 All right. Good morning, everyone from South Carolina. Welcome to the third Dev back-end presentation. But the first one, maybe even the first one at GitLab that gets to be called a group conversation under the new naming, which is great. I love calling this a conversation. Following on a little bit with the pattern that I've used previously, since this is the third one, I can call it a pattern now. I want to talk a little bit about some celebrations across the team and then have a couple of quick updates around areas of focus and open the floor for conversation with everyone. Celebrations. I want to call this out. This may seem like a minor thing, but it's great that we can put people in a position where they feel comfortable doing things like Sean did where he was able to take three weeks off with his family for a trip. Across the US last month. So I want to call out his team. Dawa for helping out with hiring anyone else who pitched in along the way in order to keep things going with plan. While Sean was out, I really appreciate that and hope everybody feels like they can take those breaks when they need to. Stan is making great progress. I mentioned in the last update that I gave that Stan was going to be able to pivot now that Rachel had started in on geo and focusing on improving our memory consumption. So there's a link there to one of the first big efforts he's making there that should pay good dividends. And I also want to call out the release management team. So Mara and Robert and Yorick were able since the last update to get release apps enabled and get la vie. Which was fun because it only took a couple hours I think after they were enabled before they caught a bug before it was merged. So that was great. And just this past week we have chat ops enabled deploys now, which is a cool quality of life improvement across the board there. I want to talk a little bit about the reorg that's coming up. Eric shared some information around this already but talking a little bit about specifically how it impacts the dev back end department. If you haven't heard anything about it we are in the process of hiring a fourth director we want to try to spread the load a little bit better across the three that we have now with Dolly and Tim and myself. And when that hire comes on board will be able to split dev and ops into two smaller departments. There's a document that I linked there that has FAQs on a lot more of the reasoning and rationale and everything behind it. But wanted to throw out that this is sort of what we're looking at right now, most likely from the dev back inside and I say most likely because what teams go where still going to be a little bit of a function of what specializations and experience that the fourth director has when they come on board. So that's sort of what things would look like there. Do you have this big reorg going on. That's kind of in hurry up in wait mode because we need to get that fourth director but we're not letting that slow us down from making changes that we feel like need to happen. One of those that is not totally finalized yet but I have a link to the merge request there is the idea that we would take what is currently the release management team put it under infrastructure which would give Jerry the responsibility for approving our releases that he needs in order to see success on his team. Call it delivery. Among many other changes and you see some of the more details there and that merge request about the team page. This would mean we'd be able to get rid of the concept of a release manager rotation. So that's where we have different engineers that are kind of cycling in and out on a monthly basis to help drive our monthly releases. And instead put that all on a team that's main purpose is to drive in and automate that that task out of existence, which is going to be great to see that continue to iterate and grow as we move in that direction. Hiring has been a fun topic. Every time I've gotten up in front of everyone. I thought I would share some fun. And scare quotes numbers here from some analysis that we did on the hiring. So for all of our back end roles so this is for any manager developer that would report through to me or to Dahlia right now so Deb back in and off back and both. We're saying slightly fewer than 200 applicants per month. We hire somewhat less than 1% of those so we're averaging around two hires per month. This puts us through the rest of 2018 on pace to hire about 16 where we have 41 in our hiring plan 16 developers. There's a link there to the full analysis if you want to dig into it but you know those are not very promising numbers right as far as being able to keep up with our pace. So we're trying to take a few steps to address that. One, I picked these and these may seem like kind of opaque numbers if you haven't looked through the analysis but for my KR's setting targets to try to improve our candidate volume by trying to get increased the number of candidates that are passing screening. By about 50% getting it up around 75 a month and passing screening is important because we want to make sure that we're getting the right quality of candidates into the pipeline we don't want people to come in that are just going to get bounced out an application review or screening. And then improving the quality by increasing our hired to screen ratio. Again, by just a little shy of our 50% there. These are some aggressive changes. But if they're both successful then what's going to happen with these changes is we'll find that our hiring process is going to get back on pace with what it should have been. Which means we're going to effectively double I mentioned in the last slide we're hiring a little less than two per month on average right now. If we can hit these numbers we're going to be hiring for per month on average which is right on pace with what our hiring plan should have been throughout the year. But we are still, I have a stray bullet point in there, we are still iterating on our hiring process, which is something that we've been doing over the year and are continuing to do. I want to thank all of the back end engineering managers, both the ones that report to me and the ones that report to Dolly as well for being so very engaged in helping us improve that process and being willing to share ideas and experiment and I know there's been a lot of a lot of churn in that area where we're trying out a lot of things and iterating a lot and I really appreciate everybody being engaged there. But we're working on getting folks onboarded into the new technical interview process so that we can move that earlier in the hiring process which we hope is going to help make things even more efficient than they are right now. So we're working on refining our job posting as well in an attempt to be more clear with what it is that we're looking for. It seems like that job posting actually hasn't been touched in maybe even a year or two. So going in and kind of refining that and making it a better reflection of what we do is an important step. So trying to find a sea change. We're trying to find that big transformative change in our hiring, even just hitting my KR says I mentioned earlier is going to mean we're going to double the rate at which we're hiring, but we're likely going to need to grow even faster and we still need to catch up from sort of the death that I can speak I promise catch up from some of the death of the set that we've built over the past several months. So some other ideas that we're considering or working with right now. We're looking to experiment with different sources for advertising our position. The first greenhouse that we made most recently is great in this regard because it gives us much better granular tracking for how candidates do based on the source that come from. So we can potentially cast a really wide net and look at a bunch of different sources and try to figure out which ones are really beneficial for us getting quality candidates and which ones maybe just add more noise into the pipeline. And you know, for front end developers, I think we just shut off advertising on stack overflow because it generated a lot of candidates for us but they're, they were really poor quality candidates compared to what we were looking for. So there's a link to an issue there it is a GitLab only link but if you have any ideas or thoughts please feel free to chime in and let us know if you think there are any sources that we should be considering there that we're not already looking at. Still having some conversations I mentioned this last time as well around reevaluating our compensation and trying to find a good place there so that we're mapping to a better fit for the talent that we're trying to hire. So there's a merge request there that talks about kind of how that process works. When we made some adjustments to the SRE benchmark and how that might work if we considered the same thing for the backend developer benchmark as well. If you're interested take a look through that. And then finally, we're talking I don't have a merge request for this yet. This was something that came up sort of on my last hour of work last week with Eric but we're considering targeting junior hires in areas where we feel like we can afford to grow some of our own talent as well so we don't want to just you know kind of put juniors in anywhere in the organization but we may have some teams that have the leadership that have the capability of bringing on a junior could be something where we could help grow talent internally without it being something that would be a negative impact on the team's ability to execute so trying to find those opportunities and put people in those places is something that we could consider. And with that, I will open the floor for conversation and check and see if there's anything in chat. And we'll try to see if anyone can get me to Sid. Is that your wall? Someone just solved it in the invite was the wrong slide deck. Yes. I was having trouble finding someone who could update it I apparently don't have rights to update it. Well, not hearing any questions or conversation. I suppose I will. What was the what was the thing that didn't work the channel that didn't work. The channel that didn't work. Yeah, I thought you were talking about hiring channels that were more and less effective that we're seeing a lot of not qualified candidates from some channel but I missed I wasn't paying attention enough to know which Stack overflow. Yeah, then Stack overflow and this was an example from front end. It was just one that I heard about recently where we were able to do the analysis now that we're in greenhouse to see that stack overflow wasn't an effective channel for us because we're getting a lot of noise for front end developers. What do we think will be effective channels. We have several. We have several that we're looking at we want to for back end developers in particular we want to target the Ruby weekly newsletter that Peter Cooper does that's something where we've advertised at least once in the past and we want to try that again and see what kind of effectiveness that has There are a lot of remote specific job boards out there that we don't advertise with currently that we could consider saying if that brings us in a different audience. I think remote okay is the one that we use right now or we work remotely one of those two There's one that we advertise on pretty standardly but there are five or six others out there that may have a different audience and we're also looking at some other job boards that target diversity candidates a little more directly so job boards that are more explicitly aimed at LGBTQ or women candidates are ones that are on the list right now, but we kind of want to try as many as we can and see which ones are effective because there may be some surprises in there. Amanda just mentioned power to fly and chat I think power to fly is one of our standards and I love power to fly. They're great. Let's find more like power to fly and see if we can build that audience out a little better. Cool, thanks. We asked, are we sponsoring and doing recruiting at events like OS con. Well, I don't know. So Kathy, you got to play up the, the quote here and get me to say I don't know. That's a conversation that I need to have with Steve is what kind of efforts we have at events right now around recruiting I'm not aware of any formal events there at the moment, but that's another area that we should take into consideration. Lucas is Ruby still going strong and you mean as a programming language. That's something that so to finish the question instead of juniors could we target developers that have PHP or Java experience. The examples. Right. Python is another one that comes up a lot are they similar enough languages where you could potentially mix and match. Before I joined we made an explicit addition to our job requirements that you had to have Ruby on Rails experience, because I'm assuming we had some bad experiences bringing people on and having to kind of train them from scratch and the framework and everything that we use. I haven't dug in on that yet. I'm hoping that's not a requirement that we would have to consider dropping in order to meet our hiring goals because to me that's tantamount to saying let's lower our hiring bar, which is not something that we're eager to do, obviously. But depending on why that rule is there you know this is Chesterton's fence right like the fence is there let's understand why it was there before we talked about tearing it down. James Edward Jones are there channels where we can get more candidates by increasing ad spend or is it more tricky. Potentially. And this is one of those things where we want to do that analysis. James. This is a great question. A lot of these job boards are not really driven by things like ad spend. They're more kind of monthly stipends. So for most boards it's something like $200 for a 45 day posting or something in that area. So there aren't really a lot of opportunities to increase your spend. There are some job boards that let you pay some kind of nominal extra fee. Maybe it's another $50 that you pay in order to highlight your board, which gives it or your post English gives it a yellow border. It makes it more visually appealing and attractive to folks. There are some options we could look at like that. I think right now we're more trying to figure out what channels do we want to operate in because surely there are channels that are more effective than others and maybe some of the ones that we've always been using like the stack overflow example or ones that we need to consider moving away from. So it's less I think an example of should we increase spend in certain areas and more which channel should we be spending in in the first place. Because we haven't really done a lot of thorough analysis of from what I can tell of which channels are going to be more effective for us there. Then do traditional ads. Traditional ads would. So James's question, do traditional ads like Twitter, Facebook, Google work in a way where we can scale spend. They would. I don't know that we advertise our job openings using any of those platforms right now, but that's another area that could be worth exploring. Because those are ones where you can also do some really great targeted segmentation, especially when you think about Facebook and all the potential options that you have to target people in particular geographic areas or the meet other certain demographics. We could potentially fine tune not only the spend but the audience in those cases that may be that may be a project for later on down the road because it doesn't seem like the real low hanging fruit right now but it's definitely something for us to keep in mind. And then Michael thanks for commenting that on the issue. This is great I feel like this is two of these updates in a row where I said well I guess there aren't any questions and then I get 20 questions all at once. So maybe I should just say that earlier in the process. No the the ideas. So sometimes you just end on that so the ideas. What's it that after you handbook to say hey I'm not going to end this call before there's a first question. Now when there's a first question there's just going to be more. Fair enough. What about conferences. Our conferences again great way to get developers to reach out to them for jobs. I think conferences can be. I'm always happy when I hear that people get people get CFPs accepted in particular to go talk at conferences. That's a little bit of a tricky one to evaluate because you don't always necessarily have people apply and then say in their application. Oh I applied because of Martin's presentation at Kube Com for something like that so you can't always do that kind of association in the same way. But I think it's a big it's a word of mouth thing. It's great to get out there. You know you asked the question earlier Lucas about is Ruby going strong enough. You know maybe what we need to do is we need to talk more about some of the awesome things that we're doing with Ruby and make ourselves more attractive to the developers that are already familiar with the ecosystem. So you know again that's I think it's a great avenue it's not one that we can measure and experiment with as directly but it's one that we want to we want to play with more. Emily asked what about technical podcasts. I think same thing right anything that helps get the word out about get laughing about the cool things that we're doing on the development team is going to be awesome. And then if you're thinking well actually I guess I don't understand which way you're going with that question Emily it could be. Are we being guests on technical podcast giving talks in which case what I just said applies. If you're asking because I know some podcasts that you sponsored the podcast, in which case essentially that I had. Yeah, that's what I was getting at was, you know someone who's taking the time from their own schedule to listen to a soft skills engineering episode that indicates that I'd be a great place to do some job sponsorships and I've heard them on other episodes before. Yeah, no that would be fantastic if anybody has any that they think would be really good targets for us. Please feel free to add them to the issue. Yeah, so I'm just going to say plus one to doing technical talks and content at conferences. One of the best hires I've ever made in the past has applied and then when I interviewed him he said he applied because you saw me speak at that point and he really really wanted to work with me so. I do see value in that kind of thing. And I think you're going to get some really great applicants that apply that way. So, great. Great. Yeah. Thanks for. Thanks for that. Gabrielle asks, will we prioritize or move in countries from the blocked list. It's one useful way of having more applicants. That's complicated. I do wish it was as easy and we've actually been having some conversations, especially some of the managers as we've been trying to do active sourcing and find people that we think seem qualified to get to recruiting and say hey maybe reach out to these folks. See if they're interested in talking. There are an awful lot of people that you find in that list that are in Brazil, or Spain or France or some of these other areas where we can't hire right now. So, that's something we're aware of, and we want to try to do that in a way that makes sense if we can, but that's a very complicated conversation so it's not the kind of thing where we can just say, well we could hire a bunch of people if we had an entity in Brazil so let's open an entity in Brazil there are a lot more factors that go into that I think. Michael asks, could it be in poor taste a highlight that we're hiring on the contributing page. Do we think customers might get angry at that. I don't know. Actually, this is the first time that I've worked with an open quarter company. So, I'm not sure if that's the kind of thing that would be considered in poor taste or not but I think it's a question worth asking and talking about. Yeah, I think we should discuss a bit with our core team in the core team slack channel, but I think as long as such a thing is open as long as someone outside of get lab merges it into that file. I think it's fine. And that is open to other people that want to hire get lab contributors. So, maybe have also a note like hey you want to add yourself here just send send a mature question. Cool. Thanks. Gabrielle has a question about visas. I think that would be a great question to bring up with people ops. I think that's kind of getting out of my, my personal area of expertise as far as talking about what we can and can't consider there. But I appreciate that you're thinking about it and it's great that we're trying to find ways to kind of open our pool up to more of these talented people. Lucas, where do we highlight. Can you vocalize that or is that something that already got answered. I was also regarding the question maybe from Michael snow, because I read the page and I don't find anything apart from the jobs link at the bottom of the footer. So, I can clear it up with Michael. Okay. Cool. David Koi. This is my third day will welcome David. I'm glad to have you on a kid lab. And this is a perfect medium to ask, who would you recommend a podcast to. There's an issue that was linked in my slides that you can go add a link into or since it is your third day. You can also feel free to just go ahead and ping me in Slack directly. And I'd be happy to make that update for you. Sounds like yeah anything that's got a really good active user base particularly active users who are likely to be good candidates for us on the hiring side that would be fantastic to get that recommendation. Thank you.