 Welcome to SuperUserTV. I'm with Mike Apostle, the software engineering director at the OpenStack Innovation Center at Intel. You've been in software for over 15 years and an engineering manager for over six of those years. What are some of the hiring trends you've seen come and go? Well, I think back to what I was looking for and I think it follows the trends pretty well. Very much specialists. I was looking for people with a very specific skill, specific language, specific domain, compute, storage, apps, client, and I found that to be very successful and I think that will continue to be successful. But now I think what I'm really looking for is generals. Somebody who can come in and be a specialist and be very low, but have that ability, that kind of emotional intelligence to move on and be able to do other technologies. In my 18 years at Intel, we move from product to product and technology to technology. The change is fast. I need engineers who will do that as well. For the positions that touch OpenStack, what are some of the changes you've seen in requirements for those roles and the candidates who end up filling those positions? Well, I can speak for the last year. That's about how long I've been in OpenStack. But what I've seen and what I've hired is a significant amount of recent college graduates and they come out and they're awesome at writing software. They don't have a lot of experience. They need some cloud knowledge and they're picking up Python and they're picking up Linux and they're picking up those things well. But what they're lacking is a lot of the operational knowledge. How do I use OpenStack? What is it like to be an operator? What are the pay points? And so I really want them to know that in order to build something better. And for some of those students, there's new certifications on the market in the past few years including now the Certified OpenStack Administrator exam. So for you, what's the place of certifications and what are some of the trends you've seen in those certifications? Well, I would say what certifications the COA is excellent by the way. I love being able to measure and as a hiring manager the ability to see a certification on somebody's resume tells me something. Somebody went out of their way, they spent a little money, they got the certification, they got the training and they proved that they could pass the test. For me what I would like to see, usually those trends come with beginner, intermediate, advanced. I'd like to see next levels so I could say, oh they passed that one, oh they passed that one, oh wow this guy passed this one, right? So I'd really like to see the different levels. For me, upstream contributions, that's what I'm all about and I want my developers to have similar certifications. In fact, in the OpenStack Innovation Center we are piloting something today that works with bringing these new recent college graduates to experts in upstream contributions and it's been hard, it's been hard to figure out what to teach them. So we're going through different levels and we'll be sharing that with the community over time when it makes sense, we're not quite ready but we're getting a lot of input from multiple companies. It'll be interesting but I would say we'd really like to see the trend of certifications and advanced certifications increase. And if I'm looking to land my first OpenStack job ever maybe I have some certifications under my belt or new grad, or maybe I've been in the ecosystem for five years I just have decided it's time for me to start working at OpenStack. What can I do to be a more attractive applicant? I think this is pretty simple. You're talking to somebody who hired a lot of OpenStack engineers over the last year and what made people stand out was if they could send me a Stack Analytics link. So if you are actually making contributions in OpenStack and you send me the bugs you fixed, the specs you implemented, the blueprints you did, the actual code that you implemented to me that says everything. You need to know Linux, you need to know Python, you need to know those cloud technologies. But if you can show me that you actually took the next step and got into OpenStack and did it on your own that tells me a lot, that makes you very interested. And so what are your predictions for OpenStack hiring trends the next 18 months going forward? I think there's going to be a lot of jobs. If you look at the recent user survey, you'll see the deployments have gone up. That means there's more OpenStack. More OpenStack means more jobs, operators, upstream developers. And for me, I think we're going to see more experience too. This is my hope. In the Innovation Center, we worked with the University of Texas in San Antonio and we actually infused an internship program where we took some of their brightest software engineers and we took them through some OpenStack trade over a six-month period. And now we're starting to hire some of those and they're coming in and they're moving fast and they're contributing very quickly. I'd like to see others do that. But I think there's going to be a lot more jobs and hopefully a lot more talent. Well, that's a really exciting prediction. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for being on SuperUserTV and we look forward to the next news coming out of the Innovation Center. Awesome. Thanks.