 There is a small amount of actual audience participation, and they've just locked the door. So you're all stuck in the room now, fortunately or unfortunately, and I lied, it's not really locked. Come on in, you're not late, I haven't started yet, no you're not late I promise, but I will get started in about two minutes. And there is a small amount of having to talk to other people which I know is going to be horrendous for some of you. So if you're not a talking kind of person, please do you make sure that you have your digital device open and ready to tweet, which I realize will be a lot more accessible for some of you, and I don't have a hashtag for the talk so you could just put it on the DrupalCon hashtag. I don't think it will be too scary though, so if you want to, you don't have to come towards me, that's fine, but if you want to move forward or back so that you're sort of vaguely sitting near someone else, again, you don't have to if you want to be on Twitter instead, that's completely fine. I love when I say audience participation and then some people are like, nope, I'm out and they just walk into the room. It's okay, the recording will be here for you later when you're ready for it. I think it's okay if I start about 20 seconds early, I think I'm all right with this, I know that everyone's like standing outside just waiting to rush the room but I think we're good. So this talk came about because in part Emma convinced me to tell the story that I had told to her about how I had found what is now, for me, quite meaningful employment. There are definitely challenges with my job and I'll tell you who I work for in a minute so you'll perhaps want to remember that statement of there are challenges. But it's been a pretty interesting journey for me and I hope that for some of you it will be useful, relevant, and for some of you it may just be story time where you get to hear about the different kinds of jobs that I've had in the last 20 years, about 15 of which has been with Drupal. So more specifically, I have been around since the days of Drupal, gosh, three, four in that range, so quite a long time in Drupal Speak. It worked at the time I was working for local government and or was a contractor sort of around that time. Since then I've worked for in-house development teams for agencies. I've worked for Phase 2, I've worked for Lullabot, although I was on the education side of things so more specifically Drupalized me and have also now maybe the right way is to say it landed a job working for the United Nations where I work as a development manager and project manager for within digital services for the office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs. So the challenging part of my job is that I deal with professional disaster responders and all of the heartache that comes with paying attention to the work that you're doing in terms of how that impacts the field. For me it has been a really interesting journey. We are using Drupal in-house. I manage, we probably have about seven or eight Drupal projects that we host and then there's also a combination of Python, some straight PHP websites. What am I forgetting? There's another platform in there. Don't tell anyone. Node, that's the other one that we host. And so it's a range of different products and effectively so the digital services team acts as a mini in-house agency but there's not time cards associated, doesn't have the same sort of regular or the typical billing cycle that you would think of in terms of doing agency work and we have a much longer term relationship with our clients because they're all within our organization. So similar to some of the work that I was doing but a little bit of a twist. Now, it's kind of a weird thing to do to everyone but what I would really like for you to do is just with the folks around you or perhaps on Twitter if you're not completely comfortable talking to strangers which I completely understand and respect. Do you know right now what it is? And so this is sort of like the before and after. Do you know what it is right now that you are doing when you are most happy? So with the folks next to you, give a bit of an introduction. You may already know them and maybe you've seen or heard about the term flow, like what is it that you're doing let's say at your computer when you are filled with the most joy and then we'll sort of unpack a little bit of that as the presentation sort of unfolds and then the other thing if you have no idea and you actually hate doing Drupal, that's okay. I understand that too. We all have those moments. Today might be that moment for you. What is your other passion in life? So we'll assume that Drupal is your number one passion which may or may not be the case but we'll make that assumption. So what is sort of your outside world or sort of when you're not when you're not doing Drupal what is it? So for me it would be sewing or running are my two sort of outside passions. So I'll give you sort of 30 seconds right now to sort of just do a quick introduction. And at the computer what are you doing when you are most happy and then the second one what's your secondary source of joy? Go ahead. So I'm going to cut you short on this one. But what I saw there was a lot of happy faces which is good because initially what I saw was a lot of faces sort of looking at me blankly thinking I have no idea what brings me joy. So for some of you the social aspect of it is what brings you joy because as soon as you were able to talk to someone else you were able to start sort of thinking about what it was that that you actually love doing. There's a few words sort of up behind me that maybe you would have exchanged with one another in terms of building or refactoring, being social or working alone. Do you like optimizing code? Do you like generating new code? There's lots of different things that you could have said. And it's always for me a bit fun to see the reaction when someone else sort of like there's people out there who actually enjoy refactoring. And the look on someone's face is like really those people are like yes I have met them. They exist in the wild. I know that they're out there and it's sort of these different ways of thinking and I'm going to sort of wrap a lot of this presentation. I know you really want to take a picture. The slides are already online. I promise it'll be all right. There's an article that I read or a presentation that I watched actually a couple of years ago that broke ways of thinking about problems into three types of people. And there's a lot of the metaphor that doesn't really work for what we're going to do, but I think it's a good one. So we're going to talk about pioneers, settlers, and town planners. And this is originally a blog post by Simon Wardley who's done a lot with Oskon. So if you do a search for Oskon and Simon Wardley you'll find some really interesting things that he's also talked about. And he basically says that there's three types of very brilliant people who do really, really important work. You've got the pioneers who are going to build something that is a prototype. It's not even a product. They come up with these outlandish ideas that you would never want to actually use. They probably, their code doesn't work a lot of the time, but they're really innovative and interesting ideas that they're going to bring to the table. The next one is the settler. And what the settler does is they take this prototype and they turn it into an actual usable MVP or product, something you might want to, you know, now you're getting into the beta phase of things. You can handle low volume traffic. You can actually start having users interact with it. And they serve a really important purpose. I mean, at this point you're starting to perhaps make money off of that initial prototype. And you are, you're able to bring some reliability to it. And then finally you've got the town planners at the end of things. The town planners take that initial website and they scale it up into something absolutely massive. And they are able to, at that point, so if you think about, you know, I can put a video on my website, but if I want to be Netflix, I don't want everyone coming to my website. So that's the scaling idea of, you have this initial platform that you then want to make bigger. So roughly speaking, you're going to have the pioneers as the people who invent, the settlers as the people who refactor, and the town planners as the people who are going to scale. Now, there's all kinds of ways that this doesn't quite work in the real world, but think of it in that way for this one. So within those three categories, you may sort of initially, you may start to think about which of those three you are and then start thinking about how you experience work and think about whether or not you are fighting with what the work is trying to do or what your employer is trying to do in terms of their core business and what you are most interested in. Ultimately, employers can also be pioneers, settlers, and town planners. And there's also, of course, different points of the project where you may have early on in the development of a product where something is going to be sort of on the innovative side of things, and then maybe it's going to be very innovative, again, at the scaling side when you start to think of a bigger infrastructure and actually making it work for millions of people instead of your cat and your dog. So now we need to start thinking about these types of employers. And the other question that I've asked myself to go over and over again is, how is it that I've had all of these different jobs in the last 20 years and sort of what do they have in common? And I've got some things in terms of I really like three-month projects. That's my window or my attention span for excitement. And even in the place that I'm in right now, even though I'm an in-house software developer, effectively, it's still project-based and I still have multiple teams that I'm supporting and we still have projects that are about three months long where we add new features and then basically set that site up for maintenance mode where it's only getting bug fixes and only getting small tweaks along the way. So I've been self-employed agency work in terms of working for phase two and it also basically agency work as my own self-employed person. And then the in-house development was working for a couple of different and actually all of my in-house agency work has been for government or pseudo-government and then finally the in-house combination which is where I am right now which is effectively an agency inside a large organization. I've found that in, especially at Drupal cons and at Drupal camps, I've found that there's this affinity for Drupal agencies and that's who we see out in on the exhibit hall. Those are the companies that we think about working for, those are the ones that we see and yet of the folks who are here, I'm not gonna do a show of hands because you might prove me wrong but I'm gonna guess that a percentage of you are not actually working for Drupal agencies and certainly if we were to go into the wider audience of who's here, there's not enough Drupal agency work for everyone to actually be working at an agency. So we're likely to find schools, libraries, government, things that are perhaps someone's secondary passion and they're not necessarily building software for the sake of software. So then we start to look at, okay, if there's different kinds of agencies, there's also different types of industries that we can work in and as I was saying, you can be producing technology for the sake of technology which is a lot of the folks who are on that trade floor are building technology for other technologists to consume in their day job. Then we have users of technology which is the government, the schools, the think about all the folks who built websites for if you do agency work right now and then ultimately combining that with your passion. So if you come back to what was your secondary hobby, it's like my dream job might actually be working for Strava, might actually be, there's lots of different ways that you can think about and it sort of as a graduate with a second degree or a second major rather in political science, for me to be always coming back to government makes a lot of sense in terms of my second passion. My first passion isn't necessarily technology, it's more that I hate bad websites and so want to make them better. You know, that sort of refactoring experience and those people do exist in the wild, like yeah, I want to make it better for people. I want this experience to be really, really wonderful or at least suck a little bit less. So if you think about your secondary passion and you pair it with that sort of, are you a pioneer, are you an inventor, a refactor or a scaler? I don't even know if these are words but let's think of it that way. Then we can sort of match those up and find the job that's going to be right for you. Now this next section rather is a cheeky, maybe a little bit cheeky because it's really a primer on reading job advertisements and I have found that most of them are really poorly written. So it may seem a little bit unfair but we'll see if I can match them up, kind of. So the first set, and these are pulled from real job adverts on the internet, you can tell because of that first sentence. So the inventor friendly, if you're thinking about keywords when you're reading a job description that might suit you, you will need, and I have to read this, like this is one of those things where I can't just paraphrase, you will need to efficiently execute on business priorities and designs in an agile framework. So there's a couple of keywords for me here. One is that they haven't actually named what the agile framework is and in my experience, agile is a code word for I didn't feel like planning and I'm going to change my mind regularly. I really like the agile manifesto and I don't particularly have a single framework that I use but for the scale of this company, for this, where this job posting was, this is code for we're gonna change our mind a lot. So if you really like sort of crafting these exceptional software experiences that are going to take time and energy to do the user research, to think about what it is that you need to build to be able to test the implementation with the users to iterate over time, this is maybe not quite going to be a good job for you but if you love to invent stuff and you love to just sort of put things out there and see if it works and put things out there and see if it works on a completely different project, this one may be a good match for you. Second, the second one, come prepared to work in a fast paced environment. That one may just be code word for we don't know how to stop at the end of the day but again, I sort of, I think it's not a, it doesn't have the language of we take the time to stop and think about what we do. So let's contrast it and why I think it's, there are different set of keywords because this one is more on the continuous, it's not about speed so much as iteration. So continuously improve operational processes and procedures, sorry my Canadians coming out here. Development and support of, so that support word to me implies refactoring because if you are responsible for a product long term, you're going to be thinking about how you can change that product to actually meet the needs of the users who are experiencing problems. So slightly different if we go, if I can figure it backwards, yeah. Slightly different from fast paced or focused on the business priorities which is not necessarily the user needs, agile framework, slightly different language on these ones and then scaling, scaling was a bit tricky for me to find examples of the language that I would expect and for the most part I found it in operations where it was more on the, where you have a division between what the developers have done and then what the operations team is responsible for in terms of making sure it stays upright in production. But in these cases I was mostly finding things around performance and scalability as being the key words that you may look for in a job description if that's of interest to you. The big one I think, I don't know it like, it's maybe an unfair heading but the big one for me was how do you personally like to work? So in terms of I work on a distributed team that it is distributed by design, being an operations team in terms of keeping the web servers online, we don't all want to be sat in the same place because we don't want to do night shifts and so we've got a team, part of the team is in Australia, part in Romania and then I'm in the UK. So the culture that we have in our digital space needs to be very aware of time zones and so we try to not have an interrupt culture that results in someone being pinged at two o'clock in the morning with an expectation of an answer unless something is actually falling over. During the work day, we also, for some of the teams, again I support about 15 to 20 teams depending on how you count, we try to keep the focus or the interrupts to scheduled meeting times which allows a larger block of time for folks to actually sit down and get their work done. This is completely different to what you might experience in terms of XP or pairing or if you were in a workplace and there's an expectation that you can just go and tap someone on the shoulder. So think about those keywords for yourself and do you, to really sink your teeth into a problem, do you need to have that quiet time to yourself or do you need to be talking to someone else? So if you think about when I said what brings you joy and you just kind of, many of you just stared at me blankly but as soon as you got to talk to someone else then that sort of got the ideas going and you were able to generate through brainstorming what that was so think about those words and whether or not you want a high interrupt or a high sort of social environment or whether or not you want to sort of narrow down, narrow down the noise and focus it in on specific meeting times. So really the question of which resonates with you? Is it the inventor? Is it the refactor or is it the scale? And asking and taking out of those job descriptions as much information as you get but also interviewing the employer and asking them to tell you what it is that they are expecting from that position. I mean, not at all have I talked about your skills. This is about what brings you sort of joy and how you like working and the delight that that that you need to have from your employer. So now we've got kind of some lessons from the trenches. I've worked almost exclusively on distributed teams since 2006 and it's hard work. You need to be very consciously involved in the day to day activities of how you're going to work as a distributed team. So it means setting up some kind of schedule it means and I don't have a picture in here but we have a lot of meetings that are set aside that there is intentional time. We don't do the 24 seven video camera of the office space. It's very even when we do hangouts we tend not to do video and that's it's just the way the culture of our office works and it works well for us but we do have these really intentional time set aside to have that communication. We tend to work on shorter sprints. We tend to force people to show how their work is going instead of going the longer two week sprint. We shorten things down and make sure that we explicitly know that someone is doing well or has run into problems. We take turns for being responsible for planning instead of trying to do it as a group because it is quite difficult and we also allow people wherever possible to self-select the tasks that they're working on. None of this is official policy. It's just what works for the folks who are currently within the teams that I work with. The next one, aiming for culture is aiming too low. So I have had a couple of jobs where I loved the people who I was going to be working with going into the company and then found that that actually wasn't enough because there wasn't a clear sense of how I could be useful and what the company needed for me and it was just this constant struggle as we didn't figure out where the click was in terms of the synergy of how we were going to work together. So when you do start a job, even if you love the people, you love the company, you love the brand, you love everything about them, stop and think about what you're actually going to be doing for the first three or six months and make sure that it's something that you're excited about working on and they are excited about you working on and it's actually going to be helping them either to generate new revenue or smooth out an onboarding process or whatever it happens to be. It can change. It doesn't need to be the same for the whole thing but make sure you have that plan with them. And then the next one. So this is a tricky one for us right now. Our team, Digital Services is responsible for helping to bring a new way of thinking about software development to our larger division. And we're going from teams with sort of a single developer who sits with the team all the time to having more of a central pool and then taking whole teams and giving them to a product owner, to a software product and they would get an intense period of maybe three to six months to build out a new feature set and then they go and work with a different team. So not all developers are going to want to work that way and certainly the conditions have changed from a developer being effectively embedded to a developer being more sort of special ops now and that they'll go in and then they'll leave again. They'll go in and then they'll leave again. It's more like agency work and that's not going to suit everyone. So if you know really well how you like to work if the conditions change at work you'll be better able to say it's not quite what I want so can I meet my needs within a different division within the company or depending on how big or how small the company is but again the more you're conscious of it the more you can make conscious decisions. That's a little bit redundant isn't it? But you have to understand yourself and you have to be able to see the work for what it is and to be able to compare it against what you need. Oh perhaps in conclusion your perfect job is out there. I do think that like I said there's challenges to every job but the job that I'm in right now brings me joy and I love helping the people that I help. Yes it has its frustrations but I'm sure that every job out there will have its frustrations and I feel for me that it's a really meaningful experience and it's similar in the work that I've done for other agencies. I mean I've worked for not for profits through agencies before but I really love this in-house aspect that I now have. Know yourself, not just your role understand what it is that you need out of a job to feel that you are working at your best. Consider the pioneer settler town planner breakdown there's lots of other different ways that you can think about it but it's not necessarily just about sort of a Myers-Briggs or a true colors or those kinds of things it's sort of thinking about how your role applies to the different phases or life cycle of a product. I work with your team to define and achieve success and then finally my slides are online. I think we may have one or two minutes for questions and I'm hoping that the next presenter will come and boot me off stage those are my last set of slides. I should also remind you contributor sprints are happening on Friday there's a mentored core sprint in the morning and also the first time sprinter workshop happens first thing then the general sprint is full day blah blah blah on you should give evaluations for all speakers not just me but I'll come back to this one. Like I said I don't know if there's questions or not but if you do want to now you've got that sort of pioneer settler town planner have a chat back with the person that you talked to before and think about with them which of those three do you think you most fit with? You're not supposed to clap you're supposed to talk to people. I have one question is do you feel that there is a pressure for like the developer to become a manager the manager to become a director that sort of pressure how? Yeah really really good question. So I think there's effectively become kind of two accepted paths I guess is the right way to say it one is for you to specialize within code and become more of an architect and then the other one is to go the manager track and I absolutely think that there is a pressure to do that and I also think that from my experience I mean I started out doing web development and I am now very very happy as a project manager slash development manager. For me the internet has moved very very quickly and especially as a former front-end developer it just was too it wasn't exciting for me to keep on top of all of the technologies so I would hope that the workplace that folks are in would recognize that an employee may want to step out of a development role or they may love the development role they may love the speed they may love sort of the constant sense of change and be able to support someone in staying in that role and not force them into a management role and the language that I've seen around that is more around architect senior it's not even senior engineer there's another there's another word that is along the architect line which is the not management track so yeah and there's a couple of good articles that sort of separate out the pressures and that sort of thing I can all dig up the resources and add them to the deck yeah. Hi. Hi. I work for a worker cooperative where we all co-own our business and I notice you didn't mention that as kind of one of the business models that one of the workplaces you may find yourself in have you ever worked in a worker owned business and or would that change your perception of how you can affect the future direction of your own type of work and the direction of the company itself? Yeah I would sort of slot that one into self-employed contractors solo printer although it's not the same thing at all there are at least three or four collectives that I'm aware of within the Drupal space one being Montreal based one being San Francisco based I won't remember any of the company names and then where are you based out of? We are agile collective based in Oxford England and just a quick plug Yeah yeah absolutely. I'm doing a talk about worker ownership and growth and sustainability at 2pm on Thursday so it'd be great to have a chat before then and compare notes. And then the other model which I didn't include in here is one where it is sort of owner operated but it is profit sharing for the employees and so the employees get to veto what clients come in and also how they're going to spend their money in terms of whether or not they're going to go to a conference what they're gonna do with or they just want the bonus at the end of the year so there's like this is a very very limited view and yes there are definitely other ways of Indeed. It's just this is these are the ones that I've worked in. Absolutely yeah. Thank you. Yeah absolutely. I think I might be getting the big hook now Amanda's not shown up I keep waiting for Amanda to show up and be like get off the stage and you hear perfect. There's my big hook. All right. Thanks very much everyone.