 is a bit linty. I'm never going to get the lint on the sweater. Yeah, that's true. It's only a matter of time. I've slept on it a couple of times. A little more than a couple of times. Pickles. Or okuraga. Okuraga. Our, um, our housekeeper can also present. We've got a lot of them. The first group is a quick guy. Are they? I think we can guess. There's an answer to it anyway. It's time. The last one finalist. Please. Raise the chair. Stop talking and come over here. It starts in a minute. Alright. Ready? Sure. Cool. Hello and welcome. This is the panel discussion. Beyond your desk. Your passport to a global mindset. Now as you may guess, I'm not checked by any means. But that does not stop me from making an attempt and greeting you all in check. Please excuse any mistakes. Ahoy. A vittate. Close enough. Thank you. Alright. For the sake of introduction, my name is Garima Sharma. I work for Red Hat and I'm based out of Westfield, Massachusetts in the USA. I'm here in Bernou for my very first DEF CONF. It's exciting to meet all the interesting people and participate in all the technical discussions. So very happy to be here. More than that, I see that we have our audience and attendees at DEF CONF local offices and also from around the world. So a big round of applause for our audience. 1700 registered participants while the DEF CONF is growing year after year, right? And if I may borrow another statistic that Radu and Musil, who is the Czech site leader for Red Hat, he shared with me yesterday. And I hear that the Red Hat office here in Bernou has thousand people and growing as we talk and from 32 different nationalities. So how cool is that? Yeah, just take a minute and think about it, right? People from 32 different nationalities working in the Bernou office what a melting pot of different kinds of cultures. And so I was thinking, right, if you want to truly experience how different cultures come together and collaborate and do some fantastic engineering and innovation, all you need to do is get your airline ticket to Bernou and come visit the office here, right? So that's it. We have local and international leaders here who are all from Red Hat to join us in a discussion about how a global business works, what Red Hat is doing in terms of employee engagement and our efforts in the diversity and inclusion space. Introductions. Starting with Ben Levinson. He is a part of the quality engineering team at Red Hat and he has been with the company for a very long time. He leads the team responsible for verification and validation of products including REL and Fedora. Next, these students. She is our vice president of platform engineering and she is responsible for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, REL. After a long history with the proprietary operating systems engineering teams, she joined Red Hat about nine years ago and she has been with Red Hat for a very long time. She is the director of software engineering at Red Hat and he is a member of the Red Hat OpenStack leadership team. He is originally from Philadelphia in the US on the east coast and he relocated to Bernou almost two years ago to help strengthen ties across departments and offices within Red Hat engineering. Next, we have Radik. He is the director of software engineering manager at Red Hat responsible for OS development. He started as an engineer about 12 years ago with Red Hat and he was actually one of the first employees in Red Hat check. He helped out starting partnership between Red Hat and universities in check and has organized several depth calls before he says he handed it over to some universities. He joined Red Hat in April 2008 as the site leader for our engineering entity in Bernou. His greatest achievements to date include growing number of people from 100 to 1000 within eight plus years and winning several awards including number one employer of the year for SMBs in the Czech Republic in 2010, number one best employer in 2011 and fifth employer of choice amongst ID students in 2015. So welcome our panelists. A round of applause for them. So we will break our panel discussion into three segments. The first round of Q&A the panelists will be answering a set of pre-selected questions which we hope will cover the themes of what we are trying to cover in the panel discussion here. In the next segment the panelists will answer a set of random rapid questions. And then in the third round we will open it to the audience for audience Q&A. So the icebreaker question goes to you Denise. How would you describe your experience with DEF CONF? What do you like the most about this conference? And how would you compare it to say the Red Hat summit? I love DEF CONF. I've been coming here for the last at least five, six years. Actually every year DEF CONF falls on my husband's birthday and every year I come to DEF CONF instead. But I love DEF CONF because there are so many interesting discussions that go on. I think there are great sessions but I also love the hallway track. I think that speaking for Red Hat the Red Hatters who come here get more done and make more architectural decisions and more decisions about product direction in these three days than for the rest of the year. The other thing that I really love about DEF CONF is to see students involved. The volunteers and the students it's really important when you look at the way we're growing from 100 people to 1,000 people clearly Bruno is a place where Red Hat hires a lot. And so we want people to get to know us and DEF CONF is a great way for students to get to know us. That's great, yeah. So rather than Denise pointing to you how would you say being a local leader here? How is your experience with DEF CONF and what do you most enjoy about you? So there are two effects of DEF CONF one you can see actually here it's the official part but same importance has the less official internal part because it has become actually the biggest engineering event in the year globally so hundreds of people meet here and we are doing planning sessions so basically thanks to a couple of engineers 10 years ago with a great commitment and trying to do something more it has become maybe the most important events in the year for engineering. That's great. So over to you. How would you cross compare your experience working in the Czech to the work culture in other parts of the world because you were originally working out of the US Red Hat office, right? Have you worked in any other locations? It's been very interesting for me because until I came here two years ago I always worked remotely my whole career I've never actually worked in a Red Hat office until I got here so it's been an eye-opening experience in a lot of ways the first strange thing I had to get used to was everyone going to lunch at 11 and the fact that everyone seems to have two pairs of shoes I'm still trying to work that out but aside from that the things that I notice in this office in particular that are maybe different from other offices I've been around the our engineers here in Brno have a very strong work ethic but they do a really, really good job of balancing that with having a normal life you know, people are proud of what they do and they work very hard and then they go home and they stop working you know and I think it's I really admire the culture in that respect in America we just work all the time it's what we do and it's not a great way to live I don't think so and ultimately I don't think it's any more productive than the Czech way of working it's just less the Czech way is more balanced it's a more sustainable lifestyle it's because of the beer and it's good beer the best beer in the world yes so note taken because a lot of my team is based in Brno and the next time I send them an email on a Saturday or a Sunday just because that's what I do I'll be careful so that I'm not setting a bad precedent for them to also log in and start responding that's a good point then question for you what would you like outsiders to know about the work environment and the office location for those of our colleagues who could not make it here so like Radovan said we grew from 100 to 1000 almost in the time I've been here as well so I'm also from the United States but I moved to Brno seven years ago when I got here we had I think less than 5% of the people working in the office were women for one and probably the same is true for the nationalities represented it was mostly Czech and Slovak and then a few random people like me and some others so like Radovan said there's 32 countries represented here now I think 8 I talked to I did some research this morning I talked to a lot of the people working at Red Hat are from countries not Czech Republic and Slovak Republic so that's pretty substantial so now when you wander through the hallways in the office you hear many different accents and other languages I think that I also learned this morning that we have something like almost 14% women versus like I said the 5% number so we're doing better there so it's changed quite a bit the office is so Hugh works on some cloud technologies Denise and I and Roddick work on what we call the platform technologies but in the Brno office we have almost every product that Red Hat develops has some sharing in the Brno office so that's an awesome opportunity as well A, if you want to just learn about something else and B, if you need to collaborate if you're trying to put our products together then usually you can find or as you learned at the keynote this morning you can find somebody to help you create a solution across the whole portfolio so the office is pretty exciting Brno is cool because it's right in the middle of Europe and I think everything I said about Red Hat office probably applies to the Brno city as well maybe not the number of women but in terms of the international presence I think in the city I notice in the cafes in town I'm starting to hear also many different languages so it's really great and DefConf you're all here what to say about that it's grown up over the last 10 years so lots more participation from companies other companies besides Red Hat we have many more international presenters as well so it's great stuff so that's the idea for any of you who are not yet a Red Hatter, we are hiding right Radhavan? all right so Radhik as much as you don't take the credit for organizing DefConf you have been an organizer for the longest time what do you think has led to the continued success of this event and what would you like to see more of in the future? that's an interesting question I was really thinking hard about it because I was doing this introduction this morning and I really thought about how the conference evolved from a very small event that actually originally was also internal so the original purpose of the conference was within the teams that we had based here let's share some experience, let's share some knowledge and then we realized well why do we do this internal? this is all open source we're all taking external people into our projects or we're all participating in external projects why to keep this closed so we opened it up and I'm still amazed how this event grows so from the conference that also used to be only 100 people so it's amazing and one thing that I really want to keep with this conference is this engineering feeling about it so as I mentioned in the morning as well it's still an event that is organized mostly by volunteers mostly by people involved in the technologies itself it's not professional even that's why we have a lot of new speakers the conference itself might have some rough edges but that's the beauty about it that's what I really can tell you about that because it forces pretty much every one of you to participate if you want this conference to be better join us if you can it's open source it's free to really start helping us out wherever you can so that's one thing that I really want to keep and it's hopefully never going to be a huge big event organized by marketing people because great message straight from the organizer thank you for that so Denise I know we have between the two of us we have spoken about some of the complexities behind hiring and doing business in a global setting can you describe for our audience what could be these complexities and even for the purposes of relocation what are some of the challenges that Red Hat faces that our audience may not be aware of what it really is first if you don't mind I would like to ask the audience a question how many of you are working in open source today how many of you sorry for the rest of you because open source is where interesting things are happening it actually does tie into this question because when you're part of an open source community what that really means is that your CV is online for everybody to see and so people who want to hire people who work in technology already know where to look and when you are an open source person and we hire you many times you can just work from home so I have a big part of Red Hat's engineering team and about 40% of them actually work from home but I have people in my organization from 23 different countries which is a lot because what that means is 23 different sets of labor laws 23 different social retirement programs 23 different lunch tickets or no lunch tickets did you know that if you hire someone in Israel you have to give them a car allowance I never knew that did you know that well I never I learned nine years ago that if you hire someone in Brno in the Czech Republic you give them lunch tickets there are things like that in every country around the globe sometimes within my organization I have somebody who works in I don't know Spain who says I'm tired of living in sunny Barcelona I want to live in London I say first you're crazy but do you really want to do that I swear that is a true one and then I have to think about what does it mean to do from Spain to London what is that fortunately that's all European Union I don't have to worry about visas but if you want to oh that's right now uh oh oh gee look a change to international law that affects the company and therefore a person but there are things like that that change constantly some countries that had had I can give you stock grants some countries if you're Finland I can't give you a stock grant or China I can't give you a stock grant so there are lots and lots and lots of differences so when you think well my spouse is going to go to grad school in Alabama in the southern United States and I'm going to work from Alabama first really but second think about what that means because you're going to have to go through a US visa process because that's not European Union so there are lots of things like that that make red hats compensation and benefits teams pull their hair out um I think every country has their own pay scale every and when you imagine how many different types of jobs there are and how many different pay scales there are for each of you know it gets very complicated so if you just decide hey I'm moving to Sweden tomorrow like great that's fabulous how are we going to cope with that so those are the kinds of things that Garima and I talked about you had one who wanted to move from India India to Dubai Dubai wow and so Denise was telling me it's not as easy as the employee just saying you know what I don't need the office space I'll work from home just send me the paycheck at my house it doesn't work like that no problem there are tax laws great great response so Radhavan talking about global business continuing this trend what is behind the success success story of the red hat R&D entity in Burno I know you've been very involved see the company grow and how do you manage to keep growing in this current very highly competitive market okay it's hard to have some short version of this but first the people here are really good the universities are good so the graduates are very well educated first second people are able to integrate to develop and they don't leave so it's very stable red hat is really a company of equal opportunities so if somebody is good it doesn't matter where they are working from so people are able actually to use the opportunity that the company is giving to them and last but not least we were able to create a multicultural environment here not only because of Burno is a really great place to live and people that come are able to find a good place to live and they don't leave and the multicultural environment means that anybody who enters the course of red hat immediately work in a global team everybody is getting international experience and it's helping a lot in working with this company why we are able to hire people so first the best hiring we use is that people usually don't leave us also if somebody leaves it's not rare that they come back later and this is really a strategic place for the red hat which allows us to work 10 years ahead we are working not just with universities but with high schools as well which helps us also to do something with diversity for disabled and for women in IT and we are in any moment in direct relationship with 200 students so it's a huge number of potential clients great response thank you for that next question to you what kinds of hiring challenges do you face in your Burno office and what are the advantages that we have compared to various locations all around the world should I start? so I'll start with the advantages and Radhavan already mentioned our strong presence here and especially our long term work with the universities actually allow us to pick the best students from the university directly so you might be aware that this university here but also the necessary university we do a long term project for Radhavan this university where students can do a long term project we actually teach them directly so that's another thing that we started doing a couple of years ago that we are influencing what students are taught here we are intentionally drilling holes into the education system between students what is open source, what technology is for their future how to use github how to use all the tooling that we know and use pretty much they would so that allows us to really have a very good type of great people that we can keep hiring and it's good for us as for planning the future so we know that we will be growing at the same time we know that we've made enough investments at the university to have these people those already invented you so opportunities what was the first part of the question are you the answer to it yes I think you covered it basically you're describing that we don't have as many hiring challenges here of course we do hire the biggest challenge we have is figuring out where to put all the people which is an ongoing challenge I believe that in my own hiring experience OpenStack is a Python project we hire a lot of Python developers and Python is a very popular skill set right now and I think I can I don't think anybody in Red Hepburno would contradict me when I say it has become more difficult for us to find experience with Python developers in the Czech Republic and Slovakia we can offset that because we really are able to grow as Veronica said and which also really helps it helps us with diversity in hiring too I mean we can we can pick engineers up as high school students as college as university students who might not make a career and we can pull them that direction and it helps us broaden our hiring base that's great so this has been a very good conversation but I just realized I on the watch we have less than 5 minutes to wrap up so with that let me make these rapid fire the next two or three sessions and please speak what comes to the top of your mind right so let me start with you Denise what are some of the challenges in dealing with multiple time zones do you have any techniques that people can use that's sweet that's the hardest problem just try to find a time that is central for people to have your meetings in get as much done as you can in your meetings keep them focused and then turn people loose but touch base often and use to restore IRC to keep in touch compromise on both sides very important that's great so over to you Ben can you suggest any local events or opportunities that the red hat employees can avail either for their learning or getting involved in the open source community I can name a few Roddick is probably a better person for this question there's lots of stuff I do quality engineering and testing so there is a local group called protest morava which a couple of people from my team participate in we also go to like pycon cz pycon sk we do euro python and then everybody knows about meetup.com if you want to see what else is out there but there's a Bruno Jenkins group there's a docker group it's the geek capital of the Czech Republic so there's no shortage of things to do on that front that's great so let's close this with red hats initiatives in the diversity and inclusion space and this question is for you Roddick can you describe some of the work that you are doing on behalf of red hat in the DNI space diversity and inclusion space including the work with individuals with disabilities okay so two parts one internal so we are making sure we are really diversity friendly environment because not everything that looks like diversity friendly for example for wheelchair about person is really friendly so we work with them we have a guy that's visually impaired that is testing our systems if they are good for these kind of disabilities and the second part is I've learned some time ago that the support for those kind of people is not good at all we are losing many of great talents because they think they are not enough opportunities they are not companies like us or other software companies for example that can offer part time work from home all the flexibility they actually needs so part of my role is to promote basically this fact that many people with various disabilities can find really a good job and have a full professional life with companies like we are that's great so as you may know that Red Hat is known for open source work but based on the discussion that we heard here and you know as an internal employee who has been with the company for less than a year I can vouch for the fact that the company also has an open door policy all the leaders in the company make themselves very very accessible to anyone and everyone in the time zones they are flexible about it and also the company as a whole supports the idea of employee empowerment and open frame decision making so again you know it's not just open source but the idea spreads into all the different parts of the company with that even though we are short on time I'd like to open to the audience for any questions that you may have and working for almost four years as international teams like how was your approach for the language issues like having people from a lot of different countries to sometimes mis-pass and dialogue and then it becomes really complicated to get on the same page I have a team in China and a team in India and one of the things that we experimented with at the beginning of some of the team formation where there were people who weren't used to working with native English speakers or people with other accents we started doing movies sorry we started doing our things on IRC or Slack and that kind of leveled the playing field not just for the people who were shy about their English speaking skills but also just maybe people who were quieter in general in spoken meetings so you can't get the same bandwidth in a meeting like that because everybody's typing but it really it really helped the teams I guess find a comfort zone and then as a manager or as somebody working on an international team I think you just also have to coach yourself to slow down and try to speak more clearly or remind yourself to slow down and speak more clearly and just keep it at a steady pace where hopefully everybody can understand the accent another thing that sometimes is helpful is to make sure that there's not one room that has the big body of the meeting going on and two or three people on the phone put everybody on the phone yeah lose that concentration of people and as if you're running the meeting sometimes it helps if you call out specifically you Yiji what do you think about this yeah that's good practice in general put them on the phone and let them turn the camera on as well most of the time you're able to tell that that person is doing it with something different I would actually sorry one more quick thing it's not only the language where you're sitting there but it's a culture so there are different ways of people are working different ways how people are behaving in different cultures I would say the US culture is do think first and then ask for forgiveness while you might be waiting for orders first it's completely different story in China so understanding this environment where you have this global team and understanding that there are different expectations from different people and really thinking about it when you tell them something when you have a meeting it's crucial for success on such a team I was going to suggest also if you're presenting things circulate before and have fewer words make it a chance to look at it and think about it before addressing it make sure everyone understands so it's critical to get some people as well are we understanding each other do you hear what I'm saying the open stack leadership team that I work on we have three French native speakers and Israeli and Irish men two Americans and in the last meeting I was in the one of the French folks said you write great emails but you need to understand that when I get one of your emails usually I can, I read the first two lines and then I put it aside so that I can read the rest later because you know I'm a master's in English and I write long emails so we've, I have I have pledged to them that I will always begin with a summary which is good practice anyway so that at least they know what I'm trying to say before they can actually get down into the details later I find at the same time that it's important for all of us to reread everything that we write to each other two or three times we do a lot of written communication and Nathan from Israel his communication style is very different from Alexi from Paris and if I don't take extra time to read what they write two or three times and really parse it I'll misunderstand something and the same goes for them so we have to be very very very careful or we just lose time over stupid disagreements to actually disagree which is another thing that we try to emphasize internally it is really easy to get into disagreements but the place to start from is assume good intent yes very much on that and also email is the most communication tool we have ever invented any other question what do you find to be the most common inadvertent mistake that folks out of this office have towards other folks I hate it when the Americans do X the Israelis when they do this bomb it's the Denise's point I'm sure it's not malicious it's an inadvertent customer activity a lot of sarcasm in Czech culture which is sometimes not understood by the other side so I'm very open here that you would have to drink with Czechs first before you understand their sarcasm Americans can't hang with you if you have any sarcasm never sit down with a table of Czechs and ask them how's everybody doing 45 minutes you look sick and the kids Americans do that all the time we expect everyone to say great how are you we're out of time I have to thank our panelists for their heartfelt and very very genuine responses I hope it was useful to all of you thank you for your attention and thank you for listening round of applause thank you all thank you this was good thank you thank you for the audience this was very interesting thank you good bye I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry thank you for putting this together Yes, the session is over. Okay. What is the discussion? We have some time. We'll take that one. Okay. So the staff may respond to this, right? No. Okay. So, I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think so. Okay. So, the staff may respond to this. Okay. So, when they received this call, they said they were ready to respond. Yes. Good. Okay. No. I don't think so. I don't think so. Okay. Okay. I don't think so. Okay. Thank you very much for your help. I will send you the pictures. Do you know my name? I sent you the email yesterday, right? Thank you. Yes. Are you all right? We still look like we're connected. They did? In the end? Yeah. Oh, it was a good question. What? Seven minutes sometimes. Maybe five minutes sometimes. Maybe five minutes. Maybe five minutes. We still have ten minutes. What's the time? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It's great. I don't know. I don't know. Well, here it is. here it is. Well, we have this Kevin, I want to say what have you been doing. Oh. You can ask him, because he seems to know what can be done. I don't know if it's recorded or not, but I don't think it's recorded. Which is good, because we can use contact readers to program it and then test it on mobile phones. It was just one thing, should we just prepare an ad-app that we can put links for people for stuff to download. So we could just open the ad-app and then use the wires from there. Yep, that's possible. Maybe then we can put the URL of the ad-app on your site. Good, then I will put it. I put also the slides online, so people can download it and basically go with their speed, because I believe they will get out of sync quickly. So how should I introduce you? Or everybody knows you, so no need to introduce me. I'm just the coordinator. Good, good, good. I bought you two together, now we have these. Maybe just use this pad, so it's that kind of travel card or something. And you will then put all links there. You can probably also create a short or something like that. But that's readable one. It seems like I've got an ad-room here. So I also checked, I have several currently empty USB sticks, so if you want to prepare something to distribute as much as possible. Good, good. Yes, that works. And now we probably can put the URL to your site. Then jcaltest.org. HTTP? I should try HTTP because there is some word direct. What did you put in the slides? Where? Somewhere. What? Oh, you can take a look. Okay, I should put also your picture. I mean, this one. I will show it. Yeah, it actually works pretty well. I had the problem that I had a custom DNS server for the 808, and I didn't get redirected to the right place. After I changed it. How should I introduce you? How do you fit? A guy who drinks the beer, programs the guys, struggles around the world. Ideally, everything at the same time. I added a bunch of shit here. I just... Okay, we will see how fast we will be able to go. Just... I'd like to... Go very quickly. Yeah, this is the real idea. I also usually have a picture that nobody can understand. Look. This is the reality. I understood that this session will not be recorded, but I thought at least the voice recorder, so if you want to record it ourselves, you could do it and show what your opinion on that. Sorry. So this session is not recorded by the DEVCOM crew, but I have a voice recorder, so we could at least make a podcast. Do you want to? The question is whether this will really help. I would be like, okay, I'm coming to you. Yeah, it's probably most interesting for the beginning when you have the... Okay, you can take a smartphone and live stream to YouTube or Facebook as well. Do it then. I have never done it before. Me neither, but I know people do it. This should be already hands-on, so we push it. Yeah. GP-Uninstall is actually much more understandable to users. Uninstall. And then you are... The cat file. The information is taken from the cat file. Cool. And it's kind of related to the fact that you have a... That's perfect. I was not aware of this switch. So you don't need... The lead is also important, but just make it like... Uninstall, right? Yeah. And put out the details. Yeah, that's really cool. That's way better. That's way better. I will use it also for the real world. Maybe the NFC... ...NXB reader writer will work for other people, but it's fresh on my phone too. Fresh? Yeah. Fresh. So you know how to quickly set up this... Black... ...stuff or... With the ACS, it's a bit more complicated. Because... This is placeholder. But this is already... I don't think we can make... Reach that far. Yeah. But for people, it's very good. If you don't use it, then you won't get your stuff dirty.