 this is grow your own. I wanted to do more of like a pot growing theme, which was kind of one of the ways I got into this career. My name is Jodi, I'm the CTO and co-founder of ZivTech, which is in Philadelphia. We started in 2008 and we're up to 30 or 35, I'm looking weirdly number-blind people now, and it's been a long and fun and difficult road. So I wanted to do this talk because I hear people all the time saying that there's not enough talent, that they can't find the the developers and the designers and mostly the technical people that they need, but also the like project managers and all kinds of talent that they can't find. And I just feel like it's a little entitled that you would be in this world where there should just be these people that you could just hire and for a decent price, and that they would already know all the skills that you really needed them to know and just come in, hit the ground running, and then they would just make you a bunch of money, you wouldn't really have any problems with them, you wouldn't really have to do much for them other than feed them some pizza and pay them and that everything would be fine. And so when people can't find that, then they get upset and they say, there's not enough talent, there's people aren't, they're not getting educated right, we don't have the right people out there, we don't have the right programs out there. To me, I think the world is full of talent, right? No, they haven't learned the specific things that you need them to do at your job yet, but there's so many intelligent people out there that would love to have a good career if you would help them out. So when I started working in Drupal, I saw myself as someone who made websites, right? And that was my output. I was making websites or I was making code, but over the years now I see that what I'm really, my product is, is people, right? So I'm selling, as having a bunch of employees, I'm selling their time and their expertise and their knowledge and their human capacity. Nobody cares about the code, how much the code is worth, it's GPL anyway, right? We say that we're gonna reuse it on the next project and we never do, right? It's like, sort of like, who cares about the code when you have the coder? It's like, it's like the egg and the chicken, like, you have to take care of the chicken, not each little egg, they just keep on making more. So I started to realize that me sitting there being such a great website maker wasn't really that valuable. And what was really valuable was me being able to grow more people who could do this, right? Because then I could really scale up. You're only gonna do so well as one person doing this, but if you are able to grow more and more people that can also do it. Now, not only is your business doing better, but you start to realize that actually this is more important than building the websites in terms of your values. So this is just like an awkward family photo from work one day when we got our hoodies. And I guess I just started to realize that over the years that I really don't care about websites or Drupal or open source or technology. I guess I'm really good at listing things I don't care about because I'm pretty depressed. So it's sort of like my superpower to not care about things. It's like, all I really care about is Game of Thrones and my cat. But what I meant to say that I really care about is the people, okay? Ultimately, it's like, I don't care about the Drupal Kool-Aid and any of this other stuff. The only thing that really matters are people. And then having this company where I have these people over many years and I see them get married and have children and buy houses and enjoy their lives and enjoy their co-workers and have an office that they enjoy and know that we were a part of that. That they wouldn't have had everything that they needed in their life without us and that they also created our value. It's a much better feeling than just fixing a bug on a website. So we early on adopted this idea that we were going to train up our people and that we weren't going to just expect them to come in all ready to go. We were going to bring people in at all different levels, including having no experience at all, like just basic computing skills, like no programming of any sort. Over the years, we found that we gained a lot from doing that. So we have, I think, much better retention than most of our peers. I have a lot of people that have been there almost since the start. I have a lot of developers that have been there seven years and they have a lot of loyalty and they enjoy being there and even the ones that have left, I get to see them in events like this and they still are on our side and a lot of times people leave because they have to move for their significant other or something like that. Also the team is very close, communicates very well. When you think of a team as a set of individuals, almost like they're neurons in your brain, the more connections that they have and the better they communicate, the stronger the team. So you could have a team of a whole bunch of really great developers, but if they don't communicate well, it's not nearly as effective. But if your team was, some of them were really strong or maybe they're all different strengths and all different ways, but they communicate really well. That can actually be much stronger than a group of individuals that are each very strong themselves. I'm not going to do any sports metaphors, but you can imagine your own metaphors there. Also they're very harmonious because they've all been trained in the same way. So they don't have like strong, we don't have a lot of strong conflicts of how we do things. We don't have one person saying we should only use Vim and this guy's on Emacs and this woman thinks we should use panels for everything. And this one thinks it should all be display suite and they're all constantly fighting and every project is done in a different way. All of our projects are kind of done in the same way because we're all trained by the same people. And we all, most of us trained from scratch basically. So we're not like undoing old opinions really. And we also have a lot of generosity towards each other on the team because people give you this retention, this loyalty and this generosity because you gave them something. You took a chance on them when they didn't have a lot of opportunities and you invested a lot in them and people feel that. We also have a lot of developers who have other strengths. So they're more well rounded. So if we have, this is not just about developers, but mainly because that's my background. But say we have someone come in to do a Spanish speaking magazine. Well, we have three people that speak Spanish and we have six musicians and we have all types of very well rounded people because we didn't just grab the people who were obsessed with only development and didn't have really any other sides to them. We have all types of people. And best of all, I think we have this culture of training where everyone values the idea of working together to teach each other. And then that extends not just to our own team, but to how we interact with our clients. And ultimately, I find that that clients in many cases, they value being taught more than they value the end product of like whatever the website or the code is that you're doing. So when I have this whole team of people who know how to communicate and know that teaching is the highest value, their every day, whether they're the project manager, the developer or the QA person or anyone else, they're always finding that chance to teach the client something, which is really excellent for our clients. So the way we got started with this whole idea was really from necessity, as well as from personal values. So I had a few different careers before I got into this, I'm pretty old. The I was actually a chemist. And I was also a math teacher for a little bit. And but then before that, I had lots of really awful jobs. Well, even even those jobs were pretty awful. Like being a chemist, it was like I would use my brain like maybe once a week for like two seconds. And then the rest of the time, I would just be pouring things. And I never had anyone who I never worked at a place where anyone really recognized my talent. I had jobs. I was a, I was a telemarketer. I was a data entry. I did all kinds of stupid jobs. And I was a pretty bright person. And nobody could seem to notice, you know, that maybe there was something more they should be having me do. And so I always thought that was really a shame that we had this economy where there were such talented people in it that were being so wasted and not really being given any opportunities. And I always thought that, you know, I wish that someone would have given me an opportunity to do something at my level. But instead of that happening, I made it happen for myself and started this company in 2008. But of course, we didn't have any money. And so and even in back then, there were even fewer Drupal developers around it. I'm super picky. I don't like people that that say that they're that they're a great developer, and then they are just a hacker and do all kinds of nasty stuff. I couldn't have any kind of bad work coming out of my company. And, and of course, we started in 2008. And then we, and then we hired a few people, then the economy collapsed and all of our work went away. And we decided that we weren't going to fire anyone. Well, it was tough anyway, because we hired like four or five people and they didn't really have any experience. So I was doing all of the billable work plus teaching these people. Then the work went away. So we decided to just pay them from our credit cards. And those about half of those people are still with us. And they're, and they're doing great. I'm really glad that we kept them. But the main reason that we that we started hiring people that that didn't really have much or any experience was we couldn't afford anyone that did. And there really weren't any. We really, we, we're not a virtual company. We've always had an office. So we're limited to our local area. And there really was very few, the people that we could find that that we're good triple developers, we did hire, but there are very few people. So what we did was we always we would just bring everyone into the office and make sure everyone communicates. And we bring a willingness to teach. Now that was always a that I go back and forth with having problems with that because I think I am a good teacher, but I'm also an autodidact. So that makes me have a little chip on my shoulder where I think, I think probably a lot of us are like, that we're like, well, no one taught me. Can't these people just learn on their own like I did? What's wrong with them? Because I did it. And they should too. Well, you can't expect everyone to be like you in this world, right? And if you can get past that and give them give them some empathy. And if you believe that that people are basic, that the people you have are basically intelligent, and that you can teach them something they can learn, they might not learn as quickly as you would like sometimes. But if you believe that they will learn and you've and I've seen it, I've had many times where I've thought this person will never learn this person just is not getting it. I have to cut my losses with this person. And then you look a couple years later and and they're doing so well. Some people just take a little bit longer than others. So over the years, we've found a lot of on ramps because obviously one of the challenges when you bring in really green people is how to get them to bill any hours at all in order to be able to afford paying them. So so they can, when you have a green person, not only are they not billing very many hours, but they're also taking a lot of time from people who would be billing a lot of hours. And so you're constantly having this feeling of like, Oh, God, like I should, I don't have time to help you. I have to get my work done. And you have to fight that and say, you know what? Helping you is more important than getting my work done. Getting my work done is a short term. The money teaching someone is long term, right? You have to find the balance, obviously, because you have to keep the money coming in. But everyone in your team has to understand that that training the people up is the highest priority. It's not just a distraction, slowing you down from getting your work done. It is the whole future of the company. And that that is a valuable activity that you have to you have to work against your impulse to be always efficient, because you're always trying to be efficient about yourself. But when it's a team, it's not just about being efficient for yourself. So we've found a lot of different ways that we can have them bill and learn as they're, you know, getting experience. So one way is QA. So having them do testing gets them in the mix of the whole project, you know, they're, they're moving through the tickets, they're testing everything, they're passing things up to the client. And that would but that was a tough one for a long time, because in order to really do QA on our projects, you'd have to do them on the development site. And sometimes things weren't deployed properly and all these problems. So that's kind of how we got into this whole other businesses, Probo, CI, which really helps to make it more accessible for us to have QA people that don't have a lot of experience and can really just see what's going on with each ticket in process. Documentation is another thing that we have people work on that have less experience. We're lucky enough to have a client that now comes to us just for technical documentation. And writing technical documentation is something that a smart, generally logical, technical college educated person can do without, you know, five years of development experience. And they in the process are learning more about this kind of software. Site building, that's one of the great things about Drupal, is that you can start people off and they can learn site building pretty quickly. Of course, it's kind of annoying how long it takes them to learn features, but hopefully that'll be dead soon. And, you know, it takes them a while to learn Git, command line, stuff like that. But the fact that they can, you know, make views and content types and do the general Drupal site building pretty quickly lets them have this unwrap that they can do stuff like that for a year or two while they're starting to learn their development chops. And even better, the senior developers don't really like to do all that site building anyway. So it's nice to have those people on your team that you can work with. We also have them similar to documentation. We have them making training materials. So they'll make training materials for clients like as like training videos or manual similar to documentation. And they'll also make it for we do paid trainings. Like we did two trainings for Drupalcon. We have like these big training manuals. We have them write, edit, take those materials, learn from the materials while they edit the materials. We have them writing like B hat tests. You don't have to be able to write code to write a lot of those B hat tests. You get a lot more in the mix of the software development project. And then we can have them on like first level support where at least they can try if they can't figure out how to fix the problem, at least they can try to reproduce it and then rewrite the problem in like a way that the developers could actually understand it. There's lots of things that you can find for greener people to work on. Then we have the problem of if we have all of these brand new people, how do we make sure that our quality stays high in our work? So I'm very obsessed with quality. So I never wanted to have a situation sort of my worst nightmare where bad quality work is going out to our clients. And so it can be a little bit scary bringing in all these new people. So what we saw of that really with just process, I mean, I really think quality is just all about process. So our process includes that we work in now and feature branches and pull requests and then a more senior developer always does code review even if you're pushing like a features module or something or some little change like that or some CSS or something. Every single change that you're making goes through code review. And it doesn't even get merged until the review and the QA has happened. So they're safe to screw up as much as they want. It's not going anywhere. They're not introducing any security problems, performance problems. They're just sending it to me for me to give them feedback. But the great thing about that is a lot of the times, especially at the beginning, I didn't have any type of plan really for how I was training my people. And many of them got trained up just from code review. So like that process has multiple advantages. Like not only does it keep up your quality, but it creates this feedback loop where people are getting review on every single thing they're doing every day. And then they learn pretty quickly to not make the same mistake again and again so they can get their work past me. We also handle having all of these different people at different levels by working with different billing levels, which I don't necessarily recommend. It's been like a huge headache in terms of billing throughout the years that we have all of these different rates that we charge people at. The idea being that if we charge a more junior person like half as much money an hour, then the clients shouldn't object to having that person on the project because, yeah, the person might take longer, but you're paying a lot less. We also do discount a lot of junior work. We would rather have them work on a real project and then us discount the time than to keep them away from the project because we don't think that they can do it in the right amount of time. So we deal with that by when we do estimates for each sprint, we put the hour estimate on each ticket so that they have an idea of how long we expected it to take and then if they blow it way up like it was a two hour ticket and then they end up putting 15 hours on it, we just discount it back down to two hours and sort of expected that that happens. So we really have varied with how formally we've tried to train people over the years and different people have different approaches. A couple years ago, summer of 2014, we did a, we did our own developer bootcamp which was, we got a grant from the city to make this free bootcamp, which I really liked. I don't like these paid bootcamps. I really loved that it was free and, but it ended up costing us a lot of money because it cost us more than the grant was for and it took up like my entire summer. So it was pretty tough, but it was really interesting how the people who applied for the the bootcamp were so much more diverse than the people who apply for tech jobs. We didn't try to have a bunch of women and a bunch of minorities in our bootcamp. It was just a very diverse like application pool and they were mostly all fairly recent college grads, some of them were still in college who didn't have any tech backgrounds. Some of them were science majors, some of them were humanities majors, and I guess that a lot of them maybe were starting to see the writing on the wall and start to think like, I guess there is no job in the field that I just paid a hundred grand for and maybe I should, you know, so it was like a six-week course. They had very little background. It was just amazing to see how well they worked and start to see how some of them, you know, were going to be more back-end and some more front-end and some maybe would be a better project manager, all different skills. But I really enjoyed that and we hired some people from that, which was another of our alternate reasons for doing it. Now I definitely recommend doing something like that if you can. I don't think I can afford the time to do another one of those soon, but I would try to do something on a smaller scale where maybe like once a week have a free class where people could come because there's no better way to see how good a potential hire is than to actually train them and work with them over a period of time. You'll find out who's reliable, who learns quickly, who communicates well, and then you can just hire the star students. The others, I helped a lot of them get jobs at other companies. This is another way we've gone about training someone. This guy, John, he's very self-directed and so he helped to make this himself where he has this whole list of different things that he realizes that he needs to learn and then he puts in like what he needs to learn and where he's at with it and ranks it and we can follow up with it. So that was a nice approach. I really just think different, I like to treat everyone as an individual, I guess, and I don't like to like shove everybody into like one training program. I like to see how it shakes out and start them with little structure and then if they seem, if that's not working then work with them, you know, to get a structure that works for them. There's a lot of, I think that overall that what people are talking about in the Dribble community is the apprenticeship model and I've read from a few other companies, I'm sure a lot more are doing it than I have here, how they're handling this, but yeah it really is a matter of that this is like a trade what we do and you need to go through an apprenticeship to really be good and you'll see people who are really intelligent and really hard working in there, but they don't work with a high level team, they just don't learn and grow as fast as when you're with a team, like I really think it's about the best way to learn this stuff is to be embedded with a team and really shadow people and see how they're doing it. So these different apprenticeship models, the metal-toed ones, interesting is like you, there's some class work for a while and then you are like an intern and then you move up a level. All that stuff to me, I'm very on the side of just deal with things as they happen and not like make formal structures, but they're very interesting programs. So yeah the way I really like to do things, probably because I'm just lazy, I don't like to plan things, I really believe in like teachable moments. So just like when someone asks you a question, making time to answer, it's very simple. It's a simple approach, right? So instead of saying that like oh that question that they're asking me right now, I'm too busy for it and they're distracting me. No, there's something about the fact that they're asking it to you right now that makes it special. You might not know what it is yet that makes it special, but it's exactly what they need to know right now and they're asking to you for a reason and it might not make sense to you, but if you just make time for your people, which is hard, it's hard to make time for your people when you're a leader. It's like you know people are going from meeting to meeting to meeting and everyone's running up on you and there's a thousand emails, but I just have to tell myself like you know none of that is as important as what someone's asking me right now. They're not always asking me to teach them how to use their virtual machine. You know sometimes they're asking me how to deal with a client or sometimes they're asking me just to just to talk to them about their personal life or something right? But whatever it is, it's what they need and to just get past how busy you are and and to take care of those people. I mean that's that's why I really like this gardening metaphor is like you have to you know you have to put time and love into it. You know it takes time, you can't just like think that's gonna speed things up and get frustrated at you know how fast your plants are growing. You know you have to wait, you have to give them what they need, not overwhelm them, but you don't want to baby them either. You know you want them to be hearty. You don't want to feed them pizza. I'm going to feed them you know I don't know sandwiches. So yes so I really believe in mentor driven development which is where you you care more about the the mentorship is sort of comes first and the development follows right so so not only is it a matter of mentoring the the new people but the most important thing that I need my people to learn is not how to use Drupal or or be a great developer. The most important thing for them to learn is is to value the same thing. It's to value training people because when they value training people now they can train more people right so if all they do is is learn to be like a great Drupal developer well I'm get some value out of them but if but if they learn to be a great Drupal developer and to teach everyone around them and to grow up the next generation that we hire that's giving me a lot more value from them right so that's like the main thing that I want them to learn is is how to teach so but luckily you know like the Feinstein method like luckily teaching is a really great way to learn so when you when you shove someone into this teaching position which I do them all the time I'll have someone who's there for a month and I'll tell them that they have to teach the new person how to do something they say I don't know how to do it like well I think you do you know and it does it teaches them a lot when they know that they have to that they're going to have to teach someone else they really learn it not only that but they can also document what they're learning and create training materials now it really depends on the person some people you could tell them to document things and they're never going to do it especially if they're ADD I find they ADD people to me seem like they don't um that they tend to procrastinate on writing assignments uh but some people are really great at writing documentation and so they can do that as they learn and like pave the way for the next people as long as they understand that that's the model okay so that's the model of the whole company that's how we work is we is we teach and we learn and then teach and we learn right and that's the whole way it works so so that's what really makes it sustainable so that's what I I've really I'm enjoying now is that you know at first it was just like me teaching everyone and now I can just kind of look back and it's just like a room full of people talking and teaching each other and a lot of that is cultural like there's um that they're open to ask for help and that they're open to say well I'm not really sure but I think you can try you know there's not a lot of like ego of um of um people uh you know trying to prove that they don't need help which I think is a real a huge problem like I wouldn't tolerate anyone on my team like that because it would make everyone afraid to to be able to work together so as a leader I really see teaching as the most the highest ROI activity that I can be doing it's not a it's not a distraction away from anything it has to be you know you only do what you prioritize you know so you have to you have to see it as as your priority to to make that time to teach people and if it's not if it's your third or fourth or fifth priority it's not going to happen you know it's got to be your top your top priority and you have to make it obvious that you are encouraging and praising that in your team you know just to recognize like hey I really like how you guys are working together you know I like that you're taking time to teach that person and um you know letting people learn in different ways I don't like to like formally assign people like this is going to be your mentor you have to work with this person and you have to learn this and you have to watch these DrupalizeMe videos that can work for some people but everyone kind of learns in different ways so if you kind of if you give them encouragement and um and you support them and talk to them about how it's going and kind of let them find their own way and that includes that you have to let people be individuals which means they're not coming in and then you're going to grow them to be just like you right no one's going to be just like you you're going to have to see you're really going to have to find their strengths and how to play to their strengths and that's what I really see a lot of my job as CTO is is that I have to know my people really well and then and then put them in the right places to succeed right because they're all so different and there's I don't want them to all just be writing Drupal code they're all Drupal developers like they all have all these different strengths and then all of a sudden I had this we had a designer we thought she was pretty shy then we realized she had um she's a great public speaker we had no idea because she seems so shy now she's doing training so that's her job right and she enjoys that so it's like there's a there's a lot more to there's a lot more ways to run these businesses than just writing Drupal code right so we have we've grown in all different directions partly because of the needs of our clients and partly because of strengths of our team it's like we've had we've grown into QA documentation marketing writing support training design you know all different directions as we have like different people's strengths someone might come in and they they want to learn a different language or they know a different programming language and then you start doing more work in that direction I just think that instead of you know telling people what to do and then getting the value from them you want to tell them more like what direction what your values are in general and then let them figure out how they fit in there because people have a lot more value than you might realize they do right if you just try to tell them what their value is it's just this one thing but you have to believe that people can be very valuable extremely valuable and that if you support them and you make them feel like they want to be on your side because you support them and then they'll give their all instead of instead of them just giving you what you specifically asked for which will never be as much as what they really have because you could never guess what they can really offer so a few things to avoid if you go in this direction divas are like the senior developers who are like you know they don't want to do anything that's beneath them and they're rude and they're condescending and the lone wolves who might be like you know great developers but they just don't know how to communicate don't want to communicate I don't think they're very valuable I think that they're they know their stuff and a lot of times people keep them because they're afraid to get rid of them though this guy like runs all of our infrastructure we can't ever get rid of him but they're so toxic to your culture that I don't think it's really worth it unpaid interns it's not good to not pay people it's wrong I mean what kind of message does it send to that person or to the rest of your team that you're just willing to just take advantage of a desperate person just because you can it's not if you if you show them instead hey I'm willing to help you because I believe in you they'll show you that you were right to believe in them if you show them hey I'm not really going to take any risk on you you're going to take all the risk and and I'm going to just like let you go after six weeks because that's the length of the internship and that way I'll just see if you happen to be incredibly awesome really really quickly then I'll keep you otherwise I'll kick you out to the street because I'm not willing to invest in you in the long haul and so you shouldn't really be willing to do so with me either contractors I have so I have the best contractor right here I have another contractor to you but contractors work out for us when they're when they're really top level but in general we try to have everyone full-time employed at the office because that's where we can really best teach and learn and I know everyone's very like go virtual office these days but it's almost like they're protesting too hard you know like if it's really that great why do they keep talking about it I don't know so you know I like everyone in the office because I just don't think that you especially a very junior person they need someone like sitting next to them like looking at their screen talking to them like you can do a lot of that online but it's just not the same and a lot of what I do is I just overhear people I just overhear their conversations and I you know go help them and and so you can't kind of have that same feeling remotely and cutbacks so we've had lots of ups and downs economically but what we've never done is cut back you know maybe maybe that's a little been masochistic at times but I just feel that you invest in these people if you're going to cut them now because sales were bad and business is slow you're just throwing away everything that you've that you've invested in it's like you've grown it and grown it and grown it and it and it's just starting to to bear fruit and now you're just gonna throw it out I always say like I would rather beg borrow and steal before I would cut an employee that I had invested in and you and you see this all the time where that's a good way to like pick up a new employee is that other shops they they do cutbacks and then all of a sudden it's time for them to grow all the work is cutting in coming in they don't have anyone now so I just think if you're gonna invest long term like you have to just try to get through it as in any way you can to keep these people because they they a person like a cutting back on a person who's been with your team for a long time and it's just you're losing so much value I mean they know your clients they know your projects in and out they know how you work they know each other like there's just too much value there like to me like each one of these people is worth to me millions of dollars like I guess I overvalue them but they they seem I wouldn't you know if I'm if I'm $20,000 short I'm not getting rid of something that's worth millions of dollars okay this is I think been interesting for us so a lot of the I think part of the reason that people can't find enough talent is they're looking at a very small part of the talent pool right so and they will say oh oh well I I wish that we had more diversity at my company but when we make a job posting it's always the same types of people that apply pretty much right so what can we do right well there's a reason why people aren't applying to your job and I think I know what it is because when I was trying to right before I started ZIFTFC I was considering trying to work for one of the Drupal shops and there was no way I was going to look at a bunch of random job postings and apply to them because if I did my chances would be that I would interview there and then maybe get the job and then I would find out it was a culture that I didn't enjoy because I was always fighting uphill it was mostly guys they their communication style was like expecting me to have a thicker skin and a little bit hostile it was just like kind of annoying to just deal with on a daily basis just in a small way but in a way that's just sort of like you know just taxes you so I would have to look for jobs that specifically seemed like a better culture so the places that I wanted to work were like the ones where they were already more diverse and already like were showing a positive friendly culture online and those were the only ones that I was going to apply to there's no way I was going to go work at some like programmer place right and so if I just saw a random job posting the odds were that it probably wasn't going to be a good culture so I wouldn't just apply to the random job postings and so we've seen the same thing where we didn't get we get mostly the same sort of types of people that apply for job postings they're confident about their skills they're usually men they're usually white they're usually straight they've usually been doing computers for a really long time they're really obsessed with computers so there's just a very small like part of like the overall world that's actually willing to apply for our jobs but now that we've and for a long time we really weren't that diverse even in terms of gender despite me being the CTO was still always mostly guys but in the past couple years we've got it to almost 50-50 and it wasn't even really like we didn't make a huge effort or I think that was more just like we like reached like a tipping point where we just had enough women that other women were coming to us and they all of a sudden they're begging us to work for us because they want to work in this industry they just don't want to work at some of these places that are going to be like an unhealthy emotional place for them to be so they see that we have all these other women the other women are speaking well of us and now all of a sudden there's a much bigger talent pool so those kinds of things make you realize like oh the talent pool is actually really large we're just only seeing a part of it right there's lots of really intelligent people out in the world they just don't all have the same background so where we've been recruiting lately there's like some boot camps in Philly so we've actually gotten three people that graduated from this boot camp it's not Drupal specific but they come out of that and they have like you don't have to pay the boot camp anything but they have like good background because they've learned Git and you know CSS and JavaScript and stuff like that so that's been working out because it's good to have them you know have just the basics done that they could get anywhere we also hire people from meetups we have like our local Drupal meetup another good place to hire from is trainings you can really see how someone learns when you train them so you can take time to like do some some trainings and try to to get people from there but yeah I have the same thing at meetups like if someone comes and they ask good questions and they and I have a good conversation with them then a lot of times we bring them in for an interview we hire a lot of friends of employees that's actually worked pretty well for us so like we I have a bunch of friends that work for me and I have some of our other people have brought in a bunch of their friends the reason that that works is that a lot of times smart people are smart friends and also so when you already have a friend it's like someone's invested in making sure you succeed so you already have like a champion and a mentor and that person will usually help you after work and and make sure that you are really going to to be a success and colleges I think it's good there's lots there's just so many college grads coming out that can't get good careers even with master's degrees these days and I don't really I'm not that concerned if they have a computer science degree if they have a computer science degree they're going to want way more money and be a lot more like usually arrogant about their awesome computer science skills we're software engineers though we're not computer scientists we're not here trying to like you know invent some new compression algorithm like on Silicon Valley we're just trying to like make websites here you know it's really not a science it's engineering and they don't and very few schools teach software engineering they mostly all teach computer science just kind of crazy but I guess they're just sort of behind the times so how do you evaluate really green people if they don't really have the technical things to evaluate so I really like try to go for the soft skills because soft skills are hard to teach but hard skills are easy to teach relatively so soft skills are like how honest are they how open are they how well do they communicate and these these things you'll have a really hard time changing someone away if they have problems like that but if they don't know how to use Vim guess what they can learn that you know I have no problem with them like learning all of these hard skills so they end up with these great developers with all these great soft skills which is amazing so I like to look at the strengths outside of our field their learning trajectory like if they've started learning like what can they tell me about what they've learned so far and how's it going and and so here's just like I'll rush through this because I've been talking too long but here's just some of my people that I'm proud of so this is a friend of mine Steve who started in 2008 as an intern he's a senior developer now and one of our top guys he's been extremely valuable he had no computer background doesn't really care about tech that much but he's awesome at it this guy Sean he started as our designer in 2010 now he's our creative director he's he's a great creative director but he started with very little experience he had some internship where he wasn't paid then he got kicked out when we hired him and like gave him a real job he's like with us for life now super valuable guy these are two people that we hired from our boot camp in 2014 that had almost no background in the field Allison now is like running a whole team for us that that works for a pharmaceutical company Jason is now a lead developers he's also like running teams they're great at like they're they're both amazing so I'm really glad we got them these are some of our latest hires they both came from a boot camp nearby and have very high hopes for them in the future and this is just an example of you know that we move people up every part of the business it's not just the development team this is Christine she's down working at our booth because she just changed from like our receptionist to being in marketing so we're always trying to get people that are that have a lot of talent put them in any position let them learn the business and then give them opportunities see where they want to go and that's you know they give us a lot for us giving them that and then we have you know the thing is I always say about doing this is like the worst case scenario is still a pretty good scenario okay so the worst case scenario is that is that the people leave but it's not it's when they leave it's like there still are advocates they're still working with us now that we have this product probo a lot of these people are pushing it in their organizations they're still our friends so Aaron couch was these are just people who specifically had very little working experience when they started with us and who have gone on to have great careers this guy Steven he came in as an unpaid intern because he didn't have papers he was from Ireland and he just came to the office and he said is it okay if I just like come in here every day and just work for you guys for free I have no experience but I want to do this I'm like okay he worked for Sony for he has a whole career now I mean he's got a family so it feels good even if they're not still with us to see how successful they've they've been so please evaluate this I have time for a couple of questions you got to talk to the mic I'm just kind of curious I mean everybody in this room wants perfect beautiful flowers and their people garden what are some kind of red flags for you when when it's time to stop investing in a person yeah we have definitely had to let some people go but it's always been really hard and there have definitely been times when I've wanted to let someone go and then later on over the years they they turn out to be awesome because they're just learning slower than I thought they could but I think it's mostly been when they don't have the the soft skills there we have never ever let someone go because they weren't a good enough developer there's always something you can have them do like we have some people that you know maybe they're not a great developer but then we have them doing operations work that they're great at we can find something else that they're great at the real reason they have to go is if their soft skills aren't there like they just aren't communicating they keep going into a rabbit hole and not coming out of it and blowing up the tickets or like they they're just or they're not they just never come to work on time they're not taking it seriously you just can't rely on them and they just keep on messing things up type of thing but those are like more like soft skills mostly yeah I assume it takes time to grow these people so if if you have someone who is really junior approximately how much time do you think it takes them to grow into a a role where they can do a project development project yeah so she said like how long does it take to to grow someone new until they can like really do a project a long time I mean it we usually have people billing after a few weeks not full-time but they'll be billing a little bit and then we'll be discounting some of it and then they can be like an active useful person in a project usually about like six months but they're not but they're not doing it on their own then they're still getting a lot of help and then usually it takes like a year or two before they're really competent so it is a long haul yeah so I've been doing that too until I got to the point where I need someone quickly because we were doing so good we were growing so fast so it gets hard when you need to find 50-60 people in six months yeah so do you have any ideas of how you can get some people quickly because we hired lots of people and of course the new people may be good but you know we don't get so much time to train them on all of these things from zero so then they get to train other people they train them in a different way the way they're used to yeah I mean ultimately if you have to grow that fast it's it's gonna be a mess no matter what I guess I mean that's really fast growth so I don't know I mean you definitely have to have a balance but I think it's really just when you're that when you have that many people coming in you have to have more time for them to communicate so they need to like be working together to make sure they're starting to get all on the same page which is going to take extra time that they're not billing for so it's just going to be rough so thank you I really like your presence thank you so much thanks