 All right, so I don't know if people on the left, you might want to migrate right, or people on the right might want to migrate left, depending on which way you're facing just so, but not gonna be a whole lot going on on the slides. I can draw some stuff maybe, but I'm a pretty terrible artist. So first of all, let's just go down, let's start with Kim, just kind of who are you? Well, we know who you are, but I'll tell us a little bit about previous, next, what the hiring situation is, and introduction. So, previous, next, we're based in Australia. We're about 22 staff at the moment. We started about five years ago, me and myself and Owen Lansbury started the company. I have a programming background, so I've been in software development, web development for about 20 years or so. So was using the same tools that we mentioned earlier to cut up files and use HTML tables and those kinds of things. So my role is a technical director, and I do most of the hiring, so I basically do most of the interviewing and recruiting for the company. Is it mainly in-house staff or telecommuting? So we're actually a bit of a mix. So we have about half of our staff actually work in-house and half are remote. And I think we, it really depends on the candidate of whether they're gonna be suitable to be working remotely versus in-house. And certainly we would wanna try and find the best talent and we'll definitely have people work remotely if they're a good remote worker. All right, so let me ask primarily, how do you look for or find talent? So I think it's pretty much all the top people that we've hired, we've known well in advance of actually hiring them. And that is through the community, both the Australian Drupal community, but also internationally. All of us participate in the community. We go to the events, we go to the meetups. Most of us speak at conferences or meetups. And just, that's generally the way that we network. And yeah. Okay, so Steve, let's move on to you, tell us a little bit about you and Wunderkraut, which is pretty unique as you're so spread out. Yeah, we're Europe's largest Drupal agency. There's just over 140 of us in nine countries, so we are quite spread out. Very much represented in the Scandinavian countries, Benelux, Germany and the UK, Iraqi offices. And we were formed from the merger of four of Europe's Drupal agencies about two years ago. And then since then we've just been gradually kind of finding our culture and developing the way that we're going to work. So how do you primarily find Drupal talent? Well, very similar in that the community is very important. A lot of our current staff have come through meeting people at events like DrupalCon. And also just the small meetups, the Drupal camps and so on. But we're starting to think very much about how we can expand outside of that. Partly because as I was discussing with someone earlier on, all of our businesses are growing at a faster rate than the community itself is growing. But also because we're trying to obviously widen the talent pool and improve diversity. And if we're only recruiting from a fairly narrow group, that's gonna be fairly difficult. So we're starting to look at recruiting from outside the Drupal community and skilling up the people that come in with Drupal skills. So we're just experimenting with that in London. We've taken on a designer who comes from a web design background, very different types of project. Hadn't previously been allowed by the agencies to work on agile projects and hadn't been allowed to get involved in the code, his job had just been focused on the design. And of course, what we want him to do is take a much more broad view. We want him to learn to code. We want him to learn Drupal and kind of turn him into a true front-ender of whom Morton could be proud. And swear at probably. And... Swear with. Swear with, okay. So, yeah, so that's quite an experiment for us, but we're really looking at, does that sort of thing work and what do we need to do? So it's putting in place a buddy system and a mentoring system. They're quite two, quite different things that can support people like that coming into the company and develop that new talent that perhaps wouldn't have otherwise found its way to Drupal. So is your staff primarily in-house or telecommuting? Again, one of the interesting things about our culture as a company is that there's a lot of flexibility for all of our country offices to run themselves in the way they feel it fits so that it can fit their local culture and what the team want to do. So some of our offices, for example, Stockholm, they do work from an office, a fixed office. In Helsinki and Munich, there is an office and a lot of people go there a lot of the time, but they don't have to, apart from one day a week, which is the time everyone goes in and hangs out. And in the UK, we have no office at all. We have nothing. There's a place the post goes to and there's some hot desks there. It's a co-working space, but we are very distributed in the UK. So one of our team members in the UK is Lewis Nyman, who's very involved in Cordev. He now lives in Zurich because his girlfriend got a job there and so he decided to move with her because his work was flexible. So we do in the UK do a lot of distributed working and that works very well for us, allows us to hire some very talented people, but it requires quite a different skill set because there needs to be people who are very, very strong communicators and very good collaborators. So we focus on recruiting on that basis. Okay, thank you. And Mike, I don't want to say same questions, but I will say, tell us about yourself and four kitchens. Sure, so Mike Manatski from four kitchens. We've been building websites for seven years and I've been with the company for about two. I was either the second to last or the last employee that was relocated to Austin, after which we became a fully distributed company and that started with one employee in San Diego and now has stretched out to across the United States and even to an employee in Europe now. And we're 22 people and we still have an office here in Austin and even the people that work at that office work from home quite frequently. And it's, we just finished a hiring set but we're likely gonna be starting up again very soon. So yeah. So what's the primary way that four kitchens finds new hires? So we've always taken a sort of a two pronged approach to it and one of them is always through the community and through referrals and through people that we know and through we meet from going to all the different events that at least somebody from four kitchens is at across the country and across Europe now. And but then on the other hand, we've also always had a lot of success at hiring outside of the community and hiring people who are who may not know Drupal but know the web or strong programmers looking to move into web development even from a completely different skill set. And that's worked up very well for us in building diversity within our company and also in allowing finding people that are not necessarily in the very competitive space of the Drupal hiring scene. Yes, exactly. I'm sure Eric can talk about the very competitive space of the Drupal hiring scene as well. Yeah, absolutely. So same questions? Sure, absolutely. So I'm Eric Affin. I work in Acquia and yeah, we have been expanding rapidly for quite some time now. I joined the company a little over a year and two months ago. We were 220 and we're at 460 as of today. So we've been growing pretty quickly, the 50 million of additional financing. We'll accelerate that a little bit more but the company was originally founded in 2007. Dries is one of the founders along with Jay Batson and we are in Burlington, Massachusetts which is where we're based but we have offices in Portland, Oregon. We have a small shared office in Washington, D.C. A small shared office in Paris and a main European office of about 40 people in Reading, UK. So I think we're in 20 countries right now and kind of across five continents. We're missing a couple so we're looking to check those off in 2014. Antarctica might be a little tough unless there's anybody know a penguin. So primarily where we find great talent to some of the panelists kind of already points that the ecosystem, the Drupal ecosystem is not expanding as rapidly as our companies inside that ecosystem are growing and need Drupal talent. So we've been creative. We've done the traditional things. We come to camps and cons and we meet a lot of great people networking. We have a very strong referral program internal to the company that we encourage people to branch out but we've also had a lot of success in attracting people that are just strong web developers and strong technologists and training them internally. We had a program called Acquiyu where we hired eight folks who had never touched Drupal before. We trained them up, gave them jobs and six of them are still with us a year and a half later and four of them I would probably say are still rising stars in our organization and they've brought a diversity of thought, different perspectives into the organization that are outside the normal Drupal kind of philosophy and backing and it's been great. So we are at this point given what we're trying to do. We have to continue to expand looking at new talent pools but obviously we're still primarily looking for Drupalists and this is why we come to these, one of the reasons why we come to these events and give back to the community so much. Okay, so thank you Eric. We're gonna, the floor is open for questions. I've got some questions. I'm going to feed them as we go but by all means if you have a question you can step up to the mic. The goal of this is kind of for our panelists to talk about what they look for and how you can position yourself and prepare yourself to potentially get a full-time job which could obviously a career with a company like one of the four that are represented up here. So if you have a question by all means step up to the mic, otherwise I'm just gonna keep on asking my questions and then you have to list all my questions. Yes, I'm sorry, in your presence did you cover kind of the same questions in your presentation? I think I covered quite a bit of it. Okay. You know how we go about hiring, really like the others had here but a multi-pronged approach. We also have a training program we put together this last year and we've hired about 10 people. We broke it into two subsets, one for front end, one for back end and ran through a series of curriculums for the different disciplines and we also have a very strong referral program and we focus quite a bit on social media and sort of that trees and branches and leaves effect, I mean that's how, that's the core of how we grew originally was the friend of the friend of the friend of the friend and that's still the core, but you can only get so far that way so we've been focusing on, as I said, building our own curriculum and bringing on great talent and turning them into Drupalus that's been our focus this last year. I think we did account that these five companies have a total of 100 and more than 150 current open positions for Drupal professionals, which is, I don't think there's 150 people in this room. So, Eric, I want to ask you one question. You mentioned you're at 460 right now. What percentage of those are Drupal based or Drupal focused as opposed to sales marketing, support staff, things like that? Yeah, probably a little over half. Obviously, as we've expanded out the organization, we've expanded out all of the corporate functions, so whether that's finance or marketing, sales, HR and recruiting and talent acquisition, but yeah, we're still the primary focus when you come down to it, we're a technology company and digital business solutions and so probably about 60% are technology focused. And then so Nancy, Ken, Mike and Steve, I'm gonna guess that percentage of your companies is higher, more percent of Drupal technologists. It's probably two-thirds, two-thirds Drupal developers, including front-end developers. They count as Drupal developers, right, Herschel? Yeah. Well, I mean, it's interesting because there has been a shift to, I think it was mentioned before, the JavaScript frameworks, the MVC frameworks. So you can actually have people, and we actually go to the JavaScript meetups and try to meet people who are specialists in that area because it is quite possible now to actually have someone who just focuses on that and doesn't actually know Drupal at all. There might be an AngularJS expert and all they need to know is, okay, what's the web service interface I need to talk to? So I think that's another thing to consider as well is that these roles are becoming more, can become more specialized as we go forward. Let me ask a different kind of question. We'll go right down the line, it's like a quick answer. On a scale of one to 10, like how, I'm gonna use the word dire, so we're 10 is like most dire and one is it's troublesome but not so bad yet. As far as your need of talent, how dire is the situation one to 10 I'll start on? About a seven, let's say. Okay, Steve. I just need to caveat that by saying actually, not that bad because we find that when you build a bit of a reputation in the community and in Europe there's quite a close knit strong community and we are substantially bigger than a lot of the other, the players in that market and known for the culture and so on, we get a lot of applications out of the blue and which is great. So we're in a reasonable position. So whichever way the scale was round. So that'd be lower. Yeah, that'd be lower. That'd be lower. I'm terrible with numbers. Yeah, as I mentioned, we just finished a round of hiring. So we're kind of like we're about to have it. If you had asked this question in January or actually at near the end of February, I would have said, oh, God, oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. Yeah. But that's gonna change very rapidly this year. And yeah, so we'll be bringing in people. I think you made a very good point in that there's a lot of connections out there. Eric? Yeah, we're probably six or seven. There's obviously, there are some areas of the company that we have more critical needs than others that we're trying to ramp up. Either it's a new product or pushing out kind of new ideas into the community. But overall, six or seven. Okay, and Nancy? I have a really hard time figuring that number. I would say, because you used the word- Do you lose sleep over it? Yeah, but that's because of the focus. So we set out this year to hire 70 people and that's nowhere near you guys. But also, we don't have the funding. That helps. So it was our number one goal for the year. We started the year and looked at, what do we see the client demand? And we're about mid-year and we've got the 35. So we are month after month hitting our targets. So I wouldn't use the word dire, but yeah, do I lose sleep? Not because I'm worried, but because I'm focused. So it's really a main thing that the executives and team members have linked. Everybody's part of it. We need to do interviews, we need to do onboarding. It's not just about hiring. It's about keeping people around and making sure that they're happy. So everybody has to get involved with onboarding and mentoring and making sure those programs are robust and mature. You just don't want to bring people and go, oh, there's a computer, have fun. Yeah, exactly. Go ahead. Question, sir? What are some potential red flags where if people have all the skills and you kind of like them, but there's this one thing you're like, you know, hell no. Like, what are some of those? I think you've got to be careful about hiring you know, so-called rock stars, because essentially, I was like, melly, melly. Well, I mean, you obviously want people to fit in with your culture. So you want them to gel with the team. Often if you've got people who are, you know, work by themselves most of the time, they might be really skilled, they might be really good at what they're doing. They're not necessarily good at communicating or being part of a team or collaborating and learning to work with other people. So, I mean, the kind of questions I would ask in interviewing them would be around how do they work in teams before what kind of experience they have in working with teams, what challenges they have working in with teams and I expect, I mean, I'm happy to hear real problems that they've faced, you know. I don't expect them to have a perfect record of everything went well and I solved all the problems. It's like, well, this is the challenge that I had and it was really hard. I think that's really important. I have a couple red flags. One would be a new job every six months for the last, you know, five to 10 years. And another big red flag is when you start to talk to folks and ask them about their previous job and they start seeing negative things about their previous bosses, their previous team. That's really a red flag that they don't have that level of professionalism to filter it and, you know, say something, you know, relatively nice about their experience and why it may or may not have been a match for them but in a positive way. Go ahead. I was gonna say, so kind of one flag is on top of the ones that have already been mentioned, lack of knowledge of the company. You know, you don't have to have read all the white papers and read all the blogs and know exactly what's going on, read all the press releases but you should have a good understanding of what the company does, how it fits into the world of technology and, you know, what the goals of the company are. Some very basics on the company. And, you know, we ask for that in the interview. Tell me about what you know about Acquia. Tell me about how you have heard of it, heard of us and talk to me about, you know, why you're excited to work at a company like Acquia and if they struggle with those questions and I question whether they're really gonna be passionate about to join the company. That's a really good one. Yeah, and Acquia, all these are really good for a flag and all the things we look for. On the paper, you wanna take some notes? Yeah. So two things that hasn't been mentioned yet is one is blaming, you know, when asking a question, like what was something that didn't go well is when they talk about the failures of other people. And that can usually mean that that's usually gonna be what the answer will always be, Berkarlis. And then the other one is not being able to reduce a code sample. We work in open source, even if you've been working on a top secret project, you are likely screwing on with an Arduino or something in your free time or writing your own, I don't know, cap log. And if you're not, and that's always just really, weirdly suspicious and every time I've taken a chance on that I've been really, I've lost an hour of my life. I mean, that was a really good point, actually, because, and this came up, I think James mentioned it before, but when you're recruiting, you really, you know, you go and Google that person, you'll go and look at GitHub, you'll look at their dripper.org profile, if you're looking for examples of their work, and that's the best judge of whether they're the right, not necessarily just their skills and they've got the right skills, but how well they engage in the communities, how are they engaged in open source? Are they? Are they nerd enough? Are they motivated enough to go and spend time working on a project that they're passionate about? You know, it's not just, you don't want someone who's just gonna turn up and just be able, this is my day job, and I'll just clock on and clock off. They need to be passionate about it. Okay. If I can just add, before we wrap up, if I can just add a few minutes. I wanna wrap it up. We'll wrap up this question. Yeah, so I can't ask my question. I'd just like to add, kind of on top of that really, key red flag, one of the main reasons that I find I reject potential candidates is often down to communication skills. And that's what we're looking for all of the time, really strong communication skills. And communication isn't just transmission, it's about input as well and listening. So some of the things for that will be looking at perhaps the way people engage in the issue queues. And you look at people's D.O profile, but you go beyond that and look at some recent issues they've been involved in. How are they reporting bugs? How are they responding to bugs filed and projects of theirs? Does it involve swear words and ranting? Or are they quite helpful and polite? And things like that. But also in the way that when we meet them, how do they communicate with us then? Are they sort of really interested and curious about the work that we're doing and able to ask intelligent questions and kind of get to the point and understand that? And are they also able to convey the important information about themselves and projects that they've worked on? And this isn't about being a slick, wow communicator. It's some people can be quite quiet and still be a great communicator. So it's about the information that's conveyed and the connection between the two people in the communication. So there's the listening, there's the transmission. Both of those are important. So that's a key thing. And I think it's one of the weaker spots within this industry. There's a real focus just on the pure technical skills and not really on the interpersonal skills that are the layer on top of that. Think of it as a human API, maybe. I think it's interesting that very little of what the five of you said had to do with book knowledge or technical knowledge. It seems like that's the initial gate that gets you there. Then the actual decision depends a lot on, we'll talk about this in a minute, more on the cultural fit. Your resume gets you a phone call, gets you in the door. And then from then on, it's about communication. It's about attributes. It's about behavioral characteristics, culture, fit, passion, integrity. You should have saved that for the end. Sorry, sorry. So yeah, one last one, but I'll add to that. There we go. He's only gonna wait so long. No. All right, so no cover letter. The amount of people that just submit their resume without a cover letter is somewhat daunting. And then when we ask people to submit a cover letter and let them know the reasons why we're asking for it, which are not just because we're asking them to just follow directions. It's because we want to understand how they communicate in written form and also how they speak about themselves and what they under and what they were able to glean from our website about our company. I just want to back him up there because that's a damn good point. Yeah, it's the... Sorry, sorry, sorry, come back. No, no, come up, man. But yeah, we pay scant attention to the resume or CV as we call it in the old world. And we pay so much attention to the email. I mean, an email even out of the blue that's well written that is personal, it says so much, you know, it's well laid out, it's well written and that will get you a call or meeting up in a cafe or meeting up in the pub. That's a very common way that we recruit. Let's start by meet for a pint, see how we get on, see if there's communication, then we'll arrange something more formal or to meet some of our colleagues and so on for a peer review. But yeah, that first cover email matters way more than the resume. Absolutely. Should we stop messing with Barry at this point? All right, Barry, you're up. Oh, come on. Barry again. You need to speak to the mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're going to have Barry go first. Yeah, let's let Barry go first. I think we need a fight. Yeah. I'm starting to feel guilty. I just want to point out that the radio guy was the one who emphasized communications. I thought that was interesting. Yeah. The question I have is what's your attrition rate? Everybody's talked about how many people they're hiring, how, you know, the people that come in have to stick around and all that, but what are your respective attrition rates? And now I don't know why you didn't want me to ask that. On the side of Mark, this way, so Nancy. Actually, we haven't measured it. I mean, it's traditionally something that's been extremely rare. I can think of a couple of people who have left Blank over the history that we might not have wanted to. Just about everybody else who left down their way out. It's sort of planned. We talked earlier, and I think you mentioned that, the first five people that you hired are still with Blank. Yeah. Right. And, you know, grew in their skills, you know, all the way up to, you know, with us. So, you know, it's a great feel, but, you know, but that's one of the things that sort of keeps me up at night, to be honest with you, is how do we keep doing that? You know, having very low attrition rate. And I know that it's not something, as we continue to progress, that's a reality that nobody ever leaves, right? So, it's something that, you know, we talk about quarterly, about, you know, what's the culture, how do we hire, what are, you know, the best thing, you know, to keep the attrition rate low. But, I think the key to that is not hiring the wrong people. As I said, you know, the folks who have left really weren't the best matches. Maybe, you know, that day we said, oh yeah, let's lower the bar a little, or, you know, we really need people. So, let's take them on. But, I think we have a good idea of who's the right fit. But, you know, sometimes you wanna get that project done. So, everything's a balance. So, we're probably, historically we've been single digits. But, you know, as we have scaled up and we've grown, I mean, we're experiencing some of the growing pains of going from a company that a couple years ago was 150, 100, 150, and now we're at 460 and expanding rapidly. So, the same people who helped the company get from point A to point B might not be the same people that wanna be part of the company to go from point B to point Z, which is where we're headed. So, there's a realization that the same person that joins the company as employee number 40 might not, you know, the chances of them leaving, if they leave, they're probably going to a company where they're going to be employee number 30 or 40 again. And they understand that our culture maybe changes and evolves over time. So, you know, you grow and you wanna retain as much of your original culture as possible, but it's inevitable that you're gonna change a little bit. We are happy where we've been. You know, we've been really excited with the people that we've brought in. And sometimes they have, I mean, it's sometimes it's a compliment. They expand their knowledge so quickly and so well and it makes such a meaningful impact. It gets noticed and they get recruited and they have opportunities to do similar things or maybe a larger role that we haven't gotten there yet. We can't, you know, not everybody can be a director and not everybody can be a VP of product and a VP of engineering. So, if somebody gets those opportunities, sometimes it's hard to say, no, we don't understand why you're leaving. We kind of do understand why you're leaving and it's a great opportunity, but stay in touch and hopefully you'll be back. Yeah, same here. It's always been very traditionally very low and everything that these two have talked about is the reasons why people leave are have always been true. It's either that it really wasn't a fit and sometimes it takes, one of the things that changed is that we have become very quick at identifying fit after and sort of a very targeted approach to sort of what happens after you get hired and how we, you know, what the evaluation is and that evaluation happens both ways. And there's like meetings that we have set up that we sort of now so that we understand, well, is this what you expected? And then we tell you, well, this is what we expected and yeah, here's where, you know, here's where you're excelling and here's where you can use some improvement. But, and then also people leaving for some of the same reasons is that, you know, the starting a very successful hosting company. It's, again, it's not something that we measure, which is a bad thing. We should measure more. We're a very management-like company. We kind of rely on self-managing teams and we like to be kind of very light in terms of the top level management. So we don't really have an HR function as such. And therefore we aren't kind of measuring all these fantastic dashboard statistics and so on. Perhaps we should. But perhaps I think that also means that it's not too big a problem on our radar at the moment. If it was, it would get more attention from the small management team we have. When we made the transition, we did the merger between the four agencies from across Europe. There was some change around then because suddenly they went from being, each of the four companies went around from being, you know, 30 person company, something like that or more to suddenly being part of a 140 person company. And again, as Eric's saying, that's quite a change. And it also meant that we were attracting a different kind of client, a much more large-scale enterprise client that needed more serious engineering talent and therefore there wasn't really much position for the kind of site builder type people. So there was a bit of a change round from our point of view and from some of the individual's point of view about what was the right fit. So there we saw some change around the merger, but then things have been very stable since then. Yeah, and I'll probably just make the point that hiring the wrong person's a very expensive thing. You don't wanna make a mistake. So while you can put as much effort, you wanna put as much effort in upfront, just going through that evaluation, making sure it's a good fit before you actually go down the path of recruiting someone. And then you wanna do continual review. So you wanna make sure that you're meeting with them, having those conversations about how things are going. Try to address issues before it gets to the point where someone's had enough and walked out. Usually it's because they haven't raised an issue. They've been bottling something in and it hasn't had time to come out and they've just got to the point where they feel like they've got no out. So they leave. But you gotta be honest, sometimes there's people that come in and they obviously get through that process and they don't have the same cultural fit or you just gotta be honest about it and it's almost like a relationship. It's we agree to disagree and let's go our separate ways and it's not necessarily an ugly separation. It can be quite amicable. And often we've let people go who've gone on and given them being referees for them in their jobs and help them find the next position because we understand they're looking for something else. I wanna touch real quick on something Steve said. Talked about site builders. I'm gonna define a site builder as someone who doesn't necessarily know code but just knows Drupal and configuration and modules and things really well. Are there roles for just pure site builders in Drupal shops these days? Or is everybody looking for someone who knows a bit of code or DevOps or front end? Or from my perspective there's people who are front end focused but no site building or developer focused and no site building. So it's one of those things that you don't target a specific role for. It's something that everyone is involved in. There's just a spectrum I guess of okay, well you know all this stuff and we've got front end developers who are writing PHP code, backend PHP code as well. Might not be their specialty but they're focused on the front end. So that role specifically doesn't really exist. We refer to it as a role on a project. So you'll be doing site building and development leaving front end development but not necessarily an individual. I guess I'm trying to figure out is if someone just knows site builder, is that enough? You know what I think it is but I think it's not for our front end. Okay. If you look at- It's a stepping stone too. I think if you look at a firm that's doing small business website, there's absolutely tons of work and opportunity and need to happen but it's just not for the folks that are on the panel. So you agree with that? Yeah, I was just gonna add there's a lot of small agencies out there who really value that kind of mix of site building skills. What you can build in Drupal these days without writing a line of code is amazing. It's very powerful and for small business clients it can be everything that they need and you don't need to code at all. It's configuration. Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah. Do you have something to add or? No, that's exactly everything that's been said. Yes. I'll just add one more thing to delay Ryan. Yeah. I'm gonna ask this question. Go ahead. Go ahead. So there's obviously a lot of focus on hiring developers and technical people. I just was kind of curious on your take on how you guys bring in people that are not technical. So particularly like sales guys, project managers, particularly for people who may not have ever heard Drupal and obviously it's not, there's a nuance to doing Drupal projects and Drupal sales that's not the same. Sure, I'll start off. I mean, how we find those people are your more traditional methods. I mean, you're probably not gonna find your traditional regional sales manager here at DrupalCon, although I did speak to one great guy earlier, so I'm really excited about that. But I mean, we look for, the baseline of what we look for kind of crosses all the departments. We're looking for passion. We're looking for integrity, intelligence was the other one, initiative. That's the P-Triple-I that our CEO oftentimes talks about P-Triple-I. And we look for cultural fit. So those things have nothing to do with technical skills. They don't have to do with your quotas that you hit as a sales guy or the products that, you know, the marketing campaign that you were running and analytics that you were looking to see how many click-throughs you had. You know, those are the technical skills in a specific job that are important that they kind of hit a certain benchmark. But we hire across the departments with a set of kind of core values that we're looking for to join Acquia. You know, are you passionate about us? I mean, we have, I've been part of large organizations like Liberty Mutual, Mellon Financial, which is now Bank of New York. And I've never come across a finance group that is as chatty, open, crazy, and fun as the group that we have at Acquia. And I like to think that it's because we hire those types of people. We hire for that cultural fit. And I've never seen that any of my other companies and they're chatty and crazy in finance. And that never happens. It's unbelievable. Like usually they're heads down, they're doing their accounting, they're helping you do your expense reports and billing analysts and accounts receivable. And they rarely socialize with the rest of the group at my company. They're the first ones to the keg at five o'clock. It's amazing. Do you have lawyers like that? Yeah, we do. Actually, we do. We have a great board of directors. Yeah, and for me it makes me feel good when I can hire somebody as an accountant or as a contracts counsel or somebody in sales or marketing that even though they're not directly working with the technology that our company is centered around but they evangelize it and they're excited about the company because of what we do. Yeah, I'll second the passion. So I mean, I think all the P triple I's that he has written down that I've already forgotten are all really important. And actually a great way of sort of describing kind of like what makes somebody successful in anything that they do. And the developer finance guy, a sales person. But it's a passion for what we're looking for. Our, one of our longer hiring periods or positions that we had trouble filling was our office manager because the office manager that we had before was so freaking awesome and fun that we were looking for somebody to fill those shoes. And the things that we were asking for over our office manager was somebody that had a lot of crafts. Because we were tired of not being able to do crafts in the office and our old office manager did crafts. So like that's the kind of stuff that, and those kinds of qualities also fall, also cycle into our developers and into our project managers is that we look for people who are really passionate about both about life in general and about what they do and about what role they're filling. And usually all the enough, those things go together. So if people are really into the yoyo and get really, really expert at it, there's a likelihood that they've become really, really expert at project management as well. I have another little aspect to add to this, a part of the question that you asked. So project managers, creative people who are working with a little less than the office managers or the financials, we put them through our training that we offer to clients. We put them through Drupal in a day. We put them through Skype. We put them through a few days worth of, what is Drupal? And we have a semi customized, blink only version of what we offer to clients because we really feel that anybody who's going to work is part of the delivery team and knows the core essence of Drupal. Okay, that was actually my clarification. I was more interested in that aspect of whether you guys do any training of your salespeople or if selling an open source, for example, just even not necessarily knowing that much about Drupal is just different. And so that's what I was kind of curious a bit more about was those aspects if you can comment on that. My short answer would be yes. Yeah, I can add to that as well. I mean, we're a much smaller shop but we don't necessarily have the role of sales because I think often clients can kind of smell a sales pitch and especially if somebody is selling something they don't know anything about. So we definitely try to position ourselves as consultants to them. So anyone who is a project manager or anyone who's going to meet with the client to talk about what their project is has to come to that discussion with the knowledge to be able to share and be able to give like a frank assessment of what they're asking for and be able to advise them. Yeah. So we do the same. We do training for our staff. If I can add to that just to delay this question again. Sorry about that. That seems to be a trend. Yeah, I once- Excuse me, when you interview people, are they allowed to speak? Yeah. It's just I always come last. I let everyone else have their turn. I just jump in at the end. I'll jump in first next time. So yeah, I just wanted to add a little bit about that kind of consultancy approach because we have the culture very much that we don't really have sales people so much because our kind of drive to have healthy web projects. We always saw that barrier where sales went out and sold something, drove away in their portion, threw it over the fence to the dev team going, yeah, deal with that. And the dev team going, you said we'd do what? By when? For how much? And we want to get rid of that. So we've kind of, we don't really have sales team. We have consultancy team and they're with the project throughout its lifetime. And therefore they do need quite a broad knowledge. Our CEO Vessa talks about us needing T-shaped people. And this speaks a little bit to what you said as well. And that is that they have a very broad knowledge of stuff and that's the kind of the upper bar of the T. And that could include crafts and things like that. Maybe craft beer. And so there's a very broad knowledge. They were interested in a whole range of things to a certain depth. But then there's one thing that they are really laser focused on and they have a real depth on. And that could be a range of things. So that could be UX, consultancy. It could be a septic. They could be really specialist in government or they could be really specialist in media and those kind of areas. So we look for that T-shape when we're recruiting. But then what we can do is we can broaden out the knowledge of the kind of top bar of the T. So they never need to become Drupal experts to get really deep, but they need enough knowledge about Drupal and how it can be applied and the way that we run projects and so on. But we look for that T from the very start. But it seems like in every single case you're not, when you're hiring for those types of non-technical positions, you're not looking for that Drupal knowledge coming in or that technical knowledge coming in but that's something, it sounds like you all do in-house. Is that fair? Absolutely. I mean, our office manager made her first kit commit right before, or yeah, so. Fantastic. Is it John? Is it John? John. I was gonna ask you to explain more on your coding sample that you never saw before you hired them and it turned out to be a bad hire because that was the red flag and people didn't pass the smell test. Yeah, so it was more the absence of a coding sample. There's pure absence, it wasn't necessarily. Yeah, it was some people that, a lot of people who will feel nervous about giving a code sample and don't know really what to really pull out or are they feel that they're, the work that they've been doing has been under NDA. A lot of times those are barriers that can be crossed by obfuscating the code or obfuscating the code or pulling into the stuff you've been doing as a hobby or that you've contributed back and things like that. So come back to what you were talking about as far as like a T-shape. What other additional skills do you look for when you're hiring site builders and developers and UX front-end guys? Sure, you wanna start this one? Wow. Thank you. Yeah, well actually there's not really the specifics. It's the idea that there's breadth. So for example, in the industry that we're in, there is such an incredible range of stuff going on and such an incredible rate of change that it's impossible to know everything about everything. But what we look for is an element of interest in a whole wide range of things. So you don't want a back-end developer who cares nothing about any kind of UX or front-end stuff at all. And you don't want a UX guy who cares nothing about code or that kind of thing. You want some level of interest across the board and also some level of interest just in life and people and crafts and flowers and whatever else it is. So yeah, that's kind of the broad bit of the T and then the narrow bit can kind of be in anything. First of all, it can just be simply showing that they have the ability to specialize and get really deep into a subject. That may not be the depth of the T that is right for us, maybe we want to move that a little, but it's that ability to specialize and to become an expert in something. So our kind of core values, if you like, although we try not to call them that because it sounds very corporate, but it's kind of professional, expert, open and collaborative and we look for those things. So the expert bit is important, that deep bit. The professional is being able to talk and communicate about a wider range of things across the top of the T. And then the collaborative and open bit is really important as well. So we're looking for elements in the top bar of the T that showing their collaboration. So maybe there's community things that they're involved in, maybe there's all sorts. Just things that demonstrate that open and collaborative nature. Yeah, that was, you just stole my words. I was about to say demonstrate an ability to do those things. So especially if you're hiring a junior, I mean, they don't have a lot of depth of experience, but if they can demonstrate they have an ability to learn things, they've gone and tried something. Doesn't matter if they're good at it or they necessarily achieved brilliance in that area. It's that they've demonstrated that they've got an ability to learn new things, have a passion about it because that's gonna bode well for them when they start to learn a new technology. You know that they're gonna have a much better chance of getting up to speed quickly and excelling at things. Another thing I was just gonna add was that, if you're interviewing someone who's worked, has experience in the industry or worked on other projects, always ask them what was it that you, what was the project about? What were you doing on that project? And you can really differentiate people by the kind of the scope of what their thoughts are. If you've got someone who says, oh, on that project I had to fix bugs and I had to, you know, we were trying to build this thing and this technology and it was really difficult and we got there in the end. You can see that their focus is very narrow. They're focusing on the specific technical challenges of that job. But you might have another candidate who's like, okay, well, this client was really trying to move into this market. They saw an opportunity to, you know, to, that was there. The challenges for them were that their competitors were trying to do this. They're looking at the project from a different level and they're really good candidates to grow within an organization because they're already able to think at the level and understand what the client's challenges are. They're not just trying to understand the technical challenges, they're looking at the bigger picture. Yeah, that's a really good point and that's something that's kind of core and what we look for always is an ability to sort of like look at things from outside of whatever perspective that they're coming from. So if it's somebody who's, you know, who's UX, it's being able to understand that there's a website at the end of whatever the artifacts that they're creating or if it's a developer understanding that there's a design aspect that's gonna make that successful or that there's business needs that whatever they're doing is fulfilling. And that is one of the things that definitely differentiates people who are successful and who wouldn't be because it's, we're a consultancy, we come in and solve problems for people, whether that's building them a new website or fixing a broken website or adding features to an existing one, it's fixing some sort of problem. And if you understand what those problems are, you can get to those solutions. And it also leads to that those people are the ones who are the most collaborative because they are compassionate about the other parts of the project. And that's really important and that's something that is that compassion and willingness to work together is what is one of the differentiators in some, because we work in very blended and very tight knit teams. I'll just add one quick thing here. So one of our favorite questions to ask and I actually got this from an engineering manager years ago back when I was recruiting like mainframe folks to date myself a little bit. But he would ask, when you're done with your day job and you go home, tell me what you're working on. What's your passion project? And what he wanted to hear was, you know what, I spend all day working on this technology at home, you know what I'm doing? I'm coding in this new language, I'm trying this new thing or I'm trying to create a new game that I can play with some of my friends online. Like we want to see that demonstrated passion and it's always been one of my favorite questions is, you know, and if they give me a good answer, I'm like, we have a good one here. Just to take it back to like a virtual question about code samples, the code samples that I submitted to four kitchens when I got my job was some Apache Solar, like object oriented code for the Apache Solar module, like wasn't no Drupal in it really, and Arduino sketch. So yeah, it's not about what we're looking for. And I think, I mean, I'm just gonna, conversation. You know, it's not specific knowledge, it's depth of knowledge and approach. I just wanna back that up with a story. Last week before DrupalCon, I was traveling around Texas in a car, nice four by four exploring the far west of Texas and ended up in some really remote places. And in one of these places, one of the waitresses was saying, where are you all from? And that's the last I'll try the accent on. And I said, I'm from England. And she said, oh, I thought you were from Australia. And I said, well, I'm from England. And she said, well, how are you liking Texas? And I said, it's great. She says, yeah, I've never been anywhere else. Texas is the best place in the world. Okay, there's a bit of a danger of that with Drupal. That we say, you know, Drupal is the best thing in the world. Well, what else do you use? Nothing, you know. So yeah, that experimentation, that trying out other things, it's what keeps us sharp. It's what makes us better at doing Drupal and brings better ideas to Drupal. So do experiment, do look around, do try other things. It's interesting, you went first and you still managed to do it. What can I say? I'm a shy Englishman. You've all discussed recruiting non-Drupal people into Drupal. So how are you guys going about that more? I'm personally a .NET developer, but I do Drupal on the side, kind of as project things. So what are you looking for in non-Drupal folk who are very technical but not specialized in Drupal yet? I'm happy to go first. I mean, this is a really simple question. You know, like what we hired for our AQUIU program and what we will continue when we have our next AQUIU class which is coming up in a couple months is passion and the web technology experience. Like if you have become, I think the panel has talked about this, if you've become a little bit of an expert in something, you are likely to have the capability to become an expert in something else. So if you have been able to achieve great things and have some great professional achievements and you have some great code samples and you have great projects that you can share with us about your .NET experience, then in your dabbling with Drupal and you're getting passionate about it, great. Our guess is that you will probably then become a passionate great Drupalist. Yeah, I'll second that. The other thing is that the soft qualities that we've sort of talked about are also very important and the non-technical qualities. The other thing is a, I don't know how else to describe it because I'd sort of like sort of what's my favorite interview question. And that is after you press enter in the browser bar, what happens between then and when you get a web page. And in the way that I look at it, everybody from a front-end developer to a systems person should have a good answer. And that good answer might have the word magic happens. And it's somewhere, but in other parts of that answer, they're gonna have really, really in-depth understanding. And so that's, but they're gonna also have a broad understanding of kind of what's going on in general. And it's not specific to a framework and it's not specific to a programming language. It's understanding kind of like what's, what are the underpinnings that are, and the concepts that are making the web work that's gonna make somebody successful at making the next framework, making the next also Drupal module, things like that. And I think a lot of your skills are transferable as well. I mean, you might be going into a team of people who only know Drupal and you get all this experience in another framework. You'll be able to compare and contrast the differences and go, oh, you know, there's other ways of doing this. Or I know some design patterns that we've been using in .NET that are gonna apply. I mean, I did eight years of Java development before I started working with Drupal. And the first thing I did was look at, look at the Drupal code and go, uh. You know, that's just. It was all. I mean, fortunately Drupal 8 looks a lot like Java. So it's actually easier for me now looking at Drupal 8 code to go, all right, well, you know, this is dependency injection and that kind of stuff, right? So, you know, those skills are transferable. So, and I think the other thing would just be your openness to other technologies. I mean, the fact that you're here and you're asking about, if you've got .NET experience and you're asking about Drupal, that means that you're interested in other things. I think that's important. Often people will be like, well, this is what I do. And I don't only do that. And, you know, I'm not interested in if you talk about that. I'm not touching that. I think if you're open to learning about all different kinds of technologies, then that obviously puts you in a better position. Can I follow up? Oh, okay. I've actually just got more of a statement because the code samples has come up a number of times. And I just, since we've got other, like junior and other people in the room, I just want to say you really shouldn't be afraid to post your code online, even if it looks really bad, because you can always get better from that. And just as somebody else, that's really important. Do Drupal patches? Do patches in the issue queue count as code samples? I think it's just legal. Yeah. If I could say like. I was waiting for that song for you. Yeah, even like, I mean, I think it's a really good statement. And it's really, that's a really good thing to keep in mind. And if you really want to learn, like how to write better code, try to submit a patch to fix a module or find an issue. And you will learn faster than you ever did in school. And you will get more support than you ever expected. Much more so than even just sort of posting your, sort of personal projects somewhere on GitHub. Not that that isn't important, it's awesome. And that's also great. But submitting patches and getting involved in the community and going to the code sprints here, it is a fast way to learn. And it's something that I spent years before I really realized how powerful it could be. So all things being equal, is it fair to say patches are more valuable than code on GitHub? That's a tough one. It depends on what the patches are. So like, it's like two different things. Core patches, how about that? We'll start with core patches. How about, so two different things? Like, cause you like, one of the things that you want to find in a, in a code sample, you want to look at architecture and you want to look at approach to problem solving. In a patch, you may not have those things necessary. You're looking at a sliver in a lot of cases. So I'd say that a lot of little sliver patches, or I mean, if you rewrote one of the subsystems, that's a really good code sample. It's a 300K patch. So it's two different things, but if you have a thousand patches in there that are all little slivers, but you don't have some really great big code sample that like shows great sense of architecture, that's gonna weigh really heavily as well. So it's all a balance. Yeah, and it's definitely learning how to contribute in any open source project is that the process of peer review, everybody gets their code reviewed. Even the smartest people, the people who are the maintainers of all the core subsystems, they all have their code reviewed by anyone who's coming along to look at it. So you have to, if you want to participate, you just accept that that's a part of it and you'll benefit from it. Yeah, I guess it really is kind of a different thing. Yeah. A patch, because a patch is more than just a code. It's about participating in the process as well. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Any more questions? Okay. Thank you, everybody who's come and give your answers. I thoroughly love this. This has been really, really great. For me, from what I've been gathering from this, I picked up basically two main things. One is that you guys very much focus more on the character ethic of the individual, the type of personality they are, the self-learners and self-teachers, that type of stuff. And then those that also contribute to the community is, that's basically the synopsis of what I've gathered from you. Is there anything else that any of you would like to add? Just, I know we're really short on time, but I'd like to hear if there's anything outside of that that you guys would like to share with us. Or is there anything else that weighs as much as either of those two things? Is that fair? I think we brought up communication, and that's part of the community. So one thing that we kind of talked about before, that hasn't come out in the panel, is that to know yourself and to try to understand the company that you're going to be working with. And it's really, really, and I think that's really important, is that the next hire for Wonder Crout and the next hire for Four Kitchens, probably may not be the same person. And that's because- That would be freaky. Everyone just- Oh, yeah. But there's different things. There's each, you know, culture and kind of like, and fit is highly personal and really kind of, and both, and temporal in a lot of ways. So knowing what you want out of a company and knowing what you provide to that company and what you want from that company is going to make that hiring successful. These guys all agree they'll stay. Yeah, I know. Hi, my name is Israel Morales. So I just want to ask you, if you are currently working with people from Latin America, are you planning to do it in the future? Yeah, so from Drupalcon Prague, I hired a support engineer who lives in Rio. And we're currently hiring some folks down in Brazil and potentially a couple other countries. That's great. Since we became a distributed company and now that we have somebody in Germany, it's where all of our job searches are worldwide, really. So we're not hiring for Austin, we're not hiring for Latin America, we're hiring for good developers. Okay. At the moment, we've been very cautious on time zones because of the need for such deep communication in distributed teams. So at the moment, we don't really have anyone that's further than three hours plus or minus away. So from Europe, it would be pretty tricky for us at the moment. We're about to begin our first experiment with a larger time zone. So we'll see how that goes and then we may begin expanding out from there. Yeah, I mean, we're in the same position. So we pretty much try to hire people within a two or three hour time zone difference just because, I mean, we run agile processes, there's meetings every day, people are chatting all day on IRC and it's having somebody who's working, who's not around during the times that everyone else is. It just makes it really difficult. Yes, I work in a startup that is based in Mountain View. It's called Uyalla. And this startup has a big office in GDL. I'm from GDL, Guadalajara in Mexico. So they have like 50 engineers there, like a really good level. Just for you to know that maybe it's a good experiment you can do because as in the United States, you have the same time frame. So, yeah, it's another idea. Thank you. We're gonna make this the last question. So two of you already mentioned favorite interview questions. What other favorite interview questions do you have? You took the last question. That was mine too, very good, thank you. So I think we've had Eric and Mike's already. So can we start down here with Nancy? Favorite interview question? Do you have one? We've talked about this a lot, but I really like to understand about what someone's passionate about and look for that fire. Sometimes it could be about Drupal, sometimes it could be about a hobby, but if they don't have one then they're passionate about it. They're probably not gonna be passionate about their job. Exactly. Okay, Steve? Actually, no, Steve, this is your only chance to answer. You can't answer, you can't answer, you can't. Actually, did you notice I skipped out two questions? I just zipped up and that was it. So we're actually really informal with interviews, so there isn't kind of a set template. It goes very much for what the role is and reacting to the individual and where the conversation goes. It's very much a conversation. So I can't say that there is a particular question, but what we're looking to explore, yeah, very much are those areas of passion, the kind of the experience, things that are demonstrating those qualities, I said, of professionalism, expertise, openness and collaboration. We're looking for things to reinforce all of those. So it's a conversation rather than any set questions. Yeah, we're pretty informal as well, but I would like to add that we, I like to ask people what mistakes they've made or what challenges they've had and what they had to do to get out of a particular situation because if you have someone who says, look, I've never had a problem, I've never had any issues and all the stuff I've worked on has been, is worked perfectly, it shows that they don't really either understand that they were having problems or they're not very open and able to communicate the flaws that they've had or mistakes that they've had and understand what it was that got them out of that situation so they're not very self-reflective and I think at least for our culture, we're very open, very honest about things and that's an important question that I like to ask. Okay, very good. So I think the five of you can stick around for a few minutes if anybody wants to talk to you one-on-one or exchange business cards. I think there are a bunch of your business cards on the back table as well as there is a little blue bucket back there if you're interested in any of our career training, you can throw your card in there and we can get in touch with you. And I think, do all of you, not all of you have booths or do all of us? I don't have a base, no. Okay. Akria might have a booth, I'm not sure. We have a big booth. Yes, by all means. We have a ping-pong table. Okay, a booth or a ping-pong table. If you want to talk to someone and just have an informal conversation and get things rolling, obviously they're all going to be happy to talk to you because they all need people. And I might just do a plug. You can, anybody can do a plug, absolutely. If you're interested in Drupal 8 development or you might be a Drupal 7 developer and you want to know what's going on in Drupal 8, there's a session on Thursday at one o'clock. It's Drupal 8 in a nutshell. I'll be presenting with one of my colleagues, Boris. And we give you a high-level overview, looking at Drupal 7 code, what it looks like in Drupal 8. So come along to that. Steve, any last words? Yes, sir. Have a great conference and enjoy the beer. Okay. Mike? I just wanted to thank Glenn and Mike for putting this together. I am hugely impressed at the quality of the advice given here and will actually be sharing this whole thing because you guys really did spell it out and all the trailblazers. I mean, this really hits it on the head as to what's important, how to get into this community and how to succeed. So, yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, thank you to everybody, including everybody who came and participated, asked some great questions to help get us going. So thank you to that. Yeah, enjoy the conference. Have a beer. That's definitely a great advice. And since I'm from Austin, go see the bats. Don't miss the bats. And that's it. Again, thank you and be true to yourself. And look forward to what's right. And don't just take the first step. There you go. All right, well, thank you. I can't say anything better than that. So thank you very much. Is it right there?