Step 1) Hack, Step 2) ?, Step 3) Profit
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RailsConf 201648 / 89
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00:00
Multiplication signFreewareTraffic reportingProduct (business)Point (geometry)PressureWebsiteWeb-DesignerComa BerenicesWeb pageSoftwareMechanism designInternetworkingProcess (computing)Level (video gaming)Slide ruleHand fanReal numberTrailBitPhase transitionShared memoryVideoconferencingWordHypermediaSemantics (computer science)Speech synthesisProjective planeSpacetimeData managementForcing (mathematics)Lattice (order)WhiteboardMultiplicationMereologyView (database)Computer animation
05:09
Product (business)Computing platformMultiplication signGroup actionQuicksortTraffic reportingPoint (geometry)Web pageUniqueness quantification10 (number)outputBuildingService (economics)InternetworkingSoftware developerPerformance appraisalOffice suiteView (database)Video gameMereologyProcess (computing)Sound effectReal numberWebsiteData managementPerspective (visual)Content (media)BitTerm (mathematics)Military baseText editorValuation (algebra)Computer animation
10:15
Event horizonRight angleData managementGoogolSelf-organizationProduct (business)BuildingComputing platformCollaborationismLattice (order)Multiplication signFacebookData structureTerm (mathematics)Process (computing)Chemical equationMenu (computing)Endliche ModelltheorieDirection (geometry)Likelihood functionWordSoftware bugSoftware developerGroup actionMereologyHacker (term)Computer programmingPoint (geometry)Client (computing)Traffic reportingBasis <Mathematik>Office suiteVulnerability (computing)Table (information)Focus (optics)QuicksortProjective planeCycle (graph theory)WhiteboardMultiplicationHand fanSound effectMeasurementNumberComputer animation
17:46
Strategy gameOperator (mathematics)BuildingGenderBasis <Mathematik>Cartesian coordinate systemMultiplication signMedical imagingRobotPoint (geometry)Uniform boundedness principlePower (physics)SequelBitBoss CorporationSelf-organizationFunctional (mathematics)Query languageTerm (mathematics)Vulnerability (computing)Numbering schemeInsertion lossOffice suiteArchaeological field surveySpeech synthesisScalar fieldFilter <Stochastik>Interface (computing)AlgorithmComputing platformMusical ensembleUniverse (mathematics)Product (business)Sheaf (mathematics)QuicksortBit rateElasticity (physics)Scaling (geometry)CASE <Informatik>Boolean algebraAttribute grammarComputer programmingPrice indexHacker (term)Computer animation
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Branch (computer science)PlanningMultiplication signRow (database)Vulnerability (computing)Data conversionMessage passingBuildingOpen sourceScripting languageProcess (computing)Field (computer science)Demo (music)NP-hardCASE <Informatik>GoogolProduct (business)FacebookWeb pageIntegrated development environmentVideoconferencingMedical imagingEnterprise architectureRoboticsObservational studySoftwareHazard (2005 film)CausalityService (economics)CodePower (physics)Web browserFree variables and bound variablesDefault (computer science)Software testingEntire functionBasis <Mathematik>Software developerMereologyComa BerenicesDigital photographyPoint (geometry)Software frameworkSource codeLine (geometry)Group actionMathematical analysisLevel (video gaming)PlastikkarteCanadian Mathematical SocietyHacker (term)GenderQuicksortProjective planeHash function
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Multiplication signQuicksortProduct (business)SoftwareCausalityMereologyTape drive1 (number)Process (computing)MultiplicationComputer animation
35:21
Computer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:02
I'll go ahead and get started even though my timer says to start in two and a half minutes because those guys are doing it and they're cooler than me anyways everybody thanks for coming I actually did not expect this many
00:22
people because this is a sponsored track and it's really just a soft talk a very loosely prepared talk by the way I I finished it around 3 30 this morning and I gave up on trying to make my slides look cool because that takes way longer than I thought it would I'm just gonna I'm just
00:43
basically gonna talk to you today a little bit about some of the things that we do at hired that I think make our culture really unique and enable us to build like really awesome things really quickly one of the things that I've really admired since I joined hired about a year and a half ago is that we have we have a very quick agile process at our workplace and now
01:06
at this point we're up to about 35 engineers we have multiple project managers but a lot of the actual like really cool shit that we've built hasn't come from product managers it hasn't come from these board meetings it hasn't come from any of that it's actually come from hired trusting us
01:23
hiring great people and then letting us basically have fun and do what we want and I'll show you some of the cool shit that we've built it you know just happened to be the weeks that we get for free at hired so I actually screwed up on the name of this talk initially when they asked for the
01:41
request for a proposal because I didn't realize it was permanent if there's any South Park fans the the joke was the underpants gnome thing and it's supposed to be phase one phase two phase three but I said step one step two step three so if any of you are worried about semantics I'm sorry next
02:01
year if my company pays for me to be up here again I will I'll do it right so anyway who am I nobody really I'm just another rails engineer if you saw my plenary earlier before the the awesome Aaron Patterson speech I gave a little bit of background I've been doing this for about ten years now
02:23
technically like nine ten years of web development nine and nine and rails I'm just part of the community I've tried to give back a little bit and I think that I've done a couple cool things along the way and I've learned a little bit about how to make cool products has anybody here actually used hired before sweet tongue I know you have with you hire
02:45
people with it tongue is my former employer he still likes me somehow yeah he's a nice guy talk to him he works for bleacher report they were doing awesome shit probably one of the biggest rail sites in the world at this point like billions of page views something so
03:03
anyways in my nine years rails which started at a company called sage bit which was a little rail shop in Indianapolis Indiana I got exposed to rails at like 1.1 the thing that we were working on you don't know about because it was kind of dumb it was essentially just a way for people to
03:23
chop up like sports videos of their kids and like share them on social media sites which at the time was basically just my space we didn't last very long and really the only cool thing that I think we actually did was brew beer in the basement but it was a good time to get exposed to rails and that's why I'm still here ten years later and finally getting to stand in
03:43
front of people and talk or just you know ramble aimlessly next company that I onto is a marketing design firm so I changed it up a little bit and I went from building rail stuff to essentially just chopping up HTML from our designers in Dreamweaver and it felt a lot like this so I quit pretty
04:06
much as soon as I found a better job and that job was to go on and work at a company called I go digital none of you have probably heard of I go digital if you have awesome I go digital was a small team out of Indianapolis that
04:23
built actually at one point we were responsible for all of the product recommendation back in for amazon.com so you've actually used our stuff and if you've done any like major online retailers you're actually using software that I built that does like that recommended products to you also if
04:41
you ever shopped on like Best Buy.com or if you are ever buying cosmetics from Procter & Gamble you've potentially used tools that I built to help you find things that you want it's kind of fun eventually got acquired by exact target which hopefully people have heard of exact target around here exact target then acquired by Salesforce so I could have
05:03
actually just stayed at I go digital and ended up in San Francisco but instead I was stupid and I quit my job and I moved to San Francisco to work for a company called style owner style owner was like my first big like move in my career like everywhere else I was just kind of a cog but I was the
05:21
first engineer at style owner and I didn't know what the hell I was doing at all we basically just worked out of like someone's apartment for a couple years and coffee shops and we built some cool stuff we were a little bit ahead of our time I think we raised three million dollars and subsequently flushed it all down the toilet we lasted about a year and a half but I
05:44
learned some stuff about building cool products at at silo with very small teams at one point at our largest it was three people from there I moved on to bleacher report which I mentioned telling us here from bleacher report was actually acquired by Turner sports a couple days before I
06:03
started so that kind of sucked at one point we were doing you know billions of page views for month we had tens of millions of unique visitors millions of requests per minute on services that we were building and bleacher report was on rails 2.3 surprisingly and it might still be are you allowed to talk
06:22
about that time yeah still 1 8 Ruby 1 8 3 rails 2.3 one of the largest rail sites in the world everybody rails 2.3 but bleacher report was awesome it's I think that that was like my leveling up in my career actually I worked with an awesome team of people great product managers and some of the
06:41
smartest people I've ever worked with and I learned what it meant to build something stable that could scale at bleacher report thank you Tom now this is the the point of contention while I was at bleacher report I was also starting my own company at and working on this at night Tom close your ears so I had a friend who wanted to start a company that would
07:04
deliver on-demand massage not really my thing but I thought I could build it and I really wanted to like build something I was proud of and something that I could like call my own so we started working on this and I we built it up and got to the point where we've now raised 48 million dollars
07:21
we're doing tens of thousands of massages per month in 26 cities across three countries on two continents and it's kind of awesome I the thing that I loved the most about working at soothe was that I had a small team again I had this really small group of people that I trusted and we got to just kind of work on whatever the hell we felt like and because of it we were able to
07:42
build this amazing platform essentially in our free time in a couple of months and turn it into a company that like I said now raised 48 million dollars it's super cool and the theme of this is small teams of people that you trust and enabling them and empowering them to build things so after soothe I went on
08:03
to hired subsequently became the face of hired very quickly as you see it notes that I am an iOS developer which is not true that was later fixed but you could see my face across the internet like on articles that teach you how to breastfeed this was sent to me by one of my friends whose wife had a
08:23
baby actually David Nemitz sent this said why are you following me right now so hired is pretty awesome like I said you know multiple people here have used it and I'm really proud of the culture that we built there when I first started I actually got thrown onto the cultural committee most I think
08:44
mostly just because I like to drink and like party and they wanted a more fun office but it worked out pretty well and now we've gone from I think when I started we had 50 people in 10 engineers and our 35 engineers and something like 240 employees are valuation is increased like 30 fold
09:02
since I started so super cool to be a part of and the reason that we have been able to build something so cool is that we have awesome engineers and the company trust us to do whatever we want it's kind of weird like when I started I thought I was joining you know some behemoth company that was going to just kind of make me work on whatever and follow a very strict
09:21
process and we do some of that you know we're an agile development team for the most part are one of our founding engineers Nate is from pivotal lab so we use pivotal tracker although now we're moving to a sauna which I don't recommend Caitlin gets a kick out of that so I didn't actually need to take the job at hired which is kind of the cool thing and the
09:43
empowering thing about this I use the product as an employer at soothe and I loved it I thought it was fucking awesome so I decided to check it out and put myself on the platform and see what it was like from a candidate perspective I immediately loved the product and they reached out to me and
10:01
I was like I actually talked my talent advocate into just getting a beer with me instead of like trying to help me find a job and I pitched her and was like hey let me come work for you guys I love this product so a couple days later I got a job offer and I joined the team one of the things that's impressed me most about it is you know besides our dedication to the
10:22
rails platform it's the process that we've developed over the last year and a half and the amount of trust that the organization has in the people that it's hired I could talk on and on about the founders one of our founders did 99 designs which I'm sure everyone's heard of curebit talkable
10:42
multiple other things these are guys who were very experienced in building awesome products and they've brought a lot to the table that allows hired to continue to iterate much faster and more efficiently than our big competitor who is also here by the way you know with billions and billions of dollars in the bank we're a small team of like 30 people and
11:02
we're doing awesome things so when I started in the first few months I got introduced to something called the hired hackathon I don't know about the people in this room but I'm sure we've all participated in a hackathon of sorts and there's a nice definition from Google right here it's
11:21
an event that lasts several days in which a large number of people meet to engage in collaborative computer programming but usually the way that it's used is it's just a term for managers to get you to work overtime and be excited about it which is kind of bullshit so when I heard hired hackathon I was like great I get to come into work on a Friday night or a Saturday
11:41
and eat pizza and pretend that I'm having a good time but that wasn't what we were doing actually what hired was actually doing was essentially kind of taking the concept of Google's 20% time and and offloading it to a full week or two weeks or eventually even three weeks where engineers could just
12:01
work on whatever they wanted it was kind of empowering and awesome I never like it really experienced that we had done a hackathon I think a bleacher report at one point but it was you know kind of like a whole business thing and you know it lasted all night and I wasn't a huge fan of it so when I started at hired like I said we were an agile development team we had one
12:21
project manager we did your typical two-week sprints there was lots of innovation because there was very little hand-holding the engineering team was separated into a product cycle this that supported two things candidate side and employer side because those were our customers we needed to build stuff that was cool that our customers would love for a while we
12:43
kind of followed this agile process we did you know the IPMs we did two weeks friends it worked pretty well and eventually we got more and more engineers and what happens when you get more and more engineers usually more structure and what happens when there's more structure usually less innovation
13:00
so we actually made some some tweaks to our our process that didn't actually work out very well for a couple months we decided to try something called the menu of opportunity and it's it worked about as well as it sounds we basically had a bunch of business goals that we wanted to meet
13:21
and people were allowed to add things that they thought were cool to the menu of opportunity and then just kind of pick and choose whatever they wanted to build and test them and iterate quickly it sounds actually like it could work and there were parts of it that we took away that were actually really awesome but it didn't work that well because having you know 25
13:40
engineers and no direction at all in the company didn't work out so well so we kind of went back to this idea of an agile process and decided that we could kind of get the best of both worlds by following this hackathon model around the same time we decided to transition into data informed product
14:01
development initially it was actually data driven product development which sounds awesome when you say data driven but data doesn't always tell the whole picture and you don't always know how to actually measure properly especially when you're building new things if you're going to build something and try to determine whether or not it's going to make you money like you can't do that in
14:22
a week and you don't know what to look for so we transitioned to data informed product development so now we have a full data science team actually which is awesome that kind of measures things for us so that the engineers can build and then someone else looks at it and tells you if it worked or not it's worked out really well actually so we continue to innovate and focus
14:45
so one of the things that we do which I think is really cool is now that we're this big company with like thousands and thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of candidates who have signed up on the platform got hundreds of employees we do need to kind of have that discipline in that long term
15:01
focus that we didn't have when it was like 10 people because you can't maintain that forever unfortunately but like I said we wanted to have the ability to iterate quickly and build cool shit without having to worry about you know product management cycles and board meetings I think an effective product organization at least from what I've seen in my experience over the last
15:22
like 10 years is you need to balance short-term innovation with long-term investment most of the time especially especially small teams it's really difficult to do both so you usually focus on one you just try to move quickly break things or whatever Facebook's new motto is I can't
15:42
adapt so like I said we brought back the hack week the hack week essentially is at hired at least is an opt-in week where engineers can literally do whatever you want you can build internal tools you can build product facing features we are an agile team so if you build something there's a very
16:02
good likelihood that you can just deploy it to production in front of all of our users like literally the same day it sounds scary and it is and occasionally there's bugs but it works out really well because the hack week works so well for us and we spun off a bunch of features which I'll talk about in a minute the organization really realized like how important
16:23
having this trust was and empowering our teams to go forth and just do cool stuff now this guy Heaton who's actually sitting right here provided a really awesome model for us when he first started at hired the first thing he did was not sit down and like try to learn our rails app he went over to the
16:41
business side and sat with people who were like working with our candidates and our clients and watch them do what they did on a day-to-day basis to understand like what their problems were and try to understand the other side of the office and it was awesome like he built all kinds of cool shit for them that like made them so much more efficient and made their days better they weren't in the product team so anything that they wanted like
17:03
essentially wasn't ever gonna get worked on because we're trying to build features we're VC funded we have to you know what shareholder value is like all we cared about for a little while but those things aren't the only things that matter so we decided to host our first business hack week the business hack week was on top of the engineering hack week
17:24
Jeremy actually was led this one so Jeremy was one of our engineers who became a product manager and realized that we needed to actually like have time to crack down work undisturbed and build cool shit so we basically opened it up to the company and said anyone who has something that they think we
17:41
need to build that you aren't getting heard about come to us on Monday and pitch us on it and then let's pair up and build it and ship it and see what happens basically everybody in the company got involved with this and they absolutely loved it we built more features and I think one week for our business teams and our sales teams then we had built in like the
18:01
previous year and it was because we connected people across teams and let them go forth and build cool shit it was awesome so another thing that we started to work on so we do this thing that's very unique to our company that probably no one else does that we call mega week mega week happens twice a year and during mega week everybody from the company within hired
18:24
from all over the world actually flies to our main office and we have parties and you know motivational speeches and stuff like that well at least in every organization I've worked with there's usually been some sort of curtain between engineering and you know business and sales and these sorts of
18:40
things they don't know what the hell we do and we don't really know what they do and they're usually asking us for stuff and a lot of times the things that they ask for sounds simple but they're really not and when you just tell someone no I can't do that you kind of seem like an asshole especially if they don't know what you're talking about or why it can't be done so we decided to host something called pairing with the stars which we
19:03
realize now was a terrible name for it because everybody keeps complaining that we think we're the stars of the company which is not the case is this tongue-in-cheek so during mega week we basically gave everyone in the company the ability to sign up with an engineer and pair program with them for an hour or two the cool thing that came out of this was people
19:23
actually didn't want to use their time the same way I thought everybody would want to sit down and maybe learn about how our application actually works some people did other people wanted to build stuff other people had things that candidates had been bugging them about for months other people just wanted to know like why is it so hard to get something shipped
19:41
sometimes and then other times you build stuff in like an hour so we spent this week just working with all these people across our organization and we built a lot of cool shit again it was kind of awesome afterwards I sent out a I actually helped organize it so I sent out a survey to everyone in the company and at this time it was like 120 140
20:02
people and it was a universal success like everyone gave it a four or five out of a five five-point rating we had tons of people say like how they want to do it more often they wanted to spend more time with the engineers they wanted to have small teams work on cool things and not worry about like all the bullshit that you usually have to deal with especially as
20:21
an organization scales and politics come into play so we did it again and again and we're actually gonna do it again in July it's getting harder to organize which I actually will probably build a tool of it maybe you guys can someday use to do this at your company but it's something I think we're gonna keep around for a while like I said one of the things that like
20:43
becomes a really big problem as you scale is working cross-team when it's just like four people in an apartment you're kind of all like fulfilling multiple roles you're working together you have empathy for each other you understand what everyone's doing and as you as you grow you lose that this
21:01
is a good way to connect people who otherwise like may not even ever talk to each other and and let them develop operational empathy for what they do and how they work on a day-to-day basis and also like everyone loves building cool stuff everyone loves like building something people who don't get to do it on a day-to-day basis don't realize how much they love it
21:20
until they sit down and actually like crank out a feature that they've been wishing for for months so we're gonna talk a little bit about some of the cool things that we've actually built during this because I could just sit here and say like hey cool shit was happened and you know you could believe me or not but we've actually got some really awesome stuff that we've built so one of the biggest things that's actually come out of a hack
21:43
week and this would be probably surprising to some people most people would think that like our search functionality which literally powers like our entire platform it's the most important thing that we have they might think that that would be a big deal like product would probably try and prioritize that but when you just have a big sequel query and
22:01
things appear to work okay like why waste weeks and weeks and weeks building something that you already kind of have well luckily we had an engineer named Andrew who is not in this session I think he was smart and went to the Pacquiao one Andrew decided that elastic search seemed kind of cool so he cracked down locked himself in our fortress of solitude
22:24
room which is our quiet dark room with like cool mood lighting and potentially atmospheric music playing locked himself in there for basically a week and came to us and said hey check it out I rebuilt our entire infrastructure this week on elastic search and by the way all of the gyms for
22:42
elastic search suck so I built a better one and we were like what the hell like all we had to do was give you a week and just trust you to do something and you literally just built the foundation of our company for the next several years it was amazing and by the way if you guys are interested in elastic search on rails go to github check out the stretchy gym it's
23:04
really cool the guy who actually builds works for elastic and builds their own gym has like called him and tried to poach him and like steal it from him because he thinks that it's actually better than their own internal gym that they use so kind of cool and what does this allowed us to
23:20
do I don't know if you can really tell because the I think the quality is kind of low up here but we've been able to build out like really awesome powerful search features that like some people don't even know that we have at this point if you're an employer and you're using hired this is the perfect pitch right now you have awesome stuff like boolean search built in now when it was just a sequel query it was like slow as shit and there were
23:42
almost no features now you can segment you can add filters we have syntax highlighting we have boolean search and this allowed us to actually build on and develop a data science team to power the recommendation algorithm behind it before we just gave you like whatever the sequel query returned
24:03
basically sorted by like date added which sucked like that's not how people hire people want the best for their own for what they're working on and now we have the ability to provide that and this surprisingly enough came out of one week of hacking I mean granted it's obviously been built upon since
24:20
then but it's kind of awesome to see that something so integral to our company came out of just a week of letting someone have fun so another cool thing that we do a hire that has also come out of our hack week is our chat ops we actually run everything via slack we have multiple bots that basically run and they do everything from you know showing us a bunch of pug
24:44
images which I'm sure everyone is pug bombed at some point to actually running our whole auto scaling infrastructure I forget the name of the autoscaler that runs with Heroku I'm sure people here have used it it sucks it wasn't doing what we needed it to do so we built our own and we built it on you but we also do all of our deploys all of our tagging we do
25:06
scaling we do logging everything through this you bought interface and it's basically just always happened to add new features the week that we let engineers have fun and like I said it powers literally like our entire
25:21
development process some other cool things that have come out of these hack weeks one of the things that you may not know about hired is that like we promise that if you're searching for a job like no one that you know will find out unless they're like actually actively hiring well when we go pitch our product to companies and we show them live stuff there's a very real
25:46
like small but very real chance that we actually expose someone who's already working for them especially when it's big companies and that actually happened once which was really really shitty so people had asked for months and months and months for this feature and we didn't build it
26:04
because it hey it only happened once like how often is it gonna happen well the potential repercussions are huge so I sat down with a guy during our pairing with the stars week and he told me about like how nervous he was every time he pitched and this is what came out of it it took about three hours and now we have a script that runs on our demo environments basically
26:24
daily obfuscates all the data puts in these cool robot images which by the way are from Robo hash dot org it's a really fun service to use if you need placeholder images like this and it makes it so that we can actually go sell to companies and and uphold the promise that we make to our candidates once again hack week that should have been a part of our
26:43
product but it was never gonna get prioritized another cool feature and I'm tuning my own horn on these because I built this one and this next one is the bias removal feature one of the things that we've been trying to do at hired is kind of level the playing field and also understand how gender and
27:01
racial biases affect the hiring process there's some really awesome videos that we've watched recently like on Facebook and stuff that you can check out if you search like Facebook bias videos that give some like really really staggering and crazy data from studies about like how how what you look like or what your name is can potentially affect how people perceive
27:23
you when they're initially evaluating you because of that people thought like hey it would be cool if we could build this feature but once again this doesn't really like make us any money like this isn't gonna like turn us from you know a hundred million dollar company into a billion dollar company overnight but it does look really good and it's cause it's it's
27:43
actually generated like an insane amount of PR for our company we've actually built some new features now to make it so that we can analyze how people who turn this feature on hire and who they talk to and and eventually we'll be able to publish some studies that show like what just a simple feature
28:02
like this removing your photo obfuscating your name and removing the name of the schools that you went to how that can affect your you know market marketability in the marketplace another cool thing another thing that came out of this was our ETL pipeline has anybody here worked with ETL recently
28:20
like it's it's kind of tough and like I feel like most people don't actually know what they're doing it's kind of like spinning your wheels like trying cool shit and it's but it's hard to pitch that as a product you can't say like hey we need to extract transform all this data that we already have but we actually built a really cool pipeline using you know
28:40
firehose kinesis redshift and now that's actually powering our entire data science back in I think I have like one more cool thing that I can tell you about oh wait no to conversation attachments another feature coworker mentions little things like this that provide an amazing user experience for people that they may not necessarily know that they want that it's hard to
29:04
pitch to product you can't just say like hey let me spend a couple days like letting you mention co-workers that it's not really something you can measure you can't measure the impact of that but when you have it all these little things add up to providing a great user experience for someone and that is worth so much more than anything else I actually have an aside
29:21
here and one of the things that I actually love and this is a just a weird thing that I noticed yesterday and it kind of speaks to these like little tiny features and how happy they can make you when you go to github and you have a pull request if you triple click on the branch name the default behavior of a browser is to highlight the entire line of text so if
29:43
you triple click on your branch name it actually highlights the entire line of text but they have some JavaScript that then shortens it so that you've only selected the branch name so you can copy and paste it easily like who the hell thought of that I don't know it's probably some engineer who was like you know what this is fucking annoying and I want to build something cool and now people like me are talking about it in front of you when I
30:02
should be talking about my own company another cool thing that we built during hack weeks employer pages we had these employer pages forever and things kind of worked alright so like why fix what's not broken well one engineer thought it was broken tried to pitch it to product to say hey give me a couple of weeks to work on this and build a new experience for our
30:23
employers and that kind of got shut down so when hack week came around he built it and then we a be tested it and guess what it works so much better than the previous experience the data almost immediately showed like a huge uptick in participation and offers made and we actually got tons of people
30:41
writing in and saying like thank you so much I actually hated the old experience but this is basically enterprise software so I thought it couldn't get any better some other cool things fortitude gift cm CMS for SEO stuff coding challenge updates email a B test framework company notes features these are all things that have come out of these hack weeks if you
31:05
want to check out some of our open source stuff I mentioned this at the plenary as well you can go to github.com slash hired you can see some of the cool shit that we built most of these things coming out of just letting people be free to do things that they think are cool so why does
31:21
this sort of stuff work there was a quote two days ago I believe during one of the keynotes talking about the skunkworks project and I'm gonna paraphrase this I should have actually looked it up and quoted it but essentially it was that if you enable a small group of smart people and trust them and it's empowering to building cool stuff the examples that he
31:43
gave were way cooler than any of this they were building like military aircraft that broke every like speed record ever and it was done by like 60 engineers who they just gave a lab and said like do whatever in a couple years have something for us and they did it now my friend actually works for
32:01
Rolls-Royce they have something like 15,000 engineers working on a single plane that's not going to go faster than planes that they built in the 70s with like 60 people and it's costing 1.5 trillion dollars so you've probably heard of the you know the Google 20% time which actually doesn't exist anymore it's just something that they say but anyone who works at
32:24
Google will tell you that it's gone which is why there hasn't been a whole lot of innovation I think at Google in a while like 20% time birth Gmail it birthed Google Calendar it birthed a bunch of other awesome things and now it's gone and you see Google just shutting stuff down like basically on
32:40
a daily basis at this point Google gets a lot of credit for 20% time and I didn't actually know this until recently but it actually started in the 70s at 3m so we all know 3m like we've used dozens hundreds of their products they've been around for years or multi worth like a hundred and eighty billion dollars or something crazy and some of their most popular and most
33:02
profitable products actually came from their 20% time their hack weeks two of the ones that you've probably used post-it notes masking tape those were what happened when they let engineers have fun and work on whatever they wanted so how can you implement this well unfortunately the hardest part of
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this and in the most important part is hiring people that you believe in smart people that you know you can trust luckily I have a sales pitch right now that there is a an awesome piece of software out there called hired that helps you do this if you do this and you get people that you trust and
33:42
you really do trust them like you can't just tell them that during a job interview you really need to let them be free and let them know that you trust them from day one they will give you everything that they have and they'll work to make the company as successful as they possibly can and if you're getting the right people like I said like we like to build cool shit
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like we're all here because we like building things I've been doing this for 10 years like there's I've met people here have been doing it for like 25 like you don't do something for 25 years unless you really love it encourage teams to collaborate this has been one of the biggest things that we've done at hired that has caused a lot of this innovation
34:22
engineers sitting alone working on stuff will generate some pretty awesome things but you really get the benefit when you get everyone else involved in your company encourage teams like business to go sit with engineering encourage engineers to sit with the sales team you'd be amazed what you'll find out when you do this and lastly set up if you want to be like us at
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least set up a routine like some sort of fun time that people know are coming the like I said we do these hack weeks basically every quarter now where we just sit down for a week and we let people have fun and it's caused you know it's caused all this awesome stuff to happen so anyways I hope I gave you
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like some cool ideas and told you a little bit about like why we do what we do and showed you some good examples of why it works I think my time is basically up but if you have any questions feel free to talk to me down here thanks for coming guys