 Go ahead and get started, even though my timer says to start in two and a half minutes because those guys are doing it and they're cooler than me. Anyways, everybody, thanks for coming. I actually did not expect this many people because this is a sponsored track and it's really just a soft talk, a very loosely prepared talk, by the way. I finished it around 3.30 this morning and I gave up on trying to make my slides look cool because that takes way longer than I thought it would. I'm just basically going to talk to you today a little bit about some of the things that we do at Hired that I think make our culture really unique and enable us to build really awesome things really quickly. One of the things that I've really admired since I joined Hired about a year and a half ago is that we have a very quick, agile process at our workplace and now at this point we're up to about 35 engineers and we have multiple project managers, but a lot of the actual really cool shit that we've built hasn't come from product managers. It hasn't come from these board meetings. It hasn't come from any of that. It's actually come from Hired trusting us, hiring great people, and then letting us basically have fun and do what we want. I'll show you some of the cool shit that we've built that just happened to be the weeks that we get for free at Hired. I actually screwed up on the name of this talk initially when they asked for the request for a proposal because I didn't realize it was permanent. If there's any South Park fans, the joke was the underpants gnome thing and it's supposed to be phase one, phase two, phase three, but I said step one, step two, step three, so if any of you are worried about semantics, I'm sorry. Next year, if my company pays for me to be up here again, I will do it right. So anyway, who am I? Nobody really. I'm just another Rails engineer. If you saw my plenary earlier before the awesome Aaron Patterson speech, I gave a little bit of background. I've been doing this for about 10 years now, technically like nine, 10 years of web development, nine in Rails. I'm just a part of the community. I've tried to give back a little bit and I think that I've done a couple cool things along the way and I've learned a little bit about how to make cool products. Has anybody here actually used Hired before? Sweet. Tong, I know you have. You hire people with it. Tong is my former employer. He still likes me somehow. Yeah, he's a nice guy. Talk to him. He works for Bleacher Report. They were doing awesome shit. Probably one of the biggest Rails sites in the world at this point. Like billions of page views or something. So anyways, in my nine years of Rails, which started at a company called SageBit, which was a little Rails shop in Indianapolis, Indiana, I got exposed to Rails at like 1.1. The thing that we were working on, you don't know about because it was kind of dumb. It was essentially just a way for people to chop up like sports videos of their kids and like share them on social media sites, which at the time was basically just my space. We didn't last very long and really the only cool thing that I think we actually did was brew beer in the basement. But it was a good time to get exposed to Rails and that's why I'm still here 10 years later and finally getting to stand in front of people and talk or just ramble aimlessly. Next company that I went on to is a marketing design firm. So I changed it up a little bit. And I went from building Rails stuff to essentially just chopping up HTML from our designers in Dreamweaver. And it felt a lot like this. So I quit pretty much as soon as I found a better job. And that job was to go on and work at a company called Igo Digital. None of you have probably heard of Igo Digital. If you have, awesome. Igo Digital was a small team out of Indianapolis that built. Actually at one point we were responsible for all of the product recommendation back in for amazon.com. So you've actually used our stuff. And if you've done any major online retailers, you're actually using software that I built that recommended products to you. Also, if you ever shopped on like bestbuy.com or if you were ever buying cosmetics from Procter and Gamble, you've potentially used tools that I built to help you find things that you want. It's kind of fun. Eventually it got acquired by Exact Target, which hopefully people have heard of Exact Target around here. Exact Target then acquired by Salesforce. So I could have actually just stayed at Igo Digital and ended up in San Francisco. But instead I was stupid and I quit my job and I moved to San Francisco to work for a company called Style Owner. Style Owner was like my first big move in my career. Like everywhere else I was just kind of a cog, but I was the first engineer at Style Owner and I didn't know what the hell I was doing at all. We basically just worked out of someone's apartment for a couple of years in coffee shops and we built some cool stuff. We were a little bit ahead of our time I think. We raised $3 million and subsequently flushed it all down the toilet. We lasted about a year and a half. But I learned some stuff about building cool products at Style Owner with very small teams. At one point, at our largest, it was three people. From there, I moved on to Bleacher Report, which I mentioned telling us here from. Bleacher Report was actually acquired by Turner Sports a couple days before I started, so that kind of sucked. At one point we were doing billions of page views per month. We had tens of millions of unique visitors, millions of requests per minute on services that we were building, and Bleacher Report was on Rails 2.3, surprisingly, and it might still be. Are you allowed to talk about that, Tom? Still Ruby 183, Rails 2.3? One of the largest Rails sites in the world, everybody. Rails 2.3. But Bleacher Report was awesome. I think that that was my leveling up in my career, actually. I worked with an awesome team of people, great product managers, and some of the smartest people I've ever worked with, and I learned what it meant to build something stable that could scale at Bleacher Report. Thank you, Tom. Now, this is the point of contention. While I was at Bleacher Report, I was also starting my own company and working on this at night. Tongue, close your ears. So I had a friend who wanted to start a company that would deliver on-demand massage. Not really my thing, but I thought I could build it, and I really wanted to build something I was proud of and something that I could call my own. So we started working on this, and we built it up and got to the point where we've now raised $48 million. We're doing tens of thousands of massages per month in 26 cities, across three countries on two continents, and it's kind of awesome. The thing that I loved the most about working at Soothe was that I had a small team again. I had this really small group of people that I trusted, and we got to just kind of work on whatever the hell we felt like, and because of it, we were able to build this amazing platform, essentially in our free time in a couple of months, and turn it into a company that, like I said, now raised $48 million. It's super cool. And the theme of this is small teams of people that you trust, and enabling them and empowering them to build things. So after Soothe, I went on to hired. Subsequently became the face of hired very quickly. As you see it, notes that I am an iOS developer, which is not true. That was later fixed, but you can see my face across the internet, like on articles that teach you how to breastfeed. This was sent to me by one of my friends whose wife had a baby. Actually, Dave Nemitz sent this. He said, why are you following me right now? So hired is pretty awesome. Like I said, multiple people here have used it, and I'm really proud of the culture that we built there. When I first started, I actually got thrown onto the cultural committee. I think mostly just because I like to drink in like party, and they wanted a more fun office, but it worked out pretty well. And now we've gone from, I think when I started we had 50 people and 10 engineers, and now we're at 35 engineers and something like 240 employees. Our valuation has increased like 30 fold since I started. Super cool to be a part of. And the reason that we have been able to build something so cool is that we have awesome engineers and the company trusts us to do whatever we want. It's kind of weird, like when I started, I thought I was joining some behemoth company that was gonna just kind of make me work on whatever and follow a very strict process. And we do some of that. We're an agile development team for the most part. One of our founding engineers, Nate, is from Pivotal Labs, so we use Pivotal Tracker. Although now we're moving to Asana, which I don't recommend. Caitlin gets a kick out of that. So I didn't actually need to take the job at hired, which is kind of the cool thing and the empowering thing about this. I used the product as an employer at Soothe, and I loved it. I thought it was fucking awesome. So I decided to check it out and put myself on the platform and see what it was like from a candidate perspective. I immediately loved the product and they reached out to me and I was like, I actually talked my talent advocate into just getting a beer with me instead of trying to help me find a job. And I pitched her and was like, hey, let me come work for you guys. I love this product. So a couple days later, I got a job offer and I joined the team. One of the things that's impressed me most about it is besides our dedication to the Rails platform, it's the process that we've developed over the last year and a half and the amount of trust that the organization has in the people that it's hired. I could talk on and on about the founders. One of our founders did 99 Designs, which I'm sure everyone's heard of, Curebit, Talkable, multiple other things. These are guys who were very experienced in building awesome products and they've brought a lot to the table that allows Hired to continue to iterate much faster and more efficiently than our big competitor, who is also here by the way, with billions and billions of dollars in the bank. We're a small team of like 30 people and we're doing awesome things. So when I started in the first few months, I got introduced to something called the Hired hackathon. I don't know about the people in this room, but I'm sure we've all participated in a hackathon of sorts and there's a nice definition from Google right here. It's an event that lasts several days in which a large number of people meet to engage in collaborative computer programming. But usually the way that it's used is it's just a term for managers to get you to work overtime and be excited about it, which is kind of bullshit. So when I heard Hired hackathon, I was like, great, I get to come in to work on a Friday night or a Saturday and eat pizza and pretend that I'm having a good time. But that wasn't what we were doing actually. What Hired was actually doing was essentially kind of taking the concept of Google's 20% time and offloading it to a full week or two weeks or eventually even three weeks where engineers could just work on whatever they wanted. It was kind of empowering and awesome. I'd never really experienced that. We had done a hackathon, I think, at Bleacher Report at one point, but it was kind of like a whole business thing and it lasted all night and I wasn't a huge fan of it. So when I started at Hired, like I said, we were an agile development team. We had one project manager. We did your typical two-week sprints. There was lots of innovation because there was very little hand-holding. The engineering team was separated into a product cycle that supported two things, candidate side and employer side because those were our customers. We needed to build stuff that was cool that our customers would love. For a while, we kind of followed this agile process. We did the IPMs, we did two-week sprints. It worked pretty well and eventually we got more and more engineers and what happens when you get more and more engineers? Usually more structure and what happens when there's more structure? Usually less innovation. So we actually made some tweaks to our process that didn't actually work out very well. For a couple months, we decided to try something called the menu of opportunity and it worked about as well as it sounds. We basically had a bunch of business goals that we wanted to meet and people were allowed to add things that they thought were cool to the menu of opportunity and then just kind of pick and choose whatever they wanted to build and test them and iterate quickly. It sounds actually like it could work and there were parts of it that we took away that were actually really awesome but it didn't work that well because having 25 engineers and no direction at all in the company didn't work out so well. So we kind of went back to this idea of an agile process and decided that we could kind of get the best of both worlds by following this hackathon model. Around the same time, we decided to transition into data-informed product development. Initially, it was actually data-driven product development which sounds awesome when you say data-driven but data doesn't always tell the whole picture and you don't always know how to actually measure properly especially when you're building new things. If you are gonna build something and try to determine whether or not it's gonna make you money, like you can't do that in a week and you don't know what to look for. So we transitioned to data-informed product development. So now we have a full data science team actually which is awesome that kind of measures things for us so that the engineers can build and then someone else looks at it and tells you if it worked or not. It's worked out really well actually. So we continue to innovate and focus. So one of the things that we do which I think is really cool is now that we're this big company with like thousands and thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of candidates who have signed up on the platform. We've got hundreds of employees. We do need to kind of have that discipline and that long-term focus that we didn't have when it was like 10 people because you can't maintain that forever unfortunately. But like I said, we wanted to have the ability to iterate quickly and build cool shit without having to worry about product management cycles and board meetings. I think an effective product organization at least from what I've seen in my experience over the last like 10 years is you need to balance short-term innovation with long-term investment. Most of the time, especially with small teams, it's really difficult to do both. So you usually focus on one. You just try to move quickly, break things or whatever Facebook's new motto is, I can't remember. But as you grow, you need to adapt. So like I said, we brought back the hack week. The hack week essentially is hired at least is an opt-in week where engineers can literally do whatever you want. You can build internal tools. You can build product-facing features. We are an agile team, so if you build something, there's a very good likelihood that you can just deploy it to production in front of all of our users like literally the same day. It sounds scary and it is and occasionally there's bugs, but it works out really well. Because the hack week works so well for us and we spun off a bunch of features which I'll talk about in a minute, the organization really realized how important having this trust was in empowering our teams to go forth and just do cool stuff. Now this guy, Heaton, who's actually sitting right here, provided a really awesome model for us. When he first started at Hired, the first thing that he did was not sit down and try to learn our Rails app. He went over to the business side and sat with people who were working with our candidates and our clients and watched them do what they did on a day-to-day basis to understand what their problems were and try to understand the other side of the office. It was awesome. He built all kinds of cool shit for them that made them so much more efficient and made their days better. They weren't in the product team, so anything that they wanted essentially wasn't ever gonna get worked on because we're trying to build features. We're VC funded. We have to shareholder values like all we cared about for a little while, but those things aren't the only things that matter. So we decided to host our first business hack week. The business hack week was on top of the engineering hack week. Jeremy actually led this one, so Jeremy was one of our engineers who became a product manager and realized that we needed to actually have time to crack down, work undisturbed and build cool shit. So we basically opened it up to the company and said, anyone who has something that they think we need to build that you aren't getting heard about, come to us on Monday and pitch us on it and then let's pair up and build it and ship it and see what happens. Basically, everybody in the company got involved with this and they absolutely loved it. We built more features in I think one week for our business teams and our sales teams than we had built in like the previous year. And it was because we connected people across teams and let them go forth and build cool shit. It was awesome. So another thing that we started to work on, so we do this thing that's very unique to our company that probably no one else does that we call Mega Week. Mega Week happens twice a year and during Mega Week, everybody from the company within hired from all over the world actually flies to our main office and we have parties and motivational speeches and stuff like that. Well, at least in every organization I've worked with, there's usually been some sort of curtain between engineering and business and sales and these sorts of things. They don't know what the hell we do and we don't really know what they do and they're usually asking us for stuff and a lot of times the things that they ask for sounds simple but they're really not and when you just tell someone, no, I can't do that, you kind of seem like an asshole, especially if they don't know what you're talking about or why it can't be done. So we decided to host something called Pairing with the Stars, which we realize now was a terrible name for it because everybody keeps complaining that we think we're the stars of the company, which is not the case, is this tongue in cheek. So during Mega Week, we basically gave everyone in the company the ability to sign up with an engineer and pair program with them for an hour or two. The cool thing that came out of this was people actually didn't want to use their time the same way. I thought everybody would want to sit down and maybe learn about how our application actually works. Some people did. Other people wanted to build stuff. Other people had things that candidates had been bugging them about for months. Other people just wanted to know like why is it so hard to get something shipped sometimes and then other times you build stuff in like an hour. So we spent this week just working with all these people across our organization and we built a lot of cool shit again. It was kind of awesome. Afterwards, I actually helped organize it so I sent out a survey to everyone in the company and at this time it was like 120, 140 people and it was a universal success. Everyone gave it a four or five out of a five point rating. We had tons of people say like how they want to do it more often. They wanted to spend more time with the engineers. They wanted to have small teams, work on cool things and not worry about all the bullshit that you usually have to deal with, especially as an organization scales and politics come into play. So we did it again and again and we're actually gonna do it again in July. It's getting harder to organize which I actually will probably build a tool of it maybe you guys can someday use to do this at your company. But it's something I think we're gonna keep around for a while. Like I said, one of the things that becomes a really big problem as you scale is working cross team. When it's just like four people in an apartment, you're kind of all like fulfilling multiple roles. You're working together. You have empathy for each other. You understand what everyone's doing. And as you grow, you lose that. This is a good way to connect people who otherwise like may not even ever talk to each other and let them develop operational empathy for what they do and how they work on a day to day basis. And also like everyone loves building cool stuff. Everyone loves like building something. People who don't get to do it on a day to day basis don't realize how much they love it until they sit down and actually like crank out a feature that they've been wishing for for months. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about some of the cool things that we've actually built during this because I could just sit here and say like, hey, cool shit happened and you could believe me or not. But we've actually got some really awesome stuff that we've built. So one of the biggest things that's actually come out of a hack week. And this would be probably surprising to some people. Most people would think that like our search functionality, which literally powers like our entire platform. It's the most important thing that we have. They might think that that would be a big deal. Like product would probably try and prioritize that. But when you just have a big SQL query and things appear to work okay, like why waste weeks and weeks and weeks building something that you already kind of have. Well, luckily we had an engineer named Andrew who is not in this session. I think he was smart and went to the Pacquiao one. Andrew decided that elastic search seemed kind of cool. So he cracked down, locked himself in our fortress of solitude room, which is our quiet dark room with like cool mood lighting and potentially atmospheric music playing. Locked himself in there for basically a week and came to us and said, hey, check it out. I rebuilt our entire infrastructure this week on elastic search. And by the way, all of the gyms for elastic search suck. So I built a better one. And we were like, what the hell? Like all we had to do was give you a week and just trust you to do something. And you literally just built the foundation of our company for the next several years. It was amazing. And by the way, if you guys are interested in elastic search on Rails, go to GitHub, check out the stretchy gem. It's really cool. The guy who actually builds, works for elastic and builds their own gem has like called him and tried to poach him and like steal it from him because he thinks that it's actually better than their own internal gem that they use. Kind of cool. And what does this allow us to do? I don't know if you can really tell because I think the quality's kind of low up here. But we've been able to build out like really awesome powerful search features that like some people don't even know that we have at this point. If you're an employer and you're using Hired, this is the perfect pitch right now. You have awesome stuff like Boolean search built in now. When it was just a SQL query, it was like slow as shit and there were almost no features. Now you can segment, you can add filters. We have syntax highlighting, we have Boolean search and this allowed us to actually build on and develop a data science team to power the recommendation algorithm behind it. Before we just gave you like whatever the SQL query return basically sorted by like date added, which sucked. Like that's not how people hire. People want the best for what they're working on and now we have the ability to provide that and this surprisingly enough came out of one week of hacking. I mean granted, it's obviously been built upon since then but it's kind of awesome to see that something so integral to our company came out of just a week of letting someone have fun. So another cool thing that we do, a hire that has also come out of our hack week is our chat ops. We actually run everything via Slack. We have multiple bots that basically run and they do everything from, you know, showing us a bunch of pug images which I'm sure everyone is pug bombed at some point to actually running our whole auto scaling infrastructure. I forget the name of the auto scaler that runs with Heroku. I'm sure people here have used it, it sucks. It wasn't doing what we needed it to do so we built our own and we built it on Hubot. We also do all of our deploys, all of our tagging. We do scaling, we do logging, everything through this Hubot interface and it's basically just always happened to add new features the week that we let engineers have fun and like I said, it powers literally like our entire development process. Some other cool things that have come out of these hack weeks. One of the things that you may not know about hired is that like we promise that if you're searching for a job like no one that you know will find out unless they're like actually actively hiring. Well, when we go pitch our product to companies and we show them live stuff, there's a very real, like small but very real chance that we actually expose someone who's already working for them, especially when it's big companies. And that actually happened once, which was really, really shitty. So people had asked for months and months and months for this feature and we didn't build it because hey, it only happened once. Like how often is it gonna happen? Well, the potential repercussions are huge. So I sat down with a guy during our pairing with the stars week and he told me about like how nervous he was every time he pitched. And this is what came out of it. It took about three hours and now we have a script that runs on our demo environments basically daily. Obfuscates all the data, puts in these cool robot images, which by the way are from robohash.org. It's a really fun service to use if you need placeholder images like this. And it makes it so that we can actually go sell to companies and uphold the promise that we make to our candidates. Once again, hack week. That should have been a part of our product, but it was never gonna get prioritized. Another cool feature, and I'm tuning my own horn on these because I built this one and this next one, is the bias removal feature. One of the things that we've been trying to do at Hired is kind of level the playing field and also understand how gender and racial biases affect the hiring process. There's some really awesome videos that we've watched recently on Facebook and stuff that you can check out if you search Facebook bias videos that give some really, really staggering and crazy data from studies about what you look like or what your name is can potentially affect how people perceive you when they're initially evaluating you. Because of that, people thought, hey, it would be cool if we could build this feature. But once again, this doesn't really make us any money. This isn't gonna turn us from a $100 million company into a billion dollar company overnight. But it does look really good. And it's actually generated an insane amount of PR for our company. We've actually built some new features now to make it so that we can analyze how people who turn this feature on hire and who they talk to and eventually we'll be able to publish some studies that show what just a simple feature like this. Removing your photo, obfuscating your name and removing the name of the schools that you went to, how that can affect your marketability in the marketplace. Another cool thing. Another thing that came out of this was our ETL pipeline. Has anybody here worked with ETL recently? It's kind of tough. And I feel like most people don't actually know what they're doing. It's kind of like spinning your wheels, like trying cool shit. But it's hard to pitch that as a product. You can't say like, hey, we need to extract, transform all this data that we already have. But we actually built a really cool pipeline using Firehose, Kinesis, Redshift. And now it's actually powering our entire data science back in. I think I have like one more cool thing that I can tell you about. Oh wait, no too. Conversation attachments, another feature. Co-worker mentions little things like this that provide an amazing user experience for people that they may not necessarily know that they want, that it's hard to pitch to product. You can't just say like, hey, let me spend a couple days letting you mention co-workers. It's not really something that you can measure. You can't measure the impact of that. But when you have it, all these little things add up to providing a great user experience for someone. And that is worth so much more than anything else. I actually have an aside here. And one of the things that I actually love, and this is just a weird thing that I noticed yesterday. And it kind of speaks to these little tiny features and how happy they can make you. When you go to GitHub and you have a pull request, if you triple click on the branch name, the default behavior of a browser is to highlight the entire line of text. So if you triple click on your branch name, it actually highlights the entire line of text. But they have some JavaScript that then shortens it so that you've only selected the branch name so you can copy and paste it easily. Like, who the hell thought of that? I don't know, it's probably some engineer who was like, you know what, this is fucking annoying and I wanna build something cool and now people like me are talking about it in front of you when I should be talking about my own company. Another cool thing that we built during hack weeks, employer pages. We had these employer pages forever and things kind of worked all right, so like, why fix what's not broken? Well, one engineer thought it was broken, tried to pitch it to product to say, hey, give me a couple of weeks to work on this and build a new experience for our employers. And that kind of got shut down. So when hack week came around, he built it. And then we A-B tested it and guess what? It worked so much better than the previous experience. The data almost immediately showed like a huge uptick in participation and offers made and we actually got tons of people writing in and saying like, thank you so much. I actually hated the old experience but this is basically enterprise software so I thought it couldn't get any better. Some other cool things. Fortitude, Gith, CMS for SEO stuff, coding challenge updates, email, A-B test framework, company notes features. These are all things that have come out of these hack weeks. If you want to check out some of our open source stuff, I mentioned this at the plenary as well, you can go to github.com slash hire and you can see some of the cool shit that we've built. Most of these things coming out of just letting people be free to do things that they think are cool. So why does this sort of stuff work? There was a quote two days ago, I believe, during one of the keynotes, talking about the Skunkworks project and I'm gonna paraphrase this, I should have actually looked it up and quoted it but essentially it was that if you enable a small group of smart people and trust them and it's empowering to building cool stuff, the examples that he gave were way cooler than any of this. They were building like military aircraft that broke every like speed record ever and it was done by like 60 engineers who they just gave a lab and said like do whatever in a couple years have something for us and they did it. Now, my friend actually works for Rolls-Royce. They have something like 15,000 engineers working on a single plane that's not going to go faster than planes that they built in the 70s with like 60 people and it's costing $1.5 trillion, so. You've probably heard of the Google 20% time which actually doesn't exist anymore. It's just something that they say but anyone who works at Google will tell you that it's gone which is why there hasn't been a whole lot of innovation I think at Google in a while. Like 20% time birth Gmail, it birthed Google Calendar, it birthed a bunch of other awesome things and now it's gone and you see Google just shutting stuff down like basically on a daily basis at this point. Google gets a lot of credit for 20% time and I didn't actually know this until recently but it actually started in the 70s at 3M. So we all know 3M. Like we've used dozens, hundreds of their products. They've been around for years or multi, they're worth like $180 billion or something crazy and some of their most popular and most profitable products actually came from their 20% time, their hack weeks. Two of the ones that you've probably used, post-it notes, masking tape. Those were what happened when they let engineers have fun and work on whatever they wanted. So how can you implement this? Well unfortunately the hardest part of this and in the most important part is hiring people that you believe in. Smart people that you know you can trust. Luckily I have a sales pitch right now that there is an awesome piece of software out there called Hired that helps you do this. If you do this and you get people that you trust and you really do trust them, like you can't just tell them that during a job interview. You really need to let them be free and let them know that you trust them. From day one, they will give you everything that they have and they'll work to make the company as successful as they possibly can. And if you're getting the right people, like I said, like we like to build cool shit, like we're all here because we like building things. I've been doing this for 10 years, like there's, I've met people here who have been doing it for like 25. Like you don't do something for 25 years unless you really love it. Encourage teams to collaborate. This has been one of the biggest things that we've done at Hired that has caused a lot of this innovation. Engineers sitting alone, working on stuff will generate some pretty awesome things. But you really get the benefit when you get everyone else involved in your company. Encourage teams like business to go sit with engineering. Encourage engineers to sit with the sales team. You'd be amazed what you'll find out when you do this. And lastly, set up, if you wanna be like us at least, set up a routine, like some sort of fun time that people know are coming. Like I said, we do these hack weeks, basically every quarter now, where we just sit down for a week and we let people have fun. And it's caused, you know, it's caused all this awesome stuff to happen. So anyways, I hope I gave you like some cool ideas and told you a little bit about like why we do what we do and showed you some good examples of why it works. I think my time is basically up. But if you have any questions, feel free to talk to me down here. Thanks for coming guys.