 Hello, hello, so you have to talk in the top of it right talk imagine. That's like a ping-pong ball between your chin and Microphone like that perfect. Okay. See my ears is a sound guy paying off You stand here. I'm gonna wonder can someone confirm whether or not we're in the frame Hey, brina Brina, can you ask Dustin if we're in the frame how to put us in the frame because there's two of us So that they're not looking at like half your face Well as long as it's a good crime if it was half my face Well if they go this way, it's not bad because then they can't see my bald spot, right? So we don't charge for that at a service I Think yours is lovely Amen good to see you a little bit different standing on this side This is Jensen's for time speaking at scale guys long time attendee first time speaking Hey, let's hear it for him. This is scary But see this is what happens when you stick around this conference long enough and you don't step back quickly enough I just want to make sure that we're in the frame because I don't know exactly how to fit us both Hello Hello, and welcome to open source career day 2024 this is our third open source career day We tried this at the beginning of 2020 and thought that we were gonna have one the next year and then you all know what happened So we've definitely improved things over the years. We bring you a lovely Series of sessions today They're gonna talk about a multitude of ways that you can get experience to re-career and enhance your careers Or to be able to strike out on your own create your own business or be a consultant or work Internationally, so I'm very excited about this the sessions we have today We also have career consulting that you're welcome to sign up for if 30 minute sessions that You can meet with a career consultant and bring your resume for review talk about the next things It is that you want to do in your career Ideate a little bit about what's available outside of the bubble that you're thinking in because there's a whole world Available in technology. It's not an industry It is a practice and it's available everywhere every business in the world needs what you have not just the Fang companies So please be sure to sign up for career consulting We have a number of lovely consultants that are all happy to meet with you We also have free headshots that are available today. You sign up with our photographer You'll be able to get a headshot professional headshot done. They'll be lovely You can put it on your LinkedIn put it wherever it is. You need it and that'll help you Look a little bit more professional as you're trying to present yourself in the world and with that I'd like to turn it over to Laurie barfield and Jensen Crawford and have a lovely day. Thank you so much All right, welcome everybody. Hopefully everybody is here for the the right conference How to get experience? When you have no experience one of the things we want to talk about is kind of the Paradox have to kind of like get behind my back to get this to work How do we get experience When nobody will hire me without experience, right? That's always a challenge. Everybody says you need experience We don't have experience, but I need experience We have a solution for you. So what Lori and I have done is We've worked with our R&D department and we've come up If I can get this to work we have to stand over here just so I can get the remote You're gonna need to stand here to be in the frame There we go. We've come up with canned experience that you can bring to your interview You bring the cans of experience to the interview. You say how much experience do you need? I've got all the experience you could ever want Now of course, it's not this easy Glad you realized this was a joke A little bit about me I'm a software executive. I've been a hiring manager for years A nerd. I'm a ham operator I'm such a nerd. I use the Dvorak keyboard layout You know, I work with boats. I'm on a boat crew. I'm an instructor. I'm a vessel examiner So done all those things that's a little bit about me and Here's some visuals about You know some of my volunteer work. I'll let Lori tell you a little bit about herself So For those of you that don't recognize me because I'm in uniform. I am a longtime scale chair about 15 16 17 years And an organizer of a collective group of crazies called raise me Who like to help people with their technical careers and do it for free? Also, I'm a member of the Coast Guard auxiliary and I am boat crew and I just qualified for a role called watch stander Which I'm very proud of I'm a natural branch assistant I'm a national branch assistant there and I am my background is and you'll hear things from this perspective I'm a former hiring manager. I was an executive at several startups And everywhere I went I was a hiring contrarian So here are my volunteer lives so the this talk is about how to integrate your volunteer experience with your regular career and How to have them play how to have them enhance each other and my volunteer experience at scale did exactly that for me My leadership I started out just volunteering at scale And then I moved into leadership roles and eventually I had a budget I had several teams of people working for me all of this informed my other career It was which was leading engineers And it gives it gave me things to talk about when I was meeting people for the first time and indeed if I ever wanted to Go back to work I could talk about my work in the Coast Guard auxiliary as a second level manager and with all the formal training I've gotten the auxiliary. I would have a lot to say All right, so we're gonna cover today is talking about how to get experience when you don't have experience We're gonna go through looking at the experience paradox How that fits into the raise me game plan? How to make your volunteer and work connection happen and then answer any questions you have So let's dive in with addressing the experience paradox one of the best ways that we've found to do this is volunteer work and People want to know well why volunteer work? Well for volunteer work you end up with flexibility in qualifications You get hands-on experience Volunteer organizations are desperate for people to help so if you have an interest in learning something They are more than willing to give you the chance to learn it Build some skills for yourself and help out the organization This also gives you the hands-on experience if you're a developer and you want to do cybersecurity if you're You know doing one thing you want to do another All of those things can be done in the volunteer organization and they're very flexible about When and how you can do that? We're looking at the time commitment because I mentioned when The time is also very flexible. They know you have another life It's not a 40 hour a week commitment It might be as little as one hour a week It might be as much as you have if you're in between jobs but the great thing is that they are willing to work with you and Let you put in the time that you have they understand that you've got other things going on This is an awesome way to build those skills, but do it in the time schedule that you have and to me the biggest thing about Going through and working in a volunteer organization is how rewarding it is you know being able to Work in something that I think is really a worthwhile cause and in our case it's saving lives That is really rewarding knowing that we're doing that knowing that I'm leaving the world a better place than I found it I feel that we're all members of a community and we have an obligation as a Community to leave the community better than when we found it So I'm going to give you an example of how Volunteering helped me a re-career So many years ago, let's see if I can get this I Hit the wrong button. There we go Met a young lady. We were dating. I didn't get to see her a lot because she was involved in theater So I started working backstage Learning how to run sound how to do lighting all those things Started doing those things and that led to me changing careers and spending ten years as an audio engineer so I did everything from television to corporate events to arena Shows one of the things they didn't know until I was driving up with Brian of this morning That if you see down here in the corner There's a backstage pass from Barbara Streisand's final tour Brian and I worked on the same show and never knew it. How about that? So that's that's kind of crazy So here's some ways that you can get experience That are unpaid We're here at scale right we all know about Open source projects There's a whole room full of people over in the convention center that would love to have help on their projects This is a great way To do work because it not only gives you the opportunity to look at other people's code, but Hiring managers get to see how it is you interact with other people they get to see the code You've actually committed they get to see how do you interact with the team to resolve issues? All those things are great ways that give you a real leg up over somebody that only has a resume to throw at them This is where Laurie got me last year so last year at very similar talk and My friend over here dragged me into it because she goes oh, I know Laurie we need to stay for this You know it's the Volunteer get involved the you know scale is the largest community run Open-source conference in North America and it's because of all the volunteers that come together and make it work You know and whether it's functioning as a speaker or I know my buddy Paul back there has been doing tech work for years There's all kinds of things that need to be done and it's great to give back to the community And that's after all why we're here at scale We want to learn more about it and the more people we meet the more Networking there is and it's more of an opportunity for us to realize you know Hey, I'm working on this and you know, she's looking for a job over here. Hey, have you talked to Laurie about this? It's an opportunity for us to network meet people and understand things about the industry in addition to just Getting the hands-on experience We could also have fun while we're getting experience My son was involved in cyber patrons. He went through there you go He went through he was a team captain led his team to Silver level for two years And he's actually put that on his resume. That's helped him get work People are impressed by that, but that's the kind of thing that we can do so whether it's going to a hackathon or competing in a Cyber security contest all those things are great to have Create a section on your resume so you can actually record What you've done what you've achieved and that'll be impressive to people Another thing it's important is finding a mentor It's important to have some guidance We often feel lost when we're in between jobs or starting or looking for mid-career going I don't know what I want to do next Having a mentor to talk to provide advice is a great way to learn not only the skills But learn kind of from a roadmap perspective how to lay out your career what you might want to do next Have a sounding board of experience that can can help you with that And if you're going to find a mentor one of the other things you can do is be a mentor Everybody in this room is Qualified to be a mentor to somebody else All of us have something to give to somebody else That wants to learn something that we know and this is a great opportunity To not only share that knowledge, but it's an opportunity for us To gain experience that we can put on our resume saying yes I've mentored three people you know that are Going through and wanted to learn more about software or wanted to learn more about cyber security or whatever it is This is a great opportunity for all of us to keep busy and Show that we know what we're doing and that we're willing to share and work with other people This is the one in Lori drag me into You know that if you go to meetings next you can speak at meetings now it doesn't have to be a meeting this big when Back in the early 2000s. I was working at a at a company was talking to a buddy of mine and We're saying gee it would be great to have like a reading group or something because you know It would be great to like go through and study with a bunch of people the the gang of fours Design patterns book well there weren't any book groups to do that So what David did is he reached out to the LA Java users group and said hey I'd like to start a group and He did and that group even though that David and I ended up leaving the group after a while that group went on for years So not only was he speaking and getting things going But it was an opportunity to create something that carried on and that he could be proud of He later it went on to become CTO of some publicly traded companies has had a great career so That that was pretty exciting for me as well And we have different social circles that we work in Whether it's our family whether it's people that we play sports with Different groups that we belong to our families All those things come together and we should be talking with people about here's what I want to do with my career How is your career going? What can I do to help you? Connections come in unexpected places Mike my son was talking to One of my wife's cousins and discovered that oh hey, it turns out the Steve is the CTO for AT&T My son's a computer science major What an amazing connection because they were talking about work and what they want to do So always be talking to people about what you're you want to do what your goals are and You know what it is that you'd like to do and how you can help those people Now I know We got all got into computers, so we didn't have to deal with people And it's not always comfortable for us So I'm not saying you know go to big meet-ups be uncomfortable or any of that But they're people that we deal with in ways that we are comfortable and just leverage those opportunities to learn more about what people can offer and What we can do for them and then another thing is that Often we're working and then we're not working and it's really important that in that time between jobs That we get busy Not just looking for another role, but how do we volunteer how do we fill that time to show You know that what was I doing? I was building skills. I was taking classes I was a volunteering and building my resume while I was in between those roles that's really a key thing for Putting together more experience showing everybody what we've done and how we're doing it and Then having a more presentable resume to go into that next role, so I've talked a bit about How to address the experience paradox Laurie's going to chat a little bit about how that additional experience fits into the overall raise me game plan and I'm going to hand her the Advance because I get the clicker to but it didn't work out that way I know that some of you are probably already thinking I want that consulting appointment So there are there are consultants out there just waiting to talk to you Let me introduce a little bit our raise me game plan how we recommend it raise me that People re-career or find their next career steps First of all here we go we have four steps we aim we build Reveal and we converge Okay, the first step is aiming where are you gonna go next if you are you you can tune out for a minute If you already know the next job that you want for those of you that don't we have some suggestions Okay, you need to pick a marketable skill set and by that we Raised me we recommend the the skills not just that will get you hired today But that will be useful for your employer in two years. So think ahead Also an appropriate role some people they want to re-career re-careering means you're making a change sometimes Two years ago when I was giving this a similar talk There was a woman that had a master's degree in fine arts and she wanted to be a system administrator She wasn't going to translate directly from the role that she had Was a leadership role working for a museum It wasn't going to translate directly to a leadership role in the technical in the IT world, right? She needed to start over at a more Junior positions so that she would have time to focus on her own skills before she was responsible for other people's output and the second thing to help you aim is to decide where you're going and If you already know the company you want to work for if you already have friends working in a certain place If you already have a direction then you don't need any advice But if you are trying to figure out where to go next here's what we recommend you do look for a strong industry and industry That's on the growth side And look for companies that are growing the reason you pick an industry that is That is growing is because then if the company you're working for runs into trouble or gets acquired Then you can go work for a competitor that's doing even better Okay, and the way I do this and And the way that consultants will show you to do this is we use Google we use LinkedIn we use the free resources out there to do our mining now remember that some of the places that are blogging this Information has something to sell you they want you to buy their stock or they want you to pay for their consulting services But every time you sit down and to work on your career to look for a job to look for a place to go to next to tune your resume Look around and see what the publications are saying about where the growth industries are and which companies are doing better It's the same as true for what skills to go to if you if you have time to take classes These are just random. I'm not recommending these are just from one random googling if You you know, you want you have time to pick up more skills You're not sure what to do next you're not on a project that says hey, we need someone that knows Julia then what you can do is go to the blogs and If you read enough sources Eventually what you see will start to resonate even though they're trying to sell you their classes and things They will all agree on something and that will help give you direction and this is kind of tiny But you know top of the list AI machine learning and and Docker Linux Java, this is not even an open-source site recommending these skills Okay, here's another thing You're doing exactly what people need to do to work on their careers whether you're looking for a role or not You're attending the largest open-source grassroots conference in North America. Here's sponsors these are companies that are doing so well they can afford to help pay for scale and They're here to talk to you and These companies have openings and they are looking for people with your skill sets who are fat passionate about open source You can't get a more targeted Experience than coming to scale and talking to exhibitors on the expo floor So raise me game plan the says so that's where you aim the second step is to build you need to build qualifications that will persuade a Potential employer with an opportunity that you're a good fit for their team And here's what our consultants will recommend you treat the in-between time like a job Jensen already mentioned this Okay, I even mentioned I even tell people to do to take Jensen's tips Make it a separate block on your resume just like it was another employment block give it a start and end date You know a little summary. This is hey, I learned I I learned I picked up AWS I learned, you know, I Managed to complete some certifications. I found it a meet-up group make it a whole separate block It gives you something to talk about just as if you were talking about a previous job Don't forget for your open-source projects Include those links on your resume. There's nothing that takes the risk out of hiring somebody more than Hiring manager being able to click on a link and seeing what your work looks like before they hire you and train you The third step in our game plan is to reveal all of those skills that you've either recently acquired Or that you found in your past that you want to talk about that make you qualified And this does not have to cost money and this is important when we're in between jobs And we're also cheap skates because you know, we're open source. So your new skills and experience need to go on your LinkedIn profile You can build your brand and social media. We're all on different social networks, right? Always always be kind of in mental promotion phase be sure to link to groups participating groups talk online And publish your work to open-source repositories So that people can search for it and find it with the right keywords The role you want also needs to be communicated, okay, not just what your skill sets are And in your link, there's a tagline that goes underneath your your name on your LinkedIn profile Be sure to keep that up to date looking for a role doing X in Y industry Another thing that is a really powerful tool is the elevator pitch The elevator pitch is this 32nd pitch that you would give to somebody that you stepped on an elevator with on the first floor and Only had until floor 10 to give them a complete picture of who you are and That you're looking for work what kind of job you're looking for and why you think you're qualified Practice this elevator pitch until it's natural until it's 30 seconds or less Until you're not until it's not an apology for you being out of work It's a very positive forward-looking message about yourself The last thing that that we have heard that people do and I have not had An attendee do this yet, but they say the 90-second video can be a very worthwhile experience It's not just creating a 90-second video Showcasing your work talking about what what kind of companies you'd like to work for next One thing it does is that helps you decide in your own mind what you want to do next It's not just to show other people but the most important tool of all for revealing your skills and your desire for a new opportunity is Your resume So your resume is important How many people have sent out the same resume to a whole bunch of companies? How well does that work how many how many do you send 10? 12, okay So what we recommend is that you use a targeted resume Now How many of you have tried to write a targeted resume? Good, how many found it a giant pain? There you go So what we found is that the painful part and certainly for me is the writer's block of I'm looking at a Job listing I'm trying to figure out. What do they do? What do I write? How do I do this and? So the challenge is how do I get this targeted resume? Well? Raise me figured out that instead of Struggling and writing it's a lot easier To delete things and we're going to talk about how you can do that so that you're not writing You're starting with a master resume and you're deleting the things that you don't need Where we start and building our master resume is? Just an original narrative. It's a brain dump about all the things that you've done in each particular job My colleagues from M gauge and cholera will recognize some of the things that that I did These are not things that necessarily going to go on the resume But it's just to get you to think about everything that you've done. I went all the way back to In my narrative to when I was mowing lawns as a kid To just get everything I've done because we're stuff that I'd forgotten. Oh, yeah, I did this Oh, yeah, I was worked as a dishwasher in a nursing facility when I was in high school Oh, yeah, I worked on this, you know, Wang micro computer when I was in college Going through all those things Kind of helps us look at not just the individual Skills that we have and the tasks that we performed But it also helps us identify, you know, kind of an is there an arc to our career Is there something that looks like we're heading toward is where we're heading toward where we want to go Those are all really good things to have so the next step after having this giant narrative is To go through this and create a master resume and The idea with the master resume is I'm taking each block And I'm putting down Everything that could go in a resume so and the focus on this is on our outcomes not on the activities if You're sending me as a hiring manager if I get a Resume and I get a lot of resumes that say oh well I read the specifications and I wrote code and I debugged Like I know that from your job title that doesn't tell me what you accomplished that think of it this way the difference between somebody saying hey over the summer I volunteered and I took a hammer and I pounded 17,542 nails it was awesome Great tells me about the activity of no idea what they did But if somebody says hey, I worked this summer and I helped build 20 homes with habitat for humanity For low-income housing That outcome that's a lot more meaningful So it's very easy for us to get caught up in the activities because the activities are often what What we think of and what we're focused on but I recommend taking a step back and Really looking at what's the outcome? What's the business value of what we did? What I always tell my team and I'm sure Nicole will attest to this as well to seem back there that Our job is not writing code if you're a developer Our job is not writing code Codes what we use our job is creating business value So understand what that business value is and make sure that that's what's recorded in the resume So as we're going through the master resume Again, I have in my master resume stuff listed all the way back to that first job mowing lawns, you know talking about how I had to deal with you know collecting the bills and invoicing and all that stuff I'm not going to include that but now I've got that master resume from that I Can create a target a resume and the way that I do that is I make a copy of my master resume I Look at the job description and then I just start deleting the things that aren't needed That is so much easier than the writer's block and figuring out What do I say because I already have everything laid out at the end? I've got all the bullet points and now all I really have to do is write that short summary on top So one of the things that we have now that we didn't have two years ago is That we can use something like chat GPT to help give us an idea of well, what kind of thing could I say? you can provide the Job description you can provide your resume and ask saying hey, what's a three sentence summary of why I'm a good fit for this? then you can take that rewrite it in your own words and You now have a very powerful way to have that Information that top section of your resume what you're targeting Why you want to be in that industry and why you're going to bring value to that role? cameras up Where are we going to find those job postings? Remember the job postings is going to be a list of bullet items that the hiring manager has said that you need to Satisfy in order to be qualified for the role You don't have to meet every requirement that they offer But the more you can address in your resume the stronger amount she'll sound like the more they will advocate for your hiring So here are the places to look open source job hub full disclosure They are a media sponsor this year. They're they're helping support. You're sitting here in this chair They we they're providing every exhibitor in the hall free job postings Be sure to check them out because you can go directly to the expo hall afterward and actually talk to the companies that have openings Okay, so I Just want to make sure that you all know how to use LinkedIn you the And then the search in the upper left you see the red oval. That's the search bar You can put other keywords on the search search bar in order to narrow Down the companies and the jobs that you're looking for if you just look for open source You'll find over 1,000 postings and you can narrow it down based on the kind of company or the kind of work situation or even The kind of scholarship you're looking for And our consultants will help you with this if you if you You can stop at Howard's desk on the way out and you can tell them I need to talk to somebody because I need help finding a role Also, you can set up Alerts using key with the same keywords that work for your search. So LinkedIn will go to you and say hey something new has come up So and this is our new job board sponsored by open source job hub.com So the last the Next section in our talk that I would like to address is the volunteer work connection How do you take your volunteer experience and translate that into an effective actionable way to enhance your career? There this is where the rubber meets the rope How am I doing on time? Okay, so that ties in with step four of the raise me game plan for Recreary and that is converging with a company or hiring manager on a potential opportunity that works for you Okay, and first of all Do your homework never talk to an employer or go into a job interview until you've looked at all of the standard sources online and Try to figure out what it's like to work for that company and what the role you're looking for is like to actually fulfill There all these are free Okay, LinkedIn is the gold standard for mining around but a Facebook group almost every big company has its own Facebook group It's very informal Blind is kind of special because only people that have corporate addresses at the company that you're targeting can actually answer your questions cameras up Also There is some programming that I would like to de-program right now in the United States. We have too much emphasis. We have us Just Horrible habit of measuring people by their success by how much money they make Your career is more than that our philosophy it raised me is salary is only one factor Okay, and when you emphasize salary too much in your next position You'll find that you're giving up other things that are that are very important to you so if you target a company and As you work with them you're finding they're not they're not your top salary offer or they're not Offering as much as you think that you wanted originally They may have other things that they can offer you but you need to know to ask for them Here's some creative ideas, but there are probably many more and as you work with our consultants You may come up with them just in real time when you're talking with them But obviously work from home schedule is a big thing If you're looking for if you'd prefer a role where you only have to go into the office once a week or once a month That's worth money Hey signing bonuses or something you can simply ask for especially if you're not working with a recruiter because often they'll have a recruiting budget and And it what doesn't necessarily have to be a per diem for relocating it can just be The argument that you can make is hey if I stay at my company until the end of December I get a $5,000 bonus they can match that Not every company can do this, but they won't do it if you don't ask Flex time training and certifications. There are companies that want to pay for your training They want you to get training you need to ask. What is your budget? How many people did you send to scale last year? so Three slides pay attention Integrate your work your volunteer work with your resume and your interview okay your resume is as Johnson said it's going to Address the job posting, but it also acts like a table of contents for your discussion with the hiring manager to HR Personnel everybody you're working with so be sure that your resume has every talking point in it Don't trust yourself. Well, I'll just bring up this great experience. I have at the Coast Guard auxiliary Running a division with a hundred people in it, right? Don't don't depend on your memory to do that put it in your resume and find a way to tie it in that the hiring manager Will will recognize that it fits the role that you're applying for And if you don't have any other ideas about how your volunteer work matches your next job And if and if you're working with a consultant afterward can't use this angle The reason I did this volunteer work is because it's what I wanted to do when I grew up so Jensen poor Jensen he attended scale for how many years? Since scale Nine scale nine. Okay. He sat in those seats until scale nine and then last year he attended a talk here and I told him I play with helicopters And now Jensen plays with helicopters. Yep, so It gives you something to talk about and you'll see see how people light up when they talk about something they're passionate about That doesn't directly. I don't imagine that you're ever gonna get a job working in the helicopter industry It's such an industry exists, but when he talks about The experience that he's getting in the Coast Guard auxiliary he can say the reason I did that is because I want to go Say lives I want to I want to support people that are getting rescue swimmer training with helicopters And that leads right into the rest of the discussion Okay Second slide on how to tie this in Emphasize what hiring managers are looking for in your vertical So you're gonna go on LinkedIn look up the people you're interviewing with connect with them You can actually Oftentimes find the person you're replacing the person that left you can see what they what their Certifications were where they went to college you can get a sense for what the hiring company was looking for When they ask you questions in the interview don't just answer Oh, yeah, I worked at so-and-so place for three years, or I was a I was a manager I had two people reporting to me Pitch it pitch it concisely but explain why your experience is Matches what you've seen on LinkedIn that that company is looking for Especially for leadership roles, so I don't know how many Mature people we have in the audience that are looking for roles, but when you get up into senior positions There aren't the skill set the technical skill set Becomes more interchangeable you might for ten years be an expert in programming in one language But then when you become a manager and you're running a team They might be using a different technology, but your experience as a lead training people mentoring people Managing schedules rollouts rollbacks in case of emergency dealing with customer support dealing with the higher-ups preparing your monthly reports all of those things those are very generic skills and You do all the same thing in your volunteer work if you work for an open-source project if you work for the Coast Guard Auxiliary those more senior roles offer training and experience. That's very generic You just need to find a way to say it that will resonate with the manager that you're speaking to so another thing that you can do with your volunteer work volunteer multiple different places use your different social spheres and Try to do try to find ways that your volunteer work creates a common theme use the same language Working on multiple projects in my case. I was always a leader so I would I would be a team lead in different in working for different organizations, okay, and that because Repetition is very persuasive When a hiring manager sees the same kind of theme on your resume in multiple places It convinces them that you are good for that whatever that particular skill or whatever that particular particular kind of Experiences that you're trying to promote in yourself. Okay. It's very persuasive So I want to get I'll give you one example real quick I Went to my first startup in the mid 90s 1996 was an ISP a fledgling ISP it was back when AOL stock was eight dollars a share and it was a crappy stock And we wanted to take on AOL. I worked for that company for eight years during the crazy calm boom Where you couldn't you couldn't make mistakes badly enough in production that you'd ever really net lose customers people were just thronging into the internet I started out as a senior system administrator, so we call them back then and Eventually because it was a startup. I became a lead. I became a senior lead And then eventually I had multiple teams working for me in a 24 by 7 environment and during that time I Met people at scale. I was sitting in one of these shares once and then they needed help with something and so I ended up volunteering and Then I ended up leading a team and I ended up recruiting volunteers and a lot of those skills that I use to recruit volunteers and run teams and Handle budgets and grow efforts and be successful and contribute to the larger organizational team a lot of that translated directly to my experience in industry and It happened for me at scale and it can happen for you in the organizations that you volunteer for So when I talk to people about my volunteer experience the next time I want a leadership role, I Can talk about I'm a second level. I've been a division vice commander And I've had through my volunteer work actual professional charm school training. These are things. These are selling points I didn't pay for any of this with anything except my labor and in my goodwill So I can highlight the progression and challenges that I've taken over the years So how many people have volunteered for more than one organization? Okay, did you do the exact of the same thing in both organizations? But was there something in common Did your work progress? So you started in one role, but you ended up with more and more responsibility Almost always if you don't smell bad, you're gonna end up running a team, right? Okay So cameras up John cyclic's not here. He's our he's our resident professor on the raise me team. This is his very favorite link for Helping for Translating volunteer work into an IT job. Oh But do I need to go back? Oh Okay, sorry too fast Just just so you know all every raise me talk I ever give Any talk that that you're gonna see in this room will probably have elements of other previous talks of Feedback we've gotten from attendees And and who have said what works for them and what doesn't people tend to fall us from tech event to tech event And they'll tell us oh hey this this thing you said I use this in an interview in an interview and and it really changed things So we we learn From you and we learn from all the people that volunteer and do the consulting work with us And so this is kind of a compendium of all of all the best stuff So these and other people are very responsible for the content in this talk Why the uniform today? That's a great question. Laurie so we're actually Operating under orders today from the Coast Guard of jewelry the you know asked us to come and talk to you specifically about Volunteering for the Coast Guard auxiliary not just volunteering in general We are involved in a number of things As Laurie said we get to play with helicopters. We go we get to go out Helicopter flies over drops a basket down to our boat We load a dummy into it That that's a crash dummy. It's not one of the other crew members And you know, but we also are involved in other things. There's a photo of me teaching a navigation class We do vessel safety examinations Laurie's involved where you know if you're out on the boat And call and channel 16 because you have an emergency it might be Laurie that you're talking to she's actually working with the active duty Coast Guard Responding to the radio So it's a very exciting Opportunity you want to tell them that they should be here and not calling you No worries Thank you, I'm sorry guys my phone got stuck go ahead Jensen So I was just saying you know, there's there's a lot of opportunities one of the things there's actually for the Coast Guard on Instagram Yesterday there was a post from the Coast Guard saying hey, we're looking for IT people So, you know another opportunity to volunteer get experience and do some things Okay. Yeah, that's how I got started actually They needed security people and I was a branch assistant for pen testing I joined the course guard auxiliary to do nerd stuff and I didn't even know how to tie my shoes and now I'm a boat crew So here's a question for you guys I get this text message out of the blue a couple days ago from my co-speaker here you know Since he met me he's been doing this uniform thing and then he sends me this text message saying hey There's this other volunteer work I do and they're looking for people I'm just wondering if you think if you guys think that that maybe I should take him up on this Apparently these folks are looking for help too. Is turnabout fair play? Maybe it is Okay, so so now that concludes our presentation. Yep. Yep Okay, all right, yeah You want one that we wanted to put to you It depends on and do we have our next speaker in the house Omar? Perfect. Yeah, so we have 10 minutes and I'll just I'll start the yeah I'll start the I'll start the questions. We just have to make sure that he gets set up so With that said Who's first for our speakers? Did you guys upload them scale always tries to do that as long as you give us the slides? Yeah, what we will Okay, so please people let me get over to you So we have a recording of your questions. If not, we'll try to remember to repeat them and I didn't do that Okay, who else right over there. Oh, I'm sorry Where will the recordings be posted Let's see They process the bigger talks first, you know the key the important talks But actually you'll you'll also find previous Open-source career day talks on our YouTube channel Southern California Linux expo from previous years Yeah, just yeah, please do because there are two things we have the videos So you have the presentation and we also separately have the slide deck. So yeah Sorry, the URL is YouTube comm slash at So Cal Linux expo Let's see. Who else do I have here we go? Okay, and people it's uncomfortable Let me hold the mic because that seems to be what scale prefers No, no, you're good. I knew you weren't going to kind of wander off on attention. Here we go Do you have any tips for balancing like a full-time job and a family and also volunteering? It's kind of a lot Lori wouldn't know anything But I think a big, you know part of this is depends on where you're volunteering so when my son was Was younger I was very involved and so I volunteered with scouting so With spending time with him my wife was happy to have us out of the house and doing stuff there So part of it is you can find ways of volunteering just be be creative and realize there are so many volunteer organizations out there what they our kids are involved with that are Spouses are involved in our partners. It's it's very easy and as I said with the time flexibility There are places that would be happy to have somebody just for an hour a week You know as often it's just going we need somebody technical that can help us with just you know Getting this data onto the website when we get the information every month Doesn't have to be necessarily a huge commitment So that's one of the beauties of this and then you know one of things volunteer organizations understand our life Circumstances change and so there's going to be times where you know We've got time available and other times we're gonna I'm gonna have to step back for a few months because and they'll be fine with that Works not so much that flexible Yes, hi, so a question on the hiring manager's perspective of Screen through applicants right we're seeing like hundreds of applicants on a different job postings for a tech I guess how do you guys process through some of the applications and what makes the cut one doesn't make the cut For being seen at all I Think to know a lot of what I'm looking for is Really looking at are you telling me the What you've accomplished right? I'm look you know because There are so many resumes that you know if you ever talks about their activities, they're all gonna look the same Oh, hey, I was using Linux and I was using this and I was writing in Python and I was doing this and that But when you're start talking about your accomplishments, I can see much more easily is this a fit or not and as Laurie said, you know What I really look for is you know Three things in a candidate, you know, are you smart? Can you get things done and are you not going to be a pain in the butt? And and those are really the three things that I'm looking for and if you can communicate that in your resume and You know and the one that's often missing is the Gets things done because if you're just listing what your tasks and not your accomplishments, that's really hard to tell So yeah No, yeah for some reason they did not give us a break between so essentially we're trying to multitask the handoff at high-speed, so Anyway, thank you for coming give another hand for our speakers, please. Thank you very much Check check one two one two check check Can you hear me? One two one two one two. Yeah Check check check check Okay, there we go. It's 11. It's time for us to get started So if you don't have a seat, please find a seat and welcome our speaker Omar Alva Speaking on from LA to Munich embracing global open-source career adventures Check check check. Can you guys hear me? Okay? Perfect. All right Okay, welcome. Thank you for being here Today the talk is gonna be My experience my personal experience Going from LA to Munich first things first Please understand that The views the comments the ideas that I'm gonna express right now today our mind They do not represent the opinions or policies of my current past or future employers, please this is just for to inspire you guys for educational purposes and Please do not consider it this one as a legal advice With that out of the way and we hit before we start Can I ask please raise your hand? How many of you are actively looking for a job? How many of you are just about to give up? All right, okay. Yeah perfect so The power of global exploration what happens when you don't have a job you have Your resume you are sending resumes all over the place and nothing happens Something I can tell you is and I think Laurie mentioned that one briefly There is something out there other than just LA or perhaps just California, right? When you guys embrace that global opportunity There will be doors Ready for you to be opened and with those doors will come different perspectives different technologies and different cultures is Normal trust me is normal to be afraid When it was my time and I had the chance To move to to Europe I Was scared at that time. I was going through my green card process And I had the opportunity to move to Europe and I didn't know what to do It's okay to be afraid But it's not Okay to be afraid for too long. I remember one night because I was thinking What to do should I move should I stay what to do? What I did is I took my car and I started driving the PCH all the way to Malibu Just to clear my head To really understand what to do next with my life as you guys can imagine Well, let me give you a little context background about myself I'm not from here. I'm from Mexico. I Came to the to the States. I've been here. I was here for over 12 years Working Going through my green card process and out of the sudden Live changes in and like a Europe is calling you Sorry, but what? Yeah, there's an opportunity for you to move to Europe But I'm in the middle of my freaking green Green card process something it took me 12 years to achieve and actually I remember Just driving In thinking am I really really gonna leave everything behind Everything that I know as of today Just for an opportunity over there and something I can tell you guys is The most difficult decision is always To make the to take the first step the first one just that little step Should I do it or not? That step it took me five months In my case was five months that day and night I was thinking I need to go to work Back to to to my apartment and thinking about But I'm going to do all right So I took my chances, but they don't come free there issues Unfortunately for some for most of the those issues there are solutions and this is something I want to tell you guys Transitioning from one location to another Is not that simple I already a couple times it brings problems one of them The language barrier cultural shock home sickness bureaucracy in tax related I'm I'm gonna describe a little bit more about each one of them so Moving from Mexico to the US the first challenge the language The second one Culture on shock. I knew a little bit the about the culture over here, but it's not the same And then even when it's kind of next door Homesake yeah bureaucracy Try going to the DMV to get your your driver license. You will understand is It took me one time. It took me eight hours. It Took me multiple times just to get my driver license Despite the fact that I have that I have my all my paperwork why because bureaucracy they were asking for more and more and more documents all right, but How can we overcome? those challenges One of the things that I can tell you is Let's just move to the next one So I decided to move To Germany I decided to take my chances First of all, I do not speak German whatsoever. I do not the companies that they I was interviewing with They were okay with me in English. Just the business language was and is English right everywhere So far what I've seen in one of the things I can tell you is you should embrace the new culture and that requires for you to adjust to adapt to Understand that you are not home anymore That things will work in a different way Right for people. They are not really from here that we came to this country We cannot understand that but for a lot of people the the the entire reality is this Sometimes it's complicated to say hey, you know what? I'm gonna go to a completely different place They understand they speak a different language and Don't take me wrong in Germany, I can talk to people in English and They will understand They speak very English than me, but of course I Feel in the need to talk to them in the same language out of respect right But there's a challenge The other one is The other thing that I've been doing is find the new friends when I came here I started to get to know people and some of the people are here in this room They turn to be my family my new family right When I moved to a different continent I Lost that I was my myself. I have my job and nothing else So one of the things I started doing is I needed to find new friends. I needed to connect to people That will really help me to understand more about the culture and not to feel lonely and Exactly the next one staying busy That's really really really important for me. Why? Because as I said you go you do your job and after that what is it? If you are by yourself at home, you have a lot of time To think about how lonely you are how far you are from home And what I did was I was working as long as I could and after that I had different activities So I was always always always busy All right, one of the things that it was helping me a lot is Even before I decided to move over there. I Was doing an intense research About Munich about Germany And even with that research and everything There were a couple of surprises once I got there and I'll tell you one one story. I Started working over there And I got my my first paycheck and I was like What's the first paycheck and like where is the rest of the money? Like and I went to my manager and say hey, this is not what we agree upon and he said what do you mean? This looks this one looks like half like No, no, that's correct. What do you mean? It's correct. It's almost half And he said well Do you take a look at your taxes? Oh It's 42 percent. Yeah, that is correct That's Germany for you guys They pay we paid 42 percent of your salary in taxes and Nobody told me even the freaking research that I did they didn't tell me once you get your first paycheck It's 42 percent. Oh We're like, okay. Okay. Thank you There are pros and cons There is a reason for that we'll explain a little bit I will explain a little bit more later, but Honestly doing a really intense Research ahead of time what it helps you to understand more or less what to expect especially in a completely new Country in the new continent. All right. Now. Let's talk about a little bit about myself How did I get there? How the hell a guy like me got into a place like Munich because of this guy? And I bet whatever you guys want that I could apply to any company anywhere on the planet and Because of this guy We can get in It's amazing the power of this guy It's just unbelievable whatever we have been able to achieve. Thanks to Linux. That's the reason why I'm here That's the reason why I was able to move to the States That's the reason why I've been able to move to Germany That's thank you. Thanks to to Linux Storbles I told him when the day I met him I Met him because my previous company gave me the opportunity to travel to conferences in one of those conference I met Linux Storbles and I told him thank you. Thanks to you. I have what I have Thanks to the community Because they are helping the the product to to keep going I always had mentors I Was lucky enough to have mentors and I always had had mentors in Mentors in Linux the open source community all the contributions They can open Amazing doors Sometimes the problem is we are so comfortable in a specific area that we don't want something else and Unfortunately, I see it in This last couple days that I've been talking to some of my friends They are struggling over here a little bit because The IT market is not the best right now Is it gonna come back to the numbers where we used to see I don't know But there are chances there are opportunities in different places guys And if you know Linux I'm telling you There is a company out there potentially outside of LA potentially outside of California potentially outside of the US potentially outside of This continent that's looking For someone like you and trust me. They are really really really happy. They will be extremely happy to have you It's amazing how Germany gave me the opportunity To work with them. I was I was at my desk one night My manager came to me and said Omar Grab yourself. Let's go Let's go They don't want somebody just there They take care of you They want to make sure that you are gonna last over there They the whole idea of you are not just another person over here. No, no, no, I want to know exactly who you are. I Want to understand exactly what What can we do to help you? I was there I arrived to Munich September 1st 2019 November 10 2019 my manager came to came to my desk and he said Omar The company wants to sponsor your citizenship Wait, I just got here just let me I mean, thank you first of all, thank you, but Let me just understand exactly how everything works. Just think about it think about it like wow I've been here only two months and somehow The company wants to keep me here not just in this company but in a freaking country like alright That's nice As I said, I have nothing against the the US at all. I love this place. That's why I'm here. I Love the US. I Spend a lot of my professional career here. I Learned about Linux here. I Met amazing people here. I Worked with PhD guys here. I worked with kernel developers here, but they are all their opportunities. I Took though that knowledge and I'm able to use it somewhere else In they are okay with me over there All right This one Laurie already told you guys about your resume how to build a strong resume. I'm not gonna get a lot of in details but something I can tell you is I've been trying to hire people In Germany and when I was here when I was here I Worked for small company called Dell computers and I was the team the team lead and I was Hiring people so I got a lot of resumes and I can tell you something I can I saw with those resumes is I Was just looking for specific keywords like okay, okay this one this one And at the moment I brought them to an interview. I realized that some of them they just put Buzzy words in the the resume and but they didn't have the experience and that for me was a no-no and immediately was Sorry next Sorry next so my piece of advice to you guys is if you're gonna put something in your resume It's because you really really know about that As simple as that The other thing is yes Mentioned over here. I mean these days Let's just forget the name chat GPT But AI in general use whatever AI solution you are you feel comfortable with and Build a really strong resume, right? Don't don't put too many things because what one of the things I also learned I also learned Hiring people is I immediately just take a look one page That's something one of my HR friend told me one page resume And put the most important things not every single thing they mentioned a targeted Resume in the previous session actually, I Didn't know this but in Germany No, you don't you should not just do that You need to add a letter Asking or telling a story about why do you want to join the company? I Didn't know that so I needed to come up with something to tell the company a could you please hire me? Also something that is I don't think it's too common around here when you get rejected You send an email saying thank you for your consideration over there Thank you for taking the time to review my profile or take a look at my resume and Thank you for whatever so even if you are rejected you should say thank you All right, so let's see You guys made the decision I'm gonna take my chances somewhere else you guys did the analysis and research about The place that you you want to go next and Now you have your your resume Already is AI up AI approved and you're just ready to break into the global IT You have one more thing. There is a huge advantage. It's a well-known Everywhere I go That the in the US the tech industry is really strong They that By the simple fact that you guys put it that you are guys are coming from the US is there You don't need to describe that. Oh, yeah, it's a there is a nice tech industry in in the US. It's already there Just by saying I'm coming from Silicon Beach Everybody knows about Silicon Valley, right? Got it, but also Silicon Beach is a thing and the proof of that It's all of you The tech industry over here is really strong So you guys can automatically use that one that opportunity. I'm not I'm not saying to to show off I'm not saying that I'm saying by the factor at the moment that you want to to put your resume somewhere else The fact that you are saying that you are coming from LA it helps Because they know the California is a is a really good place to find people with your skills. Okay now Negotiating and interviewing on a global scale. Oh boy, as I said when I did my interview I interview with three companies over there Three big big companies something I can tell you another piece of advice Be honest Be completely completely honest There is not a single company that is looking for a perfect guy There is no company that is looking for a perfect guy. I'm sorry. No, that's that's wrong What they're looking for what they the hiring managers want is somebody they can take and they is gonna grow with the company itself Somebody is able to adapt and grow with the company. Okay Be honest because in in my in my interview I Had different people from different departments and they were asking me questions and some of those questions I didn't know the answer Even over here when interview In my previous company, I didn't have all the answers. I say sorry. I don't know the answer to that one But if you give me time, I Will take a look research. I'll come back to you In that honesty is really really appreciated Transparency one of the things that I said from the very very beginning where I interview over there look To be completely clear, I don't speak German and the other thing is I Need a work visa to be here All right, just I'm gonna put it up here for you to to understand So it's there are no surprises for you. There are no surprises for me and actually We understood each other There I was bringing some set of skills that they were looking for and also they were looking for Somebody to take care of the Linux infrastructure at that time And guess what it was perfect because they said oh The work visa nor a problem German with English you are more than enough. It's perfect but Then is when I said and this is the next part and actually Laurie said it Questions This is very very very good advice. I ask can you guess? Help me to learn German I said absolutely They paid for my school and I said, um Guys. Yeah, but so I'm in Los Angeles So I Have a car Can I bring over here? Sure. They took my car They ship my car over there. They send people to my place To box everything to pack everything all myself and take it to Munich So the last couple days that I was here in NLA. I was sleeping on the floor with just one blanket Because the company took everything My car was already on the way to to Germany And in my pocket was only one-way ticket to Munich and again without knowing exactly what to expect. I Didn't I don't I still don't speak the language. I mean I understand a little bit more I Can go to a restaurant. I can go to I can go to the grocery shopping, but Establish a business conversation with somebody. Oh, no, no, no, no, no Immediately I will switch to English immediately. So Ask questions Ask questions and during this negotiation I Did this research about the living cost and I'm gonna tell you why the expectation for most people is I'm gonna get the same salary that I'm getting in California. Let's start with that If you go to places in Europe in Germany In Munich Please do not Expect the same salary Why and I'm gonna tell you why when I did my research How expensive is LA compared to Munich I found out that is Los Angeles is 20% more expensive than Munich And if you do your math right that has to be replicated in your salary. I Was able to negotiate a couple of things here and there why One of the things that also they don't tell you until you are over there most places they will pay for overtime over there my Business hours were from Whenever I wanted to start Until and I needed to work only 7.4 hours per day. I'm not allowed to work over the weekend It's not that I don't want to Which I did a couple times It's considered kind of illegal to work on Sundays and holidays over there I will tell you a story So I was really into I don't know in this zone and I was just doing a couple things and It was on a Friday Afternoon and the guy is like my manager from UK He's like, oh, yeah, we have this issue. Can you get it down? Can you fix it? Yeah? Yeah, well, it takes whatever it takes. All right, and he went on but on over the weekend It happened to be that there was an UK was a normal day Monday But in Germany was a holiday Monday But in Germany was a holiday. So I was working the weekend and Monday Being being being being there was an alert My manager came to me on Tuesday and said Because I put in a system we have a system You can put your hours That's how they track how many hours so they can pay overtime and so on and so forth And I put my hours. Oh, I on Sunday. I work this hours and on Monday I work this hours, okay On Monday early on Tuesday early Tuesday, my manager was on my desk and like a mark Did you work over the weekend? Yeah, I needed to fix a couple things. They told me to do it. No matter where it will take That information went to the to HR and it went to the working console We have a union and basically the union complained to HR complained to my manager and my manager complained to me Why did you work on Sunday? Why did you work on a holiday? Long story short guys. I needed to remove those entries from the system And I got a pile of cash and instead of that because basically It's illegal. It's completely legal to work on Sunday and month or or a holiday and Besides that they told me don't do it again. Oh, you will get fire. I was about to get fired For working over the weekend something over here. It's like normal. I Used to do over here and what like it's all right. It's okay And over there was I was getting in trouble because I was working over the weekend Well, like, okay, I understood And that brings me to the next topic, which is the the law Please if you pick a different country In a different continent, please take a look at the the labor law Because it's different absolutely different Again, I'm gonna give you the example about Germany if I want to quit My contract which is by the way is in German and English my contract will tell me well, guess what? You can quit But only at the end of Every single quarter And there is something called a termination period of three months three Over here what happens? You go to the office or sometimes you get online and you cannot access the slack or you don't have access to the email They're like what's going on? Oh, yeah, by the way You're fired over there is like It's extremely extremely difficult for a company to fire you over there very very very difficult They need to give you like a warning and Then a second warning and then a third warning and I think that the period of time between one warning and another one It's like six months something like that So maybe by the time they go to the third warning they already forgot what was the first one about so it's like three months so Now that he comes to the the next the next thing why three months? This termination period The companies use it for you To do a knowledge transfer to somebody else And everything that you have been working on to transfer to some to somebody else So everything is in place before you leave It's good and it is not My take on this Most people when they're ready at the at the time that they want to quit. They're already checked out Even before that but it's still because of this termination period They still need to be there for another three months most people what they do is Most of the time this three months they take vacation They take juice vacation and that's it. I'm done period Vacation is another thing by law in the I think at least in Germany. I cannot say the entire EU but in Germany I Have 33 business days Vacation per year Plus the company will give you five personal days Plus I have overtime one year two years ago I accumulated six weeks Vacation and I took them in one all at once 36 weeks I Cannot tell you how crazy it was for me to take six weeks All at once. I didn't know what to do anymore Seriously, I didn't know what to do But those are the kind of things that nobody will tell you guys Nobody will come and explain to you. Well, actually you guys already have that knowledge What you want is you want to use that knowledge, right? There are companies somewhere else. They're looking for that knowledge maybe It doesn't have to be LA and again, I Do miss the weather. I miss my friends. I Miss The American culture. I do not miss the traffic. I do not I Do not for the love of me You know, what are they called traffic over there five cars in front of you five Five cars, it's like, oh, there is traffic today like seriously They have Excellent public transportation. I don't need to use my car. I take my bike to work. I Take the train. I can take the train to visit my my family in Switzerland or in Spain And it's totally fine. It does work. It's safe. It's secure. It's on time. It's fine So Everything is a trade-off Everything what do I miss as I said before my friends and their the the weather is cold It is cold I'm not gonna lie. It's cold. Germany gets pretty cold, but I should not complain. My brother is in Canada No offense to the guys in Canada, but My brother is in Canada and gets really really cold over there No, but Scotia by the way, so it's it's freezing cold Over here over there we get to 2010 Fahrenheit My brother gets all the way to 30. So yeah, all right. So let's recap You took the first step. You said yes. I Want to do this You research you did your research you did your homework and said yes Europe is the one the next one and it doesn't have to be your by the way It can be Canada. It can be somewhere in Latin America and can be H8 can be it doesn't really matter the place doesn't matter What it matters is you're doing your research. You took the the the the first step and you you made a decision You polished your your resume your practice interviews. You have everything over there You found it a nice company. You got the the position All right The next challenge and now over here is when I give you a little bit more context As I said When I was in Mexico, I was working as a sysadmin System administrator over here. I was doing sysadmin straighter at Verizon and then I got a chance to To do performance engineering that's when I was working with the other kernel developers and Then from there I got the opportunity to do cloud at that time was AWS and All that I put in my resume Verizon paid for my I did a certification data science University of Washington When I was at Dell they paid for my master's degree. So Right now I Was the leading a team as I said when I was at Dell computers I Was the the team lead for the US team? We had people in Romania. We had people in India We have people in Mexico and we have people here in the US In Germany, I was leading a team of five guys from Germany And this is the next challenge Remember when I said about cultural challenges cultural shock. Well, the other challenge was for them To have a guy with a freaking and excuse my French, but a freaking American culture They have American mentality. Why is the mentality just work work work work work and for them like a Yes, but no slow down please You need to slow down Like but but we need to get it done. Yes, but I need to go this week I need to take care of my family. I need to go on vacation. I need to go skiing I need to I need to like wait, but what about this one? It can wait and That's something that you also need to understand over there Everything can wait Nothing happens people go on vacation for a month and nothing happens And you still have a job You still have a job you can have a nice family You can have a nice vacation you can have a nice salary and you do have a job so Right now Again, I understand the situation is not the best over here. Is it because we don't want Or because we just want to feel comfortable because we like what we know at the moment that you force yourself to expand To see new horizons To grow a little bit more is that is the moment when you will realize. Oh, actually LA is not the only place It's a very very nice place But it's not the only place. I cannot believe And please again guys forgive me for this one, but I cannot believe that there's not a single company Within California or within the US that is not looking for somebody like you if that's the case again if that's the case What happens if you send those resumes outside Outside of the US. I did it. I Got the job from here through LinkedIn in Germany and I went there. I flew over there to have a personal interview on site with three different companies But the time I came back I had three different contracts Each one of the companies that I interviewed with they sent me a contract Signed it They offered me a position over there With one interview again If I can do it sort of you Sometimes it's just It takes a little bit of effort just to take the first step To make that decision Again, I'm not telling you move to Germany. I'm telling you explore new horizons Expand it understand that this is just bigger than just LA or California Once you do that you will see Things in a different way if you are gonna change Culture the other piece of advice that I can give you from the bottom of my heart is Try to assimilate try to embrace the other culture is a little bit painful sometimes to see people I'm not saying you guys people they're coming from the States And they just want to show off like yeah, I'm here to roll Like no no no no no no hold on hold on Because the mentality is is I understand because I've been here, but okay Hold on there are a couple of things that you need to understand to be here Right and one of them is we are equal. We're all equal. It doesn't really matter the position if you understand That there is no capitalism over there. There is not They don't you don't have to get the latest of the latest iPhone or the latest of the latest laptop To be happy over there That you have less salary But more happiness More free time for you and your family Then is when you're starting to reconsider your choices like huh? When you understand that it might be cold, but all you require is that just an extra jacket or a bigger jacket Then you start to appreciate the season because the snow is nice So all it takes is a little bit sometimes a different mindset a little bit of adjustment if you can achieve that by all means I will encourage you to do it Just do it. Go ahead and conquer But there are whatever is waiting for you outside this place and with that I Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening Okay, we're gonna have time for questions But we are also gonna have to multitask here. So give us one second Is it okay All right, let's see and my indispensable Partner here will take the questions Any questions? One thing if you would please make sure that we have the mic so that the recording has your questions so that we can make sure that the It's maximally useful to people So and you know you can raise your hand to make sure that we can efficiently make try to make sure everybody gets to ask Anybody so if there are no questions still I'm gonna be over there on one of the tables if you guys have questions Yes, I Don't know if you already answered this but my quest I have two questions one was what was the hardest thing about your transition to working in Germany What was the most challenging thing for you? The biggest challenge for me was to understand that I'm not Longer in sunny, California That has been the the biggest challenge for me Other than that the people have been nothing but nice to me even when I was here consider that I as I mentioned it before I came here with a work visa and I what I made it all the way to green card and then over there I started started with a simple Passport and now I'm going through my blue card, which is the equivalent of work visa and people are just nice to me is That's it, but yeah the weather and and then what is your most favorite thing about being there? Okay, I'm gonna be Completely honest One of the things I really really appreciate is how How you can encounter? Multiple cultures in one small area. Europe is tiny. It's tiny is almost the size of Mexico Europe the entire continent of Europe is almost the size of Mexico in Even with that you in you can find a lot of people in the people I talked to They don't speak just English or German. They speak four or five different languages Because they have to communicate with the neighbors And I mean no disrespect, but most of the people that I talked to here is Yeah, English got it hands down English But what else so I really really really enjoyed the opportunity to talk to people in English And I'm from time to time like a teach me a little bit in Italian teach me The the my friends that I played soccer with they are from Italy most of them. They are from Italy My friends I have I have family in Switzerland. So they have Swiss German So it just that interaction with other cultures is just mind-blowing That's it All right, anything else? Yes What was your what's triggers you travel to Europe and what was triggering your decision to to stay there and find a job All right, I mean maybe you stole it, but maybe it's like some homies. No worries. It's all good Yeah, I like to travel even before moving to Europe. I used to travel to win in Europe Asia and so on and so forth The decision for me to Try to get a job in Germany is because I met somebody I Made a person my girlfriend is from Germany and I told her Move to to LA come with me and she's like Come on and at that point I was a little bit arrogant and like oh come on It's LA come on is the US and she was like and she told me Spend one Christmas with us Just come to to Germany and spend one Christmas with us and after that just leave the experience You make a decision long story short. I've been there almost five years Yeah All right, I think we ran out of time, but thank you so much you guys. Thank you All right. Thank you everybody for coming for that great talk in about Seven minutes we'll have our next talk What happened here? Okay, we'll have that set up and so please stick around for Where did it go looks it looks like it got backed out, but I think this is your presentation right here You know what I don't like Did something a little weird here, and I don't understand why it's doing what it's doing Hello everybody I Have a very important question. I need to Take a survey here and this could this could move mountains Okay, in a hundred thousand years like this could be a butterfly effect My wife said you should wear a professional looking shirt white shirt button down Just look nice and clean talk about being a manager And then she threw me off my game because I'm headed out the door and she's like wait wait wait wait Maybe you should just be yourself and and she said she said maybe you could wear old blue So I figured I'd leave it up to you all We have this wonderful blue so by way of just applause or a little noise or whatever We're gonna vote if you would like me to just go with the stuffy white button-down shirt by way of applause Option a who would prefer option a Okay option B if you think it would look kind of sweet if I very briefly ducked into my Hawaiian shirt here and Put on old blue by way of applause who would be up for option B? Fantastic. All right, by the way, I want to give a very warm Thank you to this gentleman here Dustin Lawrence I am legally blind and there was a little bit of a miscommunication I can't really use laptops and so there was no device waiting for me and bumped into him yesterday in this room He spent an hour plus with me troubleshooting and we're ready to rock So please give a warm round of applause for Dustin He rocked it. I'm gonna turn I'm gonna turn the mic over to him He can do a little intro and I'm gonna go make myself look good I think the vote was very clear probably based on the idea that we are pretty sure We'd like to have a manager who's cool enough to wear Hawaiian in the office. I Worked for a while at a place that started playing with Hawaii Hawaiian Friday and They ended it before I had the chance to try my ultimate Friday Telecon outfit. I bought I did extensive research to purchase the worst Hawaiian shirt that ever existed and Each telecon I would add a piece of that But I never got to the parasol hat, which I still own and I'm lying in wait to use Yes, part of what you're seeing is that someone decided That we should have insta in this room instead of 15 minutes between the end of questions The next speaker so we can get them all set up someone decided we didn't need any time But we parallelized thanks to them sending me a Partner Sure Excellent This guy bounces around a little bit. So let me know if I fade out. I want to do the recording justice All right, and so we can get started I Give you our next speaker Larry give him a big round of applause and we're ready to go Excellent All right big important question today. Yes. Is this falling? Looking weird. All right, cool Fantastic and the sound is great. I'm just gonna try and not pull it off too much Thank you so much for showing up to my talk here. This is a this is a big important question for your careers Even in fact the gentleman Casey over over there last night. He and I were even chatting I think he reminded me that one of the reasons sometimes people become managers because no one else would step up to do it So we will talk about all sorts of good stuff the framework for making the decisions first I want to cover a quick piece of logistics. I am legally blind. So if Like say Taylor Swift comes in make sure I won't see that. So make sure like you get her autograph for me Ask ask her if she needs a guitarist But seriously, I may not see you raise your hand You can interrupt me with any questions anything you want to ask if you want clarification If you want to tell me my mic slipping and I'm not coming through so let's let's get rocking on this Yes Well, if you want to ask question, I will I will be his eyes. So everything should work smoothly and my goal is to If you could all help help a blind guy out and just kind of keep an eye on the clock I would love to leave a minimum of 15 minutes for Q&A, which is 35 minutes past the hour This usually generates a lot of good a lot of good back and forth So I may call out to Dustin or you guys for a quick time check And if you could just let me know what time it is and I'm trying to go by my phone here, too Okay, let's talk about a few terms here I did not realize that some people don't know what I see means I see stands for individual contributor if you are Working in a capacity such that you have no direct reports. You're an IC Sometimes people like to think of it as the leaf nodes on the tree. I'm not a big fan of it But if that helps you out there you go Contrary to that for the purposes of this talk We're gonna use the terms engineering manager or people manager or manager interchangeably This is the other side of the coin. This is if you do have one or more people Officially reporting to you on paper in the org chart officially is kind of important there Because that's not to be confused with tech lead. Many of you have worked with tech leads or you've been tech leads Tech leads tech leads are involved with leadership of the team somewhat they tend to focus on technical direction Vision they will often work with the people manager of the team I can tell you I love my tech leads and I work extensively with them. They're involved in perf reviews to some extent I get their insight their input. I bounce my ideas past them. So tech leads are a wonderful group of folks Kind of randomly inserted here, but I use it several times in the presentation I want you to be aware of what the term Intern program means a lot of companies like to recruit new talent They like to go to colleges. They'll often have a campus recruiting program the intern program at your company is simply Usually sponsored and run by HR and it's a way of bringing college talent a lot of times They haven't graduated yet to work at your company as a trial experience You all know what interns are the intern program is what HR sets up to get this continuous pipeline of folks Into the company as interns and hopefully if they're young bright talent and they like your shop. They choose to work there full-time Okay, should you become a people manager big question of this talk the whole reason you are here I Thought a lot about this and we are going to apply what it is known as the MMO framework. I Cannot tell you how much I wish I was about to talk about Eve online or World of Warcraft. I love me some MMOs, and I think a lot of you do too. We are not talking about MMOs, unfortunately We are talking about something you have all heard of though Motive means opportunity This does not mean we are going to solve some crimes Yet growth mindset We are going to answer the question should we become a manager So in this framework the talk we're going to do now is basically broken up into three sections Motive is the root of the word motivation Do you have the right reasons? I also feel is the most important category So we're going to lead off with this and I'm going to walk you through Some possible internal conversations you've had with yourself or you could have with yourself Means this is the meat of the talk. It goes last. This is do you have the skills and the traits? Are you cut out for it? Opportunity when you hear the word opportunity in the sense of career and job hunting you think is there an opening Is there a job a recruiter calls you cold calls you on the phone? What's the first thing they say? I have an amazing opportunity for you We're actually talking about something different in this Opportunity is going to be an objective set of circumstances and a lot of yes or no questions My wife will tell you I am a very Black and white zeros and ones binary thinker So I have I will give you a series of yes or no questions that will tell you if you have a good environment in circumstances to become a people manager So let's get started right away on motive. Let me check my time. Okay, cool. We're doing great Why is always the most important question and if any of you? Now or in the future are thinking about becoming a manager I want you to have a conversation with yourselves find someplace quiet maybe go on a trip for a day I actually look at myself in the mirror and just kind of have a silent conversation or I picture a friend's voice or my Dad's voice in my head my mom's voice What would they what would they say about what I'm thinking? It is surprisingly easy as human beings To delude ourselves. So let's go through. I want to go through here a lot of the common reasons Why we might want to become managers and this is a quick list of bullet points Find a spouse find a good friend a parent someone you really trust my wife Amanda is absolutely phenomenal For calling me on my BS like I'll tell her like I want to do this and here's the reason I want to do it and She's a scientist and a project manager So she's amazing with the logic and she will blow my logic out of the water in a loving way in a very supportive way I love when she tells me I'm wrong. It's it's fantastic Bonus points when you talk to this confidant if they Have been a manager before I have good friends. Their names are Jason and Steve and hopefully they'll see this talk They've been a big influence and a big help because they have tried Trudden whatever the word is they have gone the path before me. So they're a big help and Then do your homework read books read blogs There's an amazing amount of leadership books out there and you don't even need to read it for the how to do it just Read it for the stories read it for the oh is this something I would enjoy It's it's I did a lot of that before I became a people manager and it kind of turned me on to it So let's go through some common reasons. I have ranked these In a certain order you will soon see the order I'm gonna offer an opinion and the blind guy likes his color. So you're gonna see little colored numbers on the screen I would all like you to raise your hand if you think it is a fantastic idea to become a people manager if You would like to make more money Raise your hand if you believe that is true Okay, that is fair that is very fair and it's a trick question Now what you're about to see for the next 10 minutes or so of these slides is my opinion. I Have been wrong many times in my life usually several times a day. I Want you to be careful on this one and I rated a oh, yeah, blind guy sees a minus there So that's a minus 10 out of 10. I want to talk really briefly about this and this is a very important It's something you need to get in touch with yourself if you become a people manager and in general. It's a good idea Compensation is what is called an extrinsic Motivator it's the external carrot out in the world that you are chasing after There is this phenomenal book that I mentioned in the last bullet point called drive the surprising truth about what motivates us if you are Partially motivated by compensation and who isn't I am everyone to you know you got up you got a parent I had a great report. His name was Darren. He reported me to be Shopify and he had this great phase. He's like Larry Titles great and all but title doesn't pay a mortgage like amen. That is the truth It's the reason you don't want compensation To be your primary motivator in such an important career change is it will not Carry you that is one of the points covered in this book drive Extrinsic motivators are almost like a hit of dopamine or a drug that has a very temporary Effect and you know what happens what what happens? We've all heard these these awful stories of addiction and downfalls and you see it in celebrities and musicians all the time What happens the drug wears off? You need more of it And so what this book talks about is if you are constantly chasing after those extrinsic motivators The satisfaction that it gives you when you finally get it wears off So please I am begging you from the bottom of my heart more salary is okay But there are actually going to be other ways to get it while staying in Icy and doing what you love You check my time real quick here. Okay More control over your work. This is also not a good one And it's kind of an amusing reason why when you become a people manager You become of service to others the primary way in which you operate is through your calendar Your time becomes everyone else's and you will have less control over the day-to-day work of what you do You will get some stuff done I carve out some quiet time both the beginning and the end of the day and I can be productive But really when you're a people manager, you are now of service to others So I would not recommend this is a good reason to get more control over your work This next one I want to cover quickly because it's complex and if any of you want to talk about this over beers Let's like let's do it. I Also hear the reason well. I want more control over. Oh, you know what? I'm sorry blind guy. I accidentally I Moved on I moved on subject matter, but there's one more thing I want to say if you want more control over your own work if you were like me you tend to be an uber helper You hear of a team that needs help you know you can do the work you want to do the work and so you say I will help you out and One diff becomes several diffs becomes Oh now you're helping out with the operations and you do this eight nine ten times and all of the sudden in a given week You have no control over your own destiny Because you have made all of these prior commit commitments and obligations out of wanting to be helpful So if you are thinking about becoming a people manager because you feel like you have no control And everything's coming at you and you really just want to organize things first of all you got to make sure okay Have you over committed yourself? The other three bullet points here real quick talk to your manager Ask yourself. Are they a micromanager? Are they not giving you the control you want? Do you need to switch teams? Sometimes it's a company-wide culture sometimes companies are just factories and they chew people up and they burn them out So you just got to step back look around your environment and say why am I not getting the control? I want but becoming a people manager will not give you that control all right. Here's the one Or I'll have beers with you because it's a complex topic. I Will hear people say I am frustrated with the work going on around me or what's going on Really this is something they haven't they usually miss articulate to themselves and in general they're just frustrated Here's a few bullet points of what they might be frustrated about the capacity of their team the direction of the team the vision of their team Really whenever I've had a conversation about this topic I'll be honest 75% of the time what is actually going on is they just need someone to vent to about how much their job sucks That's that's really what a lot of this comes down to so You can see my numeric range here minus seven to plus two it peaks out at plus two So this is not a great reason and please reach out to me after this talk I'll have my contact info if if this is one of your motivations. I can help you suss out some potential different reasons Okay Try something new I Thought about ten minutes silently in my chair of where I wanted to rate this I knew was an important one to bring up and I rated it fairly low and here's why It comes from a piece of great advice. My mom gave me growing up and it's stuck with me She said in life changes in evitable. It's changes gonna happen So a lot of times if you're lucky you're in control of some of that change And she said when you are making a change you have to ask yourself a fundamental question Are you running towards something or are you running away from something and If you were like me a lot of times and this is human desire my sister explained this to me because she's an expert on the mind and willpower Human beings get bored on long-term things every four to five years It is actually instinctual for us to crave something entirely different professionally So all I'm gonna warn you is if you're thinking I'd like to try something new Make sure it's not because you're bored Make sure it's not because you tend to hop from thing to thing because people management involves the custodian of other people's Careers and livelihood so makes so I'm not a huge fan of oh I want to try something new because a lot of times people are just bad just because that's it's a variation of that reason However, here's a good variation And sorry one one final point if you do want to become a people manager to try something new I do recommend making use of your company's intern program and we'll get more onto that in the opportunity section See how I'm doing on time here. You're curious that is a healthier version of you want to try something new You're intellectually stimulated and you say ha that seems interesting. I might want to try that so being curious That's that's a good reason and I think all of us in our technical roles curiosity has served us well That's when I did my most most learning It's when I figured out what I wanted to help people with what I wanted to do curiosity is generally a great thing Have more impact look at these ratings. We're getting up there. I like this one seven out of ten having more impact is a great thing I want to give you one caveat If you talk to your manager you talk to maybe your manager's peers You talk to the teams you work with a lot of times you can actually have more impact by Collaborating with other teams identifying bigger projects that you can be a part of a lot of times You don't have to become a people manager to have more impact around you So if you trust your manager talk to him about and just say hey, I'd like to come up with ways I can have more impact and Hopefully if one of my reports has that conversation with me It's because I dropped the ball because usually I'm looking for ways for my folks to have more impact like oh Hey, he's been cranking on some obscure firewall thing and this other team really needs help with that like let's put him with Them for a week things like that I threw this in yellow because it's important again. You got to be honest with yourself Do not mix up you want to have more impact with you want more applause You want more people to think you're awesome. That's slightly different motivation Impact is about affecting positive change in the people and the work around you. That's what I want you to remember a Couple more reasons. I like this one develop new skills You just need to remember That becoming a people manager is a whole new class of skills. I Hate to use this term, but it is relevant. It's an emotional intelligence thing If you've ever gone to the gym and done a certain exercise that you haven't done in a long time You'll feel like you've worked out muscles that you didn't know you had Every day for probably the first three to four months if not six months or longer Every day in people management was like that. I would be exhausted by the end of the day and I'd be like Why am I so exhausted? I sat at my desk. I went for a walk. I got some water. It was the Nature of the conversations and it wasn't bad. It was just a lot is writing on the line You know, you could have two conversations with two of your reports who feel they're not getting paid as much as they should and when you look at it You're like, yeah They should be getting paid more and you might have your hands tied You might not be able to get them a raise or a comp adjustment for six months That takes a toll and to deal with that and get through those types of types of conversations You're gonna have to develop some new skills, but developing new skills is a great reason to become a new people manager This is a good example. It was just a random one imagine a world-class Olympic athlete decides. Okay. I want to become a politician Sure, they might be able to do it. Sure. They were a great athlete, but being a phenomenal IC Especially in the technical genre may or may not translate to be being a phenomenal people manager and that's okay Not everyone's cut out to do it This is my favorite one Ten out of ten. Help people be more successful. Just help the people around you make the world a better place Again, this is my opinion, but I think this is the most important reason and a great motivation to become a people manager Okay, I'm gonna start needing to speed up because I want to make sure and get through all this content on time and leave time for Q&A. Let's move on to the second part of this framework opportunity This is the objective part. This is this is where you look around And say is this a healthy environment to become a people manager? Here's my analogy Imagine you decide you want to become an Olympic diver. You want to go on to the Olympic team. Is that gonna take a lot of work? Yes, do you need to start practicing now? Yes, okay? The only environment you have access to at the moment is an empty Concrete pool with a high dive board Yes, or no, do you have an environment conducive to becoming an Olympic diver? And I would argue You have One opportunity you can jump off that diving board and execute the most perfect dive once So I'm gonna give you some yes or no questions to look around and say hey Is this the company that this is the is this the place in the time to do it? Here's some rigor-marole. Basically, I'm saying it's the objective set of Circumstances around you that are you say do I have this is there that is there that? Okay, I've got the ingredients this could work out Okay, step one. I've said it several times best thing you can do participate in your company's internship program I will let you kind of read through these reasons why but I'll summarize it real quick I already did it's when your HR department basically says we want to get some talent in here We want to be young talent. Let's hit the colleges. Let's hit the universities and your manager may tap you on the shoulder Or your director may tap you on the shoulder and say hey Would you please help out? Even if you think they're just trying to offload some work You should do it for all of these reasons in particular the one in green it genuinely gives you a low risk way of Getting a sense of what it's like to be responsible for others You might make friends for life. You'll develop the mentoring and coaching skills It's really a good first step if your company offers it Be very careful Some interns are fantastic. They are low overhead You know from the second you meet them. They're future rock stars and maybe you have two or three interns And each of those interns maybe takes a half an hour a week or you do a little bit of paired programming Let's say an hour a week So you begin thinking to yourself this people management stuff is cake and it is low overhead. I Could have seven people reporting to me and they'll only take an hour a week sweet I've got 33 hours and a typical work week left for tech work. I am gonna do people management No, no, no It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of time. So just a quick word of advice Don't extrapolate the time Lack of intensiveness with interns with okay I'll have plenty of time to split my career between people managing and I see technical work Let's see and again as I said before if you get asked to do it that is an honor your management train trust you your peers trust You if you get asked to hey, will you please take these interns for the summer for us? Just do it even if you're not thinking about becoming a people manager. It's a very rewarding experience Okay, step two. This is an important one folks does your company offer separate technical and management development tracks and Kind of an opinion alert coming up here, but if not In my opinion, you are most likely not in a healthy environment to become a people manager in my experience You won't be well supported. You certainly will not be able to make the decision reversible and the argument goes like this managers rank above I seats HR will almost always consider it a promotion that comes along with a little bit more salary. Yay. You get more money You're a manager. Oh No, you don't like it. You'd like to go back to being an IC Well going back to an IC is a different salary band. It's lower. So HR says well we'd have to give you less money and That would be a demotion and a demotion is just a lawsuit waiting to happen. Yeah No, yeah, we can't really go back to being an IC So be very careful if you work at a company where there's no track and at some point you have to become a manager Just I would I would advise against it Let's see again these type of companies tend to make the assumption. You were a great IC Therefore you will make a great manager. Sometimes that's true. Sometimes it's not I think you all can come up with an example in your career where you met someone who went from IC became a manager Wasn't necessarily the best manager you could have hoped for Okay, and again, it's a culture thing worker bees on the bottom managers up top just not a healthy environment Step three make a reversible. This is a big mantra for us in tech and infrastructure and coding make it reversible You want to go and you want to talk to HR and you want to grill HR for answers and I've seen this so I'm not making this up Oops, sorry. Let's go back You'll run into a catch 22 and HR departments all over the world don't realize they've created it and it works like this They want lateral movement. They were like sure you can try out people management. Yes. Let's talk to your manager Let's find a spot. Let's let's get it happening and What they forget is they've also instantiated this rule that says oh For a role change We don't want low performers just topping from one team to another messing things up so In order to do a rule change you need to have positive performance for one review cycle or two review cycles This is a catch 22 the whole reason you are trying out people management is to see if you're any good at it And if it doesn't work out for you Well, if you're going by HR rule, hey, I you know, I'm not doing performance wise too great here And they well it doesn't matter you got to have high perf to get back So you want to see if you're good at something and the rule says well You have to be good at it if you want to stop doing it. So it is catch 22. You got to watch out for those situations We talked about the second bullet point a little bit already Step 4 talk to your manager if you have a supportive manager I would love to hear from my reports that they were thinking about it someday Every single one of my reports throughout my management career was a great I see and they loved doing it So I didn't have to have many of these conversations, but if you do are thinking about this talk to your manager and Use words like someday like don't drop this on him at the zero hour because if you're a good contributor as an IC They won't want to lose you Even if you trust them observe how they react when you say hey I was kind of playing around with the idea of someday becoming a people manager. Do they squirm is uh The first word out of their mouth. You want to get a sense of if they're gonna Help you in your career. I hope you have a manager that wants to be excited about this and help you develop in your career But give them to give them plenty of heads up And like I said a good manager will support you I would love to talk about my folks that that want to become managers someday All right, this is straightforward find an opening ideally you want it to be where you work because hopefully you've built up some good Will some social capital You know if you've become a great IC people will be rooting for you There's nothing like the feeling of trying something new you haven't done before that and having your peers root for you That is really a good feeling You can look in all the usual places check your internal job boards if your manager is helping you out He may have heard of something that's available a lot of times There may be a sister team or a sibling team where they do similar work and their manager Whatever needs to cut out permanently or maybe he's going on leave. There's a lot of opportunities if you just if you look they're out there Okay, I'm gonna fire off these bullet points. I'll let you read them as I kind of talk about them Good handoff good handoff is being about a good citizen to the end So if you've got projects you need to finish them you need to kill them or you need to hand them off You need to work with your manager be willing to hire your replacement be willing to interview or your replacement at one point in my career I conducted nine interviews with my I was the tech lead with my people manager And I was moving on and this wasn't even into a manager position and we did a lot of interviewing to find the right Personality so just be willing to help in the transition and understand We may be chomping at the bit to try the new gig, but it can take weeks or even months So just be patient and do everything you can to help your manager out All right, what are we doing on time check? Oh, yeah, I got to get moving here Step seven go for it. The main thing I would say is if you become a people manager You want to give it an absolute minimum six months preferably nine to twelve and it relates to the third bullet point If your company does perf reviews you really want to get yourself You want to experience a full performance review cycle from the beginning all the way through Doing the writings doing the feedbacks collecting the feedbacks assigning ratings Hopefully you get to have some great conversations salary bumps promotions I'd say my single favorite thing doing is a people manager is promoting my folks and showing them off Even if it means sending them to another team like again, it goes back to just help people be successful Okay, lastly, let's talk about means. This is do you have the skills? Do you have the attributes? I set this next little effect for fading and I made it yellow because it's kind of ominous and it's important Are you cut out for this? I'm gonna try and give you a little taste and tell you about the traits that in my opinion are Quintessential to survival as a people manager. I have a working title I have three chapters of a book written, but it's got a bad word in the title So if you all want to know the title of the book, I'm working on come find me afterwards. It's it's a good one Okay This right here could be three books and it could be five hours at to talk So what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna tap my keyboard over and over and I want you to watch the words that come up on the screen This is just a sampling of the types of things you might do on a random day when you are a full-blown people manager Oh Look at all that stuff. Oh, there's salary salary is good. Oh Personal issues documentation. Everyone loves documentation. Whoa, wait, didn't we already talk about meetings? Wait, is that double vision? Nope, there's more meetings. Oh what therapy? What is going on there? I therapy Well one-on-ones. Yeah, it makes sense perf review. Wow rigors. Oh, that's always fun. Oh, I forgot about meetings So if you like variety, yeah True story. I set a stopwatch. I was sitting in a text file in Emax because I'm old school I set a stopwatch and I said, okay, I need to come up with a full slide of this stuff and It took me 27 seconds to list all this stuff and I'm like, okay, I got a stop This will fill up a slide you give me five more minutes. I could give you a hundred more items People management, you never know what's in store for you. If you want to hear crazy stories go to HR They have fantastic war stories It's something new every day and it's it's very rewarding I'll talk about a little bit of these But most importantly what we want to move on to is the attributes I think you need as opposed to hey, what's it like to be a manager if you want to know what it's like You want to hear the day-to-day? Come find me come zoom meeting Google meeting. I'll talk about this stuff all day long We're gonna talk about the attributes. I think you need This is the most important you have to want others to be more successful You put their success above yours. This is my opinion you talk to a hundred managers They'll give you a hundred different explanations of like. Oh, what do you need to be a successful manager? This I believe is I love correlation Regardless of what other traits you possess I believe if you have this attribute You are very likely to become a phenomenal people manager. You will figure out how to build the rest of what you need Conversely, I feel that if you do not have this attribute or you're not truly willing to put the success of others above your own You will not likely make a good people manager Especially the people that report in through you as you make your way through your career You may have an entire org. I hope this isn't a condescending analogy But I always look at my org as my flock the people I protect I look out for their careers I look out for their skills development, you know I made a decision did this help everyone become more successful if it didn't why did I make the decision if they're Successful you're successful if they failed you fail cut and dry that is it Your number one attribute for being a people manager putting everyone's success above your own And if you were at a good company and you put everyone else's success above your own Good things will happen to you the universe. I'm not a touchy-feely guy But I will tell you the universe does reward good karma if you are helping the others around you to be successful And that's not just true for people managers. That's true for us. I see that's that's everyone in that everyone that qualifies Okay, folks, this is important Long time ago. I was on the phone with my sister because I thought I was a weirdo and I said hey Jay Her name is Joni. I'm like Joni. I Was at this party and I liked talking to people and then there's a really weird thing and it happens to all these parties after about an hour I am Exhausted and this weird Switch in my brain goes off and I have to get myself Outside away from people or I'm gonna explode and I just need quiet and I just need to not talk And she said the best phrase that any human being Can say to another human being she said Oh No crap. Holy kill. Yeah, that happens to me all the time. I thought I was the only one. It was fantastic And here's where this applies to us a lot of technical folks myself included our introverts In modern psychology and introvert it used to be back in the day an introvert meant you don't like being around other people You know heads down hang out in your cave watch your TV play your games write your code Extrovert meant you want to be the party you're in sales right 30 years when I was growing up in the 80s extroverts were in sales Modern psychology has a much better definition And I want you all to be aware of it because it affects you may think you're not cut out to be a people managing you actually are It was determined that introversion Simply means that when you interact with people that depletes your energy you could love it But it depletes your energy and at some point you just got to kick out peace out and and get a break And I'm I'm like that my kids could tell you like that dad needs a few minutes a day of his quiet time in the basement So understand you can be an introvert you can Be a successful people manager while being an introvert But what you need to do folks is you need to be willing to have Frequent interactions if you need to cut out and and get a few minutes to collect your thoughts That's totally fine But if you like working in a silo if you like being alone with your thoughts if you like solving hard problems for days on end like I used to People manager probably not the best route at this time and in the future your approach could change This is a big if if there were ever managers that I did not enjoy working for This is one of the big culprits folks You got to be able to you've got to be willing to relinquish control It's good if you try to micromanage you're gonna create resentment You've got to you've got to take every opportunity to show your reports that you trust them So be prepared to let go of the control you owe it to the folks around you You don't want to micromanage a good buddy of mine Steve gave me a great little Nugget of wisdom and he said Larry I think our job as managers is no longer to have the answers That's our smart. I see that's why we hire that's why we put them through grueling interviews They'll come up with the answers our job is to now make sure the questions get asked and he was absolutely right So Steve when you go to watch this recording someday 100% amen. You are totally right Another thing on on giving up control I have very high standards a little bit of it relates to my vision impairment I need to get things just right. I need indentation just right I loved Python many years ago when I discovered it. I need things a certain way But I want you to ask yourself when you are people managers ask yourself questions like this Do my reports hold each other accountable? Are they doing quality work? Are they are they providing value to the company or are they going above and beyond if most those questions are yes? Don't critique them. Don't polish their work Just kind of pipe down and know that maybe their work isn't up to your standards If you were doing it, but guess what? You are not doing it. You are helping them to do it. You're you're you're supervising Okay, I need to go pretty fast while yeah, we're we're running. I want to make sure leave a little room for Q&A So there's a few more traits that are of lesser import all on one slide So I want you to think about the worst scenario possible could you fire a friend you've had talks with him and A few of you in this room know of a woman her name is Bethany Blunt. She was my one of my managers at Facebook She said the greatest thing ever the first one-on-one When I sat down with Bethany the first thing she said Really stuck with me. It was so profound and she said Larry. I'm gonna tell you what my job is My job is to make sure there are never any surprises on your performance review Bomb dropped mic drop walk down there. It was perfect. Like that's that's so important If you have conversations with someone on your team and they're just not improving and you can't identify the reason why and you've given them every opportunity I Will tell you I've had to fire people it sucks I have learned that when after I need to fire someone I take the rest of the day off and I go sit in a room And I just stew in my own oh Man the world's unfair and it's it's just it's it's rough But you have to be able to do it and worst-case scenario could you do it to someone that you personally love and trust and they're a friend Conversely, there's someone on your team. You don't really get along with but they're great for the team They're great for the company and they're a star performer. Could you promote someone that you personally don't get along with? That's important Gentlemen by the name of Brent Proctor. I worked with we were in the same onboarding class at Facebook He eventually became a manager and He was the manager of my team and I was chatting with him I said hey Brent what what is the trickiest thing about being a manager and he used a Unix analogy and he's like well Larry We used to sit at a shell prompt you hit enter you get you can get a return code like okay? Zero success or minus two or 255 or whatever you can compile something right you can check exceptions You can check logs as an IC You can decide you want to try something do it and get a result that says You screwed up or hey everything's fantastic You don't get that as a people manager You need to be comfortable going with your gut going with your heart going with your brain and Watching things manifest over a course of weeks or months. I'm a big-time gaver So the analogy I threw out of being an IC is like Mario Kart Well then people management is like playing a long game of civilization like you make your decisions and then Might not be till the next era when you see like oh this might not have been a good idea You need to get comfortable with that and if you have a good network, they'll help you through it Empathy be able to understand the world from other people's point of view. I'm legally blind I cannot see the world through my own eyes. I better sure as hell be able to see it through other people's eyes That's the way I look at it empathy is critical proactive Ask yourself do I need to wait to be given a checklist? Do I need to be kind of fed direction? If if so then people management might not might not be a great, okay? I hate to throw it into the literature But there's radical candor and radical acceptance and crucial conversations and unfortunately I'm going to have to add two phrases to the literature and the vernacular become profoundly resourceful if you want to excel at people management Know what to do when you don't know what to do and if you tread carefully But with confidence and you have good support network you will rock it Okay, I'm gonna let you know a little secret. We're approaching the end of the talk here. I Truly don't know if I put this at the end because I think it's the most important or Then and I think my buddy Casey back there will be able to relate to this I really think these next couple of slides are for Myself because I can have some challenges with this You need to become a stoic you need to be able to learn how to take the frustration The angst the anger and you don't repress it But you need to learn how to deal with it because if it leaks through as a people manager It can demoralize your folks it can tarnish your professional reputation and and here's the thing like I Actually would like to think that I excelled as an IC because I was brutally honest And if I saw something that was stupid I I didn't use the word stupid But I said hey, we got to be doing something different you got it You got to keep your emotions in check folks and again. This is really just a message for myself Gotta learn to control them This is one of my favorites. This is a serenity serenity prayer. It's used by many folks Alcoholics Anonymous uses this I need to on this recording give my wife Amanda major props She has been telling me for years if not decades Larry You burn way too much energy stressing about things you can't control and God bless her I've been working on it and I have been feeling better and This is a great little tidbit to summarize how I think you should approach things, right? If you can't see it grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference And here's another good one Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it like it or not We live in a political human driven environment You will be judged positively negatively or both based on your reactions My previous manager her name was a partner I loved her pieces and she kind of was watching me from a distance I ran a compliance engineering team in compliance. They're kind of like the misfits of the engineering world They have to do things differently. They don't get access to all the great tools and TLC and love from the engineering groups So I was a little frustrated. I was a little angsty and In our first long one-on-one a Parna was such a sweetheart and she said, you know Larry I I like that you are really passionate You if you've been a people manager You quickly learn that's a zip file that you quickly learned to extract and see what's in it and she wasn't being supportive and What she was also saying is it might not have been a good idea to drop the f-bomb in the slack channel where there were a Couple of executives hanging out Maybe we didn't need the analogy between curing cancer and cleaning toilets in front of the CFO like, you know Let's she was very sweet. She's very kind and she helped me work on it. So I took this into account I'm like, I just need to remember to control my reactions and I apologize. I'm not leaving much time for Q&A but Okay, excellent. Thank you. This is the final thought and this is from the bottom of my heart And I want to apologize because I'm gonna put five words up on this screen. It's not meant to sound snarky Please raise your hand if you are a parent. Can I see if we've got parents in here? Okay, you'll be able to relate to this and I think you'll appreciate how it very much ties into becoming a people manager At the point of my career where I effectively signed on the dotted line, right? Like point of no return like okay I'm gonna go in tomorrow and holy cow There were 50 I have 15 reports the start of my people management career I went from I see one day to 15 reports the next day. Don't do that but So so I had I had that moment and I looked myself in the mirror And I don't know if it was my voice or just something from the ether But I said these words out loud to myself and I also say them to every new parent This takes us full circle I really hope all of you have people managers or have had people managers that operate like this It takes us back to the very beginning great Managers live and die and breathe and eat and sleep on the success of those around them When I was in I see I loved crunching my brain on hard problems My daughter Zoe was born and some of the hardest problems I solved that Facebook were solved by taking my little girl my little baby girl and walking her around at 3 a.m. I kid you true story one of the best little solutions I ever came up for a problem that Facebook Simultaneously happened while she threw up all over me and somehow her throwing up on me Inspired the solution. I'm like oh, that's totally what we could do We just need to barf all of the data out like this is not about parsing. This is this is about a transparency issue But I love my kids really helped me think about management and management helps me think about my kids So really I want to leave you with this parting thought. It's not about you anymore Just be prepared to dedicate all of your energy to your folks your peers your management chain But really your folks in the Oregon the people that report into you Folks oh it was in quotes. Yeah, I'll show off just some random dude that said that folks. That's it for my talk Thank you so much. I Want to I love talking about this stuff I apologize. I didn't leave room for much Q&A, but let's let's do that now if you're good We promise you 50 minutes and on all the other tracks you then have 10 minutes for questions Okay, just they smushed this so it's unclear So we're gonna start the questions. Do we have our next speaker in the house? You okay, so what you come up? So you can get started. I'm parallelizing it because they didn't give us our normal space, so Please go ahead Before we do the questions, so I'm gonna take this out of her way and then we will go And again, I mean that if anyone wants to talk about this stuff I could talk about a day and night, so feel free to look me up on LinkedIn come find me if you use Facebook I'm available there email you name it and we can we can hop on some meats So if there's any Q&A like are we are we done? Is there no Q&A time or do we have a couple minutes? Oh, no, we're gonna do Q&A fantastic. I'm getting this out of her way so that she can be this setup. That's all sounds great I'll help you if you need it, but for now I'm gonna start too much. You want to do the Q&A? Okay Any questions I am I've been fighting Being not being a manager, so I'm gonna be more of a tech lead. That's my my path But I am noticing that as I do that I Also have to hone up on same the same skills dealing with people with like junior developers because I'm responsible for vetting their stuff absolutely and I think having the skills acquiring the skills even if you're not going to be a manager is Important one for communicating also with your manager. It makes the relationship a little bit easier Absolutely, and and so there's no net negative on learning about it And then maybe you like it or maybe in one company You're not gonna have that opportunity, but somewhere else you will absolutely I want to paraphrase for the sake of the recording in case it didn't come through the mic And I want to paraphrase it like these skills are amazingly adaptable and valuable Even if you don't want to become a people manager and and thank you for that example being a tech lead and being responsible for junior developers absolutely critical skills I Couldn't agree more Anyone else have any data points thereafter Yeah, so let's say you become a manager. What about support for being a manager like I work in a very small company So it's not like I have a lot of other people at my level to hang out with That's tough. That is that you every we need peers, right? We need I'll tell you what if nothing else a good people manager needs a trusted peer to vent to And needs a therapist. I have been a therapist many times. I've needed therapy many times. I Wish I had better advice for you, but I would say do your best To find someone in your network who is in as similar of a situation as possible and You benefit by them being outside of the company because then you can dump all of the dirt and gossip that you need to right? You can turn off the filter we people managers one of that I talked about being an introvert and the things that take your energy You have to be careful and approach your communications in a certain ways of people manager and the great thing Is if you can find a peer away from your company you can just let it roll You can just let it all come out and and if it's if you're lucky enough that it's a pre-existing friend then They get it and they'll just let you vent. Well, things tumble, but I wish I had an answer for you But at a small company of support for being a manager You you're gonna have to find your external resources. I wish I had a better answer I wish I was there because then I would get you up there Like I would look for every opportunity to develop you and say like give you more responsibility like hey You're ready for more so you're gonna have to be self-sufficient and find it Externally and then if you find you crave that advancement and you're not getting it where you're at You're gonna have to consider going elsewhere, which is not a trivial deal. That's a very big deal Look me up on LinkedIn or however you like to communicate and let's do a call Sorry, I just got my notice on Wednesday, so now I'm looking at working at another company. Oh my gosh. Yes, so I'm so sorry to hear that Yeah, well, I mean once all the film work comes back. I might be back at my company But I got to figure out something to do in between and so, you know I'm like, okay What do I want to be doing it my next company and because I'm managing at a small company Do I want to manage at a bigger company? Absolutely and and I I feel like I could help you answer that question I can again I give you a framework if you want it if you want to chat about it, but yeah That's it's kind of turbulent and it can be unexpected But but absolutely it's it's about what's available matched to what you're familiar with you could do a large small versus large is not a huge transition That's that's the good news. There's just like almost like a few pro tips. I would pass on Looks like we got one back there Hi, thank you. Thank you for the call for the talk. It was I'm a big people manager So I came to this talk trying to figure out if it's truly for me because I'm struggling with that Right. I've been being a people manager and the reason I'm a people manager is because I'm in the company that you said that you shouldn't be Where there is you become a nice see it after at some point you have to become a people manager Oh, okay, and I'm gonna ask you to be very honest in the big picture. How's that working out for folks there? Is it is a good culture? Is it does it work or is it difficult to navigate? Yeah, it's very difficult to navigate It's complicated. There's all like a I'm not a people person So I had to learn a lot about that and my bosses have been very Good to that. That's good. That's really helps to have support on that But but I always tell my boss that he teaches me by telling me this is the pool This is it deep in that's the other side. Let me push it this way and when I'm drowning He will pull me out. He will jump into the pool swim and Tell me get out of the pool. That's how you do it, right? So it's very much Let me show you how I do it and you try to figure out the way that you can do it That's that's support. That's good It's amazing how many people become people managers and don't have anyone trying to support them from above in their management chain So that is that is good You know is the overall environment optimal probably not but I'm glad you're getting support Keep listening to them. I do want to pass on this thought and this is something that they taught us in Facebook onboarding It is five times more effective to play to your strengths than your weaknesses And the basically research showed to get kids from an F to a C Took five times more energy than getting them from a C to an A so if you if you know keep thinking about it keep getting objective feedback from your manager and Figure out if being a people manager plays to your strengths You will have to develop skills But you have to figure out if you're going to the gym and your muscles are sore Is it because you just haven't exercised the muscles before or is it because you're you weren't meant to be doing that? Exercise and you're actually doing damage to yourself, right? So like am I exactly that the point that I'm trying to figure out is it am I a first trying to climb a tree or Like or am I just a monkey that is kind of not lazy But trying to understand what exactly needs to go through but the question that I had and one of them being struggling a little bit lately is with Because now you're in a in a management position. You become the place for complaints to go Yep, right and now the sudden you have to defend to the degree policies that you might not agree but you cannot Openly or very proactively go into saying I disagree with okay, you know what? This is per company culture and there's a great guy named Josh He was my therapy we were each other's therapy and one of Josh's biggest concerns was How do you not agree with the decrees from above and communicate it to your folks? You don't want to necessarily do what I do because it's heavily dependent on the culture But I hate this word, but I gotta use it. I am always authentic So what I will do is I will tell my folks look folks I'm gonna be honest. I don't really agree with this and sometimes I'll say maybe it's just because I don't understand it But we were given this well, this doesn't apply here This doesn't apply here, but I very constructively say but look we gotta do it And if you can do it if you can dig in and we can get through it I will buy you all beers on Wednesday, or I will you know, I will take you out It's it's hard and your culture can say like hey just tow the line but you have got to find a way to let your folks know either Directly or very subtly through context or through subtext Don't don't just tow the line and let everyone think you're cool with it because your reports and your organization Especially if you've got people managers under you, they will see through it So it is okay to be a dissenter as long as you're a constructive and communicating Dissenter and then if you've got a healthy environment talk to the folks making the decisions get on a phone with them and say like hey Can you help elaborate why you decided this so you can get through it? It's tough and I have been in your shoes But do not bottle it up and let your folks know that it's it's okay to dissent a little bit. I apologize I'm legally blind, so I don't want to cut into your time Dustin. How am I doing Dustin? We're doing good. Do it. Should we call it here? Are there any more questions? Do we have time? Ready to go cool. We got it sounds like we got a couple more minutes if there's anyone wants to throw anything out there We're good Sweet One more. All right, cool. I Agree with all your presentation. I Have been an IC haven't been a matcher, but I've been considering it I have a question at one point you you said something about you know if you're working for a good good company What if you're not working for a good company? and You know, man, there's a bunch of old let's say legacy stuff and the managers are Managers just because they were there. There's no training and stuff and you want to transition to maybe a new company Do you have any tips on how you go about finding a good new company? Culture you want to you want to you want to tap the grapevine talk to your friends either in person or in slack There's good stories that you will the thing is I mean between Quora and reddit and everything under the Sun You will find the places that people are talking about where you want to go where you don't want to go Let me ask you this outside of all the other managers if you don't mind me asking a personal question Does your manager support you? Like and and you might not feel comfortable answering that so let me see if I'm asking in a safer way Do you feel it is potentially safe at your company to? try management out and Then use that experience to leapfrog to another company saying I have some management experience Or do you think it's best to just start externally? It's a smaller medium-sized company. I've sort of broached the subject a little bit Yeah, the There aren't that many There are there are a number of managers But the overall the let's say the the ownership and stuff there there isn't it's not like a bigger company where you have the train The managers have training and yeah, that was HR. It's smaller where People are doing multiple jobs. Yeah, so Herald clerk and the finance person are the HR department I'll give you the good news. There is a way to do it and to transfer externally Come find me and like let's do like a Google meet or zoom call like sometime next week because I can throw you out some ideas But it is possible to get what you need and do it externally, so that's the good news there. We all good on time No, we're done. Okay. Awesome. I need to change up. Thanks. Let's take our speaker again. That was fantastic Better yes, okay, sure sounds good. Okay Okay, and since we're kind of split second here, we're gonna go immediately So let's have a round of applause for our next speaker Fatima Taj Hi, everyone. My name is Fatima and I'll be presenting this beginner's guide to career progression in tech Okay, I'll just quickly introduce myself. So I am a senior software engineer at Yelp. I am from Canada So if you see me carrying around like this very heavy jacket, it's not because I'm crazy Just a disclaimer that I'm not representing my my employer here everything that's presented in this session are my personal opinions Okay, so before I start I can't claim that the content of the content of this presentation is all like Is all coming from me. I use some very very highly recommended resources Amongst all these resources, this is honestly my favorite one. It's by the pragmatic engineer It's a it's a book that recently came out like a couple of months ago. It's called the software engineers guidebook It is an excellent resource. I cannot recommend this enough Okay First things first. Why should you care about career progression in tech? Now it's like it's funny. I think that like you know back when I was in my undergrad I was like you're fixated on getting that first job, right? Like you're not really thinking beyond that And like that's that was what I was thinking as well that like oh, I just need to get that first job And then like I'll see what I need to do and I'll figure it out So there's good news and bad news the bad news is is that? Until you get to a specific level called the terminal level which we're going to talk about You're sort of you sort of need to get promoted if you're not it could mean that you know You're not performing up to expectations and in a case like this You could be put on a pip which is a performance improvement plan or worse. You could be let go Secondly getting promoted obviously impacts up the sorts of opportunities that you're getting within the organization, right? Like if you're doing good work, if you're meeting expectations, then yeah Your manager and other senior leaders will put you on sort of more interesting projects projects where you get like more ownership Try out different things all of that It impacts future opportunities as well, right? Like the kind of work that you're doing within your current organization can really impact future opportunities that you might get as well And lastly it also impacts your compensation Okay, so this is a rough outline of the content that we're going to cover So we're gonna start with some basic terminology. So and Larry already covered what an ICS So so that's good. We're gonna look at what the typical engineering track is for a software engineer I think the timing of this talk is perfect because Larry very nicely covered the engineering management track We're gonna talk about like the other parallel sort of track They're gonna talk about why promotions matter. What is a terminal level? What does the process look out like the key players that are involved the key competencies that you're being assessed on? And lastly, we're also going to talk about what you can do if things don't go as planned Okay first things first Like something that I want you to keep in mind is that every company does promotions and leveling differently So like I'm gonna give a couple of examples in this talk Try not to get like to attach to those examples because again You're gonna see a lot of variation of this the key takeaways for you should be this like you need to figure out What the expectations are within your company? You need to figure out what the process to get promoted is within your company who the key players are what the key Competencies are but yeah, try not to get like to attach to like the low-level sort of details that I'm going to share To start off what is an IC so an IC? I'm gonna skip the chat GPT definition is basically used to contrast to people who are involved in like people Management responsibilities so like your manager and ICs can hold like all sorts of titles So the software engineer data scientists harbor and engineer designer, etc Okay, so now this is the a typical engineering track for a software engineer I took this image from again an excellent resource called the staff engineer. It's by Bill Larson I highly recommend that you check it out So yeah, as you can see there's once you get to the senior level There's you sort of have two parallel tracks that you can you can pick between now again Like I said not the company that you're in right now. It might not define it this way They could they could define it very differently right like like I said in his presentation It might be that to get promoted you have to become a manager, right? But again, like every company does it differently, but this definition roughly applies to like big tech Something another thing that I want to call out is that anything beyond senior is honestly getting those promotions Is incredibly difficult and incredibly rare as well Which is why you might see a lot of usually at like companies You'll see a lot of senior engineers, but then staff principle distinguish those become rarer and rarer titles Again, like I said every when I said that companies do leveling differently So I took this image from levels.fi and it just shows you how the Like the level sort of differ across a wide variety of companies, right? Which is why I said that okay don't get too attached to the low level granularities as long as you make sure that you understand what the Expectations are and the processes within within your own company Okay, so a couple of key takeaways First of all understand that the levels build on top of each other Okay, so if you're like you know if you're at the senior level then you need to be meeting the requirements for like the new grad and then the Mid-level that we saw earlier Now for these for all these different levels you might see a minimum number of years requirement That's a tricky one You might see people who like don't necessarily fulfill that timing requirement But definitely for I think senior roles and like anything beyond that time is a pretty important factor Because at that level the work that you're doing is not like something that the impact is not like over a course of months You're likely working on like your long project So at that level you actually need to stay at a company for a specific period of time to be able to see that impact So time does start to become somewhat of an important factor Also promotions are backward-looking So what that means is is that you have to be performing at the next level for a certain period of time before you're officially given That promotion so let's say you're a senior right now, but you're performing at the staff level now And you've been performing at the staff level for like about a quarter now That doesn't mean that you're gonna be given that promotion immediately They're gonna wait and see that okay this person needs to be performing at the staff level for an X Like you know whatever that period is and then we're gonna give you that promotion So the official promotion basically confirms that that you've done this Why do promotions matter in the beginning like I said you have an opportunity for greater impact You can work on you know bigger more exciting projects But the more interesting thing I think is there's also changes to your compensation So they really impact your base salary your equity refreshers your promotion bonuses promotion bonuses again Can be really generous if you're again depending on the company and how well you did Now the key thing to understand is that a promotion moves your compensation to the bottom of the next band So usually at companies let's say you have a bunch of seniors working There's a range of like salaries that are allotted for like the senior engineering role at your company So when you get promoted you're from your Your because of your promotion your compensation moves to the bottom of the next band So you might be getting the like the minimum that staff engineer is is being paid and Interestingly enough a top performer like a top performing employee At a lower level could actually be making more than an average employee at the next level And that's mostly because of like the equity refreshers that you get and the bonuses that they have for top performers Okay, so like I said in the beginning There's bad news which is that in the beginning of your career you sort of have to get promoted because if you don't that means that You're probably not performing at par with expectations The good news is is that you don't have to be stuck in this cycle forever because in big tech There's this concept of a terminal level. So what our terminal level is is that like this is a level that Companies have decided that okay you over time you have to get promoted to this level However, once your hair you like you can just keep performing at that level. You don't need to go to the next one At big it within big tech. It's usually the senior level So once you get to senior you can sort of chill in the sense that you have to keep performing at that level But you're not like, you know, no one's gonna be breathing down your neck that okay. Why aren't you getting to staff? So at this level engineers are fully autonomous and Terminal levels also exist to manage expectations So you have to realize that like ads like for staff principle and distinguished engineers Companies are sort of tied in the sense that while these are engineers that can do like very very high-impact work They also need to have the budget to accommodate for engineers at that level a lot of companies might not have that Which is why terminal levels exist so like it's also a tool for companies to manage employee expectations Okay, the process again, there's so many variations of this It could be like if you're working at like say like a startup or like a very small company It could be completely unstructured like you might your your I don't know your VP might be doing your engine Or your evaluation or maybe it's your manager or whatnot in some companies It's manager only like you're only your manager gets to do your You know your performance evaluations in some you they also might throw in like evaluation from your peers as well And in most companies, it's a hybrid model So what that means is is that it's a combination of your manager providing feedback and your peers So at a lot of companies Promotions up to the senior level are decided by a manager only committee. That's how Yelp does it So basically my manager does does my evaluation and then they sit together within this like manager only committee Which decides that okay, whether an engineer is gonna get a desired calibration For staff and above it could be like, you know a company-wide committee So like my I really like the way my manager explained this to me He was like at the senior level again, it's it's your manager If you're going for staff your skip levels manager It's your skip level manager is going to be involved as well You go you key as you keep wine for bigger and bigger promotions the more sort of senior leaders are going to be involved in that process Okay, and so a bit part of understanding the promotion cycle also means understanding the key players that are involved So understanding your manager's role your skip level manager's role Something to remember is that your manager is your biggest ally Like it's funny again I think there's there's so many things that you sort of get more clarity on as you once you start your professional career Like when you know back when I was in school and people would complain about having a bad manager And I think like okay you have a bad manager so what but now that I'm you know I have a manager who's fantastic by the way I'm like, oh yeah a manager can really impact what your career looks like what your career progression looks like how much Money you're making what sorts of projects you're being put on So yeah, this is sort of a very important piece for you to understand that your manager is your biggest ally Hopefully they are So you have to make sure that you're on the same page as them Make sure that you're highlighting your wins and you're being acknowledged for the work that you're doing And also another thing to remember is that your manager is standing in the organization matters as well Like their tenure their influence matters Obviously the greater their tenure and their influence the more they can sort of push for the desired positions I've actually like known people who You know who are working at a company for like an extended period of time and they were like you know They were hoping for a promotion, but then a new manager came in and then they were like Obviously with a new manager right like they need to spend that time to build that influence and that time or so because of that Because they got like a new manager. They actually decided to jump ship and move to another company because they weren't all that What's so it's a good word here all that hopeful, you know in terms of getting that promotion that they were working towards Okay, so next we're gonna look at some key competencies So roughly I like I took a look at like a bunch of big tech companies Like roughly the criteria is more or less the same the wording of course is going to be different Like usually they're looking at like they're sort of like a few key themes that you're being assessed on So your technical contributions and expertise your design and architecture, you know skills And then we move more towards like the softer side of side More of towards the soft skills. So you're how you collaborate how you communicate Team building and want mentorship. These are usually more or less the the key themes that you will sort of see be a part of your performance evaluation process Okay, so before we get into Looking at these key competencies across the different levels. I just want to make a couple of quick notes here Like I like to think of promotions as being a combination of impact and visibility So I like to think that like promotion sort of boiled down down to doing the right kind of work But then also making sure that it's seen by the right people. I think those are like two very important components You have to be like I think this is very very important You have to be your biggest cheerleader for the longest time I used to think that be getting promoted was all about like doing good work and then, you know The rest will take care of itself. That's not true. You have to be your biggest cheerleader On that note, I really like the concept of a brag document, which is I think which was coined by this engineer Stripe, I don't know if they're still there Julia Evans So the whole concept of a brag document is that it's this document that you have Where you essentially just dump everything that you're doing Okay, don't think about like whether it qualifies to be on the brag document Even if it's something like oh, I helped unblock an engineer this week put it on your brag document now There's like countless benefits to a brag document. You can check out this link But like I just want to highlight a couple of them First of all, keep in mind that your performance reviews suffer from a recency bias, right? Okay, so let's say that at your company a performance evaluation happens like once every six months, right? Now every six months you sit down and you start thinking about what you did in like January Let's say one is happening in June. You have to think back to what you did in January. That's hard, right? Well, usually in the like especially in the beginning of my career Whenever it was time for like, you know for my performance evaluation, I'd sit down I'd start going through all the pull requests that I'd created and it's just not fun It's not fun It's not an efficient way of going about it and then secondly There's so many things that you might have done that obviously a pull request might not Like, you know reflect, right? Like again, like I said if you unblocked another engineer There's no way for you to remember that other than if it was on your in your brag document So yeah, so keep in mind that performance evaluations suffer from a recency bias It's very very natural for both you and your manager to only think back to the most recent wins that you had Or the most recent things that you did, right? So this is where a brag document really helps you out And secondly, which also happens to be a major concern for a lot of people It also helps you deal with manager transitions, right? Let's say you have a performance evaluation coming up in three months and all of a sudden you get a new manager Um, obviously within three months you might be like, oh like how do I let them know all the work that I'd done earlier, right? So again, this is a great place where your brag document could come in come handy Another thing that I want to sort of highlight and I think larry did a great job highlighting this as well is that Like obviously when we think about promotions, we're thinking about our own career We want to we want to get a fancier title. We want to get more compensation But I think it's very very important to understand that Unfortunately, you won't get very far in your career if you're only just watching out for your own interests And this can be I think it can be a tough concept to come to terms with I think especially when you're in the beginning stages of your career Like you're you want to do the most amount of work, right? You want to be fast But you have to be a team player So whether and and like whether that means that you spend a couple of hours mentoring like a younger engineer on your team Or you help unblock your your team members or you're volunteering for you know, uh within your company I think again, these are things that you have to keep in mind and Not just like you know for for face value. You're actually being actively assessed on these on these things as well Um, okay, so now in the next couple of sides, we're going to quickly go over Um, what the key competencies look like across the different levels Um, uh, okay, so we'll start with the new grad level So at this point your typical experience, this is like any person's full-time like first full-time engineering job At this point in terms of your scope and your impact you can develop features with obviously supervision and support In terms of your technical contributions, you can you know, you obviously know how to code you can you can code It's clear concise. It's tested. You're learning one or more technical areas You're learning tools or you know other best practices at your company and you're capable of like, you know Taking care of well-defined subtasks and completing these tasks Um, in terms of your like design and architecture skills like with supervision You can participate in engineering design discussions for features or bug fixes You're responsible for the development and testing of your own code and as far as collaboration is concerned You know when to ask for help, you know when when when needed Um, mid-level is around I would say like two or maybe like one two three years Um of relevant industry experience at this point you can develop Design ship and maintain features with support Um, you can again you you clearly know how to code you're becoming proficient in one or more technical areas Whether that's back end front end mobile what whatever it is You can like you know, you can make steady progress on task and you also know when to ask for help And at this level you're basically an engineer That's you know, you you know, you can deal with well-defined tasks and you can complete them And you can complete them in a manner that's considered high quality by your team members Um, and you know again, you can you know, you can contribute to Engineering discussions for features and bug fixes you can do code reviews for other engineers as well At this point you're responsible for the development testing rollout and maintenance of your code And again, you also know how to unblock yourself by seeking out support from your team if needed Now senior is I think when things start getting more interested like I said at this level You are expected to be a fully autonomous engineer. So like senior can be again Based on the company anywhere between four to six years of industry experience At this point you can design develop ship maintain medium-sized features independently You are highly proficient in one or more technical areas and something that I like to keep in mind Especially when I'm thinking about senior versus like let's say staff is the the impact So at senior you have team level impact versus at staff where your your You have company level impact and we're gonna talk about that So at this point, you know your you can create or co-create, you know engineering designs and you know You can provide meaningful feedback to other engineers designs and their code as well So yeah at this point now you start because we talked about full autonomy, right? This is where you sort of start seeing the like the complete software development cycle as well So you're part of the planning the risk management design development testing things out rolling them out and whatever maintenance work is required And additionally you're also responsible for improving the health and quality of of the of the work that you're doing um You can collaborate you collaborate within your own team, but also with adjacent teams and in terms of team building You are you know you assist and you mentor other engineers on an individual basis um So if you contrast this to staff again the the typical Experience my vary, but usually we're talking about eight or more years of relevant experience At this point you you're leading medium to large features And like I said like if you it's about company level impact now, right? So at the senior level you might be working on projects which are like very specific to your team But once you move to the staff level you might be collaborating across like a wide variety of teams So again, it's that it's that impact that you have to distinguish between um, again you Like you make very impactful technical contributions You have company wide impact You're now an expert in one or more technical areas And you also analyze and help help unblock your team in terms of like any technical obstacles You're now leading engineering discussions, you know, you're getting feedback you're building consensus You're providing meaningful feedback To your team and other engineers as well and you're resolving like open questions with it when it comes to like design or or their code Again in terms of like ownership you're responsible for the successful delivery of of your projects and again We're talking end-to-end and now you're like, you know now we're starting to think more long-term, right? So you're responsible for the long-term health and quality of your team's code base and and systems Um in terms of collaboration like I said, you're collaborating not only within your team But also with a bunch of adjacent teams and you're trying to build this environment of collaboration and knowledge sharing across multiple teams In terms of team building again mentorship is is a big part of this So, you know, you're trying to cultivate a culture of like learning and growth within with your team within your team and other teams as well Now all of that might have been a bit dry So so far everything that we've talked about sort of assumes a best case scenario, right? Like we talked about okay This is what you need to do These are the people you need to talk to if you do this you'll get promoted and that might not necessarily Be the case as unfortunate as that is So I want to talk about I want to take some time to talk about What you can do if things don't work out your way So the first thing that I want to talk about is just pacing yourself and how important that is I really like how the pragmatic engineers summarizes this so They propose this model of stretching executing and coasting and we're going to go over the details of this model But again like basing yourself. I think is is a very important sort of Thing to keep in mind because an average software engineer's career can last around 40 years. So that's quite a fair bit of time So when you're stretching you're basically doing things which sort of push you out of your comfort zone So this might be like you learning a new language or a new framework or you joining a new company, right? This is really where you're sort of being pushed out of out of your comfort zone When you're executing this is sort of your normal way of working So this is where again you're sort of within your comfort zone. You know what to do here So let's say you're building something where you know, and you're already familiar with the tech stack And then lastly coasting which is when you take a temporary short breather now This is not like a break. So this doesn't mean that you're just going on vacation It's just that you're taking like this the short breather after let's say like a particularly tough project Let's say you rolled out this project and it was very very intense work for a couple of months But now you just want to take a little step back for a little time. So this is exactly what coasting means So in this time you could catch up on some like pending documentation Or maybe there were some design discussions that you know needed your feedback and you've been putting it off So the what the programmatic engineer recommends is that your career ideally just to ensure the longevity Should be a good mix of stretching executing and a little coasting once in a while and I really like that model I think that is something what most of us do as well, but you know, maybe we just hadn't thought of it in in those terms Um, okay. So like I said, um, what to do in case things don't go as planned So first things first, I think it's important to be realistic Like if you just I think like it's important to look at the statistics as far as promotions Are concerned. So at most of big tech about 30 to 40 percent of promotion cases for senior levels are rejected That's quite a big number. So again, I think yeah, I think It's it's good to be aware of what the stats are especially within your own company um Now for a lot of people if they're unable to get promoted within their company, they might think that oh, I I can maybe I can jump ship right now There's pros and cons cons to that approach as well Um, first of all, there's definitely more risk with changing changing jobs with greater seniority Okay, so um, it could be a red flag if you're jumping ship too often Especially once like, you know, if you're talking senior and and anything beyond that, uh, if you're like, you know I've read uh like from A couple of engineers that I follow on linkedin that I think two or three years minimum at those levels You should ideally be staying at at a given company anything less than that could be a red flag And then like I said in the beginning that tenure is a very important factor As far as these roles are concerned, right? Like you're going to be working on projects that span years. So obviously you need to stay For a certain period of time just to see the impact of of your work In more senior roles, you also need time to build a relationship with your co-workers right building trust with stakeholders And just to understand the ins and outs of the organization who's involved what the decision making process looks like Like think back to your like when you started in your new roles Like in the beginning six months is like it's a pretty standard sort of period where you're just sort of getting easing into your role and just comfortable getting comfortable knowing What the project is that you're going to be working on and all of that So again, you have to time is uh an important factor in all of these things Um now switching jobs is usually an either or situation in the sense that You can either get a fancier title or you can get more compensation But you might not necessarily get both and there's reasons for that one I told you that the the the leveling is not consistent upon a cost companies, right? So you might be a staff at your current company, but let's say you jump ship They might not they might only be willing to give you like a senior level position, right? Um, so that's one thing secondly interview performance can be a big reason for down leveling as well Which is why it's so important for you to perform well in your interviews Like how well you perform in your interviews can really impact again the title that you're being given and The compensation that comes your way. Um, and yeah, like I said the titles and expectations are not consistent across companies Um, okay, so, um again according to the pragmatic engineer So like something to keep in mind, you know, sometimes you can have sometimes your performance evaluations might go amazing Sometimes they might just be average So it's important to remember that performance evaluations are just a snapshot of a point in time, right? They're not like It's not a permanent reflection of you, right? So it's always something that you can you can recover from Um as a rule of thumb around 20 percent of people get below like above average reviews Oh, no get that. I got that wrong. That's below average 60 to 70 get average ones and then 10 to 15 get above average ones. So again, like you have to keep those statistics in mind Um, and also, please don't be too dependent on the outcome a lot of people You know, this is uh, this is sort of a trap that a lot of people falling to is that they think that oh I think I'm doing amazing. I think I had a great quarter. I think I'm gonna get uh, you know, I think I'm gonna get promoted So um because I'm a top performer. I know just how much my performance bonus might might be so, you know, you might start planning your vacation Um, don't do that, right? Again, you you never know There's there's so many factors that are involved as far as promotions are concerned that I just don't think it's wise to like You know be too fixated on the outcome um Lastly, I just want to quickly talk about some biases that you might Come across as far as your performance evaluations are concerned We already talked about recency bias, which is when You and your manager tend to only think about things that you've done very recently. Um, there's a strictness or Lineiency bias, you know, your manager might be very strict or they could be very lenient There's a halo bias, which is for people who saved a project, right? So you might get perceived positively just because you sort of souped in and you saved a project that needed help um, there's a similarity bias, which is when If your like your manager might perceive people who are similar to them as like sort of more positively Um, and then there's a central tendency bias as well Which is when your manager will sort of rid everyone similarly because it feels more fairer than to differentiate Again, these are these are things that I just wanted to call out because at the end of the day like A big part of promotions is just the fact that we're all humans, right? So yeah, these biases are definitely very real And these should be things that you know, you're you're aware of Um, like I said, I use a lot of resources for this content. Please check these out. These are all I highly highly recommend all of these resources Two of these are books and then I for the Like when I was trying to understand the competencies across different companies just just search it up and you know, there's there's tons of content available Um, but yeah, that is the end of my presentation. I think we have plenty of time for q&a But yeah, thank you so much for attending Uh, I will upload them. Uh, you can honestly like if you can reach out to me. I can share the link with you Does anybody have any questions Um, what's a good amount of time to stay in your first position? Um, you know, is it like six months? Is it Like is it years? Um, like if you are pretty happy and you are enjoying it and maybe Maybe the pay is not where you want it to be, but it's not terrible. You know what I mean I know there's not one answer to that but what do you think about that? Yeah, I think six months is definitely pretty early. Like I said, I think Like it's too early to leave. Yeah, I think like it can easily take you six months just to get comfortable in the swing of things I think like when I joined yelp, like my manager told me like I had this question like in terms of like Oh, what are the expectations in terms of how fast I should sort of get up to speed? Like they told me that we we give engineers like six to nine months Just to sort of get comfortable in their role and then another x months to start performing at the level that they were hired for Right. So to answer your question. Yeah, it's tough. I'd say like honestly again It depends on people's circumstances. Some people might jump ship just because of the compensation thing, right To me like how I like to look at it is like the learning So if I am getting what I wanted out of this role If I'm using the tech stack that I wanted or whatever it was if whatever my motivations were for this role Like I'll stay. Um I think like for me in my previous role I was starting I was starting to get very complacent in it Which is when I decided to leave and I at that point I'd work for them for like two years So I think the answer differs but I think eventually it boils down to like what's important to you Is is your growth as an engineer important right now or is like the compensation part more important? There's there's you know, there's no right or wrong answer. It's just what what your priority is Uh, I wanted to ask uh, what is advocating for yourself look like there's some people that are Um fresh out of college and some people that are looking to transition back into the into the computer site or to the coding software engineering course workforce and How and there's There's a lot of people here that do amazing work. They whether they make a new machine learning thingy or another Open source thingamabob And it just looks amazing and when I think about it With the web development you just put up a website. It looks amazing But other people like there might be non-technical people that you're that you had to look at and How do you advocate for yourself when you're looking at the non-technical side of uh, the corporate warehouse Like can you give me an example? I'm not sure I understand like what do you mean when you say non-technical? So, um So let's say people are looking at like linkedin jobs and they're just saying you know classic cover letter resume or There's that first example and a second example. Maybe like you're in a job and there's like maybe a data and data engineer or software engineer or machine learning engineer and You have a supervisor who who um Who should be your best friend when you're trying to look for these jobs How are you advocating for? for yourself When you're talking with these people Like are you saying like I made a python application that increased This efficiency by like 300 or is it like I wrote this many lines of code? Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. Uh, I think again it goes back to what I was saying earlier about understanding expectations So like for example, um, like you know how like on the key competency slide I said that there's roughly like 14 key teams that they're looking at right You can roughly categorize them as being like technical versus like more on like the softer skill side I think it's important one to Understand that like so when I say companies have like these like four key teams That doesn't mean that each team might have the same amount of weight Okay, so like if I'm saying that okay, there's your technical contributions There's your designing like your design and architecture skills Um, collaboration and communication and team building and mentorship That doesn't mean each of them carry like a 25 weight, right? So again, that's where I think you have to understand what the expectations are that okay when I'm being evaluated How much of the evaluation is contingent on the hardcore technical components and how much it of it is contingent on like the softer skills section So you would draw a differentiation between whether the supervisor is technical or non technical and If it's non technical you would try to emphasize your soft skills Your collaboration your it is no you're you're right that like I said your manager has has to be your ally So you have to be on the same page as your manager So you have to understand what your manager's needs or expectations are from a given engineer at a specific level Okay, so yeah, so it's about finding that alignment. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Thank you I also want to ask if you had any advice for if so I've like basically just started and I'm a new grad and it's been really great And I really like what I'm doing, but at some point I was thinking. Hmm. There's so much out there How do you decide if you want to switch specialties and you know Do something completely different from what you have more experience and have you ever done that? Or did you kind of start as a new grad and just keep on? Ah I think like are you asking specifically in terms of like whether you should change like what your like Specialty is right now Yeah, or not right now, but just like eventually but what things do you look into whether like Oh, I feel like I need to just go to a different company because I want to be learning more Or I feel like I want to go to a different company and switch to a different specialty Yeah, that's a good. That's a good question. Um, I think yeah, like I said I think like when I left my previous company It was because I felt that one I wasn't learning The sort of things that I wanted to be learning like I I had a I had an interest in building scalable stuff So I I wasn't I go I wasn't getting an opportunity to do that Like the sort of web apps that I was working were being used for like by like less than a dozen people So I was like I can't learn too much about scalability here. So yeah, so that was one thing Um, I think honestly, yeah for me that was that was the biggest factor I was like, okay, I'm not getting those those the right sorts of opportunities Um, and and that's why I moved um, but again, like I I think like I said before I think it depends on what How you perceive your job to be what do you want to get out of it? Right. Do you want to focus more on the learning? I like you can I don't know you want to you might want to call me like, uh I don't know what the right way to summarize it, but like I like to I really like to I really like this mantra of like just Doing like being very good at what I do and I do think the money follows eventually You might think that's a very romantic take on the whole thing, but I it's a mantra I like sticking to um, so yeah So for me if you if you're just asking how I've made my career choices It's always been driven by like the learning part of it I actually took uh, like a couple of jobs that I switched I have taken pay cuts But I was like, okay, it's it's okay if I take a little pay cut right now because I know that will propel me Further later on um, so yeah I would like to try and answer a little bit of that I worked for a very large company and I started off as a programmer and then I Saw what product managers were doing so I you know do some business So I went into product management for a while and after that I went into technical marketing So I got to staying inside the same company. I took on a wide variety of different jobs The other thing you can do is I wanted to be a teacher one time So I took a night job at teaching and practiced that to see if I was good at it And then I took a full-time job teaching for a while. So you can you know Go go see different things and make the jump when you went when you want to So I have a question about Getting promoted to senior level if you haven't held that title before so uh at all of my previous jobs I don't think I've stayed for more than like two two and a half years But I've been in the industry for about five or six years So I haven't held a senior title, but I've definitely Like carried out some projects without supervision and uh and like mentored teammates and stuff like that So do you think it's reasonable to uh To like expect success if I apply to senior level positions, or do you think that You know hiring managers or recruiters will look at my resume and say oh, he's not senior level Is it possible to make that jump without having had that title at a previous role? I would say it will be very very contingent on your interview performance So yeah, so if you can perform at that level within an interview I think it's definitely possible even and like I said don't get too attached to the titles because as I said they're they're so different right Um, so yeah, I I think it's definitely possible, but I think the interview would be the real maker break here That's fair. Thank you Any other questions? So when choosing uh specialties, is it possible to Sort of spread oneself out too much or is it good to just learn as many different things as you can? Oh god There's so much debate on this. I wish there was one answer. Um honestly for me, I sort of started specializing in in one domain and I don't know maybe was Luck maybe was just like the sort of opportunities that came my way, but I was able to do that um Yeah, it's it's uh, you know it always this question always leaves me in a very conflicted state because While I love what I do and I like being like Sort of an expert as far as like the domain that I'm like my domain is concerned Sometimes I feel very alienated because I feel that like my vision is like it's too focused now and like Um, I I wish I knew more, right? So I think it's like that ultimate question of like depth versus breadth, right? Um, I think it's also again I think a big part of that is also just the opportunities that might come your way right like if your team is Does like very has like a very specific domain then you're sort of stuck with that, right? Um, I I always encourage people like if you are if you want to try out different things I always encourage people to try out different teams within their company But but again, even that's easier said than done It's not just like to go up to your manager one day and you're like Oh, I want to change teams the other team actually needs to have a spot for you to sort of take up, right? So again, it's it's it's tough. Yeah, there's I could give you a lot of advice about that, but Um, yeah, it's it's a question that always leaves me in a very conflicted state I don't know. I don't know what the right answer is a lot of people say that like very early on in your career You shouldn't specialize too early, right? You might just like pigeonhole your whole yourself But that actually worked out pretty well for me. So yeah, but again, I don't think there's like a right or wrong answer here But then people say luck is a matter of like the work that you've done Yeah, so again, I don't know. I generally don't know the right answer here. Yeah Any more questions Mine's a little similar to the previous one because I currently work in a job where I'm almost doing almost two jobs at once. I may be a system administrator, but I'm even though it's not under my title I do identity related stuff And when it comes to finding a new job after that I wasn't sure if Whether you find a job that combines both or you have to go one way or another And I'm sure that's probably happened with jobs that have probably even three or more roles at once Uh, so wait, what's your question exactly that like you're so so my question is It does it really depend the would it be best to Focus on one specialty if you're transitioning to a new job or Maybe if you're lucky you want to do both if you like both or Oh god Yeah, it's it's tough. I think ultimately again, I think if you enjoy both Um, that's good that I would take that as a good sign. Um Again, yeah, it's It's hard like especially in this industry I'd say that like it's It's hard for me to tell you what the right answer would be right now I think it also depends on like again, like I said the opportunities that are coming your way, right Um, I'd also say that like if you have been if you feel that you've sort of been working these two different roles You might have a lot of transferable skills as well, right? So it doesn't yeah, so that could really work out in your favor as well But I think ultimately yeah, I think it's it's sort of up to you You might want to also assess that. Okay. These two different roles that I've had What's sort of like the long-term career prospects with regards to these roles as well, right? Um Yeah This is just coming from somebody who just does AV for a living So I'm not really a developer anybody like that. So I'm just trying to get into this whole aspect of it, but when it comes to working with other departments Do you uh, is there a tendency or or some kind of pattern that you can't kind of notice between the different jobs that you've taken uh in order to be able to Uh work in a method that is able to take their input, but at the same time not overstep Somebody else so it could be like let's say the marketing team that's coming to you Or the sys admin team as a if you're working like let's say the developer role And your question is pretty much a best way to work with other departments as far as your Yeah, that's a that's a that's actually a good question. And yeah, I I have been doing that a lot in my in my current role um, I think Definitely one thing that I've learned is just sort of Understanding the capacity that another team has right so a lot of like for example the stakeholder teams that I work with Sometimes we might want them to do a certain thing Right, but they might not have the capacity to do that right because at the start of every year every team has certain projects That they're going to execute right so I think one understanding what the capacity of the other team is Especially if it's a stakeholder team or if it's a team that you know, they're like an adjacent team I think that's definitely very important um Then I think I think honestly communication is a very important one as well I get to interact with a lot of pms from other other other teams um, so sort of adjusting your communication style based on sort of Like the the nature of job that you're interacting with like if I'm interacting like obviously your you can't expect Your communication to be the same if you're interacting with say like an engineer versus like a p.m Worse to say like a director right so you need to sort of adjust your communication style The level of sort of technical detail that you're sharing across these different sort of job roles Um, so I think that's another important one. Um Yeah, does that is that what you All right, thank you Fatima Um, we'll get the next speaker set up and start the next one in 10 minutes We're gonna make this relatively quick believe some time for questions Oh, okay, I'm glad it's not first time for somebody My first wedding ceremony I had The uh, he's been married twice before and his fiancee been married once before they kind of steered me through it Brazilian godson my first Brazilian godson Is the tupi indian word for eagle and they have the largest eagle in the world That's why the emblem is the eagle flying against the sun No, we don't want you. Oh, I know All right, we want to do the microphone Last time I had problem because it kept rubbing against my beard and we got all sorts of scratchiness There we go Maybe I need to expand a little bit As long as it doesn't fall off completely we'll be okay. All right, we'll work with that I think that's Keeps wanting to do something. I don't know what Okay, and it's on Battery says Well, hopefully it'll hang on here. Can everybody hear me? Is it going through the speaker? Oh, that's great. Okay And I'm actually gonna drop drop this I don't think so. I think it's just saying it's on. I don't know We'll see what happens. So I have this white thing across my black sweater. And what time do we have? Three minutes left it's Trying to bend a little bit It's still having problems. It's still not quite Right size, but we'll see if we can make it go Still about two more minutes. So we'll just wait in case some other people come in. I don't know Okay, we're gonna get started My name is john mad dog hall and this talk is on project kawan. Okay. That's what the little tilde over the a means And this is a project I started about 12 years ago Mostly done in latin america and I'll get into a little bit of that a little bit later I'm the board chair of the linux professional institute. We do certifications for open source professionals We're non-profit based out of toronto canada Uh, I'm also the founder of project kawan And I'm the co-founder of a project in brazil called caninas lucos and the that's crazy dogs, by the way And the goal of that project is to create inexpensive single board computers But also to teach people how to design and manufacture and create supply chains of things for such computers We'll see a little bit more about that later on I'm also the executive director of linux international Now who am I in general I started programming in 1996 back then we didn't have computer science We only had computer black magic And my part of my degree was in data processing I actually had a professor tell me I would never make a make my profession as a professional programmer I'm still waiting to see if he was correct I've worked on a wide variety of different systems a lot of them closed source Um, I've worked for a lot of companies small and large non-profit and profit making Some of them were supposed to be profit making but ended up being non-profit Uh, I had a wide variety of jobs. So from the last talk about changing jobs I've had a lot of them And but most of all I like to think of myself as being pragmatic I believe in getting the job done So I don't typically spit on somebody if they're using closed source software I just try and convince them why they're wrong So there's a problem in brazil and in latin american countries A lot of the federal and state universities there in europe too for that matter It seems like the united states is the only one that's behind The tuition is free For qualified students You get good grades in high school. You work hard in high school You take the entrance exams and you pass and you can get a full scholarship To a university whether it be state or federal However, everything else is not free So if you live in a small town and you have to go to the city for the university You have to get an apartment and you have to have food and you have to buy books and and internet and computers and things like that And all of this costs money And a lot of times your family is so poor that they really can't afford that Likewise, it's also equally possible that as a see as the oldest child in the family You've been working since the age of 15 to help to support your family And so often it's not the oldest child who goes to university, but some of the younger siblings In fact I talked with one with one president of university He said 40 of the qualified students Could not take advantage of the free university because their families are too poor to do that Some of them work part-time as waiters waitresses, you know They like clerk at a hotel stuff like that But they typically don't make enough money to really get them through And there's a lot of students that get within two or three courses of graduation and they give up Uh, and besides that's not what they're studying, right? They're not studying to learn how to flip hamburgers in a in a burger place They would want to be learning computer science or computer engineering or information science Pardon me And so like I said oftentimes they give up There's another problem. It's small business You know In the united states small businesses between one to 50 people medium is 50 to 500 and Large is 500 above that But in a lot of countries small is between one and 30 people 30 medium is 30 to 300 and And it's interesting that it's small business who it typically generates the greatest number of patents and new ideas In the united states about 90 of the patents are created by small to medium business And larger companies like apple and google and stuff Sure, they develop a lot of new ideas and stuff like that But they typically buy the patents and the ideas of other people incorporating those people and those there's companies into their companies So the small business is there and they need computers But some of them really don't want to know anything about computers. It's just a tool. It's not like us We want to learn everything about computers, right? They don't want to know anything about computers They just want to use the computers to do their job But they can't afford to have a full-time systems administrator And consequently you go into a small business and there may be some computers in there that aren't working at all Or they're working very poorly or they haven't had any patches installed in the system in months and years And they the person also has no advocate for them A salesperson comes in and tries to sell him a new computer or a new piece of software and they have no idea of How that thing works or why should work or where they need it I walked into a restaurant one time. He had three computers sitting up on his counter One was his point of sale system. Okay, I understood that one of them That he had a web page that they could put in orders for pizza and it printed out on a piece of paper That order and okay, I could somewhat understand that But the third computer he couldn't tell me what it was for. He didn't know what it was for Somebody just come in and sold it to him and it sat there. We didn't know we never did figure out what it did One day we just turned it off and nothing happened. So This is this is a problem. They needed advocate for them and Particularly somebody that gets to know their business So they can advocate the proper software for them to help them do their job And then again homeowners for the most part, they're clueless. Okay So I was at a small event down in brazil one time around 2015 And I had this person come up to me and say mad dog. How can I make money with free software? Well, there's many answers to that. There's many business plans and things But as I sat there, I realized this person was not asking me How they particularly could make money with free software, but it was how they Could make money with free software and I started thinking about that. I said, well, You're smart. You know technology and stuff, but you really don't know how to create a business You don't know how to you know What business to make and how to start selling and stuff like that And I said what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a project called project kawan And as part of that project, I really have no goal of having one big Overall project that has several million people in it. Don't care What I want to have is a million small companies start up that each have one or two people To do it so they become their own boss and the profits that they make go directly into their profit their pocket But what I want to also do is make it as easy as possible for them to start up that small business And to have a product they can sell or services they can sell to the small business people Now i'm going to say something that'll probably be interesting to some of you or an amazing to others People don't buy Hardware or software. I mean they used to in 1969 when I started programming. Yeah, you go out buy IBM mainframe a couple million hours, right? And and then you wrote whatever you needed But today you don't really do that, you know, you buy a solution to a problem That's what you're buying, you know, you buy a home security system you buy a home control system you buy a Point of sale and erp system. That's what you're buying And you really don't care what it's running on a laptop or a server or an arm processor or an intel processor What it's running linux or windows or you just don't care normally You just want the solution So I started thinking about solutions that these students could sell Now some of these students have been using computers since the age of eight My husband is now I have to be careful 30 years old And I know that's that's amazing and he's been using the computers since the age of eight He's been helping his family take care of the computers since the age of eight And everybody in his family his extended family would come to him and please help me install this new app on my android phone Please, you know, my disk drive is full or my disk drive failed and you know, could you help me? And sure, you know, he knows how to do all that stuff But the problem is he can't charge his mother for doing that You can't charge your mother The mother who fed you the mother who changed your diaper the mother who took care of you who wiped your nose You can't do that But you could charge timmy's mother Right and timmy because you're busy helping timmy's mother timmy could help your mother and and your mother could pay timmy Okay, so teaching them how to do business and things like that Is what you can do And this is not just your family. This is everybody in the neighborhood I mean once they found out that you go could do this stuff people came from miles around to have them help have him help them But what these students don't know how to do is they don't know how to set up a business They don't know how to make a contract. Especially a contract is legal in their country They don't know how to go out and find customers. How do you approach your customer? How do you sell yourself to that customer? How do you figure out that the things that you can do to sell to that customer? They don't know that How do you advertise to that customer? Now back in the day if you wanted a product you wanted to advertise something you had to hire an advertising agency And in order to do that you had to have money and you had to contract with the advertising agency And then you had to have a lawyer to make the contract and all this stuff and it was very expensive But today you have social media. You don't need to do as much advertising and have as much money You can do a lot of social media to get the word out about your services and your products How do you subcontract? Now you've got a contract and in the contract it says what you're going to do for your customer And now your customer comes to you says, you know, thank you for all the things you're doing for me But I really need to have you do this You say, well, I don't know how to do that. It's not in the contract You're gonna, you know, you're gonna have to pay me extra money And then I'm gonna go out and find somebody that can do that for you and I will pay them to do that That subcontract And so you teach them how to subcontract And how to make products And I don't know if you've been following this but over the years There's has been more and more and more projects that show up In, you know, on the web Sourceforge and and you know github and all these others if you take a real hard look there's about 400,000 different projects out there that you could take some portion of them and turn them into a product So what project how one did was take the geeky Penguin with the tape on the glasses and meld that together with the penguin with the tie the business penguin To create a project that people could have So how does project how it really work? We have project our professionals the students or whatever And we can start back in high school with this to start training the high school students how to do this And what they're doing what the first goal of project how I was to create services go in and repair people's existing computers And we don't really care where these computers are linux and free software Or windows or apple Doesn't care to project, you know, we don't care for project how on It's up to the student and what the student does We prefer to do open source because we think you can do a better job in And fixing that and keeping it alive Now a lot of students we go in and do what we call break and fix When your computer breaks you take it to the student and the student fixes it and charge you a certain amount of money for their time And the and the equipment and everything But the problem with that type of model is the fact that You know, you can't you can't control it Maybe you don't have any break and fix traffic for a long time, but that doesn't mean that your rent stops Doesn't mean that your electricity does is is not going to keep going, you know You've got ongoing bills So you really need to have a contract with these people To say i'm going to get paid so much each month and each month i'm going to visit you for so many hours a week And i'm going to look your system over i'm going to see what's happening in your error logs I'm going to look for beginnings of failures of memory failures of disk. I'm going to see if your disk is filling up I'm going to see all this stuff. I'm going to see if you have to apply some patches to your system I'm going to make sure your wi-fi is secure I'm going to i'm going to untangle that mess of cables and wires that you have going throughout your building and make it Make it so you know that everything is labeled and where it's going And i'm going to spend four hours every week with you as a customer Doing this i'll answer your questions and if i don't know the answer I'll go back and look it up on the web And translate it for you And uh and do this And so if you get six customers that you're spending four hours a week, that's 24 hours a week It's a part-time job better than flipping burgers better than you know the night uh a hotel clerk And you're doing it is something that you're trying to learn. Okay, it's giving you experience in systems administration And this should generate enough living money To you can live you can pay these incidental expenses that you have in your tuition-free university so We have a website that we are developing And the website is made up of different levels The first level describes Is is written in every language we have it right now in english spanish and portuguese It describes what the project is how it works Why people should be doing it and that's the same universally around the world The second level of the website is country by country About 180 different countries That have a contract a skeleton contract which is legal in that country Maybe it's written in the language of that country. It's been checked invented by a lawyer And they say yes, this is a legal contract in this country It also has advertising materials for that country I can't tell you the number of times I've gone into a country where The the native population has a skin color much darker than mine And yet you're coming out from the airport and there's a border board with a Purely white, you know, british person or something, you know, telling them why they should be buying their product. It's ridiculous So you have advertising that fits the market Let rule of thumb Never ever have advertising in japan That shows chimpanzees dressed up in suits for some reason that just infuriates the japanese You're not going to go any place So advertising that fits that Taxes that fit the country and so forth and you put all of that at the country level the country modules You have 180 different modules at the second level Now underneath of that for each country, you have people who start up a local Project kawa site And maybe that's associated with the university. Maybe it's associated with a business group like the kawanas club or You know one of those lions club or rotary club And they you get a volunteer from them now this volunteer doesn't have to know doesn't know anything about technology Doesn't know anything about technology. That's the student's job But what they do know is how to approach their business their businesses how to approach their customers And they coach and encourage the students to go out there and do that Because remember when you were 17 or 18 years old, you know You had to go out and knock at the door of a business person your knees were shaking and stuff like that You were sure this person was going to just chop off your head They need to have encouragement But once they've done that once or twice once they've been successful at doing that They don't need to have as much encouragement. They know what they're doing Now this is a trick to this I must admit because that mentor that person who's volunteering to do that That mentor goes to the kawanas club the rotary club the lions club And talks to the business people in that organization. Maybe it's a small hotel association or a restaurant association in that city They go there they describe the whole program And they say to these people How many of you would like to have one of these students working with you to help you keep your computers alive And when the people raise their hands The mentor goes around and takes their telephone numbers and addresses and stuff like that Takes it back to the group of students whose knees are shaking and say, hi, why don't you go see this person? So now you have the customer who's been prompted. This is a magician's trick The customer has been prompted, you know, it's a force You're forcing the student upon this customer, but the customer is expecting it to happen And they say, okay, we'll try you out And once you've made once you're the student you've made a couple of successful cells Then you can be the mentor to the next student coming along So that's how the program works And what the students said to me we piloted this several times and we learned each time through the pilot some things One of the things that they whether we learned was the student said, hey We wanted to not just do services We want to do products And that would cause me a little bit of problem because I'm still in the process of trying to figure out what type of products people could have And we came up with basically four products to start off with and I'll go over some of them This is just a list of them right here Udu which is a point of sale and ERP system called enterprise resource planning Most companies have this it's an inventory control system. It's a customer relationship management system It's you know, you know, maybe a web page, but it's all built out of this system That allows you to integrate all of these things And Udu has been around for a long time It was called tiny ERP at one time And they changed it to Udu There is a commercial side of it, but there's also a community side which is completely open source and completely free and there's enough stuff when the Free side to be able to set up an entire point of sale and ERP system that you don't pay anything for the software And so that's that's one thing we'll get a little bit more into that a little bit later Another one is the freedom box personal and community server Now a friend of mine named ebbon moglin who is a law professor in new york city Who wrote gpl version three? he had this kind of a Thing one time and the thing was that he was a little nervous about people putting their most private of stuff up onto Google and amazon and stuff like that. I mean he didn't care about the cat pictures You can put as many cat pictures as you want up there But he did care about people putting their social security numbers and stuff like that So he decided to create this project called freedom box To be a secure Personal server that would run on this little single board computer and that you could plug into the wall And store your most private of things there And after a number of years of people helping them do this they created version 1.0 And it has now been integrated into debian 11 and 12 so the software is actually there And that became another product. We'll talk a little bit more about that later. Also There's also cody, which is a multimedia home system to allow you to store your music and your videos and things like that You can set up a really nice Home entertainment system out of cody and a little single board computer and some speakers And also an internet of things Integration that you could do with home assistant io And then there's a couple more things that are coming down the pipe But all these can tend to run on debian on these little single board computers. We'll see more about them later so the The project cower professionals said yeah, we want to have products as well as a service offering So we tried to create the lowest cost possible product for them that they could then extend Because it's free software and make money in the setup and maintenance and everything like that So let's go into them a little bit greater depth. Here's udu. There's the url to the udu community site we can learn more about it and It's been favored. It's been compared favorably to sap and oracle ERP POS systems now for those of you who've ever dealt with those You find out that they're very sophisticated and very expensive And not only that but they're very closed Okay, so I had a friend who had a restaurant. He had an oracle erp system And one day I found that he was really exhausted And I said why are you exhausted? It's because he spent the whole weekend Typing in his receipts that he had gotten from his vendors into the system. So the system knew what he had And I said well, can't you get those things electronic? Oh, I do they email me those those receipts Well, why can't you just feed them in the system? I have to pay oracle 30 000 dollars for the module that allows me to do that I said that's a said an ox script No, I don't know how the database is set up. So I can't do that So I have to spend a day every month typing these things in And this is the type of thing that you know, even if you got the the system the main system for free Having to do that work because it's not open is a problem Now udu works in a wide variety of systems it works for windows it works on on Linux it works on bsd You're not limited to what it is But there's hundreds of companies out there who offer second and third level support So if you need to have a new module written You can go to those companies and subcontract to them to get that module written If there's something that the that the student can't solve they can call in those companies Now I've been to those companies and people told me hey, these companies are going to hate this because it's taking away business from them No, they don't They love this because this eliminates those crappy questions. They always get My mouse I move it right and the little thing on the screen goes to the left No, no, you're holding the mouse wrong. Okay This eliminates that type of problem or the printer that's unplugged or whatever And now when somebody calls them up It's the student who calls them up and talks to them on a level and they can talk to them at different level So it shortens the amount of time they can concentrate on second and third level problems because of the students So they they love this idea And there's some of the people that we're going to get to be mentors that includes this person right here Now on the left hand side, you see a typical point of sale erp system. You see it at mcdonalds. That's what it is Okay It typically is a screen lcd screen a scanner a printer a cash drawer And then maybe something to take credit cards All of that stuff is supported with udu And this guy right here is works for a company called kameez kme He's one of the providers of udu in brazil And he came to us a show to show off this type of stuff Now you take the udu software. You have your little single board computer. Maybe it's a raspberry pi Maybe it's a kinetus Kinetus lucus system And you order a bunch of stuff over the internet. You order a printer you order a scanner You order a scale and it's all listed as the ones that are supported Both of those are usb devices. They just plug right in And then you create the system Hello, my name is john mad dog hall I am the board chairman of the linux professional institute and the president of linux international I am here today with the people from the kinetus lucus project To show you a technology demonstration of one of the potential products that could be built with free and open source software A labrador and stock components that you can order off the internet Stock components such as a printer A scanner A cash drawer And a lcd screen This is free software from the udu association And we put together this little technology demonstration to show you what we've got working at this point with more things coming in the future This is the kinetus lucus labrador computer It is a 32 bit computer This particular one we are using to drive the point of sale terminal of udu So the point of sale terminal is the interface that interacts with the human being with the clerk with the customer things like that There's another part of this system, which is a erp system that would handle things like inventory Or customer relationship management software Or a lot of e-commerce a lot of other things that a company or a store would like to do But they don't need a big computer to do it. They could do that with the labrador So we have this setup to take a standard bottle of hand gel Use a standard scanner, which you can buy off the internet scan in The barcode from the product And then You can see that it gets put onto the customer List of things the customer has purchased If that's the only thing that the customer wants at this time You can then come and say okay proceed with what the customer is going to do You can say oh you want to pay for it with cash and click on that You can then say that's the last thing that the customer wants to buy and so you validate that And then it says how do you want the receipt and in this case we're having the receipt sent out to the printer and then we would go and Print the receipt And the receipt comes out on the printer and the cash drawer opens up for you to accept the cash from the customer and give them their change You can say okay, we're going to have a new order And start the whole process over again We will be adding additional components to this a scale to be able to weigh produce And other things that people would want to have in a point of sale system These basic components including the labrador could also be put into a customer kiosk Or other types of self-service types of things This is a very powerful, but yet very inexpensive system Where the money that you're making can go into your pocket Instead of sending it to a large corporation that is going to simply give it to their stockholders So thank you very much for watching this Keep in touch keep watching because we're going to be doing more things over time And this will be ready very very soon for people to be able to use this to make business and make money Thank you very much. My name is john mad dog hall and this is caninus lucus Now over time what we're going to be doing is replacing the regular lcd screen with a touch panel And so you're not going to need to have the mouse and the keyboard You know, it'll be less clunky But this was just a technology demonstration to give you an idea about what udu can do With a little single board computer like a raspberry pi would it can eat its lucus So the next thing we want to talk about is the personal server And this is done with freedom box software freedom box.org which we talked about before And what they wanted was a blobless solution So everything was in source code and the hardware had no binary blob Synods so you can see everything that was going on because if you want security you have to be able to look at it Okay And they they created a panel to allow people to more easily set up the wi-fi uh tour server VPN and things like that that you would want to have in a secure setting now Is this mom and pop easy? Probably not but it certainly means you don't have to have a phd in computer science to set this up Just a general knowledge of things that A student might have as they went through high school and university Um, you can also add dexcloud software one there to have a community server Not just a personal server, but more of a community server where people can log in over the internet And be able to store their their data and documents and collaborate with each other Using collaboration software that nexcloud supports And finally you can add on top of that the fediverse type of software like the osprey and can do social That allows you to create facebook and other types of social media That is under the control of you instead of under the control of some corporation Now i admit that i come from a rather strange country Called the united states And we have this wonderful piece of law called the constitution And the constitution protects our privacy unless you have a part of the patriot act We'll ignore that for a little bit, but for the most part we're supposed to have our privacy protected by the constitution However, if you come from outside the united states, you're not protected Nothing zero And if i as a us citizen talk to somebody outside of the united states Then our conversation is not protected either And so if you're outside of the united states, you may have some issues about having Things located inside the united states and this is why a lot of the social media companies have servers That are outside of the united states But that still doesn't protect them because the headquarters are still inside of the united states That's a problem for a lot of people in different countries I won't say where that's good or bad. I'll just say it's a problem So besides all this software that you have You can uh, the university of sau Paulo in brazil is a certificate authentication Mechanisms so they can Authenticate the certificates that you have on a website when you say HTTPS That s is a certified website It becomes because it's a certificate and there's a handshaking thing that goes on The guarantees that the website you think you're going to is actually the website that you are going to The university is able to set that up also In addition to that there's things like multifactor authentication So one set of authentication is your username and your password Another type of authentication might be your fingerprint another type of authentication might be your eye scan Another type of authentication might be What day of the week is it and is it from nine to five? If you're trying to access the site outside of those times You shouldn't be able to do it All these are authentication ways. Well, there's a key Called, you know made by a company called solo key. There's other ones too And you have to stick this key into your laptop in order to be able to log in You can know your your login name and your password till the cows come home But unless you have that key stuck into your laptop, you're not going to be able to access it And then you can pass that through using a technology called phyto to To give greater authentication to logging into your websites and stuff like that And solo key is a company that makes these all of the software for solo key that implements the phyto to Technology is open source So you can see exactly what it does. You can actually compile it and install it yourself The hardware for the key is open source. They supply all the circuit diagrams You can check it to make sure everything's going on And if you want to you could actually manufacture it in your own country on your own manufacturing lines That's open source The last one I want to talk about is your home entertainment system. This is kodi multimedia It actually has had several renditions over the years But it allows you to store all your photos and music and videos on inexpensive hardware Not only set up a stereo system, which is basically Two channel But stereo with a subwoofer 2.1 or 5.1 or 7.1 comes out of that And you can you can handle all of those different types of systems 4k or 8k tv sets you can do that too And and you can even handle over the air transmission if you're in the city There's a lot of over the air free tv that's generated You can get a little usb prong that fits into your system and you can capture over the air tv for people Who don't want to pay for cable tv shows Of course, you can browse the internet on it It's just your first connection to the internet for a lot of people And you don't have you know, you can use the same system that's your multimedia system To browse the internet and see the connections So you can add to that home assistant i o this is a second largest platform or project on the internet Linux being the only larger one There's 80,000 people who contribute to this not everybody contributes a lot but 80,000 different people So there's a lot of interest in this They can control all the lights that google home and alexa control and so you can go through But when you talk to home assistant, it doesn't go all the way back to google It doesn't go all the way back to apple. Okay, it stays inside of your home In most cases And that's important. It's also important when the internet goes down and all of a sudden you can't turn your lights on You know, the internet is fine inside of your house But there's nothing going to the outside and this is a big problem in africa recently because some of the cables Going to africa were cut over the last couple days and their internet is spotty to be the least You can also set up a security webcam Looking at your front door Maybe you have a small apartment and the front door is the only way that people are going to get in So you set up the webcam and you say hey if anything moves Send me a picture let me know Because maybe it's just a cat jumping up on the door But maybe it's somebody else who's coming into the system and I want to know so I can call the police and let them know It's relatively as you set this up, you know, I mean for a simple You know stereo system You just plug in some powered speakers into your little usb and you have all this capability And I had a friend of mine who set this system up and tailored it. He had a projection system LCD projector He has a nice a nice amplification system and people would come over to this house He's saying you want to see some of the videos I took of my phone and say yeah, that'd be nice It picks up his phone He doesn't have to transfer the videos off his phone to any place else He just connected to his phone and played it right out of his phone Over the amplification system and the people would sit there and look at this and say Where can I buy this? He says well, it's not really a product. It's just a project that but where no no you don't understand Where can I buy it and how much does it cost? So there's a lot of demand for this and you may not be selling this to somebody who Who's a you know base salary or something, but there's a lot of people who have big expensive You know home entertainment systems that would pay a lot of money to have this type of integration And so there's 400 000 projects out there of different types That the students could look at learn and then sell support for this to the various customers that they have And what does all of project kawa cost to the students? How much of the students going to have to pay to become a project kawa professional? You know, what's the cost of the students and the answer is nothing never In fact, you don't even have to become a project kawa professional in order to have access to all the information about how to do this All the build stuff all the things that tell you about the hardware And what you have to do to put together all of that is going to be available to everyone who wants it You don't even have to log into the system However, if you want to ask a question of somebody Then we're going to make you have a login account And when you get that login account, you're going to have to agree to a code of conduct No calling people names No telling them they're an idiot You know treat them like another human being That's all you have to do And then you can ask questions and maybe people will help you Because that's what we're all about But what if I want to be a project kawa professional? We don't have to pay for that to be able to use the project kawa logo to be able to have on my business card project kawa professional You still don't have to pay It's still free But here you have to agree to a professional code of conduct Which says how you treat your customer? That you agree to go to your customer every week for four hours. You don't just leave them by You treat them as a professional And you can become a project kawa professional and use the trademark information Now what optional things could you get when you get to that level? Well, maybe you want discounted vouchers to the linux professional institute So you can get certifications because that will help you attract customers And you know, that's something you can get Why can you get that when you get to that level because you've agreed to the professional code of conduct Now you've got your certification. What else does that do for you? When you go to an insurance company to get professional insurance in your country They'll sell it to you at a discount. Why because they know you're trained And you're less likely to get into trouble where your your customer is going to sue you for the damages you've done to their system You're less likely to have those damages And you could also get discounts on books and training and other things because you're a project kawa professional But it still has not cost you any money So we're going to build this community of project kawa professionals Independent business people each one owning their own business And we're going to connect them with five to six businesses a piece all local to where they are We're going to start them off in high school. So by the time they go to university, they already know how to do it They take their customers that they've had in high school, which is local to where they live And they give them to the next project kawa potential project kawa professional They then go to university They say oh, I need to get five or six more customers that are local to where I live at the university But maybe there's a senior who's already leaving who already has those customers Or maybe they're working on their senior projects and they don't have the time to do this So the freshman coming in takes over from the senior this leaving And so the customer gets the connectivity continuity of support they need So all the revenues other than their expenses that they have goes right into their pocket other than taxes, of course everybody has to pay taxes And they're expected as part of this community to help the other project kawa professionals And they can do that because they're not competing with them each one is is five or six customers within their scope of where they live We have a community of mentors Like I said, they don't have to be technical. They're mostly business people. How do you do a business? And they help the students help themselves to do this They meet with the pcps once a month, you know, like a boy scout meeting or girl scout meeting or whatever And universities can use project kawa as a separate type of internship program for the students who need to earn money to go to university So mad dog, this is wonderful. When does this going to happen? Well, as I said, we've had several different projects several different pilots in particularly in brazil We have a project a pilot going on in argentina a project a project pilot going on in your gray and Paraguay And we've learned a lot from these product projects and pilots So today you can start looking at the udu software You can start looking at the freedom box software. You start to see what these, you know Cody, what can these things do imagine your mind what you can do with it? And then on june the 24th We will hopefully have the website done So you can go to the website and start looking at it and start planning on it and stuff and actually start doing this yourself You don't have to wait for us And then we're going to have the full launch when june Showed them the business plan. I showed them how it's going to work And after two days, they came back to me and their faces were really white And they said this scales Really well I said, yes, it does And I want this to be worldwide. I went, you know place all over the world be able to do project kawa And to have not The richest people going to university But the best So thank you very much if anybody has any questions be happy to try and answer them We need to have the microphones so that people can hear your questions on the recording And i'm going to start shutting this down because I want to go here bills Talk as the final keynote Any questions? Where's the website for this? I personally I purposely have not shown that because it's not ready yet So it will be project kawa just the same way as it's spelled Dot org when it's ready And it'll be ready during the soft launch which will be june the 24th But in the meantime you can start looking at the software for udu which is there And codie which is there and freedom box which is there and start to think about it Any other questions? No, so so why is it taking so long to do the website? Because it's one thing to do it in english It's another thing to get all the translations done spanish portuguese It's another thing to get the contracts written and vetted by lawyers And then to get those translated and vetted into different countries So we have to have all that done before we can put the website up and let people start going after it You mentioned pilots in several countries. Is anything going on on the african continent? Not currently with project kawa. No, but we have contacts in places like guana and kenya I'm leveraging off of the linux professional institute. I'm the board chair of the linux professional institute And while lpi is not doing this specifically They are helping with this and they see a movement that If people become involved with project kawan that this will generate requirements for certifications and things like that So the people that we have Inside of lpi Would be very interested in being project kawa mentors I'm curious because I do I mean, I do have some contacts in africa. How do I get in touch with you? What's the best way to sort of Start that conversation with you Well maddog at lpi.org works very well Thank you Anybody else? The other thing I'm going to do this. This has been recorded. It's going to go up on the scale website and when the When the website becomes available I will ask them to update the listing for this to include project kawa.org so that when people see the talk They'll be able to see the url for the website But it would just be frustrating for people right now to Try and go to the website and not have it ready anything else Okay bill trezwick Over in the other building. He's giving a keynote. I've known bill for 40 years Really funny guy really nice guy. Go see it. It's worth it. Thank you