the language that you're writing? Mike, how about you? I certainly agree with that. I've seen lots of technical tests and things been put in place for other technologies. We haven't necessarily done that in Drupal, so we haven't been asking for code samples, these things. Certainly when somebody has, we take a look at their Drupal.org account and we take a look at their GitHub account. These things are useful, but normally it's a conversation and we would have a call with our technical folk and start talking about some of the challenges, some issues and talk through how the candidate would start troubleshooting them, et cetera, how they would approach them. But really it's talking, just having the conversation and then seeing how deep they can go and see how comfortable they are as they get deeper. I think we've certainly found at least so far it works quite well in terms of being able to tell someone's real comfort and understanding in different areas. Of course, different people have wildly different experience in different areas of Drupal. So that works pretty well for us. I've been involved in a couple of interviews and this is kind of my journey little secret here. I've been stuck on problems in my day-to-day work and I'll bring those problems to the interview and say like, how would you solve this? And what's shocking is like watching someone interview totally solve my problems that I'm stuck on and I'm frantically taking notes like, uh-huh, tell me more, yes. I'd like more detail about this. I like this. I'm feeling that Chris. You can hire them as well which is, you know, you get the ongoing benefit from that and they continue contributing to the solution there. Of course, they also find out that you were punning off your work on the interview process. Nice. All right. Well, I'm going to move a slide forward here. So, you know, we talked a little bit this morning about, you know, what are the things that job seekers are looking for and what seems to resonate well. We talked a bit about location and compensation and giving back. Those are all ranked very high among job seekers for things that they say are the most important factors in deciding a good fit. So, let's talk a little bit about location. We have quite the mix of location approaches for teams here. So, could you guys go through that a little bit and talk about what's your pros and cons and how location plays into finding the right people? Let's start with Mike. Sure. Yes. Just holding on for the latency of this. So, location for us, and it's different for different roles and different teams, but I would say for my core team, which have a technical focus, I don't mind about location and I really don't mind about location. It can be anywhere in the world and we have people in Australia, we have people in Asia, in East, all across Europe and all across the US. So, we don't mind for those roles. We try and get them on projects where they can work their normal hours or the hours that they would want to work in. And that's helped us in a couple of ways. It's helped us because, first of all, our business of the markets in which we're building Drupal sites is global. So, there's always a project in a challenging country for time zone if you just have a team in the US or just have a team in Europe. It certainly helps from that perspective. It also helps in terms of getting talent. So, when we have somebody in a particular remote location who has a family and they want to stay with their family, they'll be very motivated to take a role where they can work remotely and have to travel. So, there's certainly some pros for us in terms of getting the talent and the fact that we need people to be working in these various time zones anyway, but also some challenges to address. So, we have to put a lot of focus around team building and these things. Try and get the team together when we can do and we typically do these around Drupal cons is that we can do some good team building and have people learning and spend time with other people in the community at the same time. So, certainly some things to address. Also, on kind of a day-to-day basis just in the way we structure our team communications with chat tools and these things. That helps keep somebody who might be the only person in their country very engaged. So, a deliberate focus on trying to keep these remote workers engaged to kind of try and tackle that challenge as much as we can do. Randy, I'll switch it over to you because I know you represent the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of how you guys have approached locations. Maybe you can talk about that a little bit again. Yeah. So, our entire team, 100% of us are based here in Portland and come into the office on a regular basis. We do have work from home days and that can be worked out between the developer or anybody and the person that they report to. And it's really, really flexible in terms of working from home but I think one of the benefits we've found of having everybody be based here in Portland is that the culture of metal toast is very, very strong as a result. We spent a lot of time together. I think I mentioned earlier, we literally gone skydiving together. We go on hikes together. We actually see, I think some of us come in on our Monday morning stand-ups and like, okay, well, I saw about six toads this weekend all at different times. So, we really enjoy spending time together and I think that's a result of being able to collaborate directly on a regular basis. Cool. And yeah, I can kind of chime in on where phase two is that since we've got the four offices, got one in New York City, got one in D.C., one in San Francisco, and our newest one here in Portland, we have about a third of our technical team completely remote. So, we've got this weird hybrid of if you're near an office, generally there's the office culture for that office, but if you're not, you're not. So, we're really flexible in that area. We kind of want people to work where they're most comfortable, where they feel they're most productive and they're happiest. So, sometimes that means like being around your team physically, being in the office here, or sometimes that means just head down with headphones on at home. So, we're pretty flexible in that regards. My personal anecdote is I worked for years from home, completely remote for various other folks. And I always thought like, yeah, I'm a work-from-home kind of person. And then once I got into the office here for the last year, I've really started to put a lot of weight into office culture. Now that I'm here, now I can see what it does, the collaboration, the teamwork. So, yeah, the office, it's really grown on me, but we're still pretty, pretty flexible either way. Let's keep on this notion of what job seekers are looking for and talk a little bit about the giving back piece. Now, I know for myself, whenever I hire the Drupal Association, they feel really engaged about the giving back part. I mean that, they're thrilled about the opportunity to give back at the level that we can give them in terms of it being 100% of their work schedule is giving back to the project. What sort of percentages do you guys offer as a part of of your work culture and how important would you say that the employees and your organizations find that? So, we don't do a percentage. You can give back this percentage. Instead, really the way it works in practice is we want you to build awesome stuff and that can be anything from building a particular site to building with a bunch of modules to building a major platform component and we're not trying to keep that proprietary. So, if your passion is building the next greatest way to do X in Drupal or building that in Drupal 8 and it's a benefit to us, of course we want you to build that and we want you to have your job building that and of course we want you to contribute that back as well. So, we don't hire people in specific roles for giving back. We don't hire people and say you've got a fixed percentage of your time for giving back but we contribute a huge amount just because of people are motivated to go work on solving big problems for us that will work for other people. So, we certainly have multiple people giving double digit percentages and then other people who are or I'd say everybody giving at least that but then multiple other people 100% and they won't hire this community or a core contributor they will hire to solve a particular problem for us and doing it in a fantastic way and then contributing all that back as well. When I Oh, go ahead, go ahead, sorry. It's like that YouTube video about the conference call. Yeah, no, I think our leads and gentlemen definitely are very invested in giving back. In fact, we've kind of built it into our culture in that we have a junior developer program where we will bring in two or three junior developers at a time and pair them with a senior developer and for the duration of their time as a junior that senior is responsible for all the codes that they're committing and they've got sprints that have been solely designed for our junior developer program and at the end of the program which can take anywhere from six months to 18 months either they are completely ready to move into a staff developer role with Miletode and if not then we actually help them find a position somewhere else in the community where they want to be. So for us about the contract before I started here I always saw a lot of names on the modules that I was using and kind of shown up here at P2 and seeing oh my goodness, those are the people that I'm working with have been the ones that have been writing a lot of these modules and core contributions but even kind of more than that just sort of like the actual modules is FACE2 actually maintains and actively develops on a couple of distributions. We do open atrium and we're open public as well so that's a really core part of our culture is the full Drupal distribution active development on it. Got a couple of folks in the security team as well and all those things are really important to our day jobs but also really important to ensuring that Drupal is able to grow and progress as well. Awesome. And then the last bullet point on here was or at least the last stat that we had was about compensation and I remember earlier we were talking about this and really compensation did not play into it as much why do you think that is what has shifted in terms of the thinking among developers where you're seeing less concern about compensation and more about these intangibles. I know for metal toad it's outside of Drupal it might be higher. Go ahead Mike. Go for it. It's definitely culture and I actually was thinking about this a little bit more in the two hours that we had between the two calls that maybe it also is that most of these agencies, most of these companies that are hiring Drupal developers do pay a really competitive wage so maybe that's not even a consideration. Maybe they're getting the same offers from most companies but I also think that culture plays a lot into this. If you've got a culture where you're going to get work-life balance you're going to enjoy what you're doing the project's going to be rich and it's going to be fun. You're going to have fun while you're doing it. Then I think that compensation kind of falls to the background and it does not hold as much weight. Josh why don't we do the last poll question? I certainly agree with that and I also think about it between the between the two sessions and one of the things I was thinking about is I think it's different for different technologies right so I think it's probably you get a different answer if you're talking about just straight PHP development and I think it's related to the balance of supply and demand in Drupal. So while demand is greater than supply people can go get a job with appropriate compensation so I think it becomes much less of a debate here specifically for Drupal. That makes sense. So it looks like Lauren's going to go ahead and open up the next poll question which touches on this. It's what actually keeps great talent around. Is it the interesting work? Is it the flexibility? The hours and location? Culture and values? Or is there something else? And if you have something else that you think is one of the key keepers of great talent what would you say that is? So Chris here just kind of jumping in right away is I think like in modern tech and especially in kind of the hip upcoming tech scenes like these should all be given right like these should be like that's where the tech shops should start. The good compensation, interesting flexible culture values. And to kind of like put a layer on top of that is can you offer growth? Can you offer a career path? Can you offer actual progression technically or maybe someone wants to move into more managerial roles? Being able to lay that out for new payers and say like here's an actual path you can follow, here's different areas you can engage in. Here's a five-year plan being able to see a future on the first day that you start. That's really important for new payers. I'm giving a little pause there. Mike how about you or what are the intangibles that keep your talent once you've hired them off? I've now seen the poll results I'd certainly agree with that interesting work right. Keeping people engaged. I'd agree that each of these can really be expected at least I see in my team is the thing I focus on to try and keep them as engaged as they can do is interesting work and allow them to focus on that work as much as they possibly can. So building something, doing what they came to do, develop something and make sure it's something that they can they find interesting. Whether it's just interesting because they can contribute it back and it will solve other people's problems as well or it's a really challenging thing for them to do or various other reasons why and interesting. Mike you mentioned last time about letting your developers develop as one of the key points that I thought that was actually so awesome I told someone about it after the call. Can you expand on that? Yeah sure, so it came from one of my team members and he's a developer and he actually managed the development team as well and he asked whether they could move into a schedule because we all work remotely there's lots of IAM, lots of meetings etc teleconferences and these things he asked whether we could put a schedule in place that involved doing a stand up in the morning but then doing four or five hours of just focused uninterrupted development before doing meetings later on in the day and of course I agreed but the outcome from that was absolutely fantastic and the motivation in the team they can spend several hours a day just completely focused on building something which is what they came here to do that's what they wanted to do, they wanted to develop but it seemed so obvious but then looking across other teams you have technical people who are very talented technical people and are therefore constantly being interrupted for help and they just can't focus on what they're doing I think there's a couple of funny XKCD comics on this right when someone's hacking away getting into detail of what they're doing someone asks them a question and then boom it's just completely gone it takes them a long time to get back into that that moment again so yeah uninterrupted development that's what's really well for us Randy, how about you? Do you have any intangibles that you really focus on that keeps the best talent in house and keeps them around? I'm thinking about it and I know we have interesting work and I know that we have flexible work schedules but I keep coming back to the fact that we really like each other and I know I'm sure you've heard the whole people don't leave jobs they leave their manager they don't leave a company they leave their manager and I really believe so strongly in the we've been able to hire people who truly fit the culture that we're looking to have who uphold the values that are important to Metal Toad and that is the respect that is being helpful and that is being a contribution and being curious, you know, seeking knowledge sharing knowledge and all of that happens across the board and I mean anybody who's spent any time at Metal Toad will tell you I mean our folks are pretty dynamic and pretty awesome to be around Excellent, you know kind of an interesting question because you talked about people don't they don't leave a place of employment they leave their supervisor what sort of turnover expectations do you have because I'm not going to ask anybody for their exact numbers but what's what's healthy turnover of talent and what should you be looking for I know that for myself I'm always looking for what's the tour of duty that keeps you engaged at not to get too military about it but what is that goal that you have that you want to accomplish while you're here with with the team and having the team really stay focused on their goals and the great work that they're doing but having that kind of goal that then they can reevaluate and say is this still the right place whenever they reach that goal do you do something similar within your organizations and what is the ideal keep if you will I think the tour of duty that we're seeing and this is kind of from what I have learned especially through some seminars that I've gone to it's kind of generational right so the generation the baby boomers they would stay in a job for 37 years I think that was the average of the time whereas Gen X is more of like you'll average of 7 years and then the millennials the longest you can hope to keep a millennial in one position is 3 years and then you add technology into the mix and I think it sometimes can be even shorter and not to mention the millennial will not only have their the work that they do that pays the bills but they'll have an app that they're working on on the side and they'll have some great ideas that they really want to bring into reality so I think turnover while I think it's very healthy because it brings a new perspective to the team I think we are somewhere around you know max of like 20 percent 25 percent and we are nowhere near that over the last year so so yeah it's hard to track turnover too whenever you're in like constant growth mode so I'm not necessarily like a it's definitely a goals thing right Mike Chris either of you have any thoughts on that I'm gonna let Mike go just so the timing thanks Chris yes I was just thinking this through actually because it's not something I've focused on a huge amount it's I would say it is really low for us and I was just trying to think through why that might be so personally while not in the same role I've worked at Pfizer for 11 years there are people on my team who worked for Pfizer for a lot longer than that and then if I'm trying to think of people who have left it's really always due to growth opportunities and other technologies are outside of the industry the only areas I would say we would have higher turnover in there is like contract staff and I think that's also because of the environment people are often working in there or the way they're working is tailored to shorter contracts so they're more likely to hop from one place to another quite quickly and then establish very quickly when this is the right place for them so a higher or some turnover there in contract staff but in terms of like employees who spend a lot of time recruiting etc it's really very very low our experience is we've got a lot of people with five plus years in the company at phase two and we've been growing a lot so the turnover is hard to track but it's pretty low for us we've got a lot of older veterans and one things that we do to really keep talent is the reality of development is that there's good projects and there's rough projects and it's just the way it's always going to be so we try really hard to cycle people to ensure that if they did, if they were on a tougher project that the next thing that it can cycle on to it's very much taken into account what their prior experience was just to really let them give them a chance to unwind a bit so it's really taking into account your employees happiness and their experience and their work also we have a really focused staff management structure every single person has a one on one every week with a staff manager and it's not just like one staff manager for everybody it's really really spread out throughout the company so everyone's very one on one engaged track long term career goals to set those goals and to actually go meet them and go lay out a plan to go meet them so like that cultivation and that one on one thing is really really important to us as well that's awesome to hear the kind of built in growth measurement and the constant check-ins I know for myself I'd completely value that sort of approach and even the way the team is structured the constant check-ins with the entire team so the idea is you keep from having someone who becomes the squeaky wheel because the rust of kind of an oppressive project or a really tough problem that's really drained them they get an opportunity to cycle back in with the rest of the team and feel that connection with the team so we're right here at the edge of our time so I wanted to throw out a huge huge thank you Mike, Chris, Randy I so appreciate you guys doing this twice today for us to hit all the time zones and we're going to be providing this online as well for folks to come back and listen and watch at a future date we'll kind of edit together the two versions that we have and once again just thank you so much for your time and for this contribution that you've given to the Drupal project we really appreciate it Thanks for writing me