Filling the Developer Skills Gap, with Abby Kearns and James Governor (Ep. 46)

Episode 33 · 46:11 · SRT · archive.org · all Tanzu Talk

Well, this week we have two guests on, so we'll see how long we can go with any amount of sanity here in the narrative thread. Usually we have one guest, and we know we barely keep a lid on that. Sorry, wait. Did you say any amount of profanity? Oh, no, no. I forget what I said, but I think it was a thread of sanity, which I guess rhymes with profanity. Oh, okay. I thought you had my number. Okay. Yes, yes. Profanity, sanity. There's probably a Latin root, the T-Y at the end there. Well, this is good material. So why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself, insane person? Oh, well, go ahead, Abby. Oh, I had to be the insane person. So my name is Abby Kearns, and I am the executive director at Cloud Foundry Foundation. And this is James Governor, one of the founders of RedMonk. And as always, this is your asleep at the microphone, MC Coté. And Richard, as always, the co-host, you actually put together this episode. This is a good idea that you assembled this together. Why don't you give us an introduction to what we're nominally together to talk about? Yeah, it's really just a festivist party together, but we'll also talk about tech, I guess. One of the things we wanted to chat about was something the Cloud Foundry Foundation put out end of October, beginning of November, about the developer skills gap. And it was a whole survey they ran identifying this coming shortage of developer skills. And I wrote up a good report, had some good data behind it. Pivotal had some input on that or some findings that we talked about with that as well. And then we just decided to reach out to people who would have good opinions on it. So Abby, of course, from the foundation who put together the survey, and James with lots of opinions on developers and how companies should be taking care of them. So we thought we'd pull together a good podcast and figure out, well, is there really a developer skills gap?

How do we do something about it? And what are those companies that have built good cultures, what are they able to do with developers that maybe others can't when they struggle to build an innovative environment? So I guess with that, actually, Abby, I wanted to start with you and just kind of quick ask, so why did you do this? Why did you run this survey? Did you have a hypothesis you were testing, or was it just a, let's ask a lot of people an interesting question? Well, the research did start with a hypothesis. Given all of these large organizations that are in the midst or initiating a digital transformation, we were curious how they were finding the skills and the talent to enable that shift to become much more software-centric companies. And anecdotally, I'd heard from several customers that they were having challenges finding and filling a pipeline. But I wanted to get a better data points around that and determine if that is actually the case, not just for Cloud Foundry users, but a broader range of users globally. And if so, what does that talent pool look like and what does retention look like for the talent pool they are able to pull in? From the findings, did, you know, the few things you all bubbled up around, I mean, specifically, the most in-demand skills were things like specific programming languages and databases. Things like continuous integration and 12-factor apps and microservices. Yeah, they were kind of at the bottom. So, did you get any findings that surprised you in this whole thing? Or did this kind of reinforce some of those anecdotes you had heard or some of those opinions? It reinforced most of the anecdotal narratives that I had heard. However, I guess what was surprising is I thought a lot of these organizations would be further along around the transformation piece. You know, having specific languages and databases ranked top in terms of what they were looking for and where things were with, you know, transformative skills at the bottom, 12-factor, microservices, CICD.

I guess I thought those would be higher up, but, you know, I am known to be a little overly optimistic around where we are in terms of the technology curve. So, that, to me, was really interesting to say that there are organizations that are trying to become software-centric, so they are hiring more developers with specific skills. But yet, they haven't prioritized, you know, basic continuous delivery practices at this time. Yeah. James, does that jive with all your developer time? Is that maybe where we often like to talk about some of these things, but that's way ahead? It does. Definitely, it does. I mean, although that said, you know, look, I mean, nobody considers themselves a, you know, continuous integration developer. You know, I guess there are some that would say they're an agile developer, but the language specificity is not entirely surprising. I mean, if you're talking to engineering people, they, you know, engineers can engineer. So, they do, you know, they don't want to be sort of bothered by all of that sort of process and kind of management hoopla. They want to just be like, oh, yeah, I'm doing my job. Now, obviously, over time, that job should increase testing as part of how they develop apps and so on. But the identification in terms of those skill sets shouldn't surprise us. You know, is there a skill shortage? No question about it. There's been a big shift in the last couple of years where it's kind of funny. I mean, it's sort of a bit of a hangover from that, you know, does IT matter kind of thing of what was actually a surprisingly long time ago when Nicholas Carr began to ask some questions about how we, you know, are you really going to get competitive advantage by licensing SAP or Oracle, ERP and financials? Probably not. But it turns out there is a world of competitive advantage that can be delivered through building apps and through focusing on user experience and through rethinking processes and through getting developers closer to the problems.

And, you know, if there are any number of businesses that we take advantage of every day doing this, you know, some make it easier to hail cabs, some make it easier to buy Christmas presents, you know. But overall, there is no doubt that investing in software engineering and development is something we're seeing a big shift around. So, one of the sort of the parts of that, I think, is the cloud we've outsourced. We used to outsource the wrong things. With the cloud, we kind of outsourced the infrastructure so that developers can get to work. And we're seeing a lot of reshoring. We're seeing enterprises. They want to hire people. We're seeing Citi is hiring people from Amazon. You know, we are seeing that sort of enterprises across the border, like, rut row, you know, we really do need to start investing in this stuff. And so, yeah, there is a premium on talent. And there aren't that many great people out there. So, honestly, we're definitely hearing this from our clients. We're definitely seeing it in the web natives, but increasingly the digital immigrants as well. And we expect it to get a lot worse. So, you know, along those lines, you know, being trying to be a little, I don't know, deserted firsty. So, Abby, when you read through the results of this, like, what do you synthesize, like, the plans are? Like, what do you see people, one, saying that they're going to do and should they do about it? Like, there's kind of scurrying around in there is this notion of you should train people more. And there's an interesting imbalance between management's perceptions of that and individuals. But, you know, to lead the witness a little bit there. But, like, what do you think organizations should start doing to meet both a skills gap, I guess, with existing people they have, and also an acquisition gap, I guess?

I don't know what you call hiring, other than hiring. Well, I think that was actually really interesting in the fact, you know, having been in technology nearly 20 years, I lived through the let's outsource solar development phase. And so, for me, it was really interesting to see that shift where training and retraining resources internally is ranked higher than outsourcing and even hiring. So, that's good. Because, at the end of the day, we aren't – if all of these large organizations are becoming new organizations, they're trying to develop new code and they're trying to become – they're trying to, you know, formally transform their organization, they aren't going to get all of that talent net new. So, there's going to have to be some hiring or some training and retraining of their existing people on how to become cloud native. So, that, to me, was super exciting to see that shift. What was also interesting is that there's a move from generalist to specialist, too. And I think that both of those are early indicator shifts in the trends, you know, to speak to hiring as well as retention is really allowing people to go deep and become experts, but also really training people and continuing to train and invest in education and enablement for the people that you do have. Yeah. I mean, when I go out and talk with large organizations, I think there is – I mean, I don't mean to sound insulting, but almost a shocking willingness of management to invest in their people. And so, it is – that is an optimistic – I don't know if I would call it a finding, but a trend that I've noticed is there is this belief that insourcing our people, so to speak, will be the best option. And therefore, if we're doing that, we're going to need to spend a lot of time training up their skills. And, you know, as a sort of, I don't know, sort of experiment in play thing, I've been following – I don't know what you would call it – the complaining about outsourcing for a couple years now because it comes up a lot in conversations I've had.

And I've noticed, James, that – I don't know why it is, maybe because they're just particularly chatty, but, you know, the people over in the U.K. government are very – there's a big conversation about outsourcing that they have. And so, you know, I'm curious, and I know you read through that stuff too, like what – do you think there's some sort of – because they're so transparent about it and talk about it, like what are some lessons that we could learn about IT outsourcing and the conversation, you know, that's been going on in the U.K. government? Oh, the main lesson is do not vote out the administration that was doing good work in that regard because if you do, they are going to mess things up. So, I mean, I think the U.K. did some great work. They were open-source design principles. They were definitely reshoring. They were, you know, causing a bit of a bias in the local market because they were one of the primary organizations that was hiring good people. I mean, historically, in the U.K., we didn't have as many kind of high-scale startups as in the States. So, you would see people cut their teeth at places like the BBC. Huge market, so highly scalable, and that's a place to work. You know, people working at The Guardian. Oh, you know, database journalism, again, fair amount of scale and so on. And then GDS, the Government Digital Service, came out, and they did a great job of helping us understand that you could kind of redefine how you did software delivery, where you weren't on the hook for, you know, nine billion pounds over three years to a consortium consisting of IBM, EDS, CSC, HP, Capita, and whoever else was, you know, siphoning all this money into their pockets and delivering very little value.

So, they sort of began to think about, okay, how do we, you know, do more development? They hired some great people. They came up with a great set of principles. But that requires a certain political imagination. And, you know, it's actually – I mean, I hate to say it. You know, this isn't about politics or anything because, you know, that's not what the show is about nominally. But there is no doubt that we're seeing a pushback. And under Theresa May, who shows a sort of a stunning lack of imagination, she seems to think that outsourcing is good. And we may see that a lot of that progress goes away. The lessons, however, are still relevant. Get developers closer to the problem. Lots and lots of focus in design. I mean, if nothing else, the key thing that we totally didn't do in the era of big outsourcing was give a – See what happens when you find a stranger in the album? – about design. So, focusing on design, user experience, getting closer to the customer, thinking about their needs, showing empathy. I mean, as an industry, we're doing that. I think in the UK, we got a bit ahead of the game, and now we're going to throw all that progress away. But, hey, you know, things could be worse. I don't know how. But, yeah, that was all good, right? So, along those lines – and I'm curious to hear, like, all of us talk with a large organization or any size organization that's looking to, as they say, transform. I always think it's great, all these phrases. We should do a whole podcast on what we call all this. But, you know, it seems like there's this big struggle. And you're kind of alluding to the negative ending of it, James. But there's this big struggle to think we do something some current way, and there's a new way that we should be doing things, right? Like, let's just call it cloud-native or whatever.

And it's better to do things that way. But everyone's very resistant to change for all manner of reasons. And in particular, with larger organizations, what's always a little hard for me to figure out is if you look at metrics for organizations that act in what I would call a more cloud-native way, where they've automated a tremendous amount of infrastructure, they focused on, like, the height of Agile development with a small batch mentality and lean and all this, you end up, it feels like, requiring a lot less people, standardizing infrastructure, saving costs, and, like, shipping things of higher quality more frequently. And yet everyone, like, wants to rest on older ways of doing things. And it's even more curious, like the example you were going through, James, when an organization has operated in a new way for several years, and then someone wants to revert back to an older way of doing things. So, you know, why is this relevant for the developer skills? Like, a lot of, I think what I read in this survey is, like, how do we get the individuals, it's not like the management skills survey, so to speak, but how do we get the individuals trained up and make sure that each individual can do that job? And I think you kind of see that with the sort of skill, the gaps and things that people have. But what I'm also curious about is how you convince the organizations to, like, shift over to doing a new way. And I don't know if it's because there's not enough, like, metrics and ROI stuff, or if they have to take this leap of faith. Like, that's kind of what I was thinking when you were talking about, like, design, right? Like, good design almost seems like a leap of faith that you want to accept it instead of, like, hard metrics or something. But, I mean, I guess that there's probably a question in there somewhere. But, like, you know, being the head of the… Competition. Competition is the key word. And I'll let someone else answer because I'm aware that I'm being monk chips. But I think some of it… I mean, look, the government doesn't have any competition, right? They did have some, but they don't now. So, they're like, oh, yeah, whatever. We don't need to worry about stuff. We'll just deliver some services. And, you know, oh, the Brexit will be fine.

Yeah, whatever. But if you're working for a Fortune 500 company, it's pretty scary out there. Funding for stuff is not easy to come by. You know, we're not seeing the traditional enterprises with the kinds of moats that we're seeing from some of the web companies that are emerging. And I think the whole sort of threat and opportunity posture has fundamentally changed. You know, I think, you know, that's the thing is that the UK government is hunkering down. They don't know what the opportunity is. They talked a lot about it in a referendum. And I'm so sorry to be going on the politics thing. This was not my intention. But you asked me about GDS, so… Yeah, like I said, they have a lot of, you know, they're, I think, one of the better documenters of trying to change the seemingly impossible aircraft carrier over. Yeah, the documentation is great. And I think we will all benefit from those lessons. But I think the Fortune 500, they're in the… Yippee-ki-yay, Mr. Falcon. You know? Like, what are you going to do? Like… I would say it's less… The more than… They have inertia. And change is hard, right? They're not in the… They're in the inertia. Yeah. They're in the inertia. And it's hard. You're asking… Many of these organizations are over 100 years old. There's a lot of momentum and inertia built up that it's hard to change. It's hard to make that shift. And a lot of the transformation initiatives start small and build on that and gain momentum. But that takes time. And it takes time. And you're fighting against decades of inertia that have built up processes and systems and behaviors that you're also trying to change at the same time. I mean, Abby, do you see… Sorry, I was going to ask you, Abby. If you see examples of where that inertia starts to finally break down, what are those wins? Like, what are those things you see sometimes where that light bulb does go off?

And it's harder to reverse because that momentum has now shifted towards a new way of working. It's not as easy as just a new VP comes in and says, let's forget this. Let's outsource. But there's clear business momentum. Have you seen kind of examples of that where, hey, that starting small turned into something bigger and everyone kind of got something? What was that something that clicked? Well, I think that something that clicks is being able to show real progress quickly. Coming up with either a mobile app or starting to develop and iterate on applications quickly and get those in the hands of customers and then getting that immediate feedback. I think when users see that and start to really feel that, then they feel like they're contributing, right? They feel like, okay, actually, I've done something. I haven't worked on this one project for two years only to finally see it come to fruition. I can now turn something around in a matter of weeks and get feedback on that. And I think everybody that works at every one of these companies wants to feel like they are contributing and contributing and being successful. And so, you know, I'm a firm believer that agile really helps show success and show success quickly. But the challenge is that there's all that inertia around you that you're still having to struggle through as you build on that and build that momentum. And I think it just takes longer to get that up at that level of that organization where all of a sudden thousands and thousands of people are now part of that momentum. And that, you know, along those lines, what I was curious to hear from you is, you know, being the head of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. There's one of the more interesting aspects of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. It's not just vendors like us at Pivotal who are involved. There's a lot of, I don't know what the jargon is nowadays, end users, people who are not selling software as their primary business, but instead using it to run their other business. And when you talk with the people who, like, walk through deciding to join the foundation, like, do you have any sort of, like, aggregated insights about what flips that switch in their head?

Because I feel like doing something like joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation is pretty far along the maturity of, like, thinking about IT in a highly cloud-native sort of way. Like, it seems like kind of an advance. I mean, you've got to talk to procurement for one thing. So you always need a good excuse to do that. I mean, I look for excuses and talk to procurement every day. I just, it's much fun. But, no, what's really interesting was when users want to join the foundation, it's what makes Cloud Foundry so amazing. It's because it's the open, it's open source, right? And so for even those commercial providers of Cloud Foundry, you know, there's still the open core aspect. And that's appealing. It's appealing for a lot of these companies that are transforming. They are, they now have the ability to not only decide their future and the roadmap, but contribute back to that. And that's really where it gets appealing with the open source aspect. I think about those users that are joining the foundation and are wanting to become contributors back into the code or, you know, have a say over the roadmap. But also, as I think about the special interest groups that we have and their ability to collaborate with other users that are also on this journey. And they're able to have those conversations in a forum where they can, you know, share on others' expertise around Cloud Foundry. But not just Cloud Foundry, but the enablement Cloud Foundry provides around digital transformation. And that becomes such a powerful opportunity for users that are struggling with not only a new technology, but a new way of doing business. And having that community really, for me, is the most exciting piece of Cloud Foundry. So, James, you write a lot about how Java is not dead for the 20th time. This is like a reoccurring theme. Java is going to die. And then you bring it back up. And I wonder, like, in your surveying, to go back to developers, I'm trying to wrest control of the agenda I totally subverted.

But, like, when you look at, like, the Java skills that people have as sort of, like, in, you know, when we look at the skills that this survey has gone over, there's, like, obviously databases are always a problem. But a lot of the things are sort of, like, process and architecture, like microservices and doing continuous integration and things like that. But, like, do you think people's Java skills are up to par or do you think that those need to be updated as well? Like, what's your experience with kind of the readiness for the future that Java skills are out there in enterprise-y land? Oh, no. I mean, this totally takes us back to the retraining thing. There is no doubt that, you know, there is a cadre of Java folks who are interested in other languages. They are interested in learning new things. Hey, perhaps they don't really work from 9 to 5. You know, they may get out and about. They might go to meetups and all of that good stuff. But, you know, that's certainly not everyone. There is a lot of retraining to be done, and that's on the individual, and it's also on their employers. So, I think from both sides. But, I mean, you know, there was a Java user community that I know, and someone recently wrote in, oh, I'm not really interested in joining your community, but I do want to find a back-end developer because they've got this great business idea, and we're going to build this app. My skills are great. I'm going to program in Swing, and I just need someone to do the back-end, and I'm going to come to your community to find somebody and then leave. You're like, hmm, okay. Well, you know, lots of things to unpack there, but that is someone that probably needs to take a step back and think about what their skills are and to think about, well, how they relate to humans,

continuous integration, what the world of app dev looks like today, what are the skills that you actually need. And, yeah, there's definitely a modernization. So, you know, we're already kind of seeing it from, and, hey, I'm not going to do the Pivotal ad because Pivotal's on, right? You guys make this advert every single day. So, I'll, you know, leave it for you to say what it is like selling to organizations that are building J2EE apps and so on. There's a lot of training to be done, and just, I think, rethinking how apps are and can be developed. There's no doubt that we are seeing, you know, a ton of areas where Java has continued relevance. I think it's up to, you know, employers to encourage their employees, but also just, you know, developers to think, well, actually, how can I improve my skills? And there's a ton of interesting stuff. I mean, Coté, you mentioned what GDS is doing. There is more observable opportunity there to learn from people that are doing amazing work than there ever was before. I mean, you know, the Internet is quite good if you want to learn new things. That's right. As I'm fond of telling people, yes, I read the Internet. There's plenty of things out there. Yeah, I mean, building on that, Sam, you just mentioned a few, James, but I guess for Abby to start with, when we think about how developers pick these skills up, and you listed a few. I mean, obviously, I can go on Stack Overflow or I can, you know, watch videos or what have you. I can attend meetups. I can attend sometimes free training, right? Cloud Foundry, open source, a bunch of Cloud Foundry training. That was great. So there's kind of traditional training, either in person or, you know, self-directed. There's things like meetups. There's all these really awesome postmortems and case studies. You see videos online from conferences and others like, hey, how we screwed up microservices, or how this company adopted DevOps, or how we developed, you know, new cloud-native apps. So tons of great stuff to learn that way.

But are you seeing a change in how companies think about education? And is it a mix of those things? Because just saying, hey, developers, get smart on your lunch hour does not seem like an investment in a talent strategy. So are you seeing a change in how some companies are thinking about training? Is it a mix of all those things? Well, I'll see. Oh, sorry. Sorry, go ahead, James. No, no. So the research that we did, you know, to go back to that report, showed that they were – there was an equal distribution of training of all kinds, be it lunch and learns, be it formal trainings, be it formal training and certification pass. There was an equal distribution across those, which, in my head, given the breadth of companies that were participating in that report, says that companies are attempting all levels. How – you know, because there is no one right path. You know, like you said, Richard, telling your developers on their lunchtime to go to Stack Overflow and learn how to, you know, resolve or architect cloud-native applications more effectively or solve for their security or compliance frameworks as they think about new application architectures, that isn't necessarily going to suit everyone. And I think everyone will also have a different aspect and a different way that they learn and a different gap between what they have right now and where they need to be. If you've just hired someone or you have someone that's pretty junior and has never actually done development at scale, then their on-ramp and their education is going to be very different from someone that's been doing it for 20 years and is just learning some finer aspects of a new language or a new way of deploying. Yeah, I mean, that's the – James, I want you to chime in in just a moment. But I think you also touch on something there that we see a ton and Coté, you see this too. I think the pairing is a great way when people actually learn new things. And pair programming is not for everybody, but I sit in a lab's office here in Seattle, and I do watch as that's a great way for people to learn new skills is to sit next to someone awesome who already has them.

And so it's not – again, it's not always the most scalable thing. I can't train 10,000 people that way. But it seems like that should absolutely be part of the arsenal of companies that are trying to change the inertia they have. But James, your thoughts on kind of the modern training portfolio? What's in the – what should these companies be using? Yeah, well, I mean, I certainly, you know, hope I wasn't just saying everybody should do everything on their own time. You know, we have said – and, you know, look, I mean, where did you – where did Pivotal Labs come from, you know? And why is there a Pivotal way? It's because you're doing a good job of transferring skills and helping people to fish and doing all of that kind of, you know, goodness. So, you know, I think that's the thing. I mean, I think there are not enough organizations that are well set up to retrain and help people reschool and everything else. But I think Abby mentioned something earlier in that age. I mean, let's not forget there are still 22-year-olds, 23-year-olds that are leaving college having done computer science that have learned Java. I mean, you know, languages in computer science sort of have quite a longevity. So, you know, that's the thing in terms of hiring them or bringing them into the organization and pairing them with people. I think that's an opportunity. But all in all, if organizations would be successful digitally, they do need to be constantly upping their game in terms of the skills and the platforms that they use. And so, you know, if you think that you can compete with web natives when all of your skills are 15 years out of date, good luck with that. Well, this brings up a topic to sway dangerously close to, as James says, political stuff again. But, you know, I'm wondering, like, there's always this idea of like a skill shortage or not a skill, a person shortage.

And, you know, there's a lot of like older developers out there. And I wonder if like in all of our anecdotal experience, like, like, are they are there enough of them or are they or is it truly like it'd be nice if I had some demographic data. But, you know, back when I was a developer, we also, you know, I was younger. We would always kind of poke fun at the older developers who wanted to do stuff and swing to modernize the thing there. And, you know, is there any like, I don't know, it seems like there's enough developers out there if you just train them. And there's definitely enough sort of like older ones set up in there. And I'm always trying to figure out, like, if they're more eager or resistant or maybe age has nothing to do with it. But I'm wondering, you know, if there's some way of slicing out this this population of the skills that are lacking by by that kind of demographic or if it's just completely invalid. Did you guys look at that in the survey at all, Abby? We didn't really and even looking at some of the the finer data points that we didn't expose in the survey didn't really go into to that level in terms of age. But I don't know, as an as an older person, I struggle with that concept that I'm I'm aging myself out of the ability to innovate. Yeah. But I will say I think one of the things that I personally believe in is that we in order for us to really say we're ever going to innovate, we need a diversity of thought around any table. And I would say that we need the same thing in the if we look at the entirety of the workforce, we need diversity and diversity is a lot of different things. Gender, socioeconomic age, you know, every attribute that you can possibly imagine are what's going to make all of us able to innovate and move technology for at a pace that realistically hasn't been here in the past 20, 30 years.

So I'm a big believer in that. And I'm also a big believer that there are things as new developers come into workforces are able to learn from older ones that are more experienced and have seen a lot of things. But then also the reverse is true is that I personally learn a lot from younger new people that are coming into organizations and thinking about things in a very different way and thinking about and looking at both the organization, the momentum, and then how I approach problem solving. So for me, I'd see that there are values to having both ends of that spectrum. I mean, it seems you're pointing out the value of, I mean, I don't know, maybe 10, 15 years ago, it was a lot about hard skills. And now there's a little more in soft skills, specifically willingness to learn. I mean, sheesh, I'm a political science major who became a developer. So, you know, it doesn't mean you have to come from one background or another. You just have to be willing to constantly disrupt yourself and learn new skills age-wise, whatever, wherever you came from. I mean, is that how we start to find more people in this pipeline is making sure it's not just saying, hey, have you built your own operating system? But, hey, do you think you want to pick this up? And is this exciting to you? I don't know. James, do you see that kind of the funnel opening when we look for more people with initiative versus just hard skills and background? Well, in general, we have been terrible at doing any hiring of people that did not look how we expected them to look. Silicon Valley is horrific at this. The worst, just, you know, Silicon Valley is so bad at this that, you know, it almost made them look good, that meeting in New York. No, so generally terrible. Enterprises, also terrible. And, you know, I noticed something really interesting, and I don't think everyone can be this. But, you know, there was this conversation about a pipeline problem.

Oh, there are not enough, you know, graduates or even people that are interested for us to hire. And then you're like, well, there seem to be an awful lot of black people and women that are actually quite interested in tech, and you're not talking to them in a way that is appealing. And you're not creating an organization that either encourages them to join or will sustain them in enjoying the company when they arrive. I think, you know, having just said how terrible Silicon Valley is at this, and I think I'll just say it again, terrible. One organization that has done this amazingly well is diversity baked in is Slack. So Slack have turned the, you know, so-called, you know, pipeline problem into a funnel. Like, it is well known that there are diverse cultures. You look at the picture, you're like, oh, my goodness, you know, that is great. That's a company that I, someone from a slightly different background from the norm in tech, would consider and be interested in joining. So, you know, I think that the pipeline problem is something that we need to reconsider. We've talked about people are going to invest in training. You're absolutely right, Richard. You know, we should be thinking about how do we get more people from a broader base interested in coding and kind of getting involved. And I do think that, yes, there is a skill shortage, but there is also a real kind of willpower shortage in terms of making the changes to be welcoming environments to work. And, you know, you all need to do better at this.

And, you know, I speak as somebody who, you know, Red Monk, you know, we hired Rachel Stevens as an analyst this year. And that was like, look at the massive growth in, you know, diversity at Red Monk. You know, I think that this is a challenge and we all need to do better. So, yeah, there are more people out there than we're giving credit for, I guess, is the simple answer to your question. Yeah, you're seeing, I mean, with that, I guess, you know, one of the pieces of the survey, Abby, was, hey, companies with good cultures don't seem to have as much of a hiring problem. Now, whether that's, it could be for all sorts of factors, but how does someone start to get there? So, even to James's point of, hey, building a more welcoming culture, do we have good case studies for companies that have gone from something that maybe was rough from either a diversity perspective or just not getting the right skills or what have you, starting to make the right changes? I'm trying to give a roadmap to some people who may listen here and go, yeah, that sounds like me. You know, we don't really have the sort of company culture that we love. We're not really attracting the right talent. That could be all for all sorts of reasons. Help me get to the next step. Do we feel like we've got some blueprints for those people? I don't know of any bullet prints off the top of my head, but I suspect an hour after this podcast ends, I will suddenly remember one. But I would say that, you know, going back to the report and the point you just made, Richard, is we did show that there was marginally better in terms of hiring and retaining talent for those companies that were further along the cloud-native lifecycle, that were already taking advantage of cloud-native application architectures and microservices and, you know, the other attributes of a digitally transforming organization. And one of the hypotheses, and James, I'll credit the conversation with you about this report to really igniting that thought,

is that these companies tended to be less risk-averse. So they were more apt to take risk, more apt to invest in new technologies. And for me, the culture follows that. You know, if you're interested in moving forward as an organization, you're interested in continuing to not only innovate, but also listen to your people and follow along with that, then the culture is going to come with that as well. You're going to really send a message that your organization is evolving and wants to continue to evolve. And to your earlier point, Richard, about the willingness to change both, I feel like that is a company ideal as well as a hiring ideal of people. In fact, if I were to rank, you know, the top five things that I would look for when hiring someone new, I would say the very first one would be the willingness to change. Because right now, that is an indicator, are you going to be able to evolve with a changing climate and as well as the changing technology that's going on right now and the ability to go with that flow? So, I just want to mention Slack. ThoughtWorks have done a phenomenal job of this in terms of bringing the culture around to making it, you know, I would say more diverse. And, you know, that comes from your hiring, you know, making sure that, you know, it's certainly never a bad idea to have a CTO that's a woman if you want to be more inspiring as an organization. There's a great company called Moo that does these funky business cards here in London. They've done a great job of this. The aforementioned GDS did a great job of improving their bona fides around diversity. So, there are just a few.

I had the chance to think about it while Abby was talking. But we can – Abby will think of some more and we can add them like in text at the end because I think those are the leaders that we really need to follow. Podcast agility. Well, there will just be a slight delay as I write the notes. So, that will be plenty of time for Abby to get her searing insights and then for James to remember to email me his URLs. It will be great. We'll be able to add all that. So, just – I think one last question that for – I mean maybe for all of us but definitely for Abby and James. I think like – so, looking at this survey like – and we'll start with Abby. But what do you think would be the next survey that gets done whether it's done by the foundation or not? Like what would be good – maybe not exact follow-on questions but something that would kind of like complete out the advice for how you should think about your people. Your people and your organization. Like what do you think some good follow-on topics and questions would be that, you know, maybe you didn't get to answer this time or you want to drill more into next time. How old are you? How old are you? Yes. How old are you? How long have you been in tech? But, I mean, more than that, I think it's just time series data is also really telling. So, oftentimes asking the same exact questions over a period of time gives more insight than asking new questions because you don't have that history and that context. You know, really trying to see those – you know, we made a lot of hypotheses with this report. You know, okay, so companies that are more digitally savvy or are more further down the cloud-native path or are having an easier time with hiring people or retaining talent. It would be great to see if that hypothesis plays out in six months, right? Are those people still having that – are they having new challenges or is that proving out and that they're actually moving further and further ahead? And just for me, time series is way more telling and being able to look at over a six-month span, what's changed, what's proven out to be true, and then, you know, maybe after that, are there additional questions we should ask based on that time-over-time look?

That makes sense. How about yourself, James, other than age? So, yeah, age, you know, clearly, Abby's committed to, you know, doing better on or trying to help us all do better on diversity. So, you know, maybe those are some opportunities. I'm interested personally. Yeah, there you go. So, you know, I think that having looked at the survey, you know, those are the right sorts of questions to ask. What are the skills you need in order to develop better software? And I guess I would just agree on, you know, that the value then becomes, you know, what is the time series? What changes over time? Yeah, you know, and I guess the final thing, you know, that this skills-based sort of does changes or does change over time. You know, the transition, what are the new skills that you have learned? Are they to do with data? What are the new skills? Which, again, brings us more into that kind of time series question. Yeah. So, yeah, diversity and newer skills. Yeah, no, that's good. And it's a great segue into my wrapping up, which is I'm glad we had you two on because we actually, most of the topics we've talked about, I wasn't even thinking about when I was trying to come up with stuff to talk about, to say the word about a lot. So, I think it's nice to get some other people on here. I mean, Richard's fantastic. Don't get me wrong. Always a font of fantasticness and interesting. But, yeah, no, I think we wheedled our way into a pretty interesting place with this. So, thanks for being on. I appreciate it. And with that, this has been another Pivotal Conversations podcast. If you want to find the podcasts we have as quickly as they're available, obviously what you should do is subscribe.

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