 The Linux Foundation has come out with its latest open source jobs report. This report plays a very important role in understanding the demand for open source talent and trends among open source professionals. To deep dive into this 2020 report today we have with us once again, Clyde C. Prasad, SVP and GM of Training and Certification at the Linux Foundation. Clyde, it's nice to have you again on the show. Very soft, no thanks for having me. As I was saying, this report plays a very important role but I want to hear your perspective because you lead this effort. What is the importance of this report? Not only for the open source ecosystem but companies outside of the open source ecosystem because today almost everybody is leveraging open source in one capacity or the other. Yes, one of the things that we realized several years ago is that there's a lot of data around general employment reports and a fair few around IT and technology in general but there was really this gap when it comes to what's happening on open source talent and we kept hearing anecdotally that people can't hire, can't find enough talent. And so what we wanted to do was put a really clear spotlight on what's going on specifically when it comes to the talent pool around open source to be able to share with the market a sort of non anecdotal state of the word but also to be able to inform our own strategy and our own mission which is to try to ensure not just that there's fantastic code coming out of open source projects but also that there is enough talent to implement and use it as code. What are some of the key highlights of this report? A couple of things. One is the rise of DevOps skills. I think everybody knows cloud is hot. It's been that way for a while but you know the companion piece to that around DevOps and the importance of understanding CI CD pipelines and also the cultural difference of working in that sort of continuous delivery. The rise of that I think is something that maybe most people are not quite as aware of. The second thing I would highlight is that there was a lot of questions about what's happening to tech hiring in response to the COVID pandemic. We have some answers for that that says that although hiring slowed down it did not slow down nearly as much as people might have worried at the outset and in fact is now accelerating. And the top level thing which is continuing to be the case is just we still don't have enough open source talent so the urgency of finding new ways to bring talent into the market continues to be something that should be front and center for all of us. What are the skills that are kind of not only most in demand but also hardest to find? So that is like a chicken and egg solution right? Yeah you know there are obviously cloud skills right so there are a lot of companies smaller companies more conservative companies the pandemic has pushed them to be much more active on the cloud and what that's done is raise the stakes in terms of people who are familiar with cloud native development, active architecture, Kubernetes orchestration and then what does the ICT pipelines look like in a cloud world because obviously there are some changes there when you're running that sort of infrastructure. So those interwoven skill sets right and of course sitting underneath all of that is what operating system does the cloud run on and I think we all know now that the vast vast 98 plus percent of instances are running on Linux and so you have this tiered approach where understanding some basic Linux competence is a baseline and then you're building on top of that with looking for cloud native development, cloud native orchestration and then what does the ICT pipelines look like to bring that to life? In addition to just coming out with this report do you have any kind of advice or suggestions to the hiring managers what can they do to attract top developers or talent to their organizations because there is heavy demands everybody wants them so. Right well you know so some of the things actually have happened in response to the pandemic right so one of the trends we saw last year was people wanting the flexibility to be able to work from home and of course now we all work from home so that helps but what came out in the report that was really interesting is that more and more talent managers are realizing that you don't just have to go externally for talent that you can in fact upscale people who are currently in your organization so we are seeing the data suggests that a lot more people are waking up and realizing that cloning LinkedIn for your next hire is a zero-sum game because other people are doing the same and they're starting to invest more in training especially online training they're starting to invest more in certifications for their employees and just in general they're starting to be much more proactive in looking at the existing internal talent pool and finding ways to provide new opportunities for development and of course that also comes with new job opportunities for the existing employee base and I just want to talk a little more about COVID-19 as well a couple of things are happening with COVID-19 of course it is also a lot of companies are scaling down they don't you know they are cutting budgets and everything at the same time since people are able to work remotely you don't have to relocate yourself or you don't have to find talent in the same area you know you have access to almost everybody wherever they are so how has COVID-19 affected the the hiring process itself in terms of while they do have to scale down some to some extent the beauty is I mean I should not say that but the beauty is that the word that we are living in is all powered by cloud eddy technology without that we would not be getting food to or I mean all the services or all the purchase that I was making even my Indian grocery they are they now have a website I can just go and place or it was not the case earlier so cloud is actually enabled companies to stay in business so that also means that you do need developer and all those talents to keep those businesses running at the same time you have advantage of not having to relocate so talk a bit about it yeah that's true I think they and it all does tie together right so as people have been forced to use the cloud more I had the same experience you did right my local Chinese restaurant suddenly developed a website and ordering kids but it is that they did not previously have so you have this broader footprint of businesses you know the old saw about every business is now an e-commerce business it is true right so there is this broader footprint and on the flip side of it you also have people who are now having to work from home where they maybe didn't use to either for practical or maybe cultural reasons within the company and that also then intersects with the the sort of cultural change and the cultural norms of CICD and DevOps right and so this idea that you have to be in person together versus this idea that you have a well documented pipeline and everybody can contribute to that pipeline and do their commits and do their polls that whole tooling ecosystem of cloud native and DevOps has actually made it easier and I would argue possible to do what's happened and what we've seen over the past several months which is people being productive working from home working with people they haven't worked with before onboarding new team members and being able to get them provisioned with the right access and upscaled on the right systems yeah it's all already come together there's you know we have in my view we have been lucky that we've got the technology infrastructure that we have today because I don't know that we would have been able to stay as productive and focused in a shift to certain shifts to remote work if we were trying to do this even five years ago and I'm a good example of that because I have been working from home ever since you know I moved out of India what I realized was that I work when I feel that I'm most productive instead of hey you know I have clocked at 9am and I have to clock out at 5pm I have to sit there and do something it doesn't matter how I feel and then sometimes you know a lot of personal issues also somebody is sick in the family so your mind is there but you have to come to office but with you know remote working you just you know I think remote working offers the best you know balance between work and life it is actually more challenging because you may end up working all the time but still it offers a better balance now earlier you're talking about that you don't have to go out to hire people you can also internally you can train people so when we look at organizations and they look at all these new you know cloud native technologies and they want to retain or prepare their own workforce what resources are available there especially from the Linux foundation because you know the training is their certification is there so that they can better equip their own workforce when there is already a shortage of a lot of talent yeah it's a good question Swapna you know from a practical perspective the portfolio that we have provided which is very heavily focused on self-paced e-learning that you take online but at the same time very skills based right so very lab intensive online training because ultimately what do you care about as a colleague or as a hiring manager it's not whether they check the box and they have a certificate saying they completed a course what you care about is the skills right they actually develop those skills and so we've got a pretty big portfolio a very hands-on e-learning self-paced e-learning programs to help people develop the skills and then we've continued to build our portfolio of performance based certification exams so this is not your grandad's it can answer out of our lineup right these are live systems with variable questions and you have to demonstrate your skills under the pressure of time under the pressure of being propped by an independent person I think that one-two punch of really focusing on skills you know I joke with people all the time we get you know we get feedback sometimes that our courses aren't don't have enough video and I say well true because we're not trying to entertain you we're trying to develop skills and the way you develop skills is not by staring at a screen and listening to a video the way you develop skills is by doing a lab and so we've got a very lab centric mindset in terms of the training side of it and that carries on into the certification side of it where it's all about performance like show that you can do the work take the time to develop the skills because that's what your colleagues are going to be looking for that's what your employers are going to be looking for and that's what's going to benefit you as an individual is to be able to have that broader skillset and to be able to do that in a remote way and not have to rely on a senior trainer coming on the site and working with you I think that's going to be the new normal so now the advantage is that you know because of this crisis is that people are realizing that they don't have to move they can actually they can move to the place ideal place that we wanted to live it could be a big ranch it could be a beach and they can work for companies who are operating in Silicon Valley which also means you can also cross national boundaries you can get the the whole idea of open source is the best and the brightest people from around the globe so how do you enable these people because people come from different cultural background different educational background different languages so do you also help them in respect of where they're coming from so whether it's internationalizing or supporting different languages so people can get trained so yes as LF training we do that so we have obviously the online format helps right because it's truly available 24-7 globally in nights and weekends so that really has expanded the footprint of what we're able to do and who we are able to reach we've also done some translations particularly for the certification exams to make those available in languages that we know folks may not otherwise be comfortable with so for Japan and for China for instance what we're trying to do is mirror what we're seeing in the workforce the shift towards more remote work has actually opened up the pipeline when you think about hiring and talent management if you think about somebody who's in the US or in Western Europe your pool is not as limited you really can reach out to this global pool of talent in non-traditional markets and so we've seen sectors get hard right obviously India was hard for a lot of work shifted there, there's a ton of stuff happening in Eastern Europe now but it really is global right we've got folks on our team in South America being super productive in this new remote way of working and I think that's becoming more and more typical which is that folks are able because of the rise of cloud native because of the rise of this sort of collaborative DevOps mindset are able to collaborate with regions across countries across time zones much more effectively than they ever have before awesome, Clyde thank you so much for talking to me today about not only this report but also how to help you know hiring managers not only get more talent but also you know retrain their own employees and I look forward to talking to you again thank you it's always a pleasure to be with you Swap thank you