Welcome to this course on nanostructured materials, synthesis properties, self-assembly and applications. We are in module 2 and this is the lecture 11 of module 2 and today we start a lecture on lithography and we will have two lectures on lithography. Today we will have the first lecture of lithography, lithography 1 and we will have lithography 2. Earlier we have looked at several other techniques for the synthesis of nanostructured materials involving chemical methods, physical methods, various types of depositions like PVD, CVD and then spray pyrolysis, VLS methods. Several techniques to make nanostructured materials including template methods have been discussed in the earlier lectures of this course and today we start the first lecture on lithography and this is the lecture 11 of module 2. The term lithography involves two basic parts litho and graphy. The Greek word lithos means stone and graphia means to write. Hence the term lithography ideally means a method of producing patterns on a substrate. So, in modern terms we are by lithography we mean we make structures it may be micron size structures or nano size structures on a substrate which is very well designed which has a particular pattern and that is the lithography of today. Originally it started with the meaning as if to write on stone and hence the term lithography came into existence. Earlier days several centuries back the lithography used to be an image which is drawn or etched onto a coating of wax or any oily substance which is then applied on a plate of a lithographic stone as the medium which will then transfer the ink onto a blank paper and hence it produces a particular design on that page using this patterned stone on which you can add ink and then transfer it onto a blank paper. That is how centuries back written material was stored. The history of lithography starts with the person Aloysine Felder who is the inventor of lithography and he has full text on lithography dated 1819 where he discusses all the possibilities of color printing using this type of lithography where you have a mold made of wax which is filled with ink and this pattern on the mold is then transferred on a sheet of paper. This lithography was very useful in the 19th century and the most important company the Courier and Ives in 1852 was one of the most important lithographic company of the 19th century and they produced many many prints are called titles and several thousand copies have been made of individual titles using this type of lithography where you have a wax mold which transfers an ink onto a sheet of paper or on a leaf or on a cloth and that was the kind of lithography in the 19th century. The importance of lithography today especially comes from our IC industry for IC or integrated circuits are the key in all kind of computational devices whether they are computers or any other electronic devices being used today and in the manufacture of ICs requires several lithographic steps and this lithography is cost about 30 percent of the total cost of manufacturing of that IC and since if the cost of IC manufacturing is lowered that means the cost of lithographic techniques is lowered ultimately the electronic device the product will have a much lower cost so it is very important to develop techniques lithographic techniques which can create patterns or here create circuits which can be used in ICs at a very low cost and hence can bring down the whole cost of the device. Another important thing is the lithography has to go to from one size to ultra miniature size so we want to make smaller and smaller devices to make smaller and smaller devices you have to make designs or patterns or circuits which have very very small dimensions and these devices like the ICs which we can call as features have their size has to be reduced that means we want low feature size in these devices and lithographic techniques decide the size of these ultra miniature devices because your technique how you are making the patterns will lead to the dimensions which ultimately form the patterns. Hence you may have to use certain types of lithography to make certain patterns which are thick of several microns and if you have to make smaller patterns which are nanometer dimensions then you may have to use some other type of lithography so different types of lithographies exist which are important for different sizes of the patterns or the thicknesses of the nan patterns which you are going to imprint in your device and this will restrict the ultimate size of your device. So there are a large number of types of lithography and each type of lithography has its advantages and its disadvantages and the of course the primary thing is to get the pattern of your choice so if you need for a particular application a device with certain dimensions then you have to choose a lithography which will create that kind of dimension and for that if the costs are high you will have to use it ultimately the product will be of course expensive but depends on your applications what you want in your device you have to use that kind of lithography. So you have photolithography for example from the term photolithography you can understand that it involves light and light induced lithography so light can have various wavelengths so if you are normally in the visible region you can call it the solar radiation if you are using or the optical lithography. If you are using UV light then it is UV lithography if you want to use extreme UV it is called EUV so that is even lower wavelengths than UV and so lower wavelengths means higher energy so you are going from the visible region to ultraviolet region to extreme ultraviolet region so higher and higher energy of the incident light beam can be used for making different types of lithographic patterns so this is photolithography. You can also do e-beam or ion beam lithography that means you are making patterns or designs on your substrate using an electron beam or using an ion beam. Then you can use x-rays this is also a form of electromagnetic radiation so however it has very low wavelengths compared to optical or UV radiation so x-rays have wavelength in the order of 1 to 2 angstroms and that is like 0.1 to 0.2 nanometers so which is much smaller than the wavelength of the UV or extreme UV radiation so x-ray lithography has much lower wavelength and hence it can achieve certain things which UV and EUV photolithography cannot achieve so then you have techniques called the interference lithography. From the term interference you can understand that there will be mixing of waves that means you may have constructive or destructive interference of two beams and that can be used to generate patterns and so that is called interference lithography. Then you have scanning probe techniques which involve a variety of different there are variations on the scanning probe technique you have the voltage pulse technique the CVD technique the local electro deposition technique and the dip pen technique these are all scanning probe techniques like the scanning probe microscopy here you are using the scanning probe to make patterns or designs on the substrate and you have different variations of the scanning probe technique then you can have other techniques like the step probe technique the nano imprint technique the shadow mass technique self assembly technique the nano templates and several templates can be used to make patterns lithographic patterns using these nano templates some of them can be made by using diblock copolymers or an alumina membrane or you have channels made in glass then you can have membranes which have been made using nuclear radiation so these are called nuclear track etched membranes so a variety of techniques is available to carry out different types of lithography to maintain patterns design patterns on substrates which then can be used for certain devices. We will be discussing some of these lithographic techniques but not all the techniques but we will try to cover the important techniques like the all the photolithographic techniques the extra lithographic techniques the interference techniques and maybe the nano imprint technique so these will be discussed in little bit more detail. Now the basic technique of lithography is that you take a substrate so your substrate becomes like the rock or the stone of early days where people used to want to write something so in the modern day we call it the substrate the substrate can be a glass or it can be silicon it can be silica it depends on what you want to do with it very important substrate is of course silicon then you want to deposit a film on the substrate and that film on that film you should be able to pattern the film so the one of the properties of this film is it should be something where you can make some impression or where you can remove some parts of the film easily so that it leaves behind a pattern so you take a start with the substrate then deposit a suitable film then you pattern the film after you have patterned the film that means the design is there on the film with the substrate behind it then you etch this patterned substrate so the film is there and the substrate and the film has been designed or patterned and when you etch only the pattern that you made will remain on the substrate remaining parts of the film will be removed that is called etching so this etching can be done using different chemicals or acids and so lithography consists of these four basic steps that you start with a substrate deposit a film which can which is suitable for patterning and after you pattern using some technique it may be light it may be electrons or iron beams or some scanning probe techniques you pattern the film then you etch the film such that only the design part of the film remains the remaining part of the film should be removed and the substrate will have the pattern on top of it now if you consider photolithography so in photolithography you use light to transfer the pattern from a photo mask to a light sensitive chemical which is called the photo resist or just a resist on the substrate so you have a substrate and on that you first have to deposit a film so that is the first step in photolithography you start with the substrate and then you deposit a film after that you deposit another layer of the photo resist so you have one layer of a film and then you have one layer of the photo resist then you on top of the photo resist you place a mask so this mask has a pattern so it has this dark and white zones in the mask and then when you shine light the mask is such that wherever it is having some material it will not allow the light to pass through however in this region which is shown as white the light will go through this and hit the photo resist so in this region the photo resist is not having any light falling only in this region the light will fall on the photo resist now so selectively light is falling in this area and in this area on the photo resist so when that happens this part of the photo resist it gets removed so this is a particular type of photo resist which is called a positive photo resist which we will discuss where wherever light is falling that part it gets soluble or it dissolved away and you are left with these gaps now after this step so you have the substrate then you have the film and the photo resist is at certain parts of the on top of the deposited film now if you H or remove this mask then only you can see this so the mask was on top of this light was passed and it creates this kind of holes on top of this film the mask has been removed and so we H the mask off and then you can see only the film on top of the substrate and the photo resist is removed at certain parts now the next thing is to remove the photo you have to H this exposed part of the deposited film now this exposed part of the deposited film can be removed using certain chemicals and that is called etching and once you H now you have a gap here wherever the film did not have any covering of the photo resist that part got removed completely so you are left with a structure which has got the film and the photo resist on top of it and then there is nothing here and then again you have so you have generated a pattern of the film but still now you have this photo resist material on top of the those columnar structures of the film so next step is you have to remove the resist from top of that so you use another set of chemicals to remove these photo resist which is on top of your film when you remove that you get the final structures this is what you wanted that is what the pattern you wanted starting from the film which is here you designed a pattern where the film exists only in certain parts and wherever you want and the other parts do not have the film of course as you see that the pattern will depend directly on the mask so the mask has to be designed in such a way that ultimately you get a pattern on the film which is the pattern of your design so the design of the mask is very important because ultimately that will be what that will be the guide to the ultimate structure that you get and this structure has the pattern or design which you wanted so if you go through the steps you have a substrate a film deposited on it and then a photo resist layer deposited on it then you have a mask on top you shine light on the mask and through the mask wherever the light can go through it will penetrate and remove the photo resist the remaining parts the photo resist will remain and then you remove first the mask from top of this and then you remove the when you remove the mask you get this and then when you remove the photo resist you finally end up with this structure so you have made a pattern structure using photolithography so the various steps which we already got through with some more details is that you have to prepare the surface of the substrate to clean the substrate then you have to apply the photo resist then you have to bake it soft bake that means little bit temperature then you have to align the mask the mask has to sit exactly on top of the film where you want so you need what is called a mask aligner and then you align the mask and then you expose it to the light the whatever radiation you are using and after that you develop that means you add some chemicals which will remove the mask so when you add after you do the light you use your light you h away the mask which will be on top and you will get this kind of structure and then you inspect if it is fine then you h further remove the resist and then you get your final structure so common factors for photolithography there are different types of resist then what is the thickness of resist you want because your resist if it is too thick that light cannot penetrate completely then you will not have this structure and some resist will remain so the thickness of the resist is also important that depends on what wavelength of light you are using how much time you are exposing to the light then the alignment of the mask of course is of ultimate importance because if you misalign the mask you will not get the structure which you want because the mask actually guides the final structure so the mask alignment which is done not by hand but automatically through equipment which is called the mask aligner so it is programmed and the mask is goes to the exact position on the resist and then you do the expose it to light then you have to know the wafer surface the wafer is basically the substrate here the substrate is silicon for IC chips most of the most of the times we are using silicon so the silicon wafer surface has to be very clean and then you have to bond the resist very carefully so the addition of the resist this property of the resist material whether it adheres to the surface or not properly is important then you have to optimize the energy of the radiation that you are using for exposure of this film so the exposure energy is important the temperature of baking is important the time that you allow for the development using some chemicals is also important so there are several factors which you need to optimize to get a proper pattern using photolithography now the different types of the photo resist before we go to the different types of photo resist a typical photo resist consists of the following components one is the basic resin it is a material that is a binder for obtaining certain properties of certain chemo mechanical properties certain strengths of certain flexibility and certain chemical resistance for pattern transfer so a good resin will have optimal properties which you want and that is used for different substrate so for one resin may not be good for all the substrate so you have to optimize the type of resin depending on the substrate because the adhesion of the resin is important then apart from the resin you need a sensitizer because you will expose it to light so you need a photoactive compound that means a compound chemical which becomes activated in the presence of light in the presence of light of the wavelength which you are using so this compound should be this chemical in the photo resist should get activated at the wavelength of the light that you are planning to use so that actually has that we call it as a sensitizer because it is sensitive to a particular band of energy or particular wavelength of light then you need a solvent and you have to control the properties of the solvent for deposition like the viscosity and the flow properties etc which provide the liquid form for this resin the resin is in a liquid form when it flows and then it has to bind so to bind you need adhesion promoter so together all these four the resin sensitizer solvent and the adhesion promoter make the photo resist a very important and commercially successful photo resist is the SU 8 photo resist and it is very popular and used extensively in lithographic techniques and this is a negative epoxy and it works in the near UV radiation so near UV there is some wavelength of light where and that wavelength of light it is most active or it is most sensitive so SU 8 is a negative epoxy near UV photo resist and we will discuss what is a positive and what is a negative photo resist so SU 8 is a negative photo resist so the type of resist are positive resist and the negative resist as we said SU 8 is a negative photo resist but you can have both positive and negative resist so what is this positive and negative resist now if you would discuss this first the positive resist photo lithography so if you have this is your substrate and then this is your oxide layer which is your film in the previous slides we are talking of a film on a substrate so here that film is made of some oxide and then you have this photo resist on top of that and then you have this mask this mask can be some metal and which does not react or is not sensitive to UV light now if the mask is designed in such a way that it allows UV radiation to go through in certain region this rectangular or square region and radiation falling on the photo resist in this region will get dissolved and that is called a positive resist so wherever the light is falling if this resist gets dissolved those areas that are exposed to light become soluble then this kind of a resist is called a positive photo resist and ultimately you will get a structure like this where the resist which was here is no more there because it has been exposed to light and during that period this part of the photo resist got dissolved and only this part where no light was coming because there was a mask on top still remains so the photo resist part which remains is where the mask actually was placed on top of it so the resulting pattern based on a positive resist photolithography will look like that if the shape of the mask is like this now if you look at the negative resist photolithography there is just the opposite it involves a photo resist where if light falls on that photo resist that polymerizes so that will remain as such it will polymerize wherever light is not there that can be removed so areas exposed to light become polymerized and then when you add the whole thing to developing chemical the region where light was not falling that resist that does not resist the chemical and so it will get dissolved and areas which were exposed to light that will resist the chemical so earlier areas which were exposed to light became soluble now the areas where light falls becomes polymerized and will remain the area where light did not fall will actually get dissolved so it is just the opposite of the positive resist photolithography is a negative resist photolithography and here the region where the light did not fall because the mask was designed like this did not allow light to fall on this region and since light did not fall on this region when you put it in the chemical it removes the photo resist and the part where light fell the photo resist polymerized and now the chemical cannot remove that part and so the final structure looks like this so this is the negative resist photolithography now you can do optical lithography with visible light with ultraviolet radiation ultraviolet radiation which has wavelengths in the order of 365 to 436 nanometers now when you go from visible to ultraviolet you are going to smaller wavelengths as you are going to smaller wavelengths you can make smaller features so if you want to make smaller and smaller features you go to smaller and smaller wavelengths so you can go to UV which is 365 to this 436 nanometers if you want still smaller structures you go to deep UV that is deep ultraviolet which is much smaller wavelength and much higher energy that is 157 nanometers to 250 nanometers if you want even smaller wavelength that means even higher energy you go to extreme UV which is called EUV where the wavelength has the values of 11 nanometers to 14 nanometers and ultimately if you want to go to even higher energies and much lower wavelengths to obtain very small feature sizes then you go to x-ray radiation which has wavelength less than 10 nanometer it is normally of the order of 1 to 2 nanometers and so you can make feature sizes much smaller than what you can get using UV or deep UV lithography so extreme UV lithography you can use when using UV lithography you are at the limit of the minimum feature size that means you cannot make designs or feature sizes smaller than the UV radiation but you need them then you go to EUV which is extreme UV and since very few materials transmit extreme UV light so you have to use reflective instead of transmissive optics because most of the materials they reflect the light instead of transmitting the light and so your optics have to be changed the masks for used for lithography using such extreme UV radiation uses heavy metals for forming the mask patterns and because those are those absorb the EUV radiation so heavy metals may be gold or platinum they can be used for forming masks which will absorb the extreme UV light and wherever in that pattern there is a hole or there is a gap the light can penetrate and will affect the film underneath the mask and hence your pattern will be generated. Now the resolution of such a photolithographic process is limited mainly by the diffraction of the light used for exposure so to reduce the diffraction and achieve the highest resolution you can use shorter wavelengths as we discussed you can use deep UV ultra in this extreme UV and you can use different sources for them for example you can use an examer laser which uses radiation of the wavelength of 193 nanometers you can use mercury vapor lamp or xenon lamp so you can use shorter wavelength to avoid the resolution which is limited by diffraction of course you are going down below the UV limit the other thing is you can choose high numerical aperture lenses to project the light so higher the numerical aperture your resolution that means your ability to see two points close together will improve so you can come down to much smaller dimensions between two points and dissolve them if you use a very high numerical aperture so that will become clear if you look at this equation where the resolution you want very small numbers here so LM which is your resolution should be very small now this can be very small if either lambda is very small which is the wavelength that means you keep decreasing the wavelength that is why you go from UV to deep UV to extreme UV and then you go to x-rays but in the other thing that you can do is you can increase the numerical aperture NA here so if you have very high numerical aperture then also you will have a very small number for the resolution that means your resolution is very good now this is typical for any these are typical optics for any microscope or optical either optical microscope or electron microscope where you have your source which may be an optical beam or light rays or it can be an electron beam and then you have lenses to focus the beam and when it is focused there is this angle this angle which is actually should be discussed as a solid angle but we are now looking at half of that angle and that angle theta if you take the sign of that angle of the half angle theta that multiplied by n which is the refractive index you calculate the numerical aperture so the numerical aperture you want is a very large number and this numerical aperture will be large if you have a very large theta value or very large n value because you will have the maximum value sin theta equal to 1 when theta is equal to 90 degrees but of course you cannot do that so this theta you can vary to increase the aperture to a certain extent and you can change the refractive index by changing n so you will you can control the numerical aperture and you can get a better resolution if you have a high numerical aperture so the wavelength of light and the numerical aperture both control the resolution and you want a low wavelength and high numerical aperture to achieve the best resolution now so one thing is which I already said that you need a for better resolution in photolithography you need a large numerical aperture and short wavelength and short wavelength you can go to deep uv extreme uv or even x-rays now if you want to go to x-rays then we come into the term what is called x-ray lithography so you are going to use x-rays as your source of radiation to make patterns on the films and this methodology the x-ray lithographic technique allows you to have very high or super high resolution pattern transfer so when you are transferring the pattern of very high resolution then this technique is very important there are other techniques like the uv lithography etc have a limit to what kind of resolution of pattern can be transferred on to the film now but x-ray lithography has technical hurdles and most time you need synchrotron x-rays so synchrotrons are not available very everywhere in you cannot have synchrotrons in every laboratory so synchrotrons need to be further developed and so it is expensive and you need these synchrotrons because they will give you collimated x-rays and those are normally used for x-ray lithography now that makes this x-ray lithographic technique a little expensive and so it has to be used for very high end product design so x-ray lithography is similar to photolithography except that you are using x-ray radiation instead of visible light or ultraviolet light and you have to keep a gap between the silicon wafer where or your substrate and the mask in the earlier techniques you used to put the mask right on top of the film which was on top of the substrate but in x-ray lithography there is a gap between the substrate or the film on top of the substrate and the mask and then you have to have x-ray resist that means certain materials which will not allow x-rays to pass and x-ray masks are always thinner so there are certain differences between x-ray lithographic techniques and normal optical lithographic techniques so this is a typical diagram to show you a x-ray lithographic process so you have your substrate and on top of the substrate you will have your image of the pattern which you have on the mask so this mask which is kept little bit away from the substrate there is a gap between the mask and the substrate and the mask is of two parts the mask is made up of an x-ray absorber which is patterned on this mask so these are x-ray absorbers and in between these are gaps where the x-ray is not absorbed so you have an x-ray absorber and there is a material of film which is transparent to x-rays so wherever the material is transparent to x-rays and there is no absorber behind it then the x-rays will pass on through the this material and then hit the film so this film on the substrate is typically a polymer like PMMA we call it is used very commonly in many many photoresist so what you have is your x-rays falling on the mask and the mask is made up of two parts you have an x-ray absorber which will absorb the x-ray if the x-ray comes in its path and there is the resist which is transparent to x-rays and you get feature on the PMMA which is the PMMA is where you will get the final image so this is the so you transfer the x-ray whatever the pattern on the mask on top of the PMMA using these x-rays now the materials which are used for x-ray absorption are typically metals with high atomic numbers like gold or compounds of tantalum or tungsten which are also of high atomic masses and the layer which is transparent to x-rays in the mask this layer is typically silicon carbide or diamond and as we already discussed the film on which the image will be formed is typically a polymer which is PMMA and so whatever be the design here that design is recreated on the film and this is called the later image so you will see that wherever there is a gap here the film here this film of PMMA has been removed by the x-ray but wherever you have this absorber that part of the film is intact so you can make a pattern using x-rays you use a visible light and some alignment optics to align your mask and you see such that you have the right positioning of the x-ray absorbers to create the right pattern on the PMMA so this is a typical x-ray lithographic technique where you are using x-rays there are couple of differences with the earlier techniques the mask is kept away from the film of the polymer and there is a gap this is an important thing and then the materials that you use are different you need to make the mask in such a way that you have some x-ray absorbing materials on the mask and these x-ray absorbing materials are made up of either gold or some compounds of tantalum or tungsten so this is the x-ray lithographic technique and with this technique you can make very fine features because the wavelength of x-rays is very small it is 0.1 to 0.2 nanometers and it is it results the diffraction problems of normal UV radiation so in photolithography using UV when we come across the problem of the diffraction limit then if you use the x-ray techniques it results that diffraction limit because you can go to shorter and shorter wavelengths like 0.1 to 10 nanometers and hence you can generate much smaller features using x-ray lithographic technique. Now there are certain disadvantages to of x-ray techniques one is I already mentioned that it may be expensive you may have to use synchrotron sources then you have to use thin x-ray masks and those are expensive then there can be deformation in the polymeric film and there can be vibrations and this process is also time consuming so these are some disadvantages of course if you want to have very precise and small features then you have to go for x-ray lithography. Now then we move on to what is called interference lithography the term interference as commonly studied in physics as you know you have two different waves and they are interfering to create either constructive and destructive regions so somewhere the amplitude of the resultant radiation or the resultant wave will become higher and some places it will become lower. So this technique interference lithography where is the preferred method where you want large scale pattern formation and if you want where the periodic or quasi periodic patterns are coherent over large areas so this is a very good technique for making such large area patterns so here you can see that you have a silicon substrate on which you have anti reflection coating and then you have this photo resist on you can have a negative photo resist or a positive photo resist and accordingly you can get the patterns on top of them. So the basic mechanism of this interference lithography is you make an interference pattern between two light beams here if you choose ultraviolet or UV light then you have two beams of UV light so this is one beam and this is another beam and they are kind of tilted at an angle theta so they will interfere and when they interfere they will generate this pattern and if you look at the variation of their amplitude then you will see a periodic variation of this amplitude which is related to the wavelength and of course the angle of the at which the two radiations are meeting. So you normally use a UV laser which is split expanded and superimposed to form the interference pattern. Now this technique is very good because you do not need a mask and it is not a scanning process. Now if you use x-rays that is you have passed two beams of x-rays instead of UV then you get what is called x-ray interference lithography. Now if you use x-ray interference then you get high resolution you can go to sub 5 nanometer region and you can get periodic structures of less than 5 nanometers you have high throughput that means you can make many nanostructures very quickly there are no charging problems in this technique and you can use other photoresist processes in addition to direct modification of films just like this kind of SAMS which are called self-assembled monolayers and the mask fabrication is much easier compared to other lithographic techniques. So x-ray interference lithography is a very advanced form of lithography where you are using two x-ray beams to interfere and creating periodic patterns and these periodic patterns are at a level of less than 5 nanometers periodicity and using this you can generate a very large scale periodicities. So the x-ray interference lithography is shown here you have x-ray from synchrotron going through a pinhole and this synchrotron light is then diffracted at a grating and that grating is basically a mask and the pattern on this mask or the will result in the ultimate image that you want. So you have this substrate and this substrate is coated with a resist on top of the substrate you have the resist and when the x-ray after interfering here it creates a pattern here then that pattern will be etched on the substrate. So you are using x-rays going through a mask which has a particular pattern and then diffraction is occurring and you are getting a periodic structure based on the interference of the two beams which is the two beams are being generated by this grating and you get a structure of your choice by the design which you made in the mask and this is the way that you generate x-ray interference lithography based on two x-ray beams which are interfering with each other. The advantages of interference lithography is that it is a one step process it is not that you have to repeat steps after steps and it allows for processing of a complete substrate with one single exposure. So you can use a very large pattern can be generated using a single exposure of course if you have very complicated pattern then you have to do several exposures. It is possible to make very small sub micrometer structured surfaces on area which are more than one square meter in size so it is very effective for large scale structures. It is time and cost effective compared to many other patterning technologies. So these are the advantages of x-ray interference lithography. With that we come to the end of today's lecture this lecture 11 of module 2 and I thank you all for your patience and we meet again for the 12th lecture on which will be the second lecture on lithography. Thank you very much.


In the wake of Hurricane Florence earlier this year, we heard of a truck driver who saved 53 dogs and 11 cats from floodwaters. And then there's the case of a woman who saved 18 dogs from a flooded house and its fenced-in pen. This mind you is occurring in the midst of a natural disaster.  But even as floods raged, residents of North Carolina were taking time to rescue someone else's pets. Hello, this is Ryan McMakin, and you're listening to Radio Rothbard. In contrast, just a few months ago, we heard about how dogs are being eaten by famished Venezuelans. In that unfortunate country, there are also reports of zoo animals being stolen for their meat. The zoo animals that aren't eaten are reportedly starving. Even worse, the conditions in Venezuela have become a daily reality. They're not even the temporary result of a natural disaster. I don't mention these animal-related anecdotes because I think they are equal in importance to the human tragedies involved in each case. After all, the most important fact and a statement about starving people eating dogs is that people are starving. And the death count of Hurricane Florence was at 23 human beings at least, a far greater tragedy than the deaths of 10 times as many dogs. I mention these cases because they illustrate how creatures without legal rights fare better in market-oriented societies. Even a hurricane-ravaged community in moderately capitalist North America treats its dogs better than the residents of socialist Venezuela. At the core of this difference between conditions for domestic animals in the US and Venezuela is this. Market-oriented, i.e. capitalist societies, can afford to treat their animals better. They can afford to build animal shelters, to package food expressly made for pets, and to put stray animals down humanely. As Catherine Greer writes in her book Pets in America, A History. The spread of the idea that pets are companions that merit kindness only began to gain widespread currency in the 19th century. It was in 1838, for example, that Lydia Sigourney published a book of parenting advice called Letters to Mothers, which established a, quote, moral code of infancy, unquote, in which children ought to be taught to not strike the dog or roughly handle a kitten. These were not the writings of a mere eccentric. According to Greer, Sigourney's writings were a look into what, quote, respectable folk, the new American middle classes, were thinking and worrying about at the time, unquote. And what led to middle class families putting more emphasis on kindness toward animals? Greer focuses on ideological and cultural factors. She concludes that a general rise in a domestic ethic of kindness evolved from ideas that defined middle class or Victorian culture in America. Gentility, liberal evangelical Protestant religion, and domesticity. Greer is only partly right. There is no denying that these factors are important, but without the enormous gains in worker productivity, wealth building, and economic progress that occurred with the rise of industrial capitalism in the 19th century, there would have been no new middle class of Victorians who worried themselves with such things. These social currents were closely tied to the new wealth that had been made possible by the new economic currents in North America and Western Europe. And fortunately, these new economic realities led to improvement for human beings as well, including those who also have often lacked full legal rights. With the rise of industrialized capitalism, women and children began for the first time to gain access to education, to leisure time, and to freedoms that had previously been unknown to those who were not politically favored or physically strong. For example, in her reassessment of the Industrial Revolution, Wendy McElroy writes, quote, a destructive myth has wrapped itself around laissez-faire capitalism. It is the erroneous notion that the free market harms the vulnerable within society. Specifically, it is said to harm women and children by cruelly exploiting their labor. The opposite is true, unquote. Noting that urban factory jobs offered an escape from the rural lives that offered few choices, women voluntarily fled to cities where choices were more abundant and where prosperity could even be had for a single woman without dependency on men or family. McElroy continues, quote, arguably women were the primary economic beneficiaries of the Industrial Revolution. This was largely due to their low economic status in pre-revolutionary times. They simply had more to gain than men, unquote. But it wasn't just the workers who gained from these changes. Consumers reaped the rewards as well. In her essay, The Liberation of Women, Bettina Graves notes how leisure time for women was largely a creation of market-based mass production, quote, the tremendous advances which have made it possible for women to achieve recognition as persons, legally, politically, economically, and professionally, are undoubtedly due in large part to capitalistic contributions, savers and inventors and producers, operating in a relatively free-market economy, risking their own private property in the hope of profit, supplied the goods and services which have freed women from the daily drudgery and heavy manual labor expected of them for centuries, unquote. The social consequences of these advancements in worker productivity and wealth accumulation, even by the late 19th century, had profound effects. The new surplus in both savings and leisure provided women with the opportunities to obtain an education, either formally or informally. It is not a coincidence that a middle class woman like Maria Montessori, for example, managed to receive a formal education in medicine in the 1880s and 1890s. Nor was education something pursued for its own sake. Literacy was of increasing importance since as household finances became more varied and complex, one historian notes, quote, it was the wife who generally determined how the family's money was spent. Women ruled at home partly because running the urban household was a complicated demanding and valuable task, unquote. As households moved away from subsistence living and as daily life became less of a struggle for mere survival, things changed emotionally as well. Married couples, quote, also devoted stronger emotional ties to each other. Affection and eroticism became more central to the couple after marriage. And many French marriage manuals in the late 1800s stressed that women had legitimate sexual needs, unquote. Thanks to improvements in wealth, the advantages of which included improvements in sanitation, child mortality began to decline and parents began to view their children differently. As one history textbook affirms, quote, although it may seem hard to believe today, the typical mother of pre-industrial Western society was frequently indifferent toward her baby, unquote. These changes began with the well to do but spread to the working and middle classes as the 19th century wore on. For middle-class households in the late 19th century, the, quote, loving care lavished on infants was matched by the greater concern for older children and adolescents, unquote. The mothers who were now themselves educated could also provide their children with an education, as this was yet another critical component of the new domestic life. In the new industrial era, a new baby did not necessarily mean an increase in the grave hardships faced by a family. It might be possible for parents to actually spend time and money pampering a child in a way they never could before. Moreover, older children no longer had to be viewed as having value primarily as workers. Parents have long sought to remove their children from the labor force when economically feasible. In his research on child labor, for example, Benjamin Powell observes how the decline of child labor is closely tied to rises in incomes enjoyed in market economies. Historically, it is not the passage of child labor laws that eliminates child labor. It's increasing wealth. As parents are able to make ends meet using the incomes of just the parents, children withdraw from the workforce. Powell concludes, quote, child labor virtually disappears in all countries when incomes reach a little over $10,000. The laws were largely redundant, unquote. It's not difficult to see how in the mid-19th century families were already beginning to read books telling them to adopt a domestic ethic of kindness in which even kittens and dogs were thought to be deserving of the benefits of the new domestic life. The same economic trends that make it possible in market economies to spend time and energy saving dogs from floods have also enabled us to benefit countless human beings as well. Yet in spite of all of this, we still continue to hear about how capitalism and industrialization dehumanize us or distract us from the important things in life or that they somehow commodify our lives. In reality, the historical record shows that it was industrialization and capitalism that propagated the conditions under which we can afford to treat each other more humanely. Unfortunately, where the capitalist economic order breaks down or had never been established in the first place, we see these trends in reverse. We see increased human trafficking and prostitution. We see dangerous child labor. We see starving people eating zoo animals. All of this should be seen as a warning against growing complacent about the benefits of a market economy. For more content like this, visit Mises.org.


All right, well, welcome everybody. I appreciate you guys coming out for one of the end of day talks. Get sort of trickier to stay awake. I'm Clyde C. Posada, head of the training and certification group at the Linux Foundation. We have been at it for a good 10 years, figuring out that you do, in fact, need some training and certification. The fact that it's open source doesn't magically implanted in your brain. And we've been spending a lot of time thinking about the talent side of the equation. While most of our comrades are working on code and actually building great code. And so the training team works on the backside of that to figure out, OK, yeah, there's great code. What can we do to get more talent ramped up as both contributors and users of the ecosystem? I'm Jay White. I work on the open source strategy ecosystem team at Microsoft. I'm here on behalf of my fearless leader who couldn't be here today. But I am her hiring manager alternate on the team so I can speak directly to the challenges that are experienced with building and retaining teams in this kind of market. But also, how to help scale what's already in your organization and ramp them up to join your team doing maybe sometimes very different things. So we're going to run through a prepared slide presentation to a small group. So just raise your hand if you have a question. We'll stop as we go along. It's interesting. We submitted this talk right when we were at peak layoff, I think, happening this year. And they were like, is talent shortage still a real thing? Because there's hundreds of thousands of people on the market. Well, actually, it turns out most of those people got another job within six or eight weeks of their last job. And if you talk to hiring managers, those of you who are hiring managers in here or on the back end of waiting for new colleagues to come in through the hiring process, the issue of talent availability did not magically disappear when the economy got tight. It's still very real. And it's real across the world. So even post pandemic with remote hiring, we're still hearing that pretty consistently. And so the idea behind this talk was to say, hey, what's really happening out there? And what strategies are available to organizations that are permanently stuck with open seats that they wish they could fill? And the old definition of insanity. You have to do something a little bit different. And for the last five years, you haven't been able to get as much cloud talent as you'd like to have available. And so we're going to explore a little bit about that. I think we have an intro slide. And then, Jay, maybe just talk a little bit about the short thing. So we have a few pictures up here, right? Talking about economic crisis. You hear this across your organizations, right? There's a flux now.  This organization is hurting over. Our customer is hurting over here. That's our main source of revenue. So we can't make this budget this year. And it's going to be in its domino effect, right? So you hear that. And then, of course, you'll hear panics when it comes to people getting laid off. And now you have problems in the housing market. And that whole bubble is bursting. And you see all those things represented there. What it comes down to is how our companies who have come off of COVID and they have these buildings that they've been leasing, that they've been putting all this money into. Their employees are now working from home. They're asking their employees to come back. But they're coming back into a storm where now there's no money for your free snacks. And there's no money for your catered lunches. What? The lunches are going away? The lunches are going away. You're not going to see the a la carte. You're not going to see the chef hats. They're not there anymore, right? So you have those kind of things that have created a situation now where you have not only the laughs we're talking about, but you have attrition. And everyone's stampeding outdoors of companies what they call the great resignation and all that kind of stuff, right? People are leaving companies now. People are starting their own companies now. I mean, I could do it better myself, right? Why should I go work for this company and make this much money for them when I could make a fraction of it, make a fraction of what they're making revenue-wise and I can keep it for myself? I'm talented enough. Why not? You see all those kind of things happening. So, you know, there is this idea that there is a change in the availability of talent because of the cutback because every time you turn on the news there's another wave of, you know, wave three of layoffs at XYZ sort of megacorp. Just this week, those of you who were in the keynote on Wednesday, Jim referenced this, we released on you 2013 State of Tech talent report that tried to put some data around what actually is happening out there at a macro level in terms of talent availability and it turns out what's happening is not what you would think was happening if all you did was read the headlines about wave upon wave of layoffs. Yes, it's real, but what the data says is that unlike past economic downturns, this time around a lot more of the people who were affected were pretty high earning kind of fairly senior folks who had been kind of hoarded at different organizations because in-house turns out that those expensive people when the economy gets tight, you start thinking about can I really afford to keep them? So the two things came out in the survey, one was it actually affected a more senior level that had happened in past downturns and the second was that even those companies that had cut back and done layoffs were continuing to hire with a focused more on entry level talent on some of the top areas of skill gaps like cyber and cloud and AI. And so when you think about talent, I'm sorry, go ahead. I have a thought, I have a thought. It begins with automation, one. There's also, when you consider what does a VP do today? I'm not, I think VP's in the room right now.   But let's imagine this, you reach the illustrious title of VP in an organization and now you've been sitting there 10 years, right? You've built up this fantastic org under you and it's very bottom heavy with you at the top. You may have a few directors, maybe a few more senior managers that are driving all this work below. All you're doing is now reporting metrics up, right? How are these metrics getting generated, right? It's not a PowerPoint anymore, right? Somebody's not doing a PowerPoint for you and you're not having to get this metric from this person, this metric from this person, this metric from this person, build a round table, okay, if this is what I'm gonna present to the president or this one I'm gonna present to the C-suite, these things are now automated. And now you have this wonderful dashboard that's automated. So when a C-suite is now looking at how do we increase revenue? How do we improve? So we wanna develop this new cool tool I'm gonna tell you right now, AI. Let's look at the whole AI, let's say evolution. AI's been around for a long time now, we're just catching up. But the whole AI evolution, right? Every major organization now is trying to find money to put in to this technology and be the first to market with something cool and fancy. Where's the money coming from? So if you look and say, well, who do we need more? The talking head here or the developer down there? Looking for logic here is not necessarily the appropriate path, because especially in the case of public companies where they have to answer to shareholders and like logic's out the window, right? And so you just have lemmings at this particular point. Layed off, so this is kind of what I mean when I say these would be the people that I would think would provide the most value to the company as opposed to entry level. You need both, I'm not saying one or another, but the senior engineers also got the job at some company, so that to me is baffling. Yeah, so on that end, I'll follow the point he made, very logical. What I will say is this, you have concepts now, not really a concept, but I guess solution, memory safe languages. So you're more senior engineers, you're more what I consider to be old school engineers. Are they coding? And what's considered memory safe languages today? Are they doing that? Or are they asking the younger developers to do that? Are they saying, okay, we'll show us what's being done to an organization who has to move fast? Remember, you still have SLOs that need to be met. Organization is moving fast. You're gonna wait on the senior engineer to get plused up, or you're gonna bring in that new budding fresh out of college. You just got finished coding in something like Rust. He spent his whole entire collegiate experience coding in Rust.   Learn Rust and come back. I mean, like I said, illogical in nature. I'm just giving up. I often think of a client I had, German guy who whenever there was a downturn, his mantra was always costs, walk on two legs. It is a difficult time to be a hiring manager. I think all of you knew. Absolutely. We have our challenges here, right? And then we talked about the resignations early on, great resignations, and you get the layoffs and things like retention, hiring. I mean, you see the slide there, right? To me, in my mind, the most important two you see here are the two down there on the right, the legacy technologies and the emerging technologies. Boy, aren't those two different ends of the coin when you think about hiring challenges? Why is that? That's because the newer individuals coming in have no idea about legacy technologies and the older individuals sometimes get so complacent that they take their eye off the ball of what's emerging. That's why it's wonderful to be in information security. It's wonderful to be in information security because I have no choice but to keep my eye on what's coming up next, right? Now, when it comes to the hiring challenges, though, I'll give you my story on how I found my way into the open source strategy ecosystem team. I just told you, I'm a security guy, through and through. I got hurt, I was a combat soldier and got hurt in the military on my second deployment. I was jumping out of planes and doing things that are a little bit uglier in nature. Anyway, I got hurt. I found myself getting reclassed first to HR and I hated life, then to IT, where I found a whole different set of challenges. But what that allowed me to do was to get plused up on, you know, I went back to school, got information security degrees with all that kind of stuff and found my way into information security. Spent my entire career, 20-something years doing information security, when I applied for a job at Microsoft, got turned down 40 times, 40 times, the person who looked at my resume and said, I want to talk to him, was Sarah Novotny. Why did Sarah Novotny want to talk to me? She said it straight up. In your resume and through our conversation, I saw that you have a philosophy around building communities in information security. My whole career has been spent, even in the military, it was spent with why the hell are we working in silos to solve these issues that we're all experiencing together? That makes no sense to me. And I brought that out into when I did information security and cyber security, supply chain security, everything else. Why are we talking about, why am I not getting all these business units together, forcing them into a room and saying, hey, why aren't we consuming open source software and third party bionaries the same way? Why isn't that done the same way? And so she saw that in my resume that I bring people together. What's open source? She said, you can't teach that. I can teach you everything else. That was March, actually I talked to her in January. I started Microsoft March 21st last year.  Come on, come on. You know what I mean? No, no, no, there's no need to clap.  You don't understand, this is harder than it looks. Okay, just don't clap for that. But I think that's a transition to you. So the opportunities, right? Look at your teams and beyond, right? Check out the broader community. Great talent is available. You have no idea where that talent is or where they come from. They could be doing something completely different. One of the things that I see many larger organizations doing, some smaller ones do it a little bit better, is they have these things like take one, take two, take three, so these steps, right?  And then we'll take somebody from their team over here and we'll cross train. And then we'll send you back, right? That's an excellent way to find talent within your organization. Because things get mundane.  And I have one individual, a mentee of mine that'll sit there and say, I liked what I was doing before, but now I'm just going through the motions. Well, maybe this is an excellent opportunity for them to find something else in their organization that they might have more fun doing. Go ahead. Right, and tradition has its values in some contexts, but in the context of technology where things are ever changing, at least if we're willing to recognize that, then this kind of legacy mindset is a problem to liability, right? So the point that you're making about like this cross-functionality essentially is what you're looking for in these teams so that you can say, hey, you might have come into the organization to do this thing and now we're moving you over here and tell me what you think about it. So portability, like individual portability, that requires a certain cultural buy-in. So I envy you if you're in an environment where they see the value of that and I would encourage everybody to try to implement that if they can because that is essentially the way forward where basically you're able to, it's not about hiring from within, it's about recognizing the talent you already have. Absolutely, and I'll tell you right now, I've been fighting because of budget, they're not gonna give it to me, but I've been fighting to get my own team stood up to do all of this stuff. I'm in so many different places in open source now, it's not even fun. So I said, hey, I need help. I need to put people in this place. So instead of getting the help I need, I reached out to different engineering teams because I did what was done for me. I looked at resumes and I have five engineers right now that I have sitting in open SSF SIGs and working groups that are helping out, that they're hands-on keyboards still doing what they love, right? But participating in these communities is such that they're getting skills from other individuals, right? That they're pulling in skills, right? They're having these conversations and they're loving it. They hold meetings for me, they love it, right? So finding that talent from within is key too, to help build up those teams. And they may not be direct reports to you, right? But you can actually help them develop unto themselves and then provide evaluations so that they can grow in terms of their own teams because they have a leg up that people on their teams don't have and that's the skills you're teaching. It's interesting how the problem gets phrased, right? So for those of you who are hiring managers, when you don't fill a role, the question is always, why didn't you fill the role? Did you not advertise in the right place? Did you not use the right recruiter? Nobody ever comes and says, why didn't you grow your own talent to be able to fill those, right? The mindset in too many places is go outside. LinkedIn is your talent buffet. Find the good passive candidate, sick a recruiter on them, pay 30% upfront and you should get the results you want, which is to put some existing talent from somewhere else and plug them into a hole. And nobody's saying that you should not do that, but a single strategy of buying talent in will never get you where you need to be, right? And it's sort of interesting that you think that people have learned this over the past five, 10 years, but there's some sort of momentum around culture and behavior where they just keep ramping up the recruiter budgets. Okay, how about do that plus do a couple of different things to try to figure out other ways to fish for talent in non-traditional places and to look for potential talent within your existing organization? Companies know what challenges they face, right? It's interesting historically when you look back, big waves of tech change had typically been coming kind of one at a time, right?  But when you look at it now, it's sort of like, there's like five things coming at you simultaneously, right?   And you don't get to pick and choose, you know, hey Jay, I'll do your security thing next year, okay? Because I'm working on this other thing right now. The talent problem has actually gotten worse because now you're trying to address multiple major technology shifts in a context where you already didn't have the amount of talent that you need to do. And by the way, you still have a serious legacy, you know. There's a whole different talk we could give about legacy systems and people pretending like they'll happen, keep working forever because they work today. And at some point the music stops and you have to deal with legacy technologies and how many people still know how to run it. And especially now because, you know, the big sea change from a year ago is all of a sudden the market case about profitability and budgets have gotten a lot tighter. And so talk about doing more with less. So again, everybody's looking at your cost structure but they're also expecting you to go.  You made an excellent point earlier about the senior engineer, letting them go, right? Well, these are the individuals, this is how organizations suffer, right? Need to keep and maintain legacy systems. Those individuals understand the legacy systems that are in place and then be a let go. I was just in the hall talking about this and I said, actually, yeah, some of the individuals in the hall when I said this, I said, if you wanna defeat a new system today as a pentester, you wanna defeat a new system, write your program a Fortran, right? Because there isn't a new system out there that'll read that, but guess what? Your legacy systems might. But we're trying to scrap those for the new shiny, the shiny new things.  If something can be updated on it, right? Shrug, who knows? Some of the systems can't even be patched. But for an organization to keep and maintain these systems, because it's incredibly hard now because of that attrition, because of those layoffs that occurred. So now you're asking a younger individual, hey, get plused up on this, huh? Questions. Why has the apprenticeship model phased out? Instead of arming recruiters with a bunch of money coping their throwing darts at a wall and hitting high quality talent, why not cultivate and upscale your talent when there's actually studies that show there's higher retention models with that and you're teaching them not only to handle the legacy systems, but additionally you're teaching them about the new software that's rolling out as well. Funny enough, for the very thing that just happened, right, job security, which now is a oxymoron, the right term for that. But we are all scared to death for months, right? But what you just talked about, right? To teach somebody to make yourself obsolete. That was always, especially for your senior folks, that was always the thing. Hey, I wanna make myself obsolete. I want you to know, if I can teach you and teach my whole team how to do all this work, I can sit back, just take your metrics and report those things out. I'm not needed. But, well, okay, right, right. So make yourself obsolete so you can do something that I'll add that in. Yes, so that you can step up. The idea is, and this is something that I've always said, if I have a team and I move up, guess what, you move up too, right? If I move, you move up too, but that's not the case as we clearly see it, right? The fear, the idea that if I move up, you move up too, that was always the case. But then there was also that fear that if, you know, hey, wait, wait, there's no place to move up. Well, if this is the limit, right? Then you're like, well, I'm not gonna teach them how to do that because then they can take my place and add a lower, add a lower cost point. It's not justifiable, but, you know, with the attention economy, the way that it is, people are just like, you know, squirrel, squirrel, they're looking for their opportunities because they don't have justification, they don't have evidentiary reasons with regards to why they might be able to live out the rest of their career at the organization that they're at now, right? So long as people are constantly questioning their value and that is not being articulated to them by the people that are, whose opinions they value, they will constantly be looking over their shoulder for the next opportunity. Yeah, you still have a, unfortunately, unfortunately, this is still a who you know, not what you know game. So the individuals you find in seats that have impact and influence are often times not the individuals that know the wealth and breadth of the organization. Those individuals are still making sure the organization has wealth and breadth to know about, right? And that's really the opportunity, right? Cast your mind back to three years ago, how many people in senior positions would categorically rule out the idea for remote workforce? Never could happen, contrast people, you lose, I mean, those same people, not all of them, but many of them have found religion in, wow. Turns out they work more if they're not spending four hours in traffic trying to get to the office and there's only so much free haircuts and lunch can get you. Cultural change is hard, right? When you're trying to change 40 years of how things were done, you have to try some different things and you're not always gonna have a pandemic that sort of forces you to take stuff off, right? So there's one strategy which a lot of companies have woken up to that they would have categorically said didn't work for a whole bunch of reasons and they're now saying, oh, actually, this is great, we can go find people in different locations, we can bring them on, they can be totally productive. But if you have that same discussion about upskilling the legacy cobalt, Fortran programmer, they look at you like you have two heads, say, oh, that's, A, where has it worked? Like, I haven't seen it work. And B, how long is that gonna take? This is ingenuous. We are sitting here because of Linux. Linux was built by people working from home. All the top people that work on Linux and most of the rest of us have been working from home for well over 20 years. Well, Linux was from 92 and it wasn't until the pandemic that a lot of organizations. I understand that, but what I'm saying is that many of those organizations are using Linux and have grown on Linux and built their entire business around Linux and yet the technology upon which they are were built from people working remotely. And I know lots of people, certainly in the kernel community, who will only work remotely. It was not for a lack of... Even at companies that require people to work, you know, co-located, they still work from home. It was not for a lack of evidence that it could work. It was a lack of practice of actually seeing it work at scale in organizations like themselves. You know, one of the challenges, I think you asked about mentorship, it takes patience to grow talent in house, right? You don't just drop somebody in and two weeks later they're productive. But it also takes patience to onboard a new employee. It takes you six months of the recruiter to find the person and it takes three or four months to teach them how to do it. Then half of them leave after six months because the next recruiter poached them on to the next thing. We get somehow the idea of saying, I'm gonna invest in this guy for a year to upskill him. Seems like heretical, right? But it's, why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you take an all-of-the-above strategy to saying, I can't hire my way out of this problem. So I should try some hiring. I should try some cross-skilling. I should try some remote. I should go to some, you know, the community college on the outskirts that I've never been to before and try to find some young folks that maybe don't have a degree and take an all-of-the-above strategy to sort of try to develop that talent. Because you know what, it's true. Maybe half that talent moves on after a year and goes on to something else. Are you better off by having the half that remained part of your organization than you would be if you didn't do it at all? Of course you are. And it's dramatically cheaper, right? For what you would spend on a single recruiter, you could probably upskill a dozen people in your organization. If you have the patience to let them work through it for six months, nine months, a year and get them up to that point, because the one thing you know is they're already a fit for your organization, right? You're gonna pick people that have been in the organization that understand the work culture, that understand the style of it. But there's an element of trying different things and being patient to let them pan out that is new, right? It's not unlike remote work three years ago. And there's plenty of evidence that it works. How do organizations get their head to a different place where they're willing to try using some of these strategies in addition to the current strategies of browse LinkedIn that you see a nice resume? Because you have to have all of the above. I have a question there. If you were going to champion this, so if COVID issued the new wave of having people rethink remote work, how could we issue that next paradigm of getting back to non-traditional talent pools, mentorship, apprenticeship, who are those internal champions inside of legacy companies like Linux to go to, to have these discussions? I imagine it's not HR will more so be senior management or who? All of the storytelling, like Jane's story. Yeah, a lot of these, let me put it like this. I spearheaded the program. This is a couple of companies ago. When we had, they were talking about, we need more cybersecurity folks. Or we need to get some junior level cybersecurity people with five years experience.  So look, understand something. We skipped over a talking point we had. And that was around with the recruiters and the job postings that you see online. What if I told you there's a portion of that job posting that we have no control over? And that's the preferred and required requirements. We have no control over that area. We have control of everything above that, where we describe the role, we describe the team, what you'll be doing, et cetera. When it comes down to that preferred or that required where it says required, four year degree, we have no control over that. That's put there by HR and HR says that needs to be there. For purposes, for legal purposes, I guess, I don't know. I sure don't know. Oh, I said, I'm getting ready to get there. So a program that I had, two things. One, it said, well, what if we reached out to people on LinkedIn or reached out to people, get the resumes in and then say they don't have any degrees, we circumvent the whole hiring process. We became the hiring men. We became the recruiter. So we did that. But there was another thing. I said, guys, why aren't we looking inside of the business? Why aren't we looking inside of finance and accounting and you're business managers for cyber talent? They looked at me like I was crazy. And I said, once again, I told you, I got my information security bones in the DOD, Home of Information Security. I went to school specifically for information security. I'm probably one of the few folks in information security today that has actually have an educational foundation in it. So I said, information security is a business function. It's not a tech function. Why aren't we going to business people who already have learned business and bringing them in to teach them cyber? They can think cyber from a business perspective and then they can articulate risk, impact and recommendation in terms that the C level will understand so that maybe it's not so hard getting budget dollars. I don't know.  I know we're mindful of time as well, right? But one of the fundamental challenges is when you look across functions that HR fills, technology has always been an outlier where it's hard for HR folks to fully understand the requirements of the role you're trying to fill. Right, you as a hiring manager know what you're trying to hire. But the roles are so technical and oftentimes your HR professionals just kind of glazes over. It's like, ah, okay, whatever above the line. But here's what needs to go below the line. Four years of work experience, college degree, wouldn't relocate because that's our standard package of how we do things unless somebody three levels up the food chain says it's okay to change it. I'm at level HR range. I don't really feel like mucking with it because what's the upside for me? It's not their fault, by the way. It's not, yeah. And I'll get to your question in just a second. This is how I was just going to say that to support your argument that you have to be creative looking around and growing this kind of homegrown talent. That's the word people use. And some of the companies I have been at, they have done a summer professional growth type program with cross pollinating. That's another kind of bringing everybody together. And I would participate, I have participated as a mentee to somebody to understand what their business is different. If you have a large company, nobody knows what other group is doing. So the only way to know is interacting with somebody that is willing to teach another person. So these programs have been very effective in the company I have been. So that's kind of what you're talking about. And they also ask the questions, what are you waiting for?  And there is a vision, the companies have to have the vision and commitment to the employees that they hire. And some of the companies I have been at they have given me, given everybody 10% of your time is yours to advance your career and will support you. So those are the things we need more of happening for us to be able to have a workforce that would be ready for future. It's a great point because we talked earlier a bit about the patients required to grow talent in house. The other thing that's required that we need to be able to do is another thing that's required that we have not historically asked of our tech talent is to invest time in mentorship. So the idea that the recruiter finds this great candidate that you can somehow magically plug and play and on day two they're productive doesn't ask much of the hiring manager or of their colleagues in terms of mentoring, growth and support. But if you're gonna grow talent somebody's gotta do it. Somebody's gotta find the time to line up with these folks and meet with them and coach them and guide them. And that is again part of the change management function is now we're asking our developers and our engineers to proactively invest the time in that next generation of talent that's coming up behind them. And now you're talking about capacity planning and prioritization. So it's not something you just flip the light switch on. It's something that has to be a commitment from the organization to the way that they want to work. I'm mindful of the time. I'm gonna skip forward a few here and talk about this from two perspectives. The perspective of the person at a lower level inside the organization thinking about what's next and the perspective of the newbie trying to start a career in tech which is challenging. How do I come in and how do I come in when every headline I see is that more layoffs are happening. But I know where maybe we... Yeah. So you see the challenges here. One of the things that I like to tell newer folks that want to get in and that's whether they're transitioning from a previous career that they already had or whether they're fresh in school or trying to figure out what to study. I tell them I need you to get as creative as humanly possible long gone of the days where you're gonna find a position that's static. There are no more static positions. You've got to get creative. Create your own lane and put that on a resume and put that out into a position you think it fits in. Just one thing... Just one position you think it fits in. Reach out. Do your homework. Become a hacker. Become a hacker. Find a person in that organization. Talk them up. Talk them up to the point where they begin to try to point you at different people. Find the hiring manager for that position that way and get your resume in front of them that way. Because oftentimes, you're gonna put your resume into that application system and they're gonna weed you out. The system set up to weed you out. Oh, what's up? It's gonna weed you out. It's gonna weed you out because I was gonna say this before. It's not the HR people's fault. Tech, as much of it as it is as a science, it's also an art form. It's so beautiful. It's a beautiful art.  So in order to effectively get there, you gotta say, well, how can I differentiate myself? What do I like to do and then what do I love to do? And put those damn things together and the resume that way. So for the new person in college or the new person, say, I want to jump in. What do you like to do? Well, I like... I don't know. I like psychology. Psychology, and I don't care what anybody says. Psychology's not a major. Psychology is the best as a minor or something like that. What is it that you love to do? Well, I love working with animals. Excellent. Write an app that describes the behavior of animals. I don't know. I shrugged the shows. Write an app that does that and fall in love with it. Fall in love with it. You're in the game now.  Hey, I've built this. Go ahead. You can contribute to an open source project unencumbered by corporate interests and then you get a lot more visibility as a result of that and a lot more respect and become a member of a multitude of different communities. It is actually the red pill that you want to take. Damn, I forgot. I was at an open source conference for a second. It's great that you say that, right? I've had this, well, it's not really an argument anymore. It's more like an open discussion inside of Microsoft and with other partners and competitors as well. Open source is the way now. It's a business driver now. It's no longer something that, oh, that looks real cool over there. Let's see if we can bring it in and make it part of this and make it part of that. No, companies are now taking open source packages, bringing them into their organizations, slapping a new label on them and sending them out the door. They're business drivers now. They're revenue generators. Next time we'll bring our Mandalorian helmets because this is the way. I know we're out of time. The one thing just quickly before we wrap, non-traditional talent pools and folks who maybe can't see themselves in an IT career because they don't know anybody who's had an IT career.  I already didn't know anybody in it and now everybody who's there is getting fired. So maybe I'll do psychology. There is so much good talent out there and you add this onto the whole availability of openness to remote work. Don't fish where you caught the fish yesterday. Fish where the fish are now. But bear in mind that that non-traditional audience is probably not feeling super bullish on a tech career. So what are you going to do to give them the confidence that there's opportunity here? How are you going to paint that picture? Because it's not the picture they're seeing in the news. So be mindful of where their heads are at and create some on-ramps for them where they can see possibility. I know we're running over and there's probably folks outside. So why don't we wrap it? I appreciate you all coming. Thanks for being part of the conversation.