1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:04,540 Well, my audio quality this week isn't too great because I'm here in London 2 00:00:04,540 --> 00:00:09,440 where mysteriously it's very sunny and like perfect weather. 3 00:00:10,180 --> 00:00:12,580 People are wearing shorts, things like that. 4 00:00:12,820 --> 00:00:15,640 But I have a really nice microphone that I used to use, 5 00:00:15,720 --> 00:00:18,040 but I don't have a tripod for it. 6 00:00:18,040 --> 00:00:21,420 And I tried holding it, but that doesn't really work. 7 00:00:21,860 --> 00:00:28,540 And you know how you're going on a family vacation. 8 00:00:28,680 --> 00:00:31,260 You think like, oh, I'm going to use my fancy work backpack. 9 00:00:31,940 --> 00:00:32,760 What could go wrong? 10 00:00:33,100 --> 00:00:35,240 And so you take all your work junk out of the backpack. 11 00:00:35,840 --> 00:00:39,060 And then, of course, you only pack your bag like 30 minutes before you need to leave. 12 00:00:39,480 --> 00:00:43,880 So you're repacking all your stuff, and then you forget to put the tripod back in. 13 00:00:43,880 --> 00:00:49,520 You don't want to take all that weight of a tripod, your special mic tripod. 14 00:00:50,020 --> 00:00:53,880 So that's the problems we're having over here in London. 15 00:00:55,940 --> 00:00:57,600 You'll make it, though. Stay strong. 16 00:00:58,220 --> 00:00:59,200 That's right. That's right. 17 00:00:59,340 --> 00:01:03,920 I might need to have a redundant backpack for family things. 18 00:01:07,060 --> 00:01:11,160 Well, we have a, I think, a thrice, if that's the right word, returning guest. 19 00:01:11,380 --> 00:01:12,400 You want to introduce yourself? 20 00:01:13,440 --> 00:01:14,520 Hey, everybody. 21 00:01:14,660 --> 00:01:19,120 This is Joe Milotelo and part of the people function here at Pivotal. 22 00:01:20,020 --> 00:01:20,720 That's right. 23 00:01:20,980 --> 00:01:22,040 Well, thanks for being on. 24 00:01:22,080 --> 00:01:26,700 We've had a lot going on since last we talked, so we'll have to see what's going on. 25 00:01:27,200 --> 00:01:40,440 Not only like a pivotal HR land or people land, as it were, but I think it's always interesting to see how the stuff that we are figuring out, how it equally applies to the customers and types of people we work with. 26 00:01:40,440 --> 00:01:52,080 Like I think in the past we've talked about, if you have these product or agile teams or whatever you want to call them, that's a whole lot of people policy and issue to deal with and all sorts of interesting things come up. 27 00:01:52,280 --> 00:01:56,560 So we'll see what we end up talking about this episode. 28 00:01:57,100 --> 00:02:00,140 But first of all, as always, we have a few little news items. 29 00:02:01,060 --> 00:02:09,960 How about, you know, I was looking at the sort of like little three items we picked in here, Richard, and I was thinking, you know, a lot of it. 30 00:02:10,300 --> 00:02:17,600 It reminded me of one that was related, which, well, in my mind was related, which was Stephen O'Grady over at Red Monk. 31 00:02:17,600 --> 00:02:26,840 Like he wrote his sort of, I don't know if it's annual, but whatever a variable perennial is, I think some desert plants are like this. 32 00:02:26,900 --> 00:02:28,640 You just never really know when they're going to flower. 33 00:02:29,420 --> 00:02:35,100 But what's up with open source nowadays? 34 00:02:35,760 --> 00:02:40,860 And I think related to the two things, you know, as you have here, you know, there's a Redis service, 35 00:02:40,860 --> 00:02:47,680 and we can talk about these more from Google and a Kafka service that Microsoft has in Azure. 36 00:02:48,060 --> 00:02:56,520 And he was going over the kind of what does open source mean in a public cloud sort of mentality of doing things, 37 00:02:57,120 --> 00:03:00,540 which I think is always an interesting topic to get to. 38 00:03:00,600 --> 00:03:06,460 I think his summary was basically like a lot of public cloud people work on open source. 39 00:03:06,460 --> 00:03:07,480 So we're cool there. 40 00:03:07,840 --> 00:03:11,260 There's not like people who are, what do you call it, free writing. 41 00:03:12,120 --> 00:03:18,980 But then there's also the, and this is a little bit more of me reading into it, but there's also, I don't know, 42 00:03:19,060 --> 00:03:22,040 people don't really mind closed source things so much anymore. 43 00:03:22,660 --> 00:03:26,880 If they are run for them as a public cloud thing. 44 00:03:27,440 --> 00:03:32,040 Like, I don't, I don't know if there's that much hand wringing and freaking out about it. 45 00:03:32,620 --> 00:03:39,960 Yeah, I go to where I got to sit and watch our own Josh McKenty and Microsoft Distinguished Engineer, 46 00:03:40,100 --> 00:03:42,580 Uli Holman, last week do a presentation for a customer. 47 00:03:42,740 --> 00:03:47,580 And they've got a talk track, and I guess, pivotal plug, they have a webinar at the end of May on kind of, 48 00:03:47,640 --> 00:03:49,040 as they talk about cloud portability. 49 00:03:49,460 --> 00:03:53,740 And one of the things they talk about is a lot of these things depend on where you are in the app lifecycle. 50 00:03:53,900 --> 00:03:57,200 Like, if I'm crazy innovating right now, I don't really care about lock-in too much. 51 00:03:57,240 --> 00:03:58,040 I'm just trying to experiment. 52 00:03:58,400 --> 00:03:59,400 I'm trying to learn stuff. 53 00:03:59,740 --> 00:04:05,960 And then as I mature my application, maybe I do care more about bringing it back on-prem or moving it between clouds. 54 00:04:06,280 --> 00:04:10,120 Then maybe I stop using that proprietary database and I use something more open source. 55 00:04:10,240 --> 00:04:12,520 So it's not even just like open or closed. 56 00:04:12,580 --> 00:04:16,100 Sometimes it's just where are you in kind of the learning cycle for an app. 57 00:04:16,100 --> 00:04:21,460 And that might also dictate whether I care that this thing is hyper-specific to Amazon or Azure or whatever, 58 00:04:21,980 --> 00:04:25,260 versus, hey, it's a generic database or everything looks like Kafka. 59 00:04:25,760 --> 00:04:26,200 So I don't know. 60 00:04:26,240 --> 00:04:27,520 I think that's an interesting hypothesis. 61 00:04:27,760 --> 00:04:29,360 It seems, I don't know, I can buy that. 62 00:04:30,600 --> 00:04:31,180 Yeah, yeah. 63 00:04:31,380 --> 00:04:40,360 I mean, definitely, to use Elon Musk terminology and Kubernetes terminology like open source is boring. 64 00:04:41,360 --> 00:04:46,140 Which is to say it's like part of the way things are done nowadays. 65 00:04:46,600 --> 00:04:50,020 So there's not a lot of controversy about it as a sort of means of production. 66 00:04:50,540 --> 00:04:52,880 And so you're bringing up, go ahead. 67 00:04:53,200 --> 00:04:58,580 I would say Google, I mean, to the point you raised, Google and Microsoft are surprisingly two of the best at this. 68 00:04:58,700 --> 00:05:02,580 I mean, their new Redis service from Google, now everyone seems to be running hosted Redis. 69 00:05:02,740 --> 00:05:12,720 And, you know, Microsoft adding this sort of Kafka looking head on top of event hubs means, look, I can use my existing Kafka stuff and just repoint it at Azure event hubs. 70 00:05:12,880 --> 00:05:17,120 They've done the same with Cosmos DB, which can look like Cassandra, can look like MongoDB. 71 00:05:17,400 --> 00:05:27,360 So sometimes it's interesting, even if the service is proprietary, you can at least put a head on it that looks like the open source interface so that I can make it more portable, not feel the same sense of lock-in. 72 00:05:27,460 --> 00:05:30,460 So that's an interesting paradigm as well that maybe becomes more popular. 73 00:05:31,560 --> 00:05:35,780 And in this context, I've never really heard the term head in this context. 74 00:05:35,880 --> 00:05:37,540 Is that like an API? 75 00:05:38,980 --> 00:05:39,380 Yeah. 76 00:05:39,580 --> 00:05:40,640 I mean, in essence, right. 77 00:05:40,680 --> 00:05:45,360 It's kind of a Kafka interface, if you will, or, you know, head is one way you can refer to it. 78 00:05:45,360 --> 00:05:49,880 But, yeah, it's an API on top of it that at least mimics the thing you think you're talking to. 79 00:05:50,860 --> 00:05:56,080 And then so is the idea that the implementation behind it can or is different or something? 80 00:05:56,280 --> 00:05:57,100 Or how does that? 81 00:05:57,860 --> 00:06:01,160 Like Azure event hubs has no equivalent anywhere else. 82 00:06:01,220 --> 00:06:02,880 It's a proprietary Microsoft service. 83 00:06:02,980 --> 00:06:10,080 But by making it look like or fake a Kafka interface, I can still use Spring Cloud Stream or I could use all these other things that talk Kafka. 84 00:06:10,580 --> 00:06:11,720 Now, it's not fully featured. 85 00:06:11,840 --> 00:06:13,380 It doesn't support everything Kafka does. 86 00:06:13,380 --> 00:06:19,480 But the idea is, hey, if I want a hosted version, this can kind of do it with no code changes besides a connection string. 87 00:06:20,160 --> 00:06:20,820 That's kind of neat. 88 00:06:21,120 --> 00:06:23,780 Or same with MongoDB or Cassandra for Cosmos DB. 89 00:06:23,960 --> 00:06:28,600 So that's an interesting trend of saying, look, we're going to keep our proprietary interface underneath the covers. 90 00:06:28,960 --> 00:06:34,960 But we're going to put more of an open source, if you will, API on it so that your common tooling and things like that work fine. 91 00:06:36,000 --> 00:06:36,540 Yeah, yeah. 92 00:06:36,740 --> 00:06:37,460 It's interesting. 93 00:06:38,160 --> 00:06:40,620 Because, I mean, it's, yeah. 94 00:06:40,620 --> 00:06:41,200 Best of all, well. 95 00:06:41,780 --> 00:06:43,680 And I guess everyone's cool with that. 96 00:06:43,740 --> 00:06:51,200 Like, it doesn't get you some weird Oracle, like Google strange territory of the copyright of the API. 97 00:06:52,740 --> 00:06:54,600 Well, that's a whole other question. 98 00:06:54,700 --> 00:06:58,900 But I think for the time being, I think you're cool with it as long as it's a wide enough API surface. 99 00:06:58,900 --> 00:07:03,000 Like, right now, the Event Hub's one that supports Kafka only supports the bare minimum. 100 00:07:03,440 --> 00:07:08,680 So if you're trying to do, like, legitimate Kafka stuff and you're doing more sophisticated things right now, you couldn't. 101 00:07:08,680 --> 00:07:15,440 So I think what's going to be interesting is how much is enough when you do these sort of pretend interfaces on top of proprietary platform. 102 00:07:16,140 --> 00:07:16,620 Yeah, yeah. 103 00:07:16,880 --> 00:07:19,300 Yeah, and I guess depending on which license it has. 104 00:07:19,380 --> 00:07:30,460 I mean, if it's, like, MIT or Apache or whatever the kids use nowadays, like, you can write your own implementation behind it and not have to open source all of that. 105 00:07:30,740 --> 00:07:35,560 So that's completely within the realm of the games, if you will. 106 00:07:36,160 --> 00:07:36,860 Yeah, it's neat stuff. 107 00:07:36,980 --> 00:07:38,900 Of what people are doing. 108 00:07:39,240 --> 00:07:39,420 Yeah. 109 00:07:39,560 --> 00:07:40,360 That makes sense. 110 00:07:40,760 --> 00:07:41,400 Yeah, that's interesting. 111 00:07:41,620 --> 00:07:44,760 And then there's a Vita service from Google, as we're mentioning. 112 00:07:45,460 --> 00:07:45,700 Right. 113 00:07:45,960 --> 00:07:46,200 Yeah. 114 00:07:46,280 --> 00:07:48,900 I mean, everyone, I think we talked about this a few months ago. 115 00:07:48,960 --> 00:07:51,000 Everyone seemed to be having Postgres services. 116 00:07:51,240 --> 00:07:53,880 So Azure does and Amazon does and GCP does. 117 00:07:54,040 --> 00:07:56,900 And now everyone does Redis as well because apparently that's just the new. 118 00:07:57,240 --> 00:07:58,260 And it's been around for a while. 119 00:07:58,320 --> 00:07:59,160 It's crazy popular. 120 00:07:59,160 --> 00:08:08,020 But now this idea of hosted service for this, it handles some of the resilience because typically sometimes this is just a single instance cache. 121 00:08:08,100 --> 00:08:11,180 But you do want to scale it out for geo redundancy and things like that. 122 00:08:11,240 --> 00:08:13,140 So having a provider do that for you. 123 00:08:13,220 --> 00:08:15,600 And, of course, Pivotal sells a Redis service. 124 00:08:15,700 --> 00:08:17,800 And we work with Redis Labs, who does a great job. 125 00:08:17,860 --> 00:08:19,420 And we have Pivotal Cloud Cache. 126 00:08:19,480 --> 00:08:24,120 So all these sort of caching solutions seem to be having a, I don't know, a bit of a resurgence, it seems like. 127 00:08:25,180 --> 00:08:25,580 Yeah. 128 00:08:25,640 --> 00:08:34,040 And I was noticing in the blog post, as you were doing, they sort of list off all the, as we would say, day two problems that you have. 129 00:08:34,040 --> 00:08:44,960 Actually operating and running it, which it'll be interesting to see if, as these things happen more and more, if the, you know, almost the default developer mentality. 130 00:08:45,140 --> 00:08:51,740 I mean, there's a reason we've called out day two stuff for so many years is developers don't really think about that so much. 131 00:08:52,180 --> 00:09:01,260 And so, you know, people like Google and others, public cloud services have a pretty big, what would you call it, thought leadership voice. 132 00:09:01,680 --> 00:09:05,460 I mean, you can see that with the rise of Kubernetes and all sorts of other things. 133 00:09:05,460 --> 00:09:16,940 But it'd be interesting, it'll be interesting to see if people take on that mentality, if developers take on that mentality of like, oh man, running this stuff is a hassle and not something I want to concern myself with. 134 00:09:17,460 --> 00:09:26,200 Whereas I think nowadays, I mean, I was even thinking, you know, that I should go over to Hacker News and see how many people were like, I don't see what the big deal is. 135 00:09:26,240 --> 00:09:29,960 I could just run this on my own with like R-Sync or like some nonsense. 136 00:09:29,960 --> 00:09:33,940 Yeah, it was, I think, yeah, it was pretty positive. 137 00:09:37,080 --> 00:09:40,560 Yeah, but then I thought like, oh, I have some work to do, so I'm not going to do that. 138 00:09:40,780 --> 00:09:49,640 But, you know, it seems like that's, it'll be fun to see if that sentiment shifts to like, it's better to have someone else run this stuff than us worry about it. 139 00:09:49,900 --> 00:09:58,020 And then also, I was going to say, I'd only say I contend, and you've talked about this a bit with your DevOps talk track as well, as well as, 140 00:09:58,020 --> 00:10:04,640 I think to some extent that let me just run it myself has come from the fact that having someone else run it internally has been such a pain in the neck. 141 00:10:05,160 --> 00:10:08,240 So, it's not that it's hard, it's just that it's painful. 142 00:10:08,420 --> 00:10:17,620 So, I think people have been taking it on themselves, and if it's easier to run it to the platform, or you do have an ops team that actually works with you versus is hostile, I don't think you want to run this stuff. 143 00:10:18,000 --> 00:10:23,440 So, hopefully this transformation of just making ops better with dev solves it regardless of cloud. 144 00:10:24,220 --> 00:10:25,460 Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. 145 00:10:25,660 --> 00:10:35,140 I also figure there's like, you know, thinking back to my, I don't know if you were this way, maybe you grew up being a Microsoft programmer and they always seem somehow more responsible. 146 00:10:37,160 --> 00:10:38,440 Yeah, no comment there. 147 00:10:39,680 --> 00:10:49,040 You know, me and all my friends in our 20s, me and all my other friends when we were in our 20s, I think it was considered the height of maturity to like write all your own stuff. 148 00:10:49,440 --> 00:10:58,920 But sometimes there's also a, you know, you got to break a few eggs to be a mature enough programmer in your later decades and realize things. 149 00:10:59,480 --> 00:11:14,640 So, also, you know, when it comes to the running things, we had a good write-up of how we at Pivotal, and I don't mean to put myself in that set of people, but some of my fellow Pivotal people, they were detailing how they ended up saving, like, what was the total? 150 00:11:14,820 --> 00:11:16,780 It was quite a bit of money. 151 00:11:16,980 --> 00:11:20,060 Yeah, it was like $675,000 a year projected. 152 00:11:20,800 --> 00:11:21,020 Yeah. 153 00:11:22,120 --> 00:11:32,020 Yeah, just by sort of tweaking the way that they were running their build environments and their test environments, because it runs on Google Cloud, if I remember correctly. 154 00:11:32,520 --> 00:11:42,600 And I don't know, I mean, there was some, like so many of these great things, it seems mildly obvious once you go through it, but it's probably not, it's like all common sense. 155 00:11:42,800 --> 00:11:45,500 It's common because it's uncommon for people to do it. 156 00:11:45,760 --> 00:11:50,780 And I don't know, there were delightful little things like, we should probably not run it over the weekend. 157 00:11:52,460 --> 00:12:08,220 And just other things of, you know, I think the thing that as they wrote up, which was most challenging, was we need to enforce that, like build times are much shorter, and that at most, to do a full build and test, it should take like five hours. 158 00:12:08,220 --> 00:12:09,140 It's like the maximum. 159 00:12:09,680 --> 00:12:16,100 And it is like having those things in there, you know, brought down their bill by a significant amount. 160 00:12:16,300 --> 00:12:33,160 And it's, I've been, another thing I've been curiously tracking is like, how, how is sort of like micromanaging that kind of costing affecting how development teams think about what they do? 161 00:12:33,160 --> 00:12:42,820 Because sort of like in the past, or the present for many people, you don't really think about the cost of things as a development team very much. 162 00:12:42,940 --> 00:12:50,300 It's almost like you pay a flat rate for something, and you might have to wait forever, but you don't really like get the chance to optimize on cost. 163 00:12:50,300 --> 00:12:59,620 So this is an example of like, not even in production, how you would optimize on cost, but it could be all sorts of interesting things that you do to drive your, your costs down. 164 00:13:00,060 --> 00:13:00,420 No doubt. 165 00:13:00,500 --> 00:13:10,300 I mean, we talked about this, I think on the podcast, if not, somehow offline, but I think there was a, it was a Forrester study, or someone recently showed that still like half of organizations aren't really managing their cloud spend. 166 00:13:10,440 --> 00:13:21,940 And so some of this lends me to think that again, as you described, sometimes it's just this feeling of let's just build stuff and eventually a janitor comes and cleans out our old stuff and, you know, hey, we're just kind of learning. 167 00:13:22,160 --> 00:13:26,940 So we're just kind of sprawling things out there, which from a security perspective is risky in its own way, ignore cost. 168 00:13:27,320 --> 00:13:32,520 But this idea of if it's easy to get compute resources, it's easy to give them up. 169 00:13:32,640 --> 00:13:40,120 And I like this model of like, yeah, in this article, hey, we blow away build environments every day and test environments, because you're just going to recreate them the next day. 170 00:13:40,120 --> 00:13:40,980 Why keep them running? 171 00:13:41,100 --> 00:13:43,720 And these are, as you say, very common sense things. 172 00:13:43,820 --> 00:13:45,540 I just don't suspect most are doing it. 173 00:13:45,560 --> 00:13:50,460 But the cost savings on even Google Cloud, which is really cheap for us in the scheme of things, was significant. 174 00:13:50,720 --> 00:13:51,820 So I think that's pretty cool. 175 00:13:52,660 --> 00:13:52,860 Yeah. 176 00:13:53,080 --> 00:13:53,360 Yeah. 177 00:13:53,500 --> 00:13:59,360 The reoccurring theme in our news items is if you, if you make resources hard to get, they're more expensive. 178 00:13:59,620 --> 00:14:01,160 I guess that's basic economics. 179 00:14:01,940 --> 00:14:09,640 You think so, but that's one reason right now I am writing a white paper on how you can use AWS spot instances under, under PCF. 180 00:14:09,640 --> 00:14:12,200 And what does it mean to really manage your compute like a market? 181 00:14:12,200 --> 00:14:14,660 And how does the platform actually help you do that? 182 00:14:15,000 --> 00:14:21,460 That if you do take a proactive stance, I mean, this can mean significant amounts of money, probably enough to pay your bonus, just barely, Coté. 183 00:14:21,540 --> 00:14:22,660 So this is important money. 184 00:14:23,340 --> 00:14:23,600 Whoa. 185 00:14:23,980 --> 00:14:24,500 I need to go. 186 00:14:24,720 --> 00:14:25,720 Did I get a raise? 187 00:14:25,780 --> 00:14:26,820 I need to go check this out. 188 00:14:27,000 --> 00:14:27,300 No, no. 189 00:14:27,340 --> 00:14:28,140 Joe's on the line. 190 00:14:28,240 --> 00:14:30,320 So I'm just going to make a Valerie-related joke. 191 00:14:30,780 --> 00:14:32,580 You may want to talk to somebody in HR about that. 192 00:14:33,180 --> 00:14:33,940 There you go. 193 00:14:35,840 --> 00:14:37,500 That was a good transition. 194 00:14:37,920 --> 00:14:40,480 Yeah, you know, that's perfect. 195 00:14:41,380 --> 00:14:48,420 Just one more thing before we go to that, because this brings to mind, I forget what I was listening to, but maybe we'll set this up for a topic for some other time. 196 00:14:48,460 --> 00:14:54,540 You know, speaking of basic economic principles, you know, there's sort of like the, what's the guy's name, Ricardo or something? 197 00:14:55,020 --> 00:14:57,440 And he's the person, I forget what it's called. 198 00:14:57,520 --> 00:14:59,880 It's like, it's not competitive advantage. 199 00:14:59,960 --> 00:15:02,220 That's Michael Porter, but it's some other competitive thing. 200 00:15:02,240 --> 00:15:05,980 And it's basically like, you should only do the thing you're best at. 201 00:15:05,980 --> 00:15:12,720 And the example in like the 1600s or whatever he came up with is like, the English are really good at making wool. 202 00:15:13,200 --> 00:15:15,660 And they can make port, but they're not very good at it. 203 00:15:15,660 --> 00:15:17,520 Whereas the Portuguese are good at making port. 204 00:15:17,740 --> 00:15:19,520 So the English should not make port. 205 00:15:19,700 --> 00:15:21,560 And then they'll just trade the wool to the port. 206 00:15:21,660 --> 00:15:22,680 And somehow that's better. 207 00:15:23,240 --> 00:15:28,080 And like, I've never, like, I need a chart that kind of shows why that's better. 208 00:15:28,080 --> 00:15:30,620 Because it doesn't intuitively make sense. 209 00:15:30,620 --> 00:15:37,500 But I think it's the basic basis for like, like, all sorts of decision making, including not building your own platform. 210 00:15:37,680 --> 00:15:43,500 So when we do, when we do another revision of that DIY platform, we should have a special sideboard on wool and port. 211 00:15:44,040 --> 00:15:48,360 Man, people are going to be holding their breath till that podcast episode. 212 00:15:48,540 --> 00:15:49,260 I can, I can. 213 00:15:50,000 --> 00:15:55,620 So if anyone, if anyone knows, I think his name is Ricardo, like a good explanation of why that works. 214 00:15:55,680 --> 00:15:59,100 I don't want any like calculus or curves, because I don't know anything about that. 215 00:15:59,460 --> 00:16:02,800 But like just something they should write in, if they still write. 216 00:16:04,260 --> 00:16:06,240 Give me some education on that. 217 00:16:06,580 --> 00:16:08,480 So anyways, back to my compensation. 218 00:16:09,160 --> 00:16:10,520 Yeah, I think it's a better topic. 219 00:16:10,620 --> 00:16:11,080 That's clearly. 220 00:16:12,360 --> 00:16:21,100 So, so, so what I, you know, I think it's probably been at least like nine months, or maybe, maybe around that time since we talked last, Joe. 221 00:16:21,200 --> 00:16:24,320 Like what, has much been going on since then? 222 00:16:25,700 --> 00:16:33,820 Well, we can talk about this later, but since you brought up your salary, I can give an update on pay transparency and tell all your, all your listeners exactly how much you make. 223 00:16:34,280 --> 00:16:35,120 Oh, that'd be great. 224 00:16:35,480 --> 00:16:40,040 Yeah, we'll have 45 seconds of silence in this podcast episode once we wipe it out. 225 00:16:40,380 --> 00:16:40,700 Be good. 226 00:16:41,960 --> 00:16:45,260 We can, we can talk, we can talk about pay transparency later if you want. 227 00:16:45,520 --> 00:16:53,340 But yeah, I just, maybe just, you know, first to start off, just, you know, just saying thank you to all your listeners, right? 228 00:16:53,380 --> 00:17:07,180 I know you have, you know, a couple of pivots, you know, that listen to it and assuming some customers and partners, you know, I said, it's just been a real true team effort to get us to the IPO several weeks ago. 229 00:17:07,180 --> 00:17:25,300 So just a big thank you to everybody, you know, like I said, it was just a real true team effort over the last couple of years and building this company and getting it to a point, you know, where investors want to invest in it and, you know, see our customers and partners played a really big role in that. 230 00:17:25,400 --> 00:17:26,780 So just a big thank you to everybody. 231 00:17:28,660 --> 00:17:29,060 Yeah. 232 00:17:30,160 --> 00:17:42,160 And also maybe just one thing on that that may be interesting is I remember talking a couple years ago about, you know, IPO, because that seemed to be a question that came up at every town hall, right? 233 00:17:42,200 --> 00:17:43,280 It was, when are we going IPO? 234 00:17:44,420 --> 00:17:53,860 And the leadership team was really conscious about making sure that, you know, if we did go IPO someday, that it was just a milestone, right? 235 00:17:53,860 --> 00:17:55,840 And that we weren't going to let it define us. 236 00:17:55,900 --> 00:18:04,260 I think that even to some employees, you know, you know, you know, getting feedback where we weren't talking about it enough. 237 00:18:04,320 --> 00:18:05,760 And that was all by design, right? 238 00:18:05,760 --> 00:18:11,120 We wanted to make sure that, you know, if it did happen, it was just a milestone. 239 00:18:11,460 --> 00:18:15,220 But the next day, right, you know, our mission and our vision, you know, continue. 240 00:18:15,480 --> 00:18:22,340 And I remember, you know, the leadership team got together at the end of that Friday and we were talking about, well, we'll see you on Monday. 241 00:18:23,100 --> 00:18:28,640 And that see you on Monday was really a, hey, today was great, but the real work, real work continues. 242 00:18:29,540 --> 00:18:30,300 Yeah, I like that. 243 00:18:31,740 --> 00:18:32,680 I thought that was a good message. 244 00:18:39,420 --> 00:18:39,780 Good. 245 00:18:39,780 --> 00:18:45,380 So what else is, new in HR in general, what else changes, Joe, as a public company? 246 00:18:45,480 --> 00:18:46,420 I mean, for us, it's new. 247 00:18:46,860 --> 00:18:50,560 So, I mean, in your world, does something have to operate differently? 248 00:18:50,680 --> 00:18:51,500 Do we think differently? 249 00:18:51,640 --> 00:18:53,080 How do you think about HR differently? 250 00:18:53,160 --> 00:18:56,700 Did you have a meeting that Monday morning going, all right, team, everything's different now? 251 00:18:57,000 --> 00:18:58,100 Or was it business as usual? 252 00:18:58,560 --> 00:19:01,640 Yeah, and it kind of goes back to the kind of the milestone, right? 253 00:19:01,680 --> 00:19:06,060 It was, you know, at some level, you know, business as usual. 254 00:19:07,320 --> 00:19:17,020 You know, we've been practicing at some level of being a public company for quite some time, right? 255 00:19:17,040 --> 00:19:22,420 So if you think about the last couple of years, just in terms of, you know, how focused we are on a quarterly basis. 256 00:19:23,360 --> 00:19:38,820 You know, think about from maybe a people in a G&A perspective, you know, we've been putting infrastructure in place, you know, for the last couple of years so that, you know, if and when we did go IPO, by and large, not much, you know, has changed. 257 00:19:39,240 --> 00:19:47,760 And, you know, with the people team, really, our focus has been and continues to be is, you know, how do we make, you know, Pivotal continue to go fast? 258 00:19:48,600 --> 00:20:03,700 And so that's really where our focus is, is really continuing to just keep doing what we were doing, continue to learn and get feedback from, you know, from all the employees on what they need from us in order to help them, you know, be more successful. 259 00:20:03,700 --> 00:20:16,700 You know, I think there may be some misconceptions that, you know, when you go public, right, you got to put in all these processes and all these policies and maybe that, you know, will choke, you know, innovation. 260 00:20:18,520 --> 00:20:23,620 And yeah, obviously, you know, as a public company, there's a couple more rules that we need to follow. 261 00:20:24,240 --> 00:20:30,580 But, you know, we're not focused on, you know, putting things in place just for the sake of putting things in place. 262 00:20:30,580 --> 00:20:40,480 We're very, you know, conscious about, you know, what we do and how we do it to make sure that, you know, we're helping, you know, the field teams, you know, take care of customers. 263 00:20:40,480 --> 00:20:45,440 And we're helping the R&D and engineering teams, you know, build great product. 264 00:20:45,640 --> 00:20:49,900 You know, that's where our focus is, not about trying to slow things down. 265 00:20:49,900 --> 00:21:00,560 So more on that, like, I mean, I don't know, maybe this is more in like the finance area, but are there like different sort of regulations that need to be put in place for a public company? 266 00:21:00,720 --> 00:21:11,860 And more specifically, I mean, obviously, there's, there's some and things, but I'm interested in like software, right? 267 00:21:11,920 --> 00:21:15,400 Like, and because it's sort of like would affect our customers a lot, right? 268 00:21:15,400 --> 00:21:21,620 Like, I always get a lot of questions like, oh, we're a big old giant company, we're going to switch over to doing things in this agile, wacky, weird way. 269 00:21:21,620 --> 00:21:42,940 And I mean, I don't imagine from a people perspective, there's any things, any regulations a public company has to put up with people wise, but like, I mean, I know, there's always this concern about how you like in the financier area, how you like capitalize software based on when it was developed and released and all this stuff, which sounds like a delightful thing to do if you're delivering software every week. 270 00:21:43,680 --> 00:21:45,540 So maybe someone figures that out. 271 00:21:45,760 --> 00:21:56,040 But I wonder if in the area of people, there's, there's any other like, new regulations that would affect the process of how, how we do software in an agile way. 272 00:21:56,500 --> 00:22:01,520 Yeah, no, I think the good thing, you know, for, for our teams is that not much has changed. 273 00:22:01,520 --> 00:22:13,020 You know, if you think about, you know, regulations that are out there around, you know, Sarbanes-Oxley or, or HIPAA in the US, which is around, you know, privacy within benefits. 274 00:22:13,680 --> 00:22:22,140 And other, you know, other government regulations across the world, you know, we've been, you know, addressing those, you know, for years. 275 00:22:22,540 --> 00:22:29,060 And, and one area, you know, as you know, we sell a lot to the federal government, right. 276 00:22:29,100 --> 00:22:40,600 And in order to just do business with the federal government, you know, there has to be a certain level of compliance and criteria that's met in order to just do business with them. 277 00:22:40,600 --> 00:22:42,580 And we've been doing business with them for years. 278 00:22:43,220 --> 00:22:52,740 And so, you know, the last couple of years has really been the getting us ready so that when we do go public, by and large, you know, not much changes. 279 00:22:52,740 --> 00:22:57,580 You know, our identity should stay the same, our culture and values should stay the same. 280 00:22:58,540 --> 00:23:03,300 And, you know, our, by and large, our strategy and mission hasn't, hasn't changed, right. 281 00:23:03,360 --> 00:23:16,600 It's, you know, it's, you know, the, the sense of urgency may increase and maybe, you know, the, the pressure a little bit of, you know, the, the scrutiny, you know, that comes with, you know, the public markets. 282 00:23:16,920 --> 00:23:26,080 Certainly, I think our teams are going to be feeling that, but, but how we do our job shouldn't change all, all that much. 283 00:23:28,280 --> 00:23:28,940 Got it. 284 00:23:29,960 --> 00:23:30,180 So. 285 00:23:30,760 --> 00:23:31,320 Go ahead. 286 00:23:31,500 --> 00:23:31,580 Yeah. 287 00:23:32,260 --> 00:23:32,660 Yeah. 288 00:23:32,780 --> 00:23:35,220 So, I mean, is there anything specific you think that may? 289 00:23:37,960 --> 00:23:42,520 Well, there's things that I think we should guard against. 290 00:23:42,720 --> 00:23:46,200 And I think there's things that we should, you know, have a healthy paranoia about. 291 00:23:47,780 --> 00:23:51,060 You know, we are, you know, we're hiring at a pretty good clip. 292 00:23:51,300 --> 00:23:55,160 You know, we're hiring about 90 people a month right now. 293 00:23:56,220 --> 00:23:56,620 Wow. 294 00:23:57,100 --> 00:24:12,880 And so I want to make sure that, you know, when we continue to hire at that pace in order to support the growth of the company, in order to take care of our, our customers is that we're not diluting ourselves too much. 295 00:24:12,880 --> 00:24:13,180 Right. 296 00:24:13,480 --> 00:24:16,960 There is this, you know, this, this ratio. 297 00:24:16,960 --> 00:24:29,100 I don't know exactly the number yet, but you can kind of figure it out by local teams of, you know, how many, how many new people you can bring on to the team so that, you know, they understand, you know, how things work at Pivotal. 298 00:24:29,100 --> 00:24:57,960 And that's really, you know, with that growth, you know, one of our biggest focuses right now is around enablement and learning and development so that as we, you know, welcome all these new colleagues to Pivotal, you know, that they are, you know, they have the tools and resources, you know, to be successful and that they get acclimated in a way that doesn't dilute, you know, who we are as a company. 299 00:24:59,100 --> 00:25:05,940 Yeah. So, I mean, speaking of hiring, there was, I think at the end of last week, a bit of a flurry on Twitter. 300 00:25:06,520 --> 00:25:14,720 I think it was some executive type had made a comment that, look, if I see a candidate who's been bouncing between jobs for a while, that's a red flag for me. 301 00:25:15,040 --> 00:25:16,020 Like, that's not a great thing. 302 00:25:16,120 --> 00:25:21,440 And a bunch of people piled on then after that saying, hey, look, are you encouraging people to stay in toxic places? 303 00:25:21,500 --> 00:25:26,840 And many of us in our careers may have stayed in places too long because we didn't want that reputation on our resume. 304 00:25:26,840 --> 00:25:33,300 So, isn't that, you know, actually encouraging bad behavior, especially in tech where sometimes it takes some work to find the right fit? 305 00:25:33,740 --> 00:25:42,020 It was an interesting discussion because on one hand, if I'm interviewing someone and over the course of 10 or 15 years, they've stayed everywhere for nine months, that would be a red flag to me. 306 00:25:42,060 --> 00:25:50,840 I would ask about it or I would wonder if they either at some point just make bad choices at some point or are they just, you know, maybe the problem themselves or just unlucky. 307 00:25:51,640 --> 00:25:53,560 Like, what is the factor there? 308 00:25:53,620 --> 00:25:59,460 So, as you talk about us hiring, you know, 90, 100 people a month, how do you look at history? 309 00:25:59,640 --> 00:26:03,000 I mean, where do you see a red flag there if someone moves around a lot? 310 00:26:03,040 --> 00:26:09,040 Or is that just an area for you to explore then when we're trying to find out if Pivotal will be the right fit for them for hopefully much more than a year? 311 00:26:09,440 --> 00:26:11,020 Hopefully, it's a good part of their career. 312 00:26:12,960 --> 00:26:15,120 Yeah, no, that's interesting. 313 00:26:15,580 --> 00:26:25,060 I mean, my advice to anyone, whether they're an employee of Pivotals or not, you know, there's this, you know, life is too short bucket, right? 314 00:26:25,160 --> 00:26:35,340 And if someone's not happy in their job and they're, you know, you spend way too many hours, right, you know, in the day, you know, on your job. 315 00:26:35,340 --> 00:26:37,560 And so, if you're not happy, get out. 316 00:26:37,840 --> 00:26:41,180 Don't worry about what your resume looks like. 317 00:26:41,300 --> 00:26:46,400 Obviously, you need to take a calculated risk around how you provide for yourself or provide for your family. 318 00:26:47,320 --> 00:26:52,260 But I would never advocate anyone staying at Pivotal or anywhere for that matter, right? 319 00:26:52,520 --> 00:27:01,660 If folks at Pivotal are, you know, folks who are not happy and they want to talk to us, then, you know, we'll talk to them and help them try to, you know, figure out how they can be happy in their jobs. 320 00:27:02,500 --> 00:27:06,760 But if not, you know, they should go and look to do something else. 321 00:27:07,140 --> 00:27:22,740 As opposed to how we look at it from a hiring perspective of, you know, if we see someone that's jumped around a lot and, you know, they have an average of, you know, year, year and a half tenure, you know, it does, you know, raise some questions. 322 00:27:22,740 --> 00:27:26,400 And I think to your point, you know, Richard, you know, I think it's just an opportunity to go explore. 323 00:27:26,400 --> 00:27:36,420 You know, so, for example, I was interviewing a candidate last week where literally every 18 months for the last four jobs, you know, they were in a new job. 324 00:27:37,240 --> 00:27:43,460 After exploring it further, it wasn't so obvious on the resume, but, you know, their company kept getting acquired. 325 00:27:43,720 --> 00:27:48,040 So every time they went to a company, you know, 12 or 18 years later, it just got acquired. 326 00:27:48,160 --> 00:27:51,880 So they were changing jobs or changing companies without any fault of their own. 327 00:27:52,680 --> 00:27:52,800 Right. 328 00:27:53,240 --> 00:27:58,940 So I think seeking to understand is really important and not being judgmental. 329 00:27:59,780 --> 00:28:12,000 But the number one area of focus for us from a recruiting perspective to ensure that we are getting the best possible talent is making sure that we are, you know, 330 00:28:12,360 --> 00:28:15,580 bar none, number one, in terms of how we screen and evaluate talent. 331 00:28:16,320 --> 00:28:21,980 And a lot of companies may surprise you or not, that they're just not good at it. 332 00:28:22,720 --> 00:28:33,860 And, you know, that's one area where I've been driving really hard with recruiting organization is that we have much more consistency in our screening and evaluation process. 333 00:28:34,280 --> 00:28:38,180 And that we are continuing to hone what I like to call a practical interview. 334 00:28:38,880 --> 00:28:45,200 So that when we do make the offer, you know, there's a high degree of probability that that person is going to be successful. 335 00:28:45,200 --> 00:28:57,540 And if you rely on that and you have a good process, then the traditional metrics and data points that you look in a resume or a CV, they end up becoming less relevant. 336 00:28:58,760 --> 00:29:07,880 Because you're relying more on that practical interview, which should be really the true evaluation, whether someone's going to be successful or not in your company. 337 00:29:09,000 --> 00:29:09,120 Yeah. 338 00:29:09,220 --> 00:29:17,900 So related to that, and I mean, actually, both of you could, since every now and then Richard manages people, is my understanding. 339 00:29:18,900 --> 00:29:33,980 It would be, and hires as well, you know, again, for a company like ours, and also, I think, highly related for those kind of organizations we work with who are, as we say, trying to become software companies or more like software companies. 340 00:29:34,780 --> 00:29:50,020 Like, I wouldn't say straightforward, but hiring technical people seems more straightforward than hiring, I don't know how you would classify the three of us, the ancillary support people, right? 341 00:29:50,020 --> 00:30:05,660 Like, we're in marketing and HR, and there's all these other roles that are in the organization and are as necessary as, like, the designers and developers and things like that. 342 00:30:05,880 --> 00:30:09,320 But, like, you can't really sit down and, like, pair program with those roles. 343 00:30:09,500 --> 00:30:18,580 I don't know, I guess you could pair write a press release or something, but, like, how do you, how do we, how do we sort of, like, screen for cultural fit with those roles? 344 00:30:18,580 --> 00:30:25,660 That it's not, you can't just, like, see if they ask enough questions to figure out the requirements for code that they should be writing. 345 00:30:26,160 --> 00:30:39,840 And how do you sort of, how are we sort of putting that into a policy that would regularize, like, when we're looking for a marketing person or, you know, an HR person or, I don't know, a receptionist or whatever. 346 00:30:39,960 --> 00:30:42,400 What are the kind of things that we put into there or think about? 347 00:30:43,380 --> 00:30:43,900 Yeah, interesting. 348 00:30:44,300 --> 00:30:45,560 I'm interested in Joe's response. 349 00:30:45,560 --> 00:30:48,320 I can give you mine as well as I've been somehow doing a lot of hiring lately. 350 00:30:49,060 --> 00:30:49,340 Sure. 351 00:30:49,400 --> 00:30:50,420 When you go first, Richard Miller. 352 00:30:51,280 --> 00:30:54,600 Well, I mean, I guess I'll first candidly admit I don't think I'm very good at that. 353 00:30:54,680 --> 00:30:59,100 And that's one area I'm trying to get better at is that sometimes I focus too much on the squishier stuff. 354 00:30:59,160 --> 00:31:04,400 It's just trying to get a sense of their fit and what they, what motivates people, you know, what do they like working on. 355 00:31:04,440 --> 00:31:07,980 And that can be risky if I don't focus on the areas I think I need to. 356 00:31:08,060 --> 00:31:09,680 So I'm actually trying to get better at that. 357 00:31:09,680 --> 00:31:14,580 But one thing I'm trying to focus more on is like a bias towards action and outcome. 358 00:31:14,580 --> 00:31:23,060 Like I ask someone frequently, what's the last asset you created that management, you know, lauded or praised because it was actually useful? 359 00:31:23,060 --> 00:31:25,940 Or what was the thing you've created recently that you're proud of? 360 00:31:25,940 --> 00:31:34,380 Or something that indicates not just we, like our team, because sometimes that might mean you don't do anything and that you actually just kind of provide feedback to other people who do the work. 361 00:31:34,500 --> 00:31:38,840 So what is that thing that you're proud of, that you worked on, that you did something? 362 00:31:38,900 --> 00:31:40,020 And yes, are you a good teammate? 363 00:31:40,160 --> 00:31:42,240 I want to make sure you can work and collaborate well. 364 00:31:42,720 --> 00:31:45,000 But, you know, we are an enormous team. 365 00:31:45,000 --> 00:31:51,480 So I definitely bias myself towards people who can work in somewhat fluid environments, get stuff done. 366 00:31:51,900 --> 00:31:55,020 They're focused more on kind of outcomes versus motion. 367 00:31:56,180 --> 00:31:56,340 Yeah. 368 00:31:56,520 --> 00:32:03,620 And I guess, I guess that's, that's the thing I was rambling towards is like, you know, when you talk with, with the product team people, 369 00:32:03,700 --> 00:32:06,320 there's dealing with unknown ambiguity stuff. 370 00:32:07,440 --> 00:32:12,740 And then also making sure people know how to like write code or, you know, like think about design thinking, things like that. 371 00:32:12,740 --> 00:32:21,540 And I don't know, it's, it's, it's, it seems like a challenge to bring that up in other contexts in a way that's not like super cheesy or whatever. 372 00:32:22,240 --> 00:32:22,360 Yeah. 373 00:32:22,440 --> 00:32:26,820 So I mean, Joe, when you're looking at people manager types and the like, I mean, how do you, right? 374 00:32:26,860 --> 00:32:32,040 I mean, I don't know if you do pairing interviews or what, but how do you kind of determine if they're a good cultural fit? 375 00:32:32,740 --> 00:32:32,960 Yeah. 376 00:32:33,080 --> 00:32:44,760 And it's, and it's beyond the cultural fit and also be, be careful of cultural fit because you want to make sure the interviewers are not putting their own biases in terms of what they think is a cultural fit. 377 00:32:44,760 --> 00:32:44,980 Right. 378 00:32:45,020 --> 00:32:48,500 And that's really thinking about what's, what's needed at, at pivotal. 379 00:32:48,740 --> 00:32:49,400 Good point. 380 00:32:50,440 --> 00:33:02,500 But with, you know, really any area where you're doing any level of volume of hiring, and it could be, you know, our concierge or receptionist, or it could be, you know, sales reps, or it could be market, right? 381 00:33:02,560 --> 00:33:10,600 Wherever you're doing more than, you know, maybe, you know, half a dozen hires a year, you know, putting in place what I like to call a practical interview. 382 00:33:11,120 --> 00:33:19,440 And, and it does stem from, you know, what I believe the engineering organizations have perfected in the RPI and the PPI. 383 00:33:19,720 --> 00:33:23,880 And, and yes, there is a pairing aspect of it because that's what they do in their job day in and day out. 384 00:33:24,820 --> 00:33:32,800 But really the, the, the secret sauce and the power of really nailing the, the practical interview and, and a lot of the functions have implemented over the last couple of years. 385 00:33:32,800 --> 00:33:34,720 And there's some refinement that needs to happen. 386 00:33:34,880 --> 00:33:39,820 I mean, Rob's got 30 years on us with the RPI, you know, with the engineering pairing interview. 387 00:33:40,920 --> 00:33:45,300 But, you know, there's, there's still a lot of value out of doing it in the other functions. 388 00:33:45,300 --> 00:33:52,840 And so, for example, you know, within HR, we've been doing it for two and a half, three years, and we've had some great success with it. 389 00:33:52,840 --> 00:33:56,880 And really just for your audience to think about is like, what is a practical interview? 390 00:33:57,500 --> 00:34:04,640 And all you're doing is, and you can, you can weave in some of the, the, the traits and the things that you're looking for, Richard, that you mentioned. 391 00:34:05,200 --> 00:34:13,700 But it's really around simulating an environment in which the candidate is going to actually have to do their job. 392 00:34:14,280 --> 00:34:14,400 Right? 393 00:34:14,400 --> 00:34:21,920 Nothing drives me more insane in the interview process when we're evaluating candidates on things that they're never going to ever do. 394 00:34:22,840 --> 00:34:23,320 Right? 395 00:34:23,480 --> 00:34:37,500 And so, with an HR, if they're going to be responsible for building programs in the learning and development space and creating different manager training, then during the practical interview, that's what we're going to ask them to do. 396 00:34:37,900 --> 00:34:38,260 Right? 397 00:34:38,300 --> 00:34:45,680 We're going to give them a couple prompts, and we're going to ask them to build and design something based on a set of problems. 398 00:34:46,080 --> 00:34:50,580 And then they're going to get evaluated by two or three peoples, by members of people team. 399 00:34:50,620 --> 00:34:57,980 And sometimes we'll bring in, you know, folks outside of the people team because, you know, their products are going to get evaluated. 400 00:34:58,460 --> 00:35:02,600 You know, when they become an employee, right, they're going to get evaluated by managers as well. 401 00:35:03,020 --> 00:35:10,040 So, it's really around simulating as much as possible what the actual job is going to be like. 402 00:35:10,040 --> 00:35:19,300 And what it also does, it's really powerful for the candidate because the candidate can then get a sense of what the day in the life of work at Pivotal will be like. 403 00:35:20,020 --> 00:35:23,100 And so, that will then give them the opportunity to opt out. 404 00:35:24,100 --> 00:35:24,220 Right? 405 00:35:24,340 --> 00:35:33,980 And so, if, you know, they're like, oh, I can't do this type of work or I don't want to work in this type of collaborative way, it gives them an opportunity to kind of self-select out as well. 406 00:35:34,780 --> 00:35:37,840 Yeah, it's interesting you say that. 407 00:35:37,960 --> 00:35:44,760 Like, I don't think I appreciated that side of things until I was much, much older in my career. 408 00:35:45,520 --> 00:36:01,900 I think I would often just like, when I was building my own software, as I mentioned earlier, my own platforms, I would just go get a job with anyone where my friends were at the time thinking about, do I want to work at this company day to day? 409 00:36:02,380 --> 00:36:15,800 And so, I think, not to be all self-horn-tooting, but that's like, whenever I interview people, that's one of the first things I try to generally get them to do is like, you know, you can ask about whatever you want to know about working at Pivotal. 410 00:36:15,980 --> 00:36:25,200 And I just want to make sure that when you show up here, you know what you are getting into, especially if I'm a referral, so you can be here at least 90 days and I can get my referral. 411 00:36:25,200 --> 00:36:39,180 But I think it is, and, you know, as a whole other layer, like, it is always interesting to hear what questions, if any, people have when you give them that sort of prompting. 412 00:36:40,160 --> 00:36:48,140 But, yeah, I think it's, it is, I think it's really vital in the interview process to make sure people know what they're getting themselves into. 413 00:36:48,400 --> 00:36:53,120 And, and also, like, kind of to the part of, like, the negative part of job hopping, right? 414 00:36:53,160 --> 00:36:59,180 Like, you want to get, at least I want to get a sense that there'll be some amount of commitment from them. 415 00:37:00,280 --> 00:37:01,660 Yeah, it's, it's such a big decision. 416 00:37:01,660 --> 00:37:05,760 All the work you'll have to, or not you'll have to, but you'll want to invest in them. 417 00:37:06,080 --> 00:37:06,260 Yeah. 418 00:37:06,940 --> 00:37:08,020 It's such a big decision. 419 00:37:08,160 --> 00:37:19,840 It's amazing how sometimes candidates don't do enough diligence themselves or companies don't invest enough in, you know, what I like to call the practical interview or really focusing on the evaluation and screening phase, right? 420 00:37:19,840 --> 00:37:24,780 It's, it's, you know, it's so expensive to find candidates, expensive to hire and train them. 421 00:37:24,860 --> 00:37:28,320 It's disruptive if you make a bad career move, right? 422 00:37:28,360 --> 00:37:33,460 And you join a company and all of a sudden you've got to be looking for a job in six months because you, you made a mistake. 423 00:37:33,660 --> 00:37:37,000 We wanted to make sure we did hit on pay transparency a little bit. 424 00:37:37,040 --> 00:37:38,000 I mean, what's the progress there? 425 00:37:38,040 --> 00:37:42,940 How are we making progress on pay transparency and what does that look like? 426 00:37:42,980 --> 00:37:44,060 What do we think the end state is? 427 00:37:45,260 --> 00:37:52,760 So, so Coda, you should feel rest assured that the end state is not to publish your salary out to the world. 428 00:37:52,920 --> 00:37:55,480 So that is not, that's not the end state. 429 00:37:55,480 --> 00:38:04,820 The end state is really to ensure that there's no mystery in terms of how big pay decisions are made at Pivotal. 430 00:38:05,920 --> 00:38:12,320 And that also that everyone believes that they are, you know, paid fairly for the work that they do. 431 00:38:12,440 --> 00:38:13,920 Really, that's the ultimate goal. 432 00:38:14,940 --> 00:38:25,580 You know, the, the journey that we've been on and it's not just so simple where, okay, we post everyone's pay bands and then folks know where they fall within the pay bands. 433 00:38:26,060 --> 00:38:32,460 Because you have to first just start off with, you know, publishing our pay practices, right? 434 00:38:32,460 --> 00:38:44,140 In terms of what is our philosophy around comp and equity, which is actually something, you know, I could have touched on earlier when you asked about, you know, does life change, you know, post IPO? 435 00:38:44,620 --> 00:38:53,200 You know, we do continue to evaluate, you know, our comp and equity strategy, you know, as a public company or just even every six to 12 months to make sure we're being competitive. 436 00:38:53,320 --> 00:38:54,740 So we can come back to that if you want. 437 00:38:56,260 --> 00:39:03,540 But we also had to go and make sure that, you know, everyone's, you know, leveled in the right job levels, right? 438 00:39:03,700 --> 00:39:13,480 So before you post folks' salary bands, not the actual salary they make, but the actual bands in which you measure them, we have to make sure everyone's, you know, in the right job level and the right job title, right? 439 00:39:13,480 --> 00:39:18,120 And we have, you know, 2,700 employees to ensure that that's accurate. 440 00:39:18,520 --> 00:39:23,600 We have, you have to train all the directors and the managers to be able to have salary conversations, right? 441 00:39:23,600 --> 00:39:41,020 So for you, Richard, right, if all of a sudden we just, you know, shared all of your teams, like where they fall in the pay bands, but we haven't equipped you or your peers in terms of having that career conversation and that development conversation around, well, why are you in that level? 442 00:39:41,260 --> 00:39:50,220 And how to equip our 550 people managers around having the career conversation around helping folks get to that next level, right? 443 00:39:50,600 --> 00:39:55,040 It would be, it just wouldn't go well because we wouldn't, we didn't equip the managers. 444 00:39:55,040 --> 00:40:11,180 And so once we get to a point where we feel all the managers are capable of having these type of conversations, which we're, which we're approaching, we will then, the end state is to make sure that we, that we will publish to each employee where they fall. 445 00:40:11,260 --> 00:40:12,820 Within the pay band. 446 00:40:13,160 --> 00:40:22,280 So we're probably, we're not putting an exact timeline on it, but we're probably, you know, two to, you know, four quarters away from, from that ultimate goal. 447 00:40:22,640 --> 00:40:29,160 And, you know, and some things we've done, you know, we were actually one of the first companies to get ahead of legislation in the U.S. 448 00:40:29,160 --> 00:40:36,540 And we're going to make this a global practice where, you know, we don't ask employees salaries anymore as part of the interview process, right? 449 00:40:36,540 --> 00:40:43,740 If you remember, maybe when you look for a job, right, you know, you know, many years ago, the first thing employer would be is like, what's your salary history? 450 00:40:45,000 --> 00:40:47,220 You know, in a couple of states in the U.S., that's illegal. 451 00:40:47,220 --> 00:40:51,440 And we were one of the first companies to, to not do that. 452 00:40:51,900 --> 00:41:04,080 Which actually posed some challenges for our hiring the sales reps, because traditionally, you know, the way a company would try to figure out whether a sales rep was good or not that they want to hire, is they would say, well, did you meet your quota? 453 00:41:04,620 --> 00:41:05,840 Did you, did you blow out your quota? 454 00:41:06,260 --> 00:41:09,180 What was your, send me your W-2, right? 455 00:41:09,180 --> 00:41:23,320 And so, hence why going back and relying on that stand and deliver, that evaluation and screening process is so important, because you're not going to be able to look at someone's W-2 to see if they were, met their quota or not. 456 00:41:23,700 --> 00:41:25,660 And that's, and that's thought in itself, but. 457 00:41:26,080 --> 00:41:28,060 And do you want to provide quick context for that? 458 00:41:28,060 --> 00:41:42,880 I mean, I know, I think some of the reasoning behind not asking for salary in general, ignore the legislation part, is sometimes gender differences and kind of how people position their previous salary, or sometimes getting people stuck in lower bands when they should be leaping forward or trying to low ball. 459 00:41:42,980 --> 00:41:47,020 So, what is the motivation, let's say your motivation, for not asking for salary history? 460 00:41:47,300 --> 00:41:54,480 Yeah, the motivation is, it's around, goes, actually stems with a lot of our value systems in terms of just doing the right thing. 461 00:41:54,640 --> 00:42:15,060 Like, let's pay people for the job that they do, and not just because, you know, regardless of the salary that they had, you know, maybe they weren't a good negotiator, or maybe their company that they were at wasn't doing well for the last four or five years, and while they gained a lot of skills, their salary increase did not, you know, did not increase with that, right? 462 00:42:15,060 --> 00:42:33,380 And so, if they go and look for a job, and the company that they're looking at, you know, normal play is, oh, we'll just give them a 10% bump from what they had, and they'll be happy because it's a 10% increase, well, yeah, maybe that's a nice increase, but is that fair, right? 463 00:42:33,420 --> 00:42:38,920 And then you have folks within the organization, you know, doing similar jobs with wide disparity. 464 00:42:39,660 --> 00:42:43,860 And so, as part of our pay transparency efforts, there is a big focus on pay equality. 465 00:42:45,000 --> 00:42:56,960 So, within the next month or so, I'm actually going to release a blog that will show specifically in the U.S., and we're looking at how to do that in certain markets outside the U.S. 466 00:42:57,440 --> 00:43:06,580 around, you know, how we pay men to women at Pivotal, so how many cents on the dollar, you know, differentiated or not, right? 467 00:43:06,580 --> 00:43:15,680 Do we have pay parity with men and women, and then also with people of color within Pivotal, we're going to publish that data as well. 468 00:43:15,680 --> 00:43:29,460 So, we've contracted with a third-party firm who's looking at all of our salary information by demographics, and I'm going to get that report in the next couple weeks. 469 00:43:29,540 --> 00:43:33,420 I haven't seen it, so I'm committed to releasing it regardless of what it looks like. 470 00:43:34,380 --> 00:43:47,160 But, again, you know, to ensure and bring visibility to not only our Pivots, but to the world that, you know, Pivotal is committed to, you know, doing the right thing and committed to pay equality. 471 00:43:48,240 --> 00:43:48,940 What a great answer. 472 00:43:50,100 --> 00:43:50,540 Yeah. 473 00:43:50,900 --> 00:43:52,880 Yeah, well, thanks for being on again. 474 00:43:53,020 --> 00:44:05,680 I think, particularly that last conversation, right, like, as I keep coming back to, I'm always interested in things I can tell our customers and people I talk with about how they need to switch over how they're doing things. 475 00:44:05,680 --> 00:44:19,820 And I think the idea of, like, removing all the fuzz around pay transparency or pay, what would be the opposite, obfuscation, so that people can just focus on, like, not only doing their job, but enjoying the environment that they're in. 476 00:44:20,760 --> 00:44:39,200 I mean, I think, I mean, pay obfuscation has been so weird for so long that it's bound to be one of those things that negative energy it puts into the system that you could just, easily is the wrong word, but, like, you have the levers to remove that energy. 477 00:44:39,440 --> 00:44:44,080 You might, as you're going over, you know, you need to train people and transition them and make all the studies. 478 00:44:44,080 --> 00:44:50,960 But at the end of the day, it's sort of like, well, do we fix these, do we fix these people by paying them more or not? 479 00:44:51,580 --> 00:44:51,940 Right? 480 00:44:52,040 --> 00:44:58,980 And it's, it seems like something that is fixable rather than sort of like some negative thing you have to live with. 481 00:44:59,240 --> 00:45:15,340 Yeah, with the customers, you know, I was talking to our head of engineering last week, and whether it's our field team or engineering teams, one of the things they talk to our customers about that are looking to, you know, change the way in which they build software, which obviously results in an organizational change. 482 00:45:16,080 --> 00:45:19,960 The focus is a lot on the balanced account team or balance team, right? 483 00:45:20,060 --> 00:45:25,460 You know, whether it's the engineer, product manager, and the designer, and the R&D, or in the field, right, we have now the balanced account team. 484 00:45:26,300 --> 00:45:32,720 But the customers also want to understand how that ecosystem around it works, right? 485 00:45:32,740 --> 00:45:43,100 And so your HR, your finance, your IT, your support systems, because, you know, we can have the most effective balanced account team or balanced team. 486 00:45:43,420 --> 00:45:49,380 But if the ecosystem around it is not supporting it, it's not going to be nearly as effective, right? 487 00:45:49,440 --> 00:46:05,820 And so when we talk to customers that are trying to build software in a new way, and we talk to them about our engineering practices and our design and our product management practices, the conversation also has to transition into, you know, what are the support functions around that team and that ecosystem? 488 00:46:05,820 --> 00:46:12,200 How are they going to change and evolve in order to change the overall mission and objectives of your company? 489 00:46:16,720 --> 00:46:19,440 Yeah, that makes sense. 490 00:46:19,520 --> 00:46:21,340 Well, it'll be fun to see how this rolls out. 491 00:46:21,700 --> 00:46:22,860 And so thanks for being on. 492 00:46:23,100 --> 00:46:24,700 And thanks to everyone for listening. 493 00:46:24,800 --> 00:46:27,000 As always, this has been Pivotal Conversations. 494 00:46:27,200 --> 00:46:33,700 If you want to get the most recent episodes or bruise our back catalog, you can go to soundcloud.com slash pivotalconversations. 495 00:46:34,460 --> 00:46:40,260 And about every Thursday, we'll post the full show notes with links to things we mentioned and other references. 496 00:46:40,820 --> 00:46:44,000 And you go to pivotal.io slash podcast to find those. 497 00:46:44,480 --> 00:46:46,640 And with that, we'll see everyone next time. 498 00:46:46,720 --> 00:46:47,480 Bye-bye.