DOP 293: Attracting and Retaining Talent in a Changing Tech World
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I think some of it is a understanding that it is enough of a employer's market right now that you can afford to do some things that are a bit unpopular if you think it's what's right for your business and assume, yep, I'm going to lose some good people over this. But I'm in a position right now that I wasn't three years ago where I can go hire good people. So like now's the time to do something. The people that leave, so be it. I'll hire others. This is DevOps Paradox, episode number 293.

attracting and retaining talent in a changing tech world. Welcome to DevOps Paradox. This is a podcast about random stuff in which we, Darren and Victor, pretend we know what we're talking about.

Most of the time, we mask our ignorance by putting the word DevOps everywhere we can and mix it with random buzzwords like Kubernetes, serverless, CICD, team productivity, islands of happiness, and other fancy expressions that make us sound like we know what we're doing.

Occasionally, we invite guests who do know something, but we do not do that often since they might make us look incompetent. The truth is out there and there is no way we are going to find it. Yes, it's Darren reading this text and feeling embarrassed that Victor made me do it. Here are your hosts, Darren Pope and Victor Farsen. Victor, have you ever been in a role to where you had to hire? Quite a few times.

Not recently, but in the past, yes. Did you ever figure out why people wanted to work for you? Now, this is a very personal question. I never understood why would anybody work with me or even for that matter, even live with me. But that's me now. On today's show, we're gonna be talking to Michael Zerker. He's the CEO and co-founder at Prismatic. And we're gonna be talking about trying to attract and retain talent in this crazy age of technology. Michael, how are you doing? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me.

Is this a real problem that we're having right now that we're needing to, I mean, we've always had problems attracting, retaining talent just in general, no matter what the role is. But here we are 2024. In fact, we're getting close to the end of 2024. People might be thinking about moving on to another job. They may have already been interviewing throughout, you know, the past five, six weeks, getting ready to make that change on January 1st. Should people really be looking for jobs right now? What do you think?

Before you answer, sorry, one sub-question to Darren. When you say talent, do you mean workforce in general or do you mean senior engineers? I'm going to say in general. The answer might not be the same. I think it's going to be different. So let's say in general and then, Michael, if you want to try to split the answer of general versus seniors. Okay.

I think hiring has always been one of the biggest differentiators across companies in individual categories and one of the most important things to get right, whether you're a startup or a later stage company, it kind of doesn't matter. So I don't think it's necessarily new that hiring is really important or that it takes up a significant amount of time and is difficult. But I think there are some unique things that are going on, whether you talk about it as post-COVID or whether you talk about it as post-zero interest rate.

There are some things that have affected the hiring market that make it different than it was a handful of years ago.

To your question as to whether somebody should be looking for a new job now, I think, you know, obviously it depends a lot on the person where you are today. I think there are a lot of companies whose prospects are increasing. And I think there are a bunch of companies whose prospects are probably decreasing compared to where they were a couple years ago. And so I think people are always looking for good opportunities and maybe more than ever stability. And so I think that drives some people to look and is probably driving some people to look right now. Stability.

Used to, you would think of stability as, let's go work at the Microsofts and the Googles and the fill in the blank. Man, I don't think that's such a great idea anymore. Yeah, but correct me if I'm wrong, working at Microsofts and Googles of the world, that gives you a bit different type of stability, right? It gives you that name in the CV that you can say, now I'm wanted by everybody. Yeah.

I think there's something to that. I also think in general, some of those big companies are pretty stable places to be. Obviously, we got into a situation where hiring got a bit out of hand during COVID and in the last few years, and I think we've seen some major corrections. I don't know that that really changes the long-term stability of some of the biggest players in our industry, though. There's always the, you're always weighing the, do you want to find...

something that aligns with where you're trying to go and aligns with what you're really interested in right now and is growing really fast? Or do you want the more stable place where you can probably worry a little bit less about year-to-year or individual performance? And I think, honestly, I think people have changed the way they're thinking about some of that over the last few years. I don't know how Prismatic hires, so I might be stepping on some toes. So to you, Michael, and to anybody in HR at Prismatic, I ask for forgiveness up front. But I'm going to go ahead and step in it.

The whole return to office thing is a ticking time bomb for a lot of companies, because even if it's a company that says, oh no, we're going to be completely remote. And then all of a sudden one day it's like five days a week in office. I don't care if you have to drive six hours to get there each way. Where does RTO fall in to trying to find a new job? I mean, to me, that's stability because more than likely if you're going into an office, more than likely they're still going to be there. Again, that's a broad statement, but yeah.

What do you think about it? You know, I think what we're seeing is that people decide which of those worlds they want to live in. And then they essentially just filter for the jobs that support that world. We are fully remote. We will continue to be fully remote. Back to the office just isn't really...

Like it's basically not possible for us, even if it's something we wanted to do. We're already spread so far across the country, which is working well for us. But, you know, we talked to some candidates where they're specifically looking for that kind of environment. And those folks do pretty well here. We also talked to some candidates that decide, you know, Hey, I really like the in office thing and that's not prismatic, which is fine. But I think you have people kind of self-selecting into those now to your point, um,

We're obviously seeing this transition where some companies went from in office to remote and now they're flipping back and that's causing turmoil, of course. But I think candidates generally know what they want. And I don't talk to very many or almost none, perhaps, that are saying, hey, it's a coin flip for me. I'll be remote. I'll be in the office. Either way is fine with me. People generally have a preference one way or another. Now, whether that's enough that they're going to leave...

whatever company that makes the transition back. I don't know, but I think people generally have a preference that they're pretty firm on. There is a bigger number, let's say, than before, fully remote companies or remote companies. That means that the pool of people you're hiring is the planet, or at least kind of like five, six time zones apart. Does that affect pricing or salaries?

So, like, traditionally, for example, I live in Europe, right? It was acceptable that salary of a software engineer in Europe, the same skillset will be half in the US, right? But now people in Europe are working remotely for US. So...

How does that go, if you have any insight? Are we starting to see some kind of equilibrium based on the skill set rather than location? I think a lot of people, myself probably included, believe that has to be where it ends. That has to be what this trends toward because it would seem like removing the friction of hiring from anywhere, which is essentially what we've done for fully remote companies, at least as you said, within a handful of time zones,

That has to change the differential pricing across areas. I don't know that we've seen that completely play through. I think certainly there are still specific areas in the United States that have higher salary expectations and command higher salaries than other places. But I have to believe that in the years to come, we're going to see that continue to even out. And I think the folks that are maybe the most

impacted negatively, the companies that are maybe the most impacted negatively are those that were based in, you know, outside of the most expensive markets and took advantage of the fact that they could hire cheaper in their local market. Well, now suddenly all these people in the local market can go work for, I mean, to your point, any company out of any expensive market or anywhere. And I think it has changed the environment in some of these like tier two, tier three cities in the, in the U S and I think it's probably good for workers. And I think it's probably just

removing an unnatural arbitrage to some extent, but you know, I think we're still watching it play out. Let's go back to our attracting and retaining real quick, even though that's what we're talking about too. If we're trying to attract just general, so let's say they're either fresh out of university or it's someone that is making a career switch, right? So early stage, if you will. Now it's sort of interesting because if you're making a career switch, as long as you've been in your other career for a bit, at least you understand how to work.

And you've got that down. So you can't compare that directly to somebody out of university. Do we really want to be attracting that level of worker today? It seems like AI is the answer for everything, right? Can AI replace those entry-level hires? I mean, I certainly don't think I have seen that we are currently at a place where you simply don't need early-level talent in any situation anymore. Right.

I do believe that we're making software engineers enough more efficient and effective with all of the assistance that comes with AI co-pilots and those kinds of things that it is changing the dynamic of like the balance of what you want in a lot of companies. You know, we used to talk a lot, we still talk a lot about the balance of, you know, how many entry level do you want versus middle of career people versus kind of late career people. I think that balance is shifting a little bit. I also think a lot of people are just holding off waiting to see what AI does in the next couple of years. I mean, it's,

If you look three years ago versus where we are today, I don't think very many people would have predicted where we are today, specifically in the software field. I think people are kind of looking forward saying, I hate to go hire a whole bunch of early career folks and then regret it in a couple of years. So I do think we're seeing a bit of trepidation maybe in the market by employers as a result. But I don't think we're there today, but I think everybody sees it coming.

If you had to roll the dice, how soon do you think that's going to be? Oh man, it would be a dice roll is the thing. I don't, I don't feel like I have any special information there. I, I think we're going to just keep making people more and more efficient in the short term here. And I think companies will accomplish more with less people where you get to some kind of tipping point where we're actually saying, we just don't need early, you know, entry-level engineers. We just don't need engineers at all or whatever. Like I just, I couldn't guess. Yeah.

If that's the story for the entry-level talent, what about senior-level talent? I would have to think that senior-level talent today is not the same as senior-level talent five or 10 years ago. I think the skill sets still have to be different. So you're not going to have somebody with 10 years of AI experience using AI experience. Let's put it that way.

You could say machine learning and everything else that led up to AI. Sure. But people actually using it. What's the fancy term that they use in AI? Not inference. What is the other one? So we're not training a model. We are. I can't remember. It doesn't matter. But anyway, people actually using AI, right? Because that hasn't been around for maybe two years, three years, right? 2021, somewhere in there.

How do we hire seniors today? Or what are we looking for in seniors today? Because one of the big things of seniors was helping train up juniors.

So if we don't need as many juniors, does it matter if a senior can train a junior? I mean, to some extent, that starts to blur into the remote work thing, because I think remote work has made it harder to mentor junior employees as well. I think that's a major challenge to remote that nobody has fully solved yet. As far as what seniors are today, I'm sure AI has changed that some. I think it's a new enough thing that we're all still kind of figuring out what that's even going to look like. I think maybe an even

I hesitate to say this, but an even bigger shift at the moment is, and not the moment, but over the last decade, is that, I mean, we've gone away from needing people who are senior in narrow, deep topics, right?

to people who are very skilled at pulling together lots of different systems and libraries and everything else. And I think in that way, what a senior, what makes a very successful senior today, it's just a very different discipline than it was 10 or 15 years ago. 10 or 15 years ago, we were talking about people who, you know, were really deep in, you know, the ability to think through algorithms or the ability to write C++ in some giant monolithic thing or something.

Now a lot of it is like, do you know enough of the ecosystem to pull the right things in? And do you have the kind of ability to hold all of that in your head and tie everything together? I think we just build software very differently than we did 10 or 15 years ago. And AI undoubtedly will contribute to that change. But I think that change was long before AI. I think we've just seen a difference in the way we build software. So do I interpret it correctly if I would say that the change is in a way that

We had more very highly specialized seniors before, and now it's more, maybe generalists is a wrong word, but more wider, not necessarily, people with wider knowledge, not necessarily as deep as before. I think that's probably true. I mean, if you look at the extreme, I mean, let's go back 20 or 25 years or something. I mean, there were lots of companies that needed engineers that understood sorting algorithms well.

There aren't many companies anymore that need very many senior people who understand sorting algorithms well, right? We all type dot sort and it just works itself out for the most part. I think we're just, we're building at such a different level of abstraction than we were 20 or 25 years ago. And it's been a continuum ever since then. I'm just using that far back as an extreme. I think we're just building at such a different level of abstraction that it just requires a different kind of person. And

I think there are people who are very, very, very good seniors today who would have been terrible 25 years ago. I think there are people who are great seniors 25 years ago who probably just don't have some of the personality or whatever to do really well in today's software. I just think it's pretty different. I feel that very often I get contacted with people and sometimes their juniors are just finished or are finishing university. And I have a feeling, I don't know how much that is a trend or this is simply anecdotal,

that most of the time I get questions, how do I become, let's say, dev of something or whatever. Oh, I learned Kubernetes and cloud and I program in seven languages. What should I do next? And what I have in my head is, that's so irrelevant. You didn't have time to do that. What I'm trying to say is that I have a feeling that young people are now trying to be how you describe a senior entrepreneur.

From the very start, I'm going to spend 15 minutes on every single technology that there is. I think so many companies, I mean, outside of very entry-level, straight out of university, where people just don't have the experience to be able to judge, I think companies are largely looking for people who know how to work inside of a team with a large ecosystem of tools or libraries or software or whatever and actually produce things that people care about. And I think, to some extent,

We pay a little bit less attention probably to the let's check the box of the seven languages you've used in the past. I think it's much more like talk to me about the way you worked in a team. Talk to me about the way your team solved a hard problem. Talk to me about the things that you actually produced and shipped to customers.

Now, I'm not saying those are completely disjointed things. I mean, obviously, there's a correlation between people who can learn quickly and people who can ship things. Obviously, these are related, but I think the game of do you know some specific piece of knowledge is just not that important anymore. I think there are many skills that are important beyond that to really succeed inside of a lot of companies today. Well, if you think about it, we've had time for Google, because they're the only ones still standing relatively, to scrape the internet and

index everything, which we didn't have back in 2000 because we had blinking tags and that was about it. But now everything has been learned and now it's stepping up to where, okay, things have been trained into models that then gives you not just here's a query, here's your answer. Now it's here's your query, here's some ideas. I think the people that are coming out new, if they don't have that capability, if they were trained, which I'm assuming is

That this is still happening in university. It's still algorithms and everything else. And there's probably a smattering of AI or AI thinking in there, but we're not going to need thousands of people to do model training. We're need thousands of people to do inference. Thank you. That was the word I was looking for earlier. We're going to need people to know how to use the tool, not keep building the same hammer over and over and over and over again. Right.

So if we're able to sort of get those people learning and we've got the seniors, I think you're right. Once the pandemic kicked in and we were dealing with remote work because everybody became a remote company magically on March 15th of 2020. Now that people are coming back into office, this gets in sort of the retain. What do you feel about that?

Sort of the rug pulls that have happened because there were some companies that were very vocal about we're going to stay remote. And now they're saying you need to be in the office five days a week because we need to have that interaction between people that whatever the magic warm and fuzzy words are to where things just magically happen when you're together. And I don't discount that, but I do at the same time.

I think there are probably a lot of different reasons for some of the things we're seeing. And, you know, I don't pretend to understand the motivations of any specific companies. But, I mean, obviously some of this is a way to reduce the size of a workforce, you know, by having people opt out. I'm not saying that's what all of it is, but that's obviously what some of it is. I think some of it is a...

And understanding that it is enough of a employer's market right now that you can afford to do some things that are a bit unpopular if you think it's what's right for your business and assume, yep, I'm going to lose some good people over this. But I'm in a position right now that I wasn't three years ago where I can go hire good people. So like now is the time to do something. The people that leave, so be it. I'll hire others. Right.

I think you also have some employers that are in pretty significant positions of power in the just hiring market, at least in the United States with some of these really big tech companies. Everything from just a comp perspective to a reputation perspective. You mentioned having that line item on your CV. I think if you're Amazon, you've got a lot of power in the market right now, and I think they're choosing to use some of that capital to come back to office. Now, why exactly they want to be in office, I've never –

been in an organization of that size, I couldn't really pretend to understand all of their motivations, I suppose. But in the organizations I've been in, I don't think I see the need for everybody to bump shoulders every day in some room somewhere to magically have something happen. I think especially companies that were kind of like organically remote to begin with are finding ways to do that awfully well. Now, I'm not claiming it's a completely solved problem, but...

I think there's a lot of hand-waving that maybe isn't all that true about return to office. Could there be a significant difference between fully remote from day one company and people being used to it? And on the other hand, if you're a company that has been an office company for 10 years or 20, and then pandemic changes everything, but

Could one of the reasons be that simply companies did not adapt to that change and then that resulted in bad results? 100%. I think companies get that kind of DNA baked into them as they grow through whatever size. It probably happens gradually as you continue to get larger. I'm in an interesting situation that my first company, which I ran for about 16 years, was a very strong in-person culture company.

And this company, which I've been at now for five and a half, is a very strong remote culture. I can tell you that that previous company, which had a very good culture and was completely in person, had we pivoted that to remote, it would not have been a graceful pivot. Like so many of our cadences and legends and just like the way that culture worked was so based on remote.

And we had a central lunchroom that everybody ate lunch in together every day. Like, so just so much of the routine was, was in person. I'm not saying it wouldn't have been possible, but like it had been a pretty major change. Whereas for prismatic, we've always been remote. We've kind of built a culture around that. And I think switching is probably very difficult. You had a central lunchroom. Wow.

That's the phrase I haven't heard in decades. We served breakfast and lunch to everybody every day. We were a small company. There were only about 300 of us or 250 or something when I left. But I mean, that's a pretty good way to deal with siloing and things as you get larger. We had a lunchroom where there was free food to tempt people into sitting next to each other. And in that particular culture, it worked awfully darn well. Now,

you know, the world's different today. Fine. But it worked awfully well at that time. Breaking bread can solve lots of problems. I mean, I love to say like humanity has spent all of humanity building culture over food and drink. That's just the thing we've been doing as long as we've been human, essentially. I don't think we should pretend overnight that all of those kinds of

things that are fairly innate and are just like the most root things in our culture just change overnight because we start using Zoom. I think there's still very much a place for some of those things that are so innate in the way that we operate as a culture. Now, I think companies can find ways to cultivate that and make it work. But Prismatic, for instance, we get together four times a year in person, even though we're fully remote. I think there are ways to accomplish some of those things if you're really thoughtful about it. But it takes a lot more work than it did when everybody just magically came to the office five days a week.

I want to go ahead and stay in that return to office thing for just a second. And since you brought up Zoom, I'm not going to throw Zoom under the bus, even though they have said return to office. Zoom, really? But the follow-on to that is, let's say you've got multiple teams within your company and those teams are actually geographically dispersed. So in cities one, two, and three, you've got one person in each of those cities. And now everybody has to return to office to go to an office to get on and sit on Zoom. That would just, to me, those kinds of things. Because I have a friend.

That works for a large-ish company. It was, you need to return to office. Well, in the city he lived in, there was an office, but all of his team was in a completely different city. So now he's relocating to the other city to be near his team because to him, it made zero sense to go to an office to where he's going to sit on Zoom all day.

Yeah, I mean, going into an office to sit on Zoom with people in other offices spread around the world is insane. Except for bandwidth. Because in theory, you get good bandwidth then. I guess that's true. Yeah, you don't have your ISP problem. But I think that just removes...

One of the biggest arguments that a lot of these return to office companies are using, which is we need everybody in one place to bump shoulders and water cooler and magic collaboration. And as you said, there are kind of different phrases that get used, but I've got a friend who works for a pretty large company outside of tech actually, but in engineering and they've done a major return to office. And I mean, that's what it is. His workforce is spread out all over the world. He comes in, he sits on zoom for eight hours and he goes home. Like, I mean, that's a strange thing to optimize for in my opinion.

Let's mark that as a non-retain type scenario. Go to office and sit on Zoom all day. That would not retain me within a company. I think many people at this point would choose to find something else. Speaking of finding something else, did you recognize some pattern? What makes people join a company?

Or leave a company, whichever you want to put. I guess I'll start with join. I mean, I think everybody has their own things that they optimize for. But I think one thing we've seen more over the last couple of years is I think people are seeking stability more than they used to.

I think there's been a bit of turbulence in the market in tech. And there was a long time there up through COVID where the market was just up, up, up. You could change jobs every 12 months and always find something paying more. And it was very much an employee's market there for a long time. And I think people were valuing

fast progression and constantly interesting things. I think they were valuing those things over stability to some extent. I think to a large extent, that pendulum has swung back. And I think a lot of people are really interested in stability. And if it's a startup, what's the runway? And if it's a larger company, how stable is the team that I'm joining? And I think people's minds have changed a lot in the last few years. And I don't think that's going to change anytime soon. I think

When you see either yourself or your friends lose the layoff lottery a few times, it kind of changes the way you think about where you're going to go next. And we've definitely seen that with candidates, and I expect most companies have. So what about the leaving part? What makes employees leave? Yeah.

I believe the cliche that to a large extent, people leave people, they don't leave companies. I don't think that's universally true, but I think certainly if you don't feel like you are in a situation where you're doing interesting work and appreciated and have a manager or a mentor or whatever that you really respect, I think those are definitely reasons that people leave. I think that's probably been true forever and will continue to be. I think if people sense a lack of stability anymore, they tend to kind of like start perking their ears up and looking around.

I think there are lots of companies that raised lots of money in 2020, 2021, 2022 that are in an awkward situation of either needing to raise down rounds or running shorter on runway every month. And I think a lot of employees are nervous about that. And I think we've seen a lot of people that have left to more stable things. So I'm not saying stability is the only thing, but I think it's notable how much more people pay attention to it than they did three years ago. If stability is now...

more sought after thing than before. Are people still as interested as they were before into options of a company? You know, we're a startup, we're going to go IPO in unknown number of years, you're going to be rich. I guess that that must also be affected if people are more into stability.

There are lots of situations where people are looking for options and options make sense such that, you know, addition, lots of people can participate in upside. But I, I think people have maybe seen enough cautionary tales over the last year of options, the last few years of options, not working out that I think people don't see them as the, just like absolute given that they used to. I think we got in a situation.

where as long as values were going up and up and up now, keep in mind, there wasn't a ton of liquidity in some of those companies, but as long as paper value was going up and up and up, everybody felt like, man, this is just a lottery ticket. I go somewhere, they hand me options. Next thing I know they're worth more than I ever thought I'd have. And then in, at least in some companies, we watched that crash back through the floor in 20, you know, late 22, 23 and into this year. I think that makes people kind of less interested in it as a magical creator of wealth and

I think we're kind of back to where we maybe should be, which is playing for a slightly longer term than just in 18 months, my options can go to a whole bunch because we're artificially running the market up. And I think we're in an interesting transitionary period maybe, but in some ways the market is maybe more rational than it was in 21 or whatever year you want to pick. So it sounds like for wanting to retain as a business owner, we want to give our people the ability to choose where they want to work from,

That feels pretty good. Meaning there may be an office to go into as well. Or in your case, where you have a fully remote company, you come together four times a year, twice a year, whatever it is, right? You at least get some face time. Now, let me ask this question. When you have your people come together four times a year, number one, how long is that together time?

It's basically three solid days with travel on each end twice a year and then shorter periods in the other two times. So you're basically together three days in a row. So you fly Monday, go home Friday, whatever it is. Yeah, basically anyway. Yeah. All right. Okay. So in those three days, how much of the eight hour day is planned versus sort of free form? You know, we've changed this as we've grown a little bit, but we essentially have kind of three categories of things. We have

we have the like company-wide sessions, which you obviously try to not make everybody's going to sit in a room for a whole day because everybody will fall asleep by, you know, partway through or whatever. So like, which are the company-wide things, which are breakout things where every team or sub team or whatever is going to kind of do different things based on what's going on in their worlds and the kind of role they have and whatever. These are of course, not just technical roles, but across our company. And then the third thing is the less planned, whether that's

some kind of dinner on your own thing or some kind of we did a baseball game in Phoenix last summer I think things like that where people kind of do it the way they want to do it to some extent just based on personalities and whatever you know needs to be part of it as well and

To be honest, we're kind of focused on trying to capitalize on the time together. So we do schedule a fair bit of it. But I think you have to do that such that people can actually be productive and not just try to jam as many minutes in a meeting room as you can. So assuming you could have all 200 or 300 people in a single city, which you can't, but let's assume you could. Yeah. Does the cost of those four get-togethers a year...

Is it equal more or less than what you'd pay in office space? It's more than the office space would be. Yeah. Time you fly people from all over the country and you feed them and you do all the things. It obviously offsets it a bit, but office space is pretty cheap compared to flying people around the country.

But even if you're flying them in, then you're not having to maintain that office space. Yeah, that's definitely true. I mean, we definitely get off easy because we flat don't have an office that we pay for. It turns out the math doesn't quite work to where it's a wash, but the in-person time is so valuable that it's pretty easy to justify. Do you think you get more value out of that sporadic four times a year than you would

every week or maybe even once a month? I think our culture is so different than what I was used to in my last company that was in person that it's kind of hard to say. It's just so apples and oranges. We do just so many things differently. We have much more frequent, shorter all-hands this year that are virtual. At the last company, we did less frequent in-person all-hands. I just think you build different cadences and you build different cultures.

so around whether you're in person or not that it ends up being kind of hard to compare. But what I can say is that I think both cultures were highly effective at keeping people aligned, keeping people engaged, keeping people having the input that they need to guide the company and move the company forward. I think there are ways to solve this on both sides and you just kind of have to decide what you're going to be. What's another thing to retain people with? Money's got to be one of the things.

Yeah, I think money is absolutely one of the things. Whether people admit it or not, nearly everybody in some form or fashion works for money. I think it became kind of popular to pretend that wasn't true for a while. But I think most people are working because at some level they need to eat and feed themselves and house themselves and whatever. I think beyond that, though, I mean, I don't think things have changed a whole lot in that I think what very technical, smart people are looking for is –

a place to do their best work on interesting problems with people they respect. And I think, you know, in-person versus not in-person kind of feeds into that. Like, where are they going to do their best work? If they think they're going to do their best work at home, and if they're going to do their best work when they're not commuting an hour every day because they're just flat going to... Of the time they're working, they're going to spend more time actually working instead of commuting, then that's where they want to be. And I think for a lot of the best people, that's really where it stems from. It's not that they...

want to wear their sweatpants every day. I mean, maybe that's a small part of it, but I don't think that's actually the driving factor. I think the driving factor for good people is they want a place to do their best work. And it's really frustrating if you're told you're going to drive an hour and sit in a conference room that for whatever reason is just less the kind of environment you want to be in while you're on Zoom than

When like I could have done better work if I had just stayed at home. And we've all heard those stories from really good technical people, like that they do their best work in their own environment or with their own setup or with their own whatever. Great. That's what people want. They want to do their best work on interesting problems with people they respect. And I don't think that's changed in as long as I've been doing this. And I, you know, I think we shouldn't overcomplicate it to some extent. Every year we get some new thing that we're focused on, but I think so much of it boils down to that.

There must be also the factor of place of living, right? I know quite a few people that lived in or around San Francisco and many of them kind of, man, I don't want to be here. Just that I have no other option because this is where, you know, Apple, Google, whatever, whichever company it is, right?

And now, I mean, again, this is anecdotal. I don't have data, but I know so many people that, hey, I'm so happy that I'm back in, I don't know, Phoenix, Arizona, Italy, wherever that is, right? Moving those people across the country or states or continents back to where they were might be challenging. I think for a senior person who is sought after for their skill,

living in a place that is unpalatable to you to work in a specific place, a specific company rather, means that company has to have something pretty darn special to be willing to do that. Now, Apple is a classic example of like, for kind of a couple different times throughout the last 30 years or whatever, it's been an attractive enough place for really good engineers that they will do unnatural things like live in a place that they don't want to live maybe to have that job. But I think that's kind of few and far between. And I think you're right that

That scale has tipped a little bit. And, you know, there's just too much opportunity for really good people to be stuck a place they don't want to be.

Now, Michael, of course, you live in the Bay Area in one of those high condo towers, right? Yeah. I live in the opposite, of course. I'm in South Dakota, right in the middle of the United States. I don't think we have high condo towers here, but you get a lot of space, which is one thing I like. And for me, this has been, like I said, I built my last company here in person. We had 200 or 300 people. That worked fine, but obviously you have a pretty specific talent pool you can draw from when you have an in-person office in South Dakota, of all places. Yeah.

With Prismatic, we're able to recruit from anywhere. We stick with four time zones for practicality reasons right now, but anywhere within the continental United States, that is a much bigger hiring pool than Sioux Falls, South Dakota. And it's changed the way we can attract talent and the level of talent that we can generally expect simply because you increased your pool by several orders of magnitude.

Yeah, probably. I don't know how big Sioux Falls is, but let's say it's 50,000. You go from 50,000 to 340 million. Sioux Falls is about 300,000 people or so, but doesn't have a huge tech scene or anything. So like of the actual tech community here, it's, I mean, you can, you could probably count individuals if you wanted to. Whereas yeah, to your point, the tech scene in those four time zones is infinitely large. So if we've tried to figure out how we retain money's good,

The ability to work where you want, when you want. Is that really a good thing for the company though? Work when you want? Does it matter to you as, as the owner? Well, as the CEO, I'll put it that way. Yeah. Does, does it matter to you of the, when the, where obviously is not a big deal to you? Does the wind matter?

You know, I think for us currently, the wind matters. You know, I think there are enough things that our culture tends to do synchronously, which certainly doesn't mean everything, but there are still some things we do synchronously that would be hard if there was essentially no overlap with four time zones. Of course you get five hours of overlap or four hours of overlap or whatever. That's enough for most of the synchronous stuff.

I know there are cultures that are asynchronous enough that it really does work to just kind of have everybody work whenever. I don't think that's what prismatic is right now. That may become what we are at some different scale, but for us, it matters. For us, it matters that there is some overlap for synchronous work, but I have seen successful companies do it a different way and not here to judge them. I can just say what works for us. What about earned time off versus unlimited time off?

That could be another hot button that HR might start yelling at me for. So be careful how you answer. Yeah. All that's to be honest, I get a little bit confused anymore about some of the definitions of all of this. I've always been fortunate at the two companies that I've run. I've been fortunate to do, I guess what I think we call in limited time off, which is like do your job and be respectful of your team and make sure that you're coordinating when you're not here and

Just kind of like do your best work and it'll all work out. That's always worked for us. Again, I've never worked for a giant, giant company that has different things that they're optimizing for or whatever. So yeah,

I've been fortunate that it's never really been much of a hot button of the companies that I've run. We do unlimited time off at Prismatic. I think there are downsides of it too. It can get to a situation where managers abuse it or companies abuse it. I haven't really had to struggle with some of that, at least from my perspective at the couple companies I've been at. But there are horror stories of essentially just using it to make sure that nobody ever takes time off.

I think a lot of really great people need to be forced to take time off more often than really great people need to be restricted from taking time off. And I think it takes a special kind of manager in an unlimited time off environment to incentivize or manage to the right expectations there where you're getting people to do their best work by being fresh and resetting when they need to reset in those things. I think you're putting some amount of responsibility on managers that some managers are undoubtedly better at handling than others.

So it sounds like you're trying to treat people like adults instead of children. That seems like a very strange thing. Yeah, it's always worked fairly well. But again, maybe not for giant companies. I want to be clear. I've always run the kind of companies I've run. No, no, no. Telling people, you know what, you need to take time off. That's treating them as children, not adults.

Yeah, there's probably some truth to that. One of my favorite people on the technical side here at Prismatic is an engineer that I've worked with for a very long time. Very, very good back-end engineer. And he's the guy who just like, you actually have to basically tell him like, dude, sometime in the next...

next quarter, I need you to find a week to go disappear because there's going to come a day where you're going to look back and realize you haven't had any time off in forever and now you're spinning up. We need you to take some time. And maybe that is treating people like children. But I think we probably all need people in our lives to tell us to do things or at least to think about things that we don't naturally have a predilection for. Can that, you know, a limited time off introduce some kind of competition where

People who would want to get time off don't take the time off because they see the people who their colleagues who don't take time off and then they feel like

under pressure not to take it. Yeah, I think that's why it's so important to have strong managers and a strong culture that treats time office as an important part of doing your best work and just living a reasonable life. I think, yes, I think in a culture where that's not valued and where you don't do the right things to kind of make sure it's valued, I think you can have all kinds of negative side effects. That's kind of true of just about any policy you have at a company ever, though. It always takes some amount of management to make sure that things are working out.

Okay. I'm going to touch on one more, probably hot button issue. HR. I'm sorry. Let's talk about benefits. Cause that's a big retainer for some places and some, not so much, but not so much as means they have no benefits. Should companies today, and again, your size is two to 300. So you, to me, you're considered a small, medium business, not a medium, small business, but you're, you're somewhere in the area, right? Cause you're in the, yeah.

But you're not Enterprise, right? And you've sort of- Yeah, definitely not. Definitely not. So should companies provide insurance completely free for the employees? I think it all just rolls together with what an overall compensation package is. I think most people are smart enough to be able to step back and-

and look at the value of a total compensation package. Like if you're getting paid materially more salary and have some amount of employee contribution to whatever benefit, that can work out fine. If you have a slightly lower salary and your healthcare is free, that can work out fine. Like I think no matter what, you just have to look at as an overall package. I think options make that tricky because they're famously basically impossible.

to value at present time. And so I think that complicates it. But the rest of it is, it's just dollars and cents. You know, I don't think it has to be super complicated. So we've done that both ways. I think it just has to be thought of as an overall package and whatever makes the most sense. The healthcare system in the United States also, or just the health insurance world in the United States sometimes has weird ways that the numbers fall where it may make more or less sense to pay all of it or not quite all of it or whatever. Like there are always...

And I don't pretend to understand that world very well, but there are always reasons that some of that gets done the way it's done. And I think as long as employees think about what their overall compensation is, like it's kind of a wash. So think about total comp and don't care about options. Consider that monopoly. Well, I think, I think you should care about options, but I think you can't, it's hard to put just like a dollars and cents on it. Like, okay, this is worth, you know, $50 here and $70 there. It's just kind of impossible to put a real number on sometimes. Yeah.

Spoken like a true founder. You want that to sound really good. Well, yeah. I mean, you can... One of my pet peeves is the like, here's a hundred options. It's going to be worth a hundred million dollars if everything... I mean, that's just not the way the world works. I think if you're not talking about percentages, you're being unfair to people. I think if you're not talking about future dilution, at least in situations where it's possible, you're being unfair to people. And I think there was a lot of that for a while where we took advantage of...

A lot of fairy tales speak around all of that, and a lot of employees ended up with a lot less than they thought they would. That was a pet peeve of mine because I just flat think it's dishonest. Shades of the dot bomb of 2000. I lived it, and that's what I was fortunately or unfortunately part of. Yeah, for sure. As I said at the beginning, Michael is the CEO and co-founder at Prismatic. We've been talking around Prismatic, but we haven't said what Prismatic does. Michael, what does Prismatic do, and are you hiring?

We are hiring. I'll get to that right off the top. So Prismatic is what's called an embedded integration platform as a service. We provide a platform to other software companies who use us to build native integrations as part of their product that connect their product to the other products their customers use. So if you think about so many software platforms today or software products today, SaaS products, have some kind of integration marketplace.

Prismatic can be the guts or is the guts behind a lot of those marketplaces that produce everything from the UX that your customers use to the actual like jobs and workflows and those kinds of things that drive the raw integrations. And so we are a platform in which other software companies build native integrations. So if you're interested in trying to find a job right now, if you're looking for a job, Prismatic might be a place for you. You can go out to prismatic.io and go

look there. All of Michael's contact information will be down in the episode description. Michael, thanks for being with us today. Yeah, thanks for having me. We hope this episode was helpful to you. If you want to discuss it or ask a question, please reach out to us. Our contact information and a link to the Slack workspace are at devopsparadox.com slash contact. If you subscribe through Apple Podcasts, be sure to leave us a review there. That helps other people discover this podcast.

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