 So good morning everyone. This is the third day of the open golf concert Kyle. He's gonna be a little bit late So I'm just kind of representing Kyle as Kyle 2.0. I'm Hussain Yassar and working for Carnegie Mellon University I'm a technical director and faculty member as well And our first speaker is Clyde Spurset and he's gonna talk about acquiring retaining great government tech talent and Floor is yours and gonna have to hear your Context. Thank you. All right. Thank you. I appreciate the introduction um So my name is Clyde C. Posada head of the training and certification group for the foundation Which we created about 10 years ago Because we realized that there was this weird behavior in open source where People didn't like to write training material and just expected other people to pick it up because that's what readme files are for And of course, that's not how anybody doing software. And so One of the things that happens in the market is when open source gets widely adopted You don't necessarily get this rich ecosystem coming from the commercial providers To onboard people into it because what they want to onboard you into is their product version of that But if you're brand new it's pretty helpful to start with the basics and understand Well, what is a Linux distribution or a Kubernetes cluster before you get into the aws version or to the azure version And so as a foundation we created the training group to focus pretty specifically on training and certification programs that create entry-level talent in the open source projects that drive whole sectors of the tech economy And Haven't spent a decade sort of looking at that. There's you know, there's been lots of different trends sort of up and down The one thing that has remained true Is you very rarely find an organization or a sector where they're satisfied with the ability to access talent And as somebody who used to work in the government sector before I switched over I dare say that very few of you are probably satisfied with the level of access to talent or your ability to retain that talent As you develop it all the while The expectations keep rising right of Why aren't we doing more? You know, how can we get more secure? What are we doing about the generative AI stuff? And so it does feel like a pretty high hill to climb when you are battling to find talent, struggling with pay skills, struggling with attrition because some start up with a giant stock option program just came wandering down the corridor telling your people So there are some unique challenges in the public sector that exacerbates stuff that's already happening kind of other parts of the economy I only have a couple of slides and as a Mike here, so if anybody wants to ask questions Just you know, raise your hand. We'll get you the mic. I think there are quite a few folks watching online. So I'll try to get the mic to you so that you can The folks who are remote can hear the question before we start the discussion But feel free to weigh in anytime this is Goes a lot better if there are Observations from you or because I'm going to posit a few things that sort of seem generally true When you think about public sector and DOD type organizations But of course, you guys are the ones living it, right? So it'd be great to get your perspective on You know what's life really like kind of at the cold face um You know one thing that's really interesting if I think about it from the perspective of new talent on the outside sort of looking into the market is If all you did was read the headlines You would think that this is the worst time in history to consider starting a tech career because Literally every day You pop it open and it's 10,000 more laid off at this company in round three of layoffs and 5,000 more laid off And that's true, right? I mean there's clearly been a lot of layoffs particularly from the larger tech organizations You have to remember those were also the organizations that just went on an unprecedented hiring binge kind of post-covid, right? And so this Eventually things return to the mean but from a naive user's perspective and we're going to spend quite a bit more time talking about new talent in the market right the people who aren't currently in the market aren't currently practitioners, but are good candidates for bringing in and onboarding in and their view is This is a terrible environment layoffs everywhere You know, I'm going to go be an influencer because that seems like a thing that makes a lot of money But if you look at the data and I think there's some cards on the seat for the 23 20 23 state of tech talent jobs report. This is research. We just got done we published it this week And we kind of went underneath the headlines to ask well, what's really happening that we know what the headline say is happening and Two interesting things happen when we look at the data one is we saw that almost half Tiny number at the bottom says 45 percent of the job cuts were in fairly senior positions Which was quite unusual compared to past downturns. You know a lot of highly compensated director and a lot above folks got impacted Now most of them it turns out a finding It would Very quickly post that because they're senior and they're typically Finding work in organizations a little bit smaller than the one they were at before but the the most of the adjustments were Skewed heavily towards the more expensive resources and at the same time in the same survey Organization said that they planned to continue hiring in the focused areas And not surprisingly that's things like cloud technologies like cyber security like ai And so it's a little bit schizophrenic right you're laying off all these senior people on one hand And at the same time you're saying I need to get all this other talent on the other hand And how does that How do you square the circle and part of what's happening is they are still trying to hire They are still trying to hire not necessarily director level folks They're trying to hire kind of foot soldier folks right folks who could come in there and actually start to do the work Of course there's a whole separate question is who's going to lead and manage those people But that's what the hiring plans are saying right is that uh the demand is still strong the Appetite to address some of these new technologies is still high and So it's not doom and gloom Regardless of where you are companies are still hiring New developers new talent is still being brought into the market Despite all of it You know, I think when I think about it from a government sector perspective There are challenges right there's this sort of regular challenges around that everybody is facing Like one of the things that strikes me is if you look at the history of technology The big changes have tended to come in waves kind of one at a time right so there was the first wave of kind of you know the Super computer big box computer wave and then there was a pc wave And then there was a networking wave and then there was a virtualization wave and then there was a containerization wave And so there was kind of a big thing that people would always be chasing But just in the past couple of years it feels like there's multiple big things trying to happen Simultaneously right so there's still a huge amount of cloud stuff needing to happen just a massive massive amount of legacy apps out there that nobody has touched yet because They're just fine right now. So I really can't work with it. Plus it's Certainly not sexy to go ask for money to refactor my old apps when there's all this new stuff that I need to get to But there is kind of this old app problem kind of sitting there But at the same time I'm trying to figure out How am I gonna you know, what's my cyber security strategy gonna look like how am I gonna Get more cloud native type talent into my organization Who's gonna go start playing with the generative ai models to figure out what if anything we should be doing with them so the challenge on All organizations not just government organizations Is pretty intense because there's multiple fronts on which you're you know, somebody up the food chain is probably looking at you saying What are you doing if you staffed up you have a proof of concept and you're thinking First I need people that actually know this stuff and so how would I even begin to do that in a world where? You know the last line says kind of budgets are Already if anything more constrained than they were a year ago And I've got all these legacy systems And if I raise my hand and say I need 10 million dollars to refactor the legacy systems I'm probably going to get laughed out the room because nobody want to spend money on that right now Now the ticking time bomb there is There are a lot of organizations with perfectly functional legacy monolithic systems that every year that goes by there's fewer and fewer people in the organization that actually know how to run the thing I was I had an airline client in the late 90s early 2000s beyond their campus And every now and again i'd see this guy pushing Like a cart this high seem kind of pushing this cart kind of look like a It wasn't food but you could tell there was some kind of equipment on it But it was always different places and then finally asked somebody I said you guys know It looks like a guy that pushes this car around here. I wonder if he's homeless. Maybe they're like, oh, that's ben Oh, you know who it is. Yeah, ben is the guy that It knows how to load the tapes that we use because We're still using our scheduling system from the 60s and it's this like tape reel based system And so network operations who plans where the airline's going to fly Mox up what they want to what they want the schedule to look like And then ben takes those tapes and he rolls them over to tech ops And then the maintenance guy say nope, this won't work because that plane has to be out of service for a heavy sea you know Check up and then he rolls it over the flight tops and then he I'm like, oh my god This is how you guys are scheduling this airline with like literal like tapes from the 80s And it was another two years before they spent Tens of millions of dollars to completely Uh update that system and this is not that long ago, right? These legacy systems are incredibly sticky, but they're insanely risky. Like I honestly don't think that That was like 70 years old too There's a lot of risk In legacy systems tied to people who have very specialized skill sets And languages that maybe aren't well Supported or known so there's definitely some serious challenges not just with the new technology But with how do we get the old technology sort of ported? Into something looks that looks like modern infrastructure because think if you are If you went around college campuses and try to get people excited about the prospect of working on your Fortran code from the 70s you might find it difficult to do so Uh, so one of the opportunities, right? You look at our prior slide, you think well, okay, that does not look promising, right? We have tight budgets. We have lots of install based stuff And we have a whole bunch of different technologies that we need to um Try to figure out how we're going to address uh, so what are the ways sort of out of this conundrum and As you all know, you know probably know for this hand Just trying to hire on the open market is never going to be sufficient to get you what you need Does anybody in here had run into the challenge of people laughing at the top of your salary scale when you Say you can't get me onto the is it sec schedule where you can go off? They're like no if you can't get me on that that gs schedule is laughable There's only so many degrees of freedom right if you're trying to get existing talent When they look at that gs schedule they think Maybe 10 years ago you could have got me but there's no way that i'm coming to do this like I might be as patriotic as the next person but it's just it's just you know, there's a real structural problem with Uh parity right and then what constraints you all operate under versus what you know Private sector companies that you know, maybe if they don't have as much cash They can throw some stock options and they can kind of try to put something together that seems um Appealing enough right to get folks in but there's a real serious constraint around that Which probably means that you're not going to just go behind hiring recruiters and try to fill this so What strategies can you use to get talented? Uh, I gave a presentation yesterday with j white from microsoft And j told the story in there that he Uh enlisted in the army and served three tours and after his second enlistment They put him into an it training program because he got hurt in the desert and it turns out He had a real aptitude for it and so he ended up doing a whole bunch of networking first generation wireless networking stuff from the army They actually paid for him to go get trained on it Uh, and then eventually uh, when he hit his 20 years and got his retirement He came out and now he's at microsoft doing um secure supply chain Stuff for them, but they got Six years of great it work out of j who was an enlisted member with no college degree in this stuff until they began To invest in him I would argue if you could find somebody and get a couple of tours out of them If on the military side or somebody out of college coming into into a government department You're probably not going to keep them forever because the siren song of private sector wages is probably going to crash the door At some point, but if you can get Four or five good years out of them as they start their career That's a win, you know might they then refer other younger people as a week, you know coming in to get started You know that's also a win, but you've got to be able to find non-traditional pools of talent and get ways to kind of get them in the door Cross-training upskilling existing folks Uh, I mean that's essentially what happened with j right? He was gonna Regular guy just through basic training doing his thing and somebody realized that he had this talent And kind of pulled it off and put him on that uh technology training track Who in your organization has aptitude that you could probably put on to some sort of training program? the remarkable thing about training in tech is it is Orders of magnitude cheaper Then even hiring a recruiter Right, you're talking about a thousand dollars Versus twenty five thousand dollars I tell people I train 20 people even if two of them are good You're still better off than you would be paying one recruit at a higher one person that probably leaves a few months later You know aggressively investing in trying to build out some talent from people who are already in your pool I Would suggest it's probably the most cost effective and the highest yield thing that you can do because Trying to get somebody from the private sector into the government sector is hard at the best of times You start thinking about salary differences You know the whole just just gets higher and higher right as to what can you realistically do? Do you have degrees of freedom to hire people remotely? I think one of the things that came out of covet definitely in the private sector is a lot of people who yell and scream that Remote work was not possible and the whole organization was going to collapse and it was going to be disastrous In fact found that people are you know hardworking and honest and you can in fact Have a non-traditional workforce in terms of location I and I know different parts of the government have different restrictions So you can't always do that But to the extent that you're able to find folks to be able to work off site So just a great way to fish into a different pool Sorry question So you mentioned that the the report that's on the linked on the sheet that's on our our seats What I've seen is is a lot of data that looks like Surveys of managers or senior leaders or something that says hey, do you feel like your people were as productive doing remote work? The messaging we're getting inside the the u.s. Government largely looks like Hey, we need to get back to the level of productivity we had before so because in order to get back to where we used to be in terms of being Awesome, we're going to come back into the office Do you guys have data or do you know anyone that has data to actually support the remote work case in different situations because like We need if we're going to go fight those battles in the government. We really need that that data Yeah, that's a fair question. I don't know that we have we didn't address that particular point in the data What we have observed In the tech industry is It depends on how you try to measure productivity But certainly folks have been able to be super productive. You know, you see people working nights and weekends logging on early working non-traditional type hours If you look at the sort of top level data stats of sort of bureau of labor statistics There is some variability in terms of what gets reported It's hard to tease out the real number because a lot of companies cut back on ours during covid because of the level of uncertainty and so trying to Trying to get to productivity is hard to measure the best of times Trying to measure productivities effects through a pandemic where significance slowed on an economy significance slowed on an hours work Is really difficult. I don't know that it's ever going to be a great piece of research that says ah, here it is people are in fact more productive I think if you look anecdotally at Our people who started working remotely allowing allowing them to continue to remote Work remotely. Are they continuing to hire remotely where they previously didn't use to hire remotely? I think those signals are pretty strong Let's say that there has been a change of mindset In some places not everywhere. There are some Famously in news some big tech companies are trying to push people back into the office and I suspect The cynic in me says that part of that is this is a backdoor way of reducing Uh labor cost because they're trying to nudge people out who don't want to come in Uh and who already live in high cost locations Because if you choose to quit and I don't owe you a severance package Because it's just not logical, right? It's when you've had organizations that have thrived for two years and tech sector above all thrived during covid To then turn around and suddenly say this doesn't work After we just came off the best two years in our history. It doesn't bring true to me Um and you know, I would say certainly for the Linux foundation. We've never had an office, right? So we've always been a hundred percent remote and it's always been I found it As somebody who came from an office environment to a fully virtual environment that it's Insanely more productive. I don't have to spend two hours a day getting ready drive-in parking You know I mean foraging around for lunch and then coming back like I just get on and kind of get my stuff done Um, but I hear your point. It is challenging because people want proof So I call I don't know how I can get you proof. There's so much noise And how do I get the signal in that data that says definitively one way or not? And likely what's going to happen is it's sort of like if they're looking for a reason not to do it They'll hide behind that as a reason not to do it Uh, if they're looking across the economy and saying hey, what changed as a result of covid Yeah, I live in austin texas and I can tell you Just based on the amount of traffic on the road that people are not back in the office at anything like pre covid Because I will now meet my wife downtown for dinner, which I previously was like, why don't you drive up here and We do it because I ain't coming down there um Some of you may have seen this chart. They uh, forget who it was public some research about three weeks ago and it was The percentage of cell phones active in the downtowns of major u.s cities today versus pre pandemic In san francisco, it's 34 percent In new york, it's 47 percent in austin. It's 48 percent You talk about data to me. That's compelling data. They're not downtown. There's somewhere else These companies didn't build offices in the suburbs. That must mean people are working from home So I think there is some out this there's data that strongly suggests that work from home. Maybe not every single day of the week um The joke in austin is that tuesday is a new monday because nobody goes in so tuesday and thursday are now the bad traffic days so, you know but certainly some level of Combined not every day in the office seems to have become the new normal First-hand observation of what's happening in austin. This is a very big tech city All right, um, yeah some other slides there. I didn't want to talk about this In terms of the hiring managers and kind of the you know, we talked at you know, mostly we're talking kind of higher levels sort of trends you know, there are challenges down kind of in the at the individual job level of How am I going to get somebody interested in potentially applying for this job? How am I going to? How am I going to retain them? How am I going to get them and have them not quit after they've been in for You know, some very short period of time you know, one of the cynical approaches that used to happen in past economic down cycles is that people take jobs in perceived safe industries when there's uncertainty with the expectation that once things get better over there, you know, I'll see you so there's that there's there's definitely this sort of Job security seems a lot sexier right this minute than it did a year ago and You know, my wife's a university professor at universities. I get in a lot of applications. You know, I Might be true in some areas of the government service as well if people say, oh, that's stable employer probably not going to lay off for a while I would say that's an opportunity get them in the door and then hang on to them as tight as you can Right, if you're in a window now where they're more willing and they were a year ago to consider this career path, even if their current thinking is safe port in a storm so what hire them and hang on to them hire them and cross train them aggressively and give them new skills and get them working on Cool technology that they probably wouldn't be able to get if they kind of stayed across in the private sector but you know Don't uh, yeah Feet here not bug, right? Anything that gets them to want to come take a look at your job openings I would say you should celebrate it because lord knows it's hard enough getting folks to come consider a career You know a few years ago we were at cube con which is sort of a cloud native conference in so right before the pandemic in San Diego And there was a really really well attended session by a senior person from the air force Who had gotten this really cool like semi Hollywood level video done of How they had retrofitted an f18 fighter to run on kubernetes Which is hard to do because all it's up is deeply proprietary software that's been baked in by the ministry supply companies So they're taking this one f18 completely retrofitted it and had done sort of a top gun style video of taking this thing and actually flying it and I asked him afterwards. That's like Seems like a lot of money to spend on this very slick promo type video. He's like listen This is my only shot to make this job seem sexy In this audience of people who are like startup and you know facebook meta bound Is I figured let's bring the house this How cool is it to work on fighter jets? And that's going to be our best chance ever and getting somebody to come at least apply for the jobs we had And I saw him about six months later and he was pleasantly surprised He didn't get thousands of applications, but he got dozens of applications, which is better than this small pathetic drip that he would normally get um Now that's a you know It's a pretty heavy lift right to get a conference so you can slot I don't know how much he spent on the video, but Try some very very different things, right? You got to get in the consideration set, right? You got to find some way of unlocking people's interests And getting them to consider a career in the government sector because pay isn't going to do it Patriotism is probably not going to do it, you know tying it back to the mission and finding some way to get a hook into them You know just experiment, right? It's probably not one Single way to do this, right? It's just a matter of try something until something works and If all else fails build a cool video with whatever your products is and roll out to some kind of conference See if you can get people Excited about doing it Um, I think the important thing is just keep trying different things, right? You know, it feels like maybe a hand is tied behind your back on some other things And to some extent that is when it comes to pay and other factors But there are other things you can do to get folks Interested and particularly folks who are entry level in their career um the big guys don't like to hire truly entry level people because Feels risky ain't nobody got the time for that. I can afford to pay the person 200k plus stock bonuses and just get them in and have them up and running Okay, play the hand you dealt with right focus more on some of that entry level talent Go to those community colleges go to those high schools that have alternative curriculums and just try to find those folks and get them in the door Training is so much cheaper than experience Right, it is way way way cheaper to train somebody on these technologies and it is the buy experience when people already have it Order of magnitude difference I have a question again follow up on on this Paper that we got on your seats Does this numbers does the report has anything specific to government sector or is more very broad in the all industries? Uh, I don't believe there was a separate cut out There weren't enough respondents on the government sector So there is a section that goes industry by industry when there was statistically Enough responses from the sector to be able to line it out But if memory serves we didn't get enough from government to carve it out We had a few but not enough to be statistically significant So it doesn't show are they the stats guys go through and kind of cut the line on kind of what you If it's only five or six, it's not robust enough to show And there because I know there's financial services. There's telecom. There's health care Um, but we it wasn't the question set, but there weren't enough responses to to have a Valid response to publish a separate line item on it I would suspect yeah for those of you in the service I suspect you can read the data and sort of interpolate as to where you think the the data lines up, right? Somewhere south of health care is when you think of sort of how attractive a tech career is in different in different verticals All right, I think I only have maybe one more slide And this is kind of back to some of what we talked about Upskilling upskilling upskilling I'm just like a broken record on this because it's so much cheaper than trying to hire talent And you can find it everywhere. There's you know, we have stuff your community college locally poppy has stuff You know, I think the one challenge that Is more of a change management and cultural challenge that you need to really Be mindful of When you go down the path of an upskilling or non-traditional hiring There it does place an additional burden on your organization, which is your existing folks have to commit to doing more mentoring Right the one upside of hiring qualified people Is they walk in the door and they ought to if you did your interviews, right have the basic skills that they need to sort of Be kind of basic professional competence You should have to train them on using the systems and all that right But when you take when you're up upskilling somebody from a different role or when you take somebody from a non-traditional hire there has to be a collective commitment to mentoring because Building up a skill set like that is not two weeks of onboarding for a new hire Right, this is a multi month probably six to nine maybe 12 month commitment to sort of gradually helping this person Are you assigning somebody to be a mentor? Do you have some kind of program that says hey, let's check in weekly Just training people is not enough right you have to make them successful The ask of your organizations if you're going to do that is Assign mentors to these folks have somebody to Not just learn the ropes, but somebody to just give them the feedback on No, that's not how you set up that service. It's going to end in tears They need somebody holding their hand make you know remember folks who are not coming in with experience they as a general rule are going to have Confidence issues about their ability to do this job Your job is to help them not get hung up on that and so really It's a very new thing to have to ask your engineers and developers To explicitly put time towards mentorship But if you're going to have to use non-traditional hires and upskilling That's going to be the one ask of you. It's cheap It's available to you because you can go fishing pools that other people aren't fishing in But you as an organization are going to have to find ways to be aggressive in mentoring these folks Tell them when they're doing great. Tell them when they're not doing great Hopefully quietly privately But encourage them and encourage them Everybody in tech at some point kind of has that aha moment, but they suddenly feel like they get it It's not day one. It's certainly not day one if you're a newbie, right? So try to make sure that you provide a supportive environment for these folks as they go through it You know for sure they're going to make mistakes, you know for sure they're going to have One or more crises of confidence, you know, make sure your organization is prepared To realize that and they have support mechanisms Because you're way better off if you can get those people through the crisis of confidence and productive Then you'd be in the alternative where you're back to trying to hire an experienced person from the outside That's a big commitment that most people maybe don't see coming is It's not just training. Training is critical. They have to get the skills It's also that mentorship environment that you've got to put people into I have some other slides. I don't really think we need to go through them I've kind of talked a lot and covered most of what I wanted to say any questions comments observations from you guys All right, what's that up to Cheyenne? Yeah, it's more of a comment than a question. Um, so even in the private sector you tend to have these problems With recruiting where you know, you're not google meta or etc um, and you a lot of time compensation is a way to do that, but also Uh, with these training programs specifically, I think we've had success where By getting people from these diverse backgrounds and non-traditional backgrounds and putting in the effort to actually train them Like a six eight week training Before they even join a team is that you first of all build a certain level of Competency in those people So that they're ready to get started out the door. So you avoid the crisis of confidence and secondly You once they're up skilled, right? They provided the first sort of set of thinking that a traditional see if you have a hundred traditional cs majors Often having 50 traditional cs majors and 15 non-traditional you come up with wildly better solutions more creative and more well thought out And foster a culture that will encourage your employees to stay So we found that that is probably the secret sauce I Couldn't agree more It's on the same line. It's not a question, but more of a maybe a comment that that's one thing that we have done we have a lot of success on talking to students participating on co-ops projects and school projects like university And also not necessarily more of a formal training. Maybe a certain even IT and tax schools that provide Diploma certificates. We we've had a lot of success as well from those. We've had people who came in um A few of them have left but I think they provide enough service for about five years and then they gained some skills and Went away. We got some more and and I think that that was fine And we've also had success with people who who got some even open working open source is a way for them to to attract them on building their resume their career path and Then that I've discovered that, you know, government is not as bad as it sounds And ended up staying for far longer People will stay right people will stay If they enjoy the work and they're getting to push and learn and and drive new skills That's not to say they might stay forever and at some point, you know The mortgage plus the new kid on the way and he might decide, okay, you know Gotta go where there's a more green to be had but yeah They're not being fatalistic about it. Get them in and try, you know And you know what they may move on and they may have a younger cousin friend neighbor that they then sort of clue on to the same track um There's a lot when you get into these non-traditional networks You get a lot of referral effects that you don't necessarily get when you're on a college campus and people have 10 offers because It's like finding magic, right? It's like, oh my god I found a way in and the people are supportive and friendly and you know, it tends to be very self Reinforcing if you can get into some of these non-traditional talent pools Because you're not competing with that kind of there's not 10 companies in there, you know trying to figure out Uh, how you can identify skilled people. It's probably just you Yeah, it's a mission as well that that company layoffs but not specific to that I've also seen people went away and then they come back a few years later So so they might have some other career goals that they want to develop or get more experience But some of them also come back later on in a more leadership role Um and that that has I've seen that happen as well so Yeah, those are great folks if you can if you can get them on their second way across, right to to uh because Career gaps are hard to explain right career gaps kind of spook some employers and so You might have a better shot of somebody coming back, you know, they took time off with a sick parent or had a new baby or whatever, right? But um Fish where the fish are man don't fish don't fish where the other people are fishing fish where the fish are because Yeah, if you are not a startup or a big fortune for 2000 company Yeah, you know that you're at a competitive disadvantage in trying to in trying to access some of this talent So you got to use different strategies to make it happen right Last call for questions Either that or lunch All right. Thank you all for being here appreciated