Can Automation and AI/ML Solve Our DevOps Hiring Problems? – DevOps Unbound Roundtable

com webinar brought to you by textrung and tricentus. My name is Cody J Brown. I'm the host of text strong learning.

We have an exciting panel ahead. But first I have a couple of housekeeping notes. First today's session is being recorded So if you miss any of our discussion or you'd like to rewatch or share with a friend the on-demand recording will be made available shortly after we conclude today.

If you have any questions for our panel members, we want you to go ahead and send those in using the Q&A tab, which can be found on the right side of your screen and for any other General comments, or you just want to let us know from where you're tuning in. Go ahead and use the chat tab. Finally at conclusion of today's webinar.

We will have a drawing for 425 Amazon gift card. So stick around. So our topic today is can Automation and AI ml solve our devops hiring problems and to introduce our panel today.

I'll turn the floor over to Alan shiml to introduce the rest of our panel. Hey, thanks very much, Cody. Welcome everyone.

Welcome to our panel. Excuse me, is Cody mentioned? today's webinar is sponsored by our good friends at tricentes, but this is a special webinar Center our usual sort of Tech strong webinar it's actually a round table as part of our devops Unbound series them ups and bound is a bi-weekly video series where usually every other week which is what bi-weekly means.

We we have a panel of experts exploring various topics in in devops that panel is pre-recorded and we do stream it on Textron TV and through our Tech strong TV network. About once a month though or once every six weeks. We do a live version of devops on that.

We do a live Round Table version and this is one of those right here where we do have a great panel and we actually have an excellent panel today, but the real stars of today's show. Are you Folks out in the audience. We appreciate you checking in.

I I always love seeing the people check in from all over the world. I see Heidelberg Germany. I saw Paris earlier Boston.

Thank you all for joining in. You get to sort of can drive the discussion today you meaning our audience you can put it in the public chat, which of course is open to everyone and everyone May answer either via chat or the the panel may run with it. If you have a question specifically that you'd like to see the panel address though next to where it says chat you'll see Q&A.

If you put your comment question in Q&A, I will try to grab it from there and bring it up to the whole panel for panel wide discussion. Sometimes we get a lot of side discussions going on in the public chat wearing QA we are more focused on panel wide if I didn't mention I apologize but devops about is sponsored by our good friends that tried sentence. So we thank them very much for that and always great to work with them.

Now. Let's get busy. Let me introduce you to our great panel today.

I want to first introduce you to really the the person who sparked this conversation. And that's Tyler Jewell Tyler. Welcome to devops.

I'm down live Round Table. Good morning, Alan. Thanks for having me.

Great. Why don't you just if you don't mind take a little bit of time let the audience give the audience a sense of your background. Sure.

I'm currently a partner at Dell tech Capital which is the VCR of Dell Technologies. We invest about 300 million dollars each year and a range of Enterprise companies and have a pretty large portfolio of devops related companies previously. I spent 25 years as a product operator at companies like red hat Oracle MySQL DEA and was also a CEO three different times two companies that I I started those two exited and a third company wso2, which is approaching 100 million dollars profitable.

And then I also publish a landscape. I call it the developer LED landscape and it has a database of 1200 companies in the devops realm and it's available online. Excellent love it and you should check out if you're interested in the devops space as a potential investor entrepreneur.

Just curious. Did you go check out? Tyler's on like database so it's pretty cool stuff next.

Let me introduce you to A not a frequent but a regular participant in a lot of our discussions here. She's charity Majors. Hey Charity.

How are you? Hi, it's very early for me am here. My name is Charity.

I'm a co-founder of honeycomb that. The original observability company and co-author of observability engineering with Lisbon Jones, which we just finished. We just shipped it off to O'Reilly all the final edits yesterday.

So congratulations what when will that be available? For download now it'll be available to print and I think about two months end of me. Congratulations charity, you know, he's great to have you one.

Our third panel member and I should mentioned I think all three of our panel members are here real early. You're all West Coast folks. So it's eight o'clock for all of you.

And and here at eight in the morning is already moved in. Hey Lauren, how are you? Ah top of the morning pleasure to be here.

I have one. I've my background. I've yeah, I've been building developer tools for the last 25 years.

This one. I will focusing a lot in the last 15 years on on testing mostly helping developers move things to production much faster in that passing. That's kind of what today's all about as well or thanks for joining and then last but not least my my co-host here on on devops Unbound.

He's Mitchell actually Mitch. Welcome. Thanks.

If you want to tell people a little bit about you, you bet good to be here with this illustrious panel. I'm CTO with group without business partners as well as a principal in texturing research Our Endless firm and doing devops and developer tools and cloud and all that for some time. So it's I love the topic of Automation.

And of course, yeah, I am now is top of mind and when it's real and when it's not all that, I'm sure we'll get into lots of good stuff about how these things can or can't help us. Absolutely and just hey a quick shout out to participant 407 who's actually taking the time of putting those links in the chat window for us here. And so if you want to get the download of Charities book from O'Reilly, it looks like it's there already as well as Tyler's developer LED landscape quote.

URL is there as well. So you'll find that in the chat and that that's what makes these great right you we it's almost like a running commentary going on on the side anyway. Today's topic can Automation and AI ml solve our devops hiring problems, you know, even before covid we were talking about a talent shortage Talent shortage of developers.

It's challenging shortage of testers a challenge shortage of devops of cyber, right? It seemed like in all of the it technical engineering fields. We we had a talent shortage now, of course with covid and coming out of covid.

Everyone's talking about the great resignation. Right people hopping around I I would put forth the proposition people have always hopped around in Tech. but Nevertheless, it's real now right this this whole everyone it seems everyone talking about I guess maybe that makes it real.

conversation with Tyler about two months ago and Tyler's research has some findings that many of you may find counterintuitive or hard to believe that the amount of developers the amount of Engineers. Right doing it software. In the world has not appreciably grown.

in the last decade Right, the the population of software Engineers is relatively stable and that's in spite of the need for software engineering. mushrooming right and almost kind of anti-market forces when you take that as a given their compensation has not necessarily grown and kept up with it, either you would think if a a role was more in demand the market would raise the wages or the compensation for that role because it's more in demand, but Tyler's research says no. And Tyler if I mischaracterize that please jump in here because you're the expert.

So, how do we how do we solve this? Well, some people are saying look we need Ai and ml to kind of fight our way out of this. That's the only solution that's gonna help address this Source shortage.

We need to automate more which really goes to the Corey devops, right? We need to automate more we need in order to automate more. We need to make better use of AI ml type of solutions to Automate more to leverage the existing humans.

We have and allow machines and so forth not wanting to do more with less. Right you're always always like you can't even keep up even within an individual organization. You know, if you're if you're keeping up linearly with the amount of stuff that you do like you you can't actually hire yourself out of that hole.

In fact, I think what a lot of teams right now are trying to do is they're trying to hire themselves out of the amount of out of the fact that they have too much work to do which really never it almost never works. Right if you're in a whole and you're like, okay give me more people to be in this whole with me like it doesn't work like you want to give more people to the teams where the managers know how to say no where they know how to write size or work where they know how to push back but they know how to like, you know, you don't typically increase your output as an engineering organization adding more Engineers or by, you know, the force multiplier, there is is usually it starts it, you know, the delivery process making that really tight making those feedback loops really well op I was making it so that you can do a lot more with fewer people and and like the question of can we automate our way out of this crisis just kind of fundamentally bugs me because I've never seen that work as soon as you have an automated thing now now you need people to own that automated thing and it's probably a lot more complex and challenging than it was to begin with. like I mean, it's not the automation doesn't work.

Obviously automation works, but you know an organ and you can speak to this but but like I do see like we need to do fewer and fewer things, but they need be at a higher and higher level right and Engineers. Like I was brought up in Ops, you know, and I'd be taking a taxi to the collo to flip this switch and the my sequel primer in the middle of the night, right? I don't need to do that anymore.

It's been you know, it'll be us is all the people now, I think there's a real role for testing and you know other low level stuff, but you can't really place the human Direction when the person who's sitting at the top trying to fit it into cohesive story and trying to build something great out of the building blocks. So let me just characterize what I'm hearing from you though. We can't hire our way out of it and that automation stuff never works.

So we just screwed Tyler. No, okay charity. No, we're not smooth good.

All right, I'll let someone else answer. Here, we're definitely not screwed. Right?

You know, it's it's such a it's such a fascinating Topic in this is probably going to be the next kind of you know, 40 page installment of the devil landscape is you know, why why has there not been more entrance into our industry? Why is the wage growth not appreciated significantly Beyond where inflation is despite all the hype that goes in into it and you know, and one of the factors here is complexity and that while on many different fronts it is a lot easier to do hard things, you know that there are things that were hard. It's now pretty easy to do a lot of the stuff in and around the construction of software has become more complex.

So the paradigms that we embrace the nature of the processes the way that we communicate to each other. Here's a superficial but a very interesting metric which is Number of companies in my database and I've been collecting it for 13 years. Now.

There are four times as many companies in the database and there were a decade ago, right? So you've got tool fragmentation. You've got vendor Choice.

You've got a lot of Technology introduction here all this adds to a complexity burden and then you layer on the fact that the pace of change has been increasing and there is unfortunately this feeling that many people who come into our industry have that. It's just not sustainable. I can't I cannot keep up with the pace of change.

I cannot keep up with the education. I cannot understand all the technology that's there and and as a result they lose they lose the joyment the the joy and the satisfaction out of it. And so to answer your question.

Is there a way out of this? Yeah. They're absolutely is a way out of this.

I think it has to start by people recognizing that maybe some of the paradigms and principles that we've embraced as the de facto standard over the past 20 years such as distributed. Version Control and agile may not be the healthiest in terms of how do you do things sustainably and then once you kind of you know grasp around some of those Concepts that's there, then you can have a dialogue on the different things that are available to make it a little bit better. on the front and interesting Theory I would love to hear more about that like distributed Version Control in particular.

Like how does that can contribute to something? That means yeah, you're about that. So yeah, I I a little bit of a controversial thing so so both agile and distributed Version Control solved really fundamental a problems and broke down a lot of gates that that inherently were in our industry 20 years ago, but they introduce new problems that were there in the case of distributed Version Control ultimately what it enabled was a new form of collaboration.

I mean, so we have a you know a much higher degree of collaboration between you know, different entities and that was adamantly needed in the case of agile agile, you know broke down, you know, basically eliminated in many ways low quality software by encouraging groups to have tight iterative feedback loops and that you know, as you can get inputs on a more iterative and continual basis then you know as a group you can react Or in the case of both of those when you take them to their infinite conclusion, which we've tried to optimize you end up having to you know communicate with way too many or collaborate with probably a larger group of parties that is you know, not sustainable and in the case of agile, if you take it to its continual Evolution, if you're doing continuous deployment, you are overwhelmed with the amount of feedback that's coming in and then the pace of change is too fast and it becomes almost done sustainable. And so there is a point where these these paradigms start to break down and then ultimately there's new forms of complexity that's introduced that that you know way on on the group overall on that and so unfortunately in an academic, you know sense not not so much in a practical practical. So I've never seen a team get burned down from Shipping too much but full stop.

I've seen them get burned out from not being able to ship enough and I've seen them get burned out by, you know, people leaning on to work like 16 hours today, which Possible software engineer but like the idea that this seems very counterintuitive to me. Um, let me we try to see if I if I understood what you're saying. Okay, I think I understand what you're saying and I'll try to complete why is that a lot of change that happened in things?

Like if left for example developers are now in charge of quality something that 15 years ago wasn't the case now when you want to have if you don't start from the being agile rapid delivering, but that means that the developers needs to make sure that they own quality. So now they're bombarded also with something that they're they're making a small change of code. Something doesn't work.

They need to know why is it it could be Related to so many things that are not theirs. So there there are. so they're and they did they need to address that on the other hand.

By the way, I think everyone's keep talking about the sheff left. There's there's another one of the pair that was just shift Drive which is hey the developers want to know what's going on in production. There's a lot of information coming in not just right now from the next two seconds and out what's going on.

I'm going to release faster and I want to know what's going on in production. And and what's going on in real time right now. So those downloaded with a lot of more info more data more a lot more information and that they need to consider.

But but that's a good thing. Like I think there was a lot of changes in the in the last decade or two so many changes that it's it takes time for the industry to get a hold of their own of standards. And once you have that then I'm guessing that this is where charity and and some food words in your mouth.

It's still everything is very low level right now. And what happened is in order to improve the productivity things have to go and one Level of structure like higher levels. Is that when you met with earlier Journey?

and maybe I think we're having like three different conversations here. I'm trying. Yes.

We are look good. You jump in charity. Yeah.

So Tyler, I think I understand what you're saying. The fly thinking that logic is a respectfully is there are other things going on at the same time. It's not just doing agile.

One of the things we're doing is taking ideas some proven concepts for manufacturing. We're breaking down problems into smaller chunks smaller batch sizes, you know kind of back from Toyota and Total Quality Management. So we're taking bigger complex systems.

We're breaking them down into smaller units of work. Yes that creates other things but it also solves problems like, you know integration Fridays. Don't break the build.

If you remember back in those days, you know of you know of hell trying to get the build just to get through a test cycle. So it isn't yes anything taken to an extreme sure brings with it, you know more complexity more feedback loop than you can handle but I don't think we're doing that so Respectfully think you're wrong. So Tyler before you jump on that though, I want to bring in a prospective from the audience and that was addressing the the labor shortage.

One of their participants said basically because businesses are hiring based on paper not on people meaning, you know, we've all seen this I'm looking for someone with 20 years of devops experience. Right but devops has been around 20 years and they have done the PHD in master's degree in in devops right is if any school offers that but And so it kind of makes it harder to you know thread that needle for these people. I don't know if I agree with that.

It's a YouTube. I think, you know I come from the security world. So when I got into security, there was no such thing as a security degree you might have went to fans.

And taking a few classes from Sands or you had a cisp. You didn't have cyber security Majors like you do now. And those people know they may be short on experience coming out of school are getting some good training.

Yeah, I mean there's Jordan there's nothing, you know, I kind of worry about the professionalization of engineering, you know, all the certifications and you know, like for devops in particular like most of the best, you know Ops, you know system people. I know we're like English major dropouts or like music Majors like me just kind of people who are good at fixing things who are curious and diligent but we didn't have like, you know, the all the background the formal, you know, algorithms data structures, which is software engineering Is so much of a it's a discipline that you learn. It's an apprenticeship discipline.

You know, it's one where you learn from each other it kind of back to the point. Someone was making earlier. You can't just grip I think it was Tyler using you can't just graduate from college learn a skill set and then apply those skills for the rest of your career.

You're constantly having to you know, learn different Frameworks or different ways of problem solving learning things from each other and that works really well for some people and really less well for I think most people I think most people but it difficult to to have that hunger to learn. I don't know if I'm generalizing grossly but I think that you did the right that the paid the pace of change in software as challenging for a lot of people who you know might want to take you know, five or ten years to get married have kids and have work be kind of ones like that. It's hard to sustain that level of learning, you know over here.

Yeah. It's it's not that the pace of learning is, you know, it's a turn off that it's a sane sustaining and I think in finding balance, but that is a very big challenge for people. Yeah, and I do worry that as we as we start, you know adding all of these, you know, now you must have a four-year degree in all this stuff.

Like I don't think I ever could have gotten into Tech with my credentials such as they were, you know, I I feel like I wish that I wish that we were making it easier for when people to get into computers not harder. You know, it's interesting. I mean said a Junior Achievement office yesterday down here in South Florida was the high Zango and his anger family donated.

It's called Junior Achievement world. This was amazing. It was an amazing thing, but I was talking to the lady.

What are the two biggest ask of kids in high school today? When you ask them what jobs they want to be where they want to be. Well number one.

They want to be a social media influencer, whatever that means right and and that they all want to be influencers. But number two they all want to work in Tech. Okay, you'll want to work in Tech.

The problem is there's working in Tech and there's working in Tech right who's working in technine being an engineer doing the work you need to do to be a good Ops person. To be a good devops to be a good coder and Tyler I I'd ask you to clarify. As the the amount of software engineer stayed constant or has it just not grown to keep Pace with the amount of software.

We're turning out. It has grown right, you know every every year right now in the I think it's crossed Europe and in the United States between a boot camps and a degree programs. There's about 250,000 graduates.

So that that's definitely you know, growing faster than the pace of population. It's not growing faster than the demand for software Service is like if we could measure output, you know, if there was a GDP for software created, you know, that that has grown appreciatively larger than the number of Engineers. So on on that level the output per engineer on a global basis as probably tripled or quadrupled over the past, you know, 20 years a lot of that.

Thanks because of the Paradigm shifts that we've gone through and then the wonderful vendors that have emerged, you know, there's 1200 vendors now when it used to be only a couple hundred vendors, right? So these vendors are obviously filling in a lot of the gaps, that's there. You know, I I just The controversial question of is that sustainable right?

And and can we continue to produce more software output at you know, the levels of talent that we've got and generally I think I think we are going to run into what I call a peak devops Talent issue probably in about a decade. It's where a ways away from it, but I think we're about a decade away from that. Oh, I would think we're much closer to it than that because we aren't churning out in devops engineers.

We're treating it new software Engineers, but we're not turning out people who are used to living in the gaps and gluing things together and making systems work. So charity you've already kind of Said automation's not the answer. We can't automate our way out of this.

But you know, I'm always that boy who goes in the room full of pony manure and says there's a horse here somewhere Dad. Can we can we can we improve our Ai and ml capabilities? To leverage automation more to leverage people better to more importantly leverage machines better.

Right. Can we start getting software that right software? I mean that sounds like a cluster f*** to debug if you ask me but probably yeah.

Okay. I mean can we be better the answer is always going to be yes, of course, we could be better. I think I'm cranky about it right now because I see so much of this like solution and search of a problem, especially when it comes like attracting lots of VC dollars you slap AI on it or I'm on and you get no order of magnitude more money, but it's in order of magnitude more value, usually not or you they're usually using it.

They're really stretching the definition of what ml or yeah, and so that just makes me kind of cranky about it. Well, let's let's be a little bit fair and we'll get you know, I'm gonna highlight or in here a bit there. There are like five or six areas today where machine learning has dramatically made things more productive for developers, but they're very narrow and they tend to be in areas where there's a high amount of repeatability and and generally humans still do that process.

So test automation particularly test maintenance, you know, once the test is written when test break it's you know, it's usually a pretty bot driven thing that you can do to go and figure that that's one Area machine learning is taking over quite a bit of the application security testing as well, you know, because a lot of application security testing is, you know, wrote, you know wrote, you know, kind of hammering, you know Hammer like, you know, 10,000 different permutations of different stuff and the Bots are pretty good at guessing what those permutations might be better than the humans on that front. And we are seeing we are seeing a lot of machine learning. I guess the best way to describe it is developer assistance, you know, whether it's you know GitHub copilot for auto complete, you know zenhub which is you know, a fascinating little company it's you know profitable.

It's just issue Management on top of GitHub, but they've got all kinds of different machine learning Bots to automate the scrum process, you know, it's almost like a virtual scrum manager for you on that. So we're seeing these things that happen over and over and over again that humans generally do in our process, you know machine learning is emerging on that and I'll give a plug now for for orange company test him which is, you know using this and you know a great example of it all. Done.

Oh, thank you. I think you're right that there's it depends on the sub domain because we're saying devops and that's a the huge domain and it could be that every one of us is focusing and and one specific sub domain in in the the test automation world as it started said there's been a big huge shift and AI has been very helpful in taking tedious tests. That's human usually have done and Non-Stop and automating that and and reducing the complexity.

Maybe there's a bit of Charity maybe where you're focusing and that's I guess my it's more of a question. I'm not asking him but asking where's you're saying that you're seeing the the parts where hard to automate there? I see that a lot in instill in pure devops and seeing a lot of things that they're being.

That there are being doing things more manually and they're still being doing that like manually what I mean you're coding that but there's a lot of coding that's been done and and then no coded Solutions. The code list have been we've seen them around in in different domains and especially in the test automation, but and I've seen them in the in the pure devops space as well, but I didn't see because everything is really new. I didn't see huge success since you were saying.

Oh this is this is my go-to Over Terry what are you seeing or whether you're some domain that you're saying? Hey, this is this is where I see that the Big Challenge there. Oh, well, you know obviously I'm looking a lot at data stuff and observability and and just like the claims that are being made in the market when it comes to like Ai and ml you will find your problems for you.

It's like it's not true. Like every time you ship a new version of code, you know, you ruined you ruined your your Baseline and and you know, there's a lot of buzzwords that are going on. It's not a lot of practical usage.

So I I Mitchell put it in the chat, but not look I've been around a long time and you know, there's a reason the gardener hype Cycles have been around as long as they are because they're right right things get over a height and and the word the world attaches to a word or a bug's word and and it takes years to really see the you know, as it comes down into the travel of disillusionment and then back out right? I think unfortunately AI more than ml AI It suffered greatly from this right, you know. People who had visions of Steven Spielberg's little boy in the movie.

You know, it's Ai and we haven't seen a lot of pure kind of AI helping out here Tyler. in my mind Ai and ml is really a catalyst for better more automation. Right.

Is it is there another role there that a place? Um, well I think that you know to make the distinction what's the difference between Automation and mlai? I think we're in an era today of significant Automation and industrialization of the software process, right?

And so what constitute automation is, you know, the the ability to script, you know some if you will process into something that's repeatable and executed by machines and we have many different forms of that today. I mean you could use you could argue that a low code a low code no Code system as they form of automation. There's obviously a lot of workflows.

There's all kinds of tools sets clever coding abstractions might be automation so we can go on and on I think what distinguishes ML and AI is that you no longer have the humans defining the Automation and instead you have models and data as the foundation and so the our ability to describe intent in terms of a model as a value statement and then Appropriate data as a richness, you know capability in order to feed that model and then allowing those systems to perform the automation that the human would have previously prescribed that that would be a transition to New Era at that point in time. I think we are in the as Charity points out very very early at stages of ml being applicable, you know in the only time it's been really useful is when there's very narrow topics where there's huge data sets available and that you've got a lot of super computers who can run, you know, very powerful models against that and even then there's all sorts of flaws in what we're doing in that narrow slot, you know, so so for ML to become a broader part of the entire devops process and software construction and supply chain, you know, we're we're a long long ways from that because we're probably just don't have enough data there are and maybe Charities company honeycomb can you know, we'll actually be the source of that data for us and at the rate of what they're collecting good. I mean all kidney inside.

At the promise of observability that we're able to deal with such large data sets and Performing analysis and take actionable intelligence out of the observant out of the analysis of this data and isn't that really a form of a now? I feel like I'm a monkey python. Is it a witch?

It's made out of wood. It's close. I mean, he's away what's happening inside systems just by looking at them from the US side so sort of but I don't think it says anything necessarily about the size of this.

In fact, I think one of the problems that I have with this whole this whole thing is the assumption that more data is always better. It's not sometimes more data is is not better than it is. It's just more data sometimes just more confusing.

Sometimes it's just you know, and I feel like right now we're still kind of dealing with the clean up left over from the every log line is sacred. Never drop a single bit sort of an era where we're actually you can get way more powerful and insights out of say Dynamic sampling and you can pay less you can analyze less and and get better results and if you try and like analyze every little detail and that's something that people are still a little allergic to and I'm not sure why so let me back to our audience here because you know from the kinds of things I'm seeing here. Their focused on that Talent shortage, right?

And how do we get more humans? Well here I've got one tip for people who want to ease the talent show shortage in tech make it easier for people to get their first job. It is so hard when you're a new grad or when you're anybody training your first job in Tech.

It is like it is so hard. It's like everybody out there wants to reap the benefits of somebody else having trained their Engineers, but nobody wants to invest in training was engineers. And that's just not how it works.

Right? And if you if you want to have you know, your pick of Engineers train, lots of them. It will be still happen.

It will be loyal to you, you know, you will will you know if you treat them well in my experience, yes, absolutely. People don't love hopping jobs they do it because there's a lot of jobs out there where they're not treated. Well, um, but people fundamentally dislike having to interview they dislike having to switch jobs.

Look, I think I think employer employers who look I I ran a company with 800 people in it. When an employer focuses on the job and it's you know more than focuses on the environment and the needs of the team in the individual, you know, people are going to leave. Right, if if you invest in the people and what ultimately they need to feel safe secure valued appreciative, you know and giving them all those sorts of resources and sometimes that's cash compensation but more often than not it's a safe environment for you know for them to work within it's a group of teammates that they really admire a door access to virtually unlimited resources to continue their education encouragement and kind of recognition for them taking taking that, you know, pursuing those paths and pulling those threads allowing them to take risks without you know fear of repercussions.

When you provide all those sorts of things, you know, people are gonna increase equally find it hard. Why would you want to leave that you know, unless you had some fundamental ethical or moral or you know objectionable issue to what you are working on. there so I'm not a coder.

I'm not an observability, but I'm an entrepreneur and I'm a CEO and I hire people. And here's my philosophy. I'm also a big baseball fan.

You could be the Yankees or the Red Sox or the Dodgers? And you can go sign pricey free agents and have an All-Star at every position. And you might even win a lot of World Series.

Right, but what happens is? You're in a not a death spell you're in an up spiral where you are always going to need to pay top dollar to keep those a players happy because those eight players tend to be more compensation focused. Right?

They they want to make time. They want all the things you're talking about. Tyler great environment unlimited resources great team to work on but they're also very compensation.

That's not my experience at all. No. Mine is because I would rather hire people who are out of school who may not have that.

Well well-defined polished skill set yet. But but they're good people with good basic skills comes down to how do you define a people because in my experience like we don't even we don't negotiate with salary wise, you know, we have we have brackets we have, you know levels Etc and we tell everybody up front like we don't negotiate we target the 75th percentile for for, you know, our state of companies, but you know in my experience people it's way more important to them that they be paid fairly. And they be able to have their you know to cover their bills then that they'd be making absolute top dollar or they wouldn't be coming to us.

Fair and I would say we're probably in the same boat. Right, we pay people fairly a good wage good benefits, all of that. Not not necessarily to be competitive.

I just think it's the right thing to do, but there are I mean look, there are all right. I have friends who work for large who are you know, see level at large companies who are paying what I consider ridiculous money. Right for for some really you know for you know, that's something you have to where you have to bribe them to stay get to get them to come.

You know, it's Yeah, and I think other element is quite well, they own their own careers. They want to know that the people they work for or willing to invest in them. And there's always been this sort of dilemma of I don't want to send people to training or invest in their growth because they might leave they're gonna leave everybody's Gonna Leave a job.

We're Not Gonna all unless they die in there at that job. We're all going to leave jobs. Right?

And I think it's it's you're kind of sending people out into the world. And as you develop them in their careers and they're even gonna come back or they're gonna talk favorably about you. It's gonna help build the reputation of your company is a company who cares about people and we've gone so far under the dark side if it's only about the money and not about people or customers we're swinging back to that now because we've got to be able to hire those people.

Tyler you were going to say something. I was going to say I think I think that employers I think we've talked about what great things that wears need to focus on here. And when employers do that, I think that on the aggregate things are going to work out they're gonna have a very low, you know, very high retention and low attrition model the X factoring all of it is that you know, it takes time to mature, you know, and for what it's worth.

I think it takes us longer to mature now than it did, you know 30 years ago on that front and so, you know people in the first 10 or 15 years of their career, they may not really know what it is that brings them peace and joy and and happiness and and what they're kind of pursuing their career and so they them go through a little bit of volatility on that front. And we just have the best we can worry. We need to hear from you.

Yeah, I I completely agree. That's the problem at least on that and that's right. People want to have There's not just what I don't agree with is is that people don't want to have one thing I think telemented that is that it's growth in the first 10 years.

You want to grow even after that you want to grow and you start in one position you want to move to another whether that's from training extent of training people want to grow and you're you're not just hiring you want to know in your hiring person. It's just for this position. No, that's the starting position.

This is where of course you you learn a lot about the company and a different aspect and it could be that in two years. You'll move to somewhere else inside the organization. There's there's your path not just your career problem, but you're personal path of what you want to do.

And as I'm going to say you want to make sure that's that's being respected and and you find a place when people leave. Yes, it's either if they have bad managers. Oh they get to Point where they're saying?

Hey, that's the one that I want to do something else and there's no way I can do that right here. And that's and that's And when that's it that's rare with the second one that happens. You want to make sure by the way if some places like those happen in the rare cases that I had those as you I helped them find another job somewhere else.

I wanted to help them. I was there it recommending saying that's the amazing person. But right now they're looking for something that we don't have if that's happens.

So you really need to yes. The people is is the most important thing. You know what?

You're you highlight something the Warren and that's leadership. right people especially people earlier in their careers really benefit right like charity. I've never worked with you right but from everything I see and I've seen you on enough of these shows to know it must be fun working on you.

I can only imagine that it's fun working on your team. Right it like just let's just get s*** done, you know and and get out and do it. I I like being parts of things like that.

Leadership in the kind of leadership. You have helps an awful lot in dealing with these, you know Talent shortage. You want to call devops hiring problems, or what have you?

It Orin I wanted because I think like a tricentis for instance. I know a lot of folks. Gregory Right comes to mind which I sent.

It seems like a great person people want to work for us. um, oh, so this is a good word about they said this they're they're doing an amazing job. They waited testing recently joined was a crab.

Like I said this and one of the first thing that you do Did you care about the one thing is making sure checking? Who's who who's the leaders in that company? How do they convey all the things you just said do they give you the responsibility that you're looking for in the transition in the next step?

And those are super super important. It's you have to have those. Along your career path where where you want to focus on exciting and building new things that's never been done before.

I think everyone's are good people. They want to do great for Humanity in in shortening. The things that people are the tedious tasks that everyone has but you want to make sure that you have a organization that's building the right way.

that Tyler how do you account for leadership, you know within the dev landscape, you know within your world you're you know, how do you account for certain companies just have just a better leadership and the people want to work there. Okay itself. I think that on the surface the companies that are growing faster.

tend to have leadership that attracts the better Talent Right and then the better Talent contributes to that great product and ultimately they cause to grow faster and so it turns into a bit of a flywheel or you need to virtuous cycle, right? and the rich get richer or the the better get better and the parking and poorer just like so you could go. And the average stay average on that front so you can go into the landscape and one, you know, look look at it on that front as an investor.

I think we can we see it much more tangibly, you know, and you know, when I look at the you know companies that are growing the fastest in our portfolio like men IO and you goodbye, right, you know and you contrast that to the companies who aren't growing as fast in our portfolio, you know, you know, it is oftentimes comes down to the Quality leadership the environment that they create and their ability to attract a talent oftentimes, which is better than the founders themselves in and around that company in the technology. Yeah, I I vote Yes on that right? He's always looking to not be the smartest person at the table.

Hey guys, we're and now we're almost. at the you know the end of our time here, I wanted to give each of you a chance to Take a minute or two or three here and leave our audience with your final thoughts around this whole. Conundrum that we seem to be in as an industry Tyler.

I'm going to save you for last if it's okay. So if you want to gather your thoughts. Um charity.

I don't want to put you on the spot, but would you mind going first? Sure. big advocate of opening the Barn Door a little wider Yes, you have to manage people out more but you know give more people opportunities.

Let them show you what they can do when it comes to you know, the hiring problems in general. Like I don't think that our engineering leadership is spending nearly enough time on you know, optimizing the internal feedback loops that make teams really shine. You can't, you know, you can't you can't hire great people to fix a problem because you know, if you Engineers tend to their ability to ship code will rise or fall to the level of the teams within a couple Right.

If you hire a top performer from Google you can only but it takes you six hours to ship a line of code. They're not going to ship any faster than anyone else inside this ecosystem, right? So that's where the real Force multiplier is make it so that everyone can ship code swiftly safely and with a lot of visibility into what's going on and and that will unlock a lot of potential inside the team you have now.

Excellent. Thank you. Oh, and how about you?

I would add something and I haven't seen I've done this intestine, but I haven't seen it a lot and I would really recommend. people from the entire the development doesn't wear where even the developed the developer themselves. talk to customers like I think that technology at the bottom line needs to help and serve something then go.

There's one thing I know we're talking about. Working AI help. And there's one thing where I think AI is not easily helpful is making the developer understand what's going on right now with with the person that actually is using the product that he's building.

Um, so I encourage I encourage teams to have haven't you every developer Media customer once a month someone that's actually using their product just and they'll get to know and and you Okay, you got a little feedback there I think but okay Tyler. How about you? Hey, you know look.

as long as the demand for software is outstripping our ability to deliver it which has been kind of the case for 30 years. Now, you know, I think there's going to be a lot of amazing opportunities, you know for individuals to innovate for vendors to provide a new ways of for us to deliver, you know, construct and deliver and maintain these software systems and you know in generally I'm hopeful that you know will increasingly see, you know machines who can comprehend the complexity of these systems better than humans can in many ways, you know become an increasingly larger part of our of our life and and if you happen to be listening out there and you're an entrepreneur who's thinking about you know doing they yeah, please please come talk to me, you know, this is areas where I want to support it in many different ways. comment Great.

Mitchell I'm going to give you the last word here on this. Well, thank you. I just posted this into You know there I think the philosophy had developed.

It's interesting that we've gone from Ai and ml this is that the salt the solution to your shipping people watching. I think it's the real strategy. I always adopted.

Who I've come to the place where I've adopted that I really do believe there's greatness in all people and yes, occasionally, someone will disappoint you and that doesn't happen. But if you take that belief and you create an environment and opportunities for people to find and express that you will have a fantastic organization because 99% of the time people rise to the challenge and yes some don't and some are to fit and that's also part of part of leadership but it's getting out of the way by creating the environment and putting people where they can not only leverage their strengths but find what that next thing is as they grow and progress so You know, can we can we grow more developers? I don't think it's about growing more developers.

Right people will come into it or passionate about technology that they've really grown developed an interest in devops or testing or AIML. Whatever it is, they will excel those will be the people who really will you know, help us Advance this state of the art. That's where I am.

You're unmute now and you're immune. I was trying to kill any extra noise. I apologize Before We Say Goodbye.

I didn't mention at the top. We do give out four Amazon gift cards on every one of our webinars. And so if Cody if you want to Maybe you could say at the end or get me out a winners.

But before we do. Owen charity is always Tyler. Thanks for coming on.

It's a great discussion. This is the kind of thing you can talk about all day. Actually, it's one of you my mind actually it's one of the biggest.

issues we face You know within Tech and within it devops and development today. So thanks for everyone for attending. Cody if you want to announce the four winners and we'll wrap up.

Sure thing. So this is for 425 Amazon gift cards. Our first winner is pramod B.

Our second winner is Arlene M. Our third winner is Gerald W and our fourth and final winner is John M. So congratulations keep an eye on your inbox to claim your gift card.

And if you don't see that email just check your spam folder. Absolutely. Thanks Cody.

Hey everyone. Thanks, excuse me. Again special thanks to Trey sent this to sponsors for develop some down join us on our next devops on band on techstrong TV, and we'll be back here in another live Round Table in about a month until then though.

Be well charity. It's our pleasure to have you man. We crazy.

We love having you. Tyler great having you on Owen. We hope to see you back again as well soon.

Good luck everyone. It's Alan Shimmel. We're out.

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