 Hello, my name is Jordan. I am with my company, Damn Good Technology, and I thought I might like to take a minute or, okay, almost an hour to talk about what I believe is the issue with hiring and a potential solution. First, I'd like to talk a little about me, about my background, and kind of delve into a solution that I think we can all benefit from in order to hire the right candidates in technology. So a little about me. I am a software developer. I am in and out of the industry. I like to say I'm in and out of the industry because I've had a rough ride of it. I'm currently freelancing. I have found a lot of success with that in freelancing. And I like to say I'm the organic owner of Damn Good Technology. I like to say organic because it didn't necessarily start how I wanted it to start. You know, I'm very entrepreneurially minded, and so I was thinking, yeah, I'm going to launch a great product. Things are going to be awesome. I'm going to, like, really start my company. That's how it's going to start. Didn't end up that way. But I, this is how I'm starting my company, by freelancing and developing full-stack applications for folks. So yeah, my specialty is in full-stack development with a focus on automation. I like developing apps for people, and I love automation because you know what? I hate doing the same thing over and over again. Like why not just get it done all in one foul swoop, right? I am also a multi-potentialite, and this basically means that I just am into, like, everything and anything, kind of all of this, basically a jack-of-all-trades master of none type thing. Although I am trying, and I have been able to develop some master of some things, which does, which does strengthen me in the long run. And yeah, I currently live in the Pacific Northwest. Any other Pacific Northwesters out there? You can say it in the Slack channel, too, if you're in there. So before I begin, yeah, so this is a perspective from a burnout job candidate. Somebody who would be applying for job after job, not hearing anything back, even when I had a college degree in my belt. And I also, I meant to change the slide title. I didn't want this to be the solution, since I don't want this to be a final solution, but I think I can provide a template, kind of a groundwork that we all can work from to move hiring in a more abundant and substantial direction where everybody benefits. I want this to be more of a talk where we ask, what if? Like, what if we do this instead of the old way of doing stuff? A little of my career background, I definitely had a North Dock's career path. In 2006, I was pretty excited because I got an apprenticeship at OSDL. Has anybody heard of that? Heard of OSDL? If you know about Canonical, they bought OSDL. Actually, Linda Starwald's actually worked for OSDL. I saw it was cubicle there and everything. I mean, just a little name, Linus. I'm sure nobody here knows who he is. No, I'm sure everybody does. So I was really excited. A great apprenticeship at OSDL. My career was going to take off. All my other peers were just like at Safeway or Starbucks or working those lowest jobs. I was just going to rock it out. Then reality hit. I basically had trouble finding any job. I was even trying to be really humble about it. I realized, yeah, I might not be able to immediately get a job at Google or AWS or a job like that. But, hey, I couldn't work my way up, right? But around the time, I think with the combination of the market crash and just that spurt apprenticeship that I could put on my resume, it was really difficult for me to really land any job. This went on for years and years. For me, it was just a pipe dream to think that I could actually earn a living. When I did have a job, the jobs are very short-lived, especially in tech. Somebody very creative. It's really hard to really fit in in technology and a lot of those high-tech industries. Because of that, my resume was pretty spotty. I would have months and months of nothing and then, oh, yeah, a little job here doing this little thing. I'm really embarrassed by my resume. I tried to show it to people unless they really asked for it and they're like, yeah, I can explain. My greatest desire out of all of this was really work hard to really use my skills and talents in order to benefit somebody. Fast forward to the start of 2020. Does anybody remember what happened in 2020? Yeah, I think we all do. But that for me was a time of change of growth. For me, that's really where my career really started to take off. I've had all these odd jobs of getting in with the company, getting a let go very easily, or within a company. But I eventually found a retail job, just another stopgap job in the place of me looking for work. I was in a pretty tough spot. I had to move back in with my parents. It was very embarrassing. But I was freelancing at the time. I was freelancing a bit before. It wasn't like at the start of 2020, I began freelancing. I was still doing very small projects, very poor pay. But in 2020, that's really when it took off. I was eventually able to get out of retail. Thankfully, being an introvert, retail was not for me by any means. It was definitely a learning experience. From there, my career took off and I was able to quit my retail job and do freelancing full time, or more than full time if any other freelancers are in here. This has been my experience with the hiring maze. If anybody else can relate, then good on you. A lot of employers want to know, what do you know? Can you do what the job is asking you to do? Which is fair. A lot of them, what do they ask for? Get a profile. Pretty simply, you can get an easy indication about what somebody knows. On the same coin, a lot of times I would show my get a profile with projects that I contributed to, even some projects that I've started, and they'd say, well, it's probably fake, which I agree is also fair. It is possible to fake get a repository, right? Then they would hand in coding, and then they would offer coding challenges. Has anybody here had to do coding challenges? Yeah, they're pretty fun. I don't like them for several reasons. They're very impersonal. They really provide no feedback. Okay, there tend to be two types of coding challenges that any developers come into. There tends to be ones that are test based. It needs to be like a solid input, solid output. We'll be checking it with a machine. It's either pass or fail. With that, the pluses are that it does have a very concrete scoring, like it's either pass or fail. The downside is that it's very impersonal. Then there's the kind where it's like, we need a solution for this problem we're solving, we'll review the code, we'll get back to you. The problem with that is that the scoring tends to be very arbitrary. You don't know what they're really looking for. They could be looking for how you write your comments, they could be looking for how you name your variables, they could be looking for anything. It's very arbitrary in that sense. But at the same time, it's a lot more personable so you can do it back and forth, communicate. With all these coding challenges, it was difficult for me. I didn't even pass one. I'm now freelancing as a developer. Maybe other developers have shared that same sentiment. Maybe you could come into me and give me a coding challenge. I might be able to pass it. Come talk to me later. But for now, I have not been able to pass a single one and I've done like two dozen easily. But really where I took off was, has anybody heard of this guy named Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary Vee? He is a business person, very intense on fire business person. His story is pretty awesome. If you want to look him up, look him up later. I don't want to get into it. But something he said and really stuck with me is that everybody these days is a media company. Doesn't matter what you do, everybody needs to behave like a media company, start producing content. And so that that's really where I, what I started to do, I started to produce content, talk about blogging, which ended up being my resume. So a couple of weeks ago, or a couple months ago for this talk, I just kind of wanted to get into the sense in the community, how people feel about hiring and, sorry, how people feel about the job market, how easy it is to find a job. So I asked the question on Twitter, for any job seekers out there, how easy is it for you to land tech jobs? And yes, I got an overwhelming response of five votes. Because that's the overwhelming size of my community. But still, it's data. And so I found that, you know, it's 100% say that it's either pretty hard or nearly impossible. I would imagine that if I interviewed 100 people or 1000 people, this would be pretty similar. I might get a few, a few weird people out there saying, Oh, it's so easy. But I think for the most part, everybody finds it difficult. And in fact, I did find I did come across another poll that somebody else posted on LinkedIn, where we're talks about interviews and the guy was asking, Okay, where, how long should take to interview? And the overwhelming majority said one to three interviews. I'm afraid to ask who said six or more interviews. If it's a job seeker, good on you. If it's a hiring manager, let's not, you know, even cross paths. But overwhelmingly, everybody wants short interviews. And I think this is for both the job seekers and, and employers that are responded this fall. So why aren't coding challenges useful? I can give you my, my take from a developer's perspective. They are not reflective of a typical work environment. It for the same reasons that I was explaining earlier, like they can be very impersonal. There's no collaboration. There's no communication. Just basically, okay, what do you have? You might argue, Oh, yeah, but customers and clients are like that. Not really. I mean, there's like a lot of dialogue between you and the customer and you and the client. You know, a lot of code reworks, a lot of revisions, like a software project, it's not final. I mean, that's the point of it. Yeah, so those are, I also believe that a lot of it is wasted energy. And like really, it's only beneficial, I believe to the higher job candidate. And even then they've gambled one or two hours of the time. Really, I don't think there's any benefit to the employer. If there is, then it's usually canceled out just because the employer has to spend a lot of time creating these coding challenges, making sure employees can pass them. And only to only only to get the candidate to show that they can do the coding challenge. So is there an alternative? Well, how many times have we been been saying, once I earn a million dollars in the context of altruism, like once I earn a million dollars, then I will give money to charity. You know, like once I earn a million dollars, I will save up for my kids retirement fund, right? I've probably said it. I'm sure I've said it. Most of us have probably said it, right? Or maybe once I retire, then I'll have more time to, to devote to volunteering in the local soup kitchen or planning trees or, you know, we all we all think in future, in a future version of ourselves that is completely separate from ours from our own selves, right? But what if I asked what about now? Like what where this this sense of altruism, where can we think of it right now? And I'll be getting back to what this has to do with hiring in a second. Yeah, like it'll come around, don't worry. So I came across a surprising source of abundance a couple of years ago, when I was learning about ancient Jewish law. And so a little of a little bit of a history background for those that aren't familiar. Israel thousands of years ago was enslaved by the by the Egyptians. And they for 400 years grew up in slavery. And they were oppressed, they were, they were not in good, a good situation. The Egyptians were controlling them or pressing them. For a while, like there were many generations that that were that born and died, that were born and died in slavery. And eventually, eventually, they were freed. And but, you know, there were this suddenly freed nation of like, hundreds of thousands, they didn't quite know how to run a society. And so their God gave them instructions on how to on how to live how to create a society. And this is one of the laws. It's called payah. And it's when you reap of the harvest land, do not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleams of the harvest, do not go over a viewer in a second time, or pick up the grapes that have fallen, leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord of God. As I just think of this, basically, we, the law is encouraging farmers that when you're when you're harvesting wheat, like it can be so tempting to like harvest all of it, right? But when you do it, don't don't harvest to the edges of the field, you know, just just like get lazy about it, leave some for the for the edges. So what can be a modern day interpretation of this? For me, it would basically be don't penny pinch, right? And it can be so easy to penny pinch. And this is where I believe the abundance comes from. Like, oh, yeah, I meant, I meant to say, does anybody know what what I what I'm talking about when I mean abundance? There's like a mindset abundance versus scarcity, where abundance is basically, I have more than I need, I'm able to give away scarcity is, I don't have enough, I have to scrimp and save. And, and, you know, I have to hoard, I have to I have to have an abundance is very much a giving, because I'll get it in return type of mentality. So what does it have to do with technology? Right? I mean, most of us aren't farmers, at least most of us aren't weed farmers. So what does this have to do in 2021? Like they didn't have Linux back then as far as I know. So what I would propose is that we can incorporate pay into technology. I'm not going to like control your project or tell you how to do it. But one suggestion is to break these larger projects into what I like to call gleaning. You know, the edges of the field, per se. And there are some some suggestions are that there could be like small, small non show stopper bugs, like for for the projects that you're on, how many of you have like the small bugs maybe it'd be, oh, yeah, the box doesn't appear quite right. It's hard to read the text, you know, like they're not show stoppers, but still they're, you know, somebody should work on them. How many of you have have some? Yeah. You could also break the project into smaller chunks like the monolithic application that everybody's afraid to touch, you could break off chunks and have somebody work on them. And if you want an added bonus, you can reward the candidate for their efforts. Here, the there is a greater some benefit, like the candidate actually gets real world experience. Like, can't you imagine a college graduate with this, like they're graduating college and then it's like, wow, I can actually contribute to something. And plus they get satisfaction with their efforts that aren't wasted. The employer also gets a benefit because they can actually see a working example of the candidate's code within their work environment, so on their project. And they can get low level tickets knocked out. So then like the 200 tickets that you have lined up can get shrunk down to like five, who knows. And then this is a, this can also be a pathway to potentially more open source projects. And I don't know, I think anybody here is, you know, is a fan of open source and I don't know. That sarcasm. So what do you do if you're, so for this question, what do you do if you're not sure to hire someone? Hire them. Let me explain. So is it, how many people here are numbers people? Like, you love numbers. I am not. But I decided to crunch some numbers. So I suffered for two hours for this data. I sweated. No, I did spend some time crunching some numbers to see the financial viability of this. And here's one scenario. So let's take a scenario where there are, there are four stages for hiring, right? Glassdoor says that there are fourth out, that there's a $4,000 average that the company spends to hire somebody that that's on all across the board. So I'm sure it's probably more in tech, but let's just say it's 4,000 for now, right? For the sake of argument. So if there are four stages that would be $1,000 per stage, right? And so then he can break it down into the job candidates and let's say there are 200 job candidates that apply for the job initially, and then 10 are shortlisted, five are kind of brought on board to get the coding challenge and then one for the final, like, are you fit for this company? Yeah, so the last candidate gets $1,000 for paid on them for hiring. So in the first instance where we have $5 paid per candidate, let's say we want to eliminate that or at least bring the cost down for that group. So we offer gleaning as part of the any group process. Let's say we do that, like a short, maybe it's a small project that we want done or something like that. Then and let's say 50% of the candidates respond. I'm sure that in reality it would be a lot less, but let's say it's 50%. That means that in order for this to remember $1,000 for the stage, in order for us to kind of break even on the stage, we would need to pay candidates $10 if we wanted to keep the stage. But I mean let's say we give a payout of $8 for the candidate, then the math would pay $800 and that's $200 saved. But wait, there is more. We just eliminated another stage too, right? No, don't worry, we didn't eliminate the candidates, we eliminated the stage. That's $1,000 right there for that stage. We have saved $12,000 total for that stage. That's just for one job. Just to be realistic here, there are other factors involved. Let's assume a developer makes $100 an hour, then there would be $100 that the developer would be working on it and reviewing the code, so you could guesstimate that it would be like $900 saved per job. But still, I mean eliminating both those two steps with these cleanings. But yes, I mean we do need to be careful, because we don't want to have our API keys public, right? Not a good idea. Or passwords, or there's sensitive info. There might be legal challenges too, like I would recommend talking with your legal team on your company before embarking on any of this. There could also be the problem of a candidate might feel entitled for this. They might feel entitled to that, hey, I did this job for you. I mean, I need something more full-time, right? And so I would also recommend doing cost-benefit analysis for your company to make sure that this really does help with your company. So I want to end this talk, and I guess I am a bit earlier, I guess I'm getting done a bit earlier than I had hoped, and so I can leave the rest of the time for questions. So some food for thought, who would you consider the poor and the foreigner at your company, in the tech industry or at your company? And poor doesn't necessarily mean, doesn't necessarily have to mean monetary value, right? Because at a company, everybody could be paid just about the same, I mean, especially in tech. But there are other ways that somebody could be poor, right? And so how can we be mindful of those people at our company or in the tech industry as a whole? What can we do now as an organization to serve the needy? We don't have to do all these grand, all these grand virtue signaling of, oh look, you know, we did this really cool event to feed the poor, you know, like what can we do now as an organization in what we can do, in what we know how to do, you know, like what our company does, like how can our company serve best in our own capacity? And more practically, what are some back burner bugs that we need to take care of? We can use these back burner bugs as gleanings for job candidates. And then finally, how's our project documentation, right? I mean, this could be a really good practical way for job candidates to apply for job. Like what, who better else to write your documentation than somebody on the outside who is familiar with the stack? I was at some other talks previously where they were talking about this where it can be so easy to get involved, to have the blinders on and get so focused on your product or your project that you write terrible documentation that doesn't necessarily have, that doesn't necessarily help users at all. And so what are ways that the, and so maybe the documentation could be something that that job candidates could work on. And so that is all for the talk. I am on social media, Twitter, and minds.com. I'm not sure if anybody likes that social network, but I'm on there. And element, if anybody wants to hit me up on element matrix.org then I'm on there. That is it for the talk. Are there any questions from people? Okay. And with that I would like to thank you, thank you everybody, and that is all. Thank you.