It did occur to me while I was looking at my slides again just a few minutes ago We probably should actually add a disclaimer here that this is my hiring practices Personally, it's a round for doesn't necessarily reflect the hiring practices of Rackspace as a whole Yeah, that's probably a good point And this is also Lana's team. I've just been with Lana through two companies now So that's kind of ago. Oh this Jesus. I haven't used this in high school, right? okay, so In the beginning Just over 12 months ago now the OpenStack Rackspace documentation team basically consisted of one woman She was five foot one and that was about it and Weirdly enough she was stressed inches away from mental breakdown to the point where Lana went over and actually saw her like Hair in a hair out losing it. She was like, well, that's you know, that's it So our unsung the phrase I believe was running fast to stay still. Yeah She did the whole documentation suite herself. Her name is Karen Levenstein if any of you know her But our unsung five foot one superstar hung around thanks to a small upstream break that Lana offered her So she went up and did upstream OpenStack while we just she suggested it and I waited it and now Karen is co-manager with Lana here with eight riders in the US a world-class agile development team model Sorry internal systems and a fully overhauled documentation suite Well, you know, we think it's well-class anyway, so back to the disclaimer there again, shall we? Lana and I were the first two hires apart from Karen the When we're releasing Karen off our OpenStack burden. I'm from there. We have built a team around us Hiring faster than basically you can say boo. I think we had Equivalent of two guys in one month within about two weeks of each other But hiring at such a pace comes with a price building a docs Team without compromising the quality of deliverables building an appropriate culture that does fit our team Or maybe doesn't fit what rack space wants And you know in with the ideals what's common in our industry What do we want and trying to mold this all together and picking the right people? In this talk we plan to address culture HR hiring processes what we do at rack space and how we were all hired Our tool chains and systems and learn about momentum and team momentum. Sorry. I can't read So does anyone know what noodling is anyone heard of the sport noodling? No, okay, so it's not dirty. We promise if you promise it's not dirty like it sounds But it's not pleasant either. Ah, so noodling is a sport where you actually You catch catfish with your bare hands You stick your hand in the mud and you wait till the catfish comes along and then you'll rip it out And if I could show you a picture I would but I'm going to not do that to just Breach the code of conduct probably So anyway one day as a team we were sitting down discussing the sport for completely unknown reasons I couldn't even tell you and we were having a Basically and that's actually how we started our first release We decided to call it the noodle release and what actually happened It was the equivalent for us of trying to catch a catfish with our bare hands trying to wrangle this documentation suite into something that we had envisioned and And I'm gonna add that the the noodle documentation release wasn't actually tied to a software release at all That was just something we decided to do because the documentation which through no fault of of Karen's obviously the documentation So it was in a pretty bad mess Mostly because she'd only ever been able to patch it She hadn't been able to sit down and make those big decisions about where does this information actually need to go And how does it need to look and what's the best way to deliver this? She was just dealing with bugs and is band-aid upon band-aid upon band-aid and the noodle release We did we did it was I sat down with Lana in the coffee club And I had read over this documentation so you'd about two weeks after she hired me I turned around outside. Well, this is just bananas. We cannot Sorry, you know the noodle was and it's was the overhaul It was the it was us getting in there and trying to get it out to make it something That was at least something we could start from so between the three of us We decided to split the original getting started guide in half we had the install and the networking guides and Then I got a little bee in my bonnet and decided we needed an upgrade guide as well by that point We'd fortunately hired more so then we hired Joe Joe turned up. Yeah after we hired Darren And then Darren and then we built our US team who consisted of Eric rub and Matt and it all started with Conversation about noodling catfish So here we are we've built a solid team of eight writers who are all pretty good if you don't mind me saying For an Australia four in the US and we'll talk a little more about the geographical challenges later on because obviously they're very different time zones So what we want to do now is actually go through So that was just a little potted history So you understand where we're coming from and what we want to do now is actually just go through Some of the main points when we were talking about this as well What are the main takeaway points for an audience in this situation? We know we did it What we want to do is try and analyze how we did it and why it worked I Think I have to be honest and say I'm actually still not entirely certain why it worked Yeah, so I Have a I try not to admit this in public, but I have an MBA and In my in my MBA my major was organizational behavior, which is basically MBA speak for pop psychology for teams and What that means is I spend a lot of time thinking about culture and Trying to you know apply these these lessons through through through my education and I like to more colleagues I Like I like to try and and assess culture as I'm going and making sure I spend a lot of time asking my stuff if they're happy Um, I don't know if that annoys them or not, but I do spend a lot of time going. Are you happy? Are you happy Alex? Do you like me? Anyway, so the first point I wanted to talk on Was a bit still a fairly broad point about building the team fast but I want to focus on the culture and How it is that we haven't just fallen back apart again because I think when you do build a team very quickly that the culture tends to To go and I must admit that the first time I wrote this slide it had a lot more swears in it The word terrible was not the first word I chose But we're going to try and make this a suitable for the younger people in the audience But yeah building the team fast without terrible culture So one of the first things is actually something that I stole from Michael still who I'm not sure it's Michael here No, no, that's good. I think I can steal the point is Management by meme is something that Michael Michael started doing This was actually the meme that was created. I believe when Darren started this was everyone Everyone had a meme that was done for them on the day they started. This was this was the one when Darren says Oh my god another tech writer So management by meme is It sounds very very silly and frivolous and when you actually dive deeper into how this impacts culture. It's actually really interesting What it does is makes it very clear from the outset. This is actually on the front page of our team wiki and Michael and Josh. I believe wrote some scripting behind it. So it rotates daily So we just we just load memes up and it rotates through them Means we have a lot of memes Yeah, we take a picture of you at a conference and guarantee it be memed and not just made once I was trying to stay awake when we went to texas and I was drinking coffee out of a straw Oh, I should have put that one in the toilet clothes and I was on the table and I came back to australia And I was like, ah terrific. I'm back at like, you know back home. I get time to sleep I'll just check my emails and stuff and I found out while I was sleeping someone had named me And and mean turn mean turn mean turn mean turn Anyway, um management by meme is interesting So this is pretty much the first thing you're faced with when you when you join our team is you're you're faced with these memes That are very highly personal in some some place Birthday memes are a thing. I know my birthday my first first birthday with rack space It was a cupcake. It was happy birthday. Lana. Please make your own cupcake Um and these things stick with us and now we actually Then we know we've all been around a little bit longer The the memes actually get referenced in our own conversations So we've quite nicely created a little potted culture of our own through the memes and through the in jokes They're all about the in jokes and from a culture perspective. This is really interesting and actually Solidifies the bonds between us a little bit more and it also is is very clear There's where where this team and we have these we have these these shared secrets, I guess It's not a work in no play and The risk of sounding like we don't do any work Um, and obviously we do get quite a lot of work actually done We're really that we like to try and blur that line just a little bit Um, it's really important to me that that my staff especially have a good work life balance And I want to make it very clear that they are allowed to go and do personal things if they need to And one of the examples I wanted to use was was alex About a couple of weeks ago. I had to take my car in to get serviced and I took Oh, I had to pick my car from the smash repairs. Actually, that's embarrassing. Yes, I crashed my car Uh, I had to go pick up my car from the smash repairs and it ended up taking five hours Because to get there to get back to get my car Uh, brisbane you have to drive everywhere if people know all live in brisbane. You have to Take a while to get places And essentially I just had messaged Lana and I was like, I'm Good, I can't do anything about it. I'm sorry. Like I have to go pick up my car today And she was like, that's fine. Don't worry about it. There will be days where sometimes it's it sounds bad in a way But sometimes I'll message her and be like, I not, you know, maybe I'm not maybe I'm in a great place I feel like I can message her and say, hey Today I'm feeling really low. I'm gonna chill in bed until I'm okay. Is that all right? Yeah Just check your emails check in. Let me know if you're all right But then obviously the next day when I'm feeling just fine. She's like Right the documentation So, you know, you have the two sides that's it's easy So, I mean I worked with Lana previously at red hat as well So I'm more comfortable with this kind of thing because that's how I was introduced to this That gets a field of work really whereas others are adjusting which is interesting to watch So so the other note I've got here that I wanted to talk about is that Meetings of catch-ups because we all work remotely and I mean, you know, we have little pockets of people around the country Alex Joe and I are all in the same location, but Darren isn't of course. We've got the us team as well And what that means is when we do have one-on-ones and we do have IRC meetings and we do have face-to-face meetings on on google hangouts or whatever They're not always about work Especially I don't know the guys up here. I remember the meeting we had the first meeting We had back after the the new year in the holidays. We didn't actually have an agenda We didn't have anything to talk to talk about we just decided we'd better see each other's faces again And we just had a chat about what we've done over the holidays and that kind of stuff It's yeah one-on-ones. I like to go out to breakfast with the with the guys who live close to me And we don't often actually talk about work in those It's about having social time as well. And once again, this is because are you happy halfway through the conversation. Are you happy? So, yeah, we do we do have a lot of we do have a lot of meetings, but we also try to not take ourselves too seriously That picture incidentally Is Bondi Beach? I'm not sure what year I was I was quite fascinated to find it's such an old picture of Bondi Beach All right, okay, so we're gonna talk a little bit about IRC, I guess IRC who hands up here who uses IRC or has used IRC or has thought about using it. Yeah Does everyone know what IRC is? There's no one who doesn't if you don't know what IRC is Excellent good stuff guys because that could have been stupidly awkward so basically we use as long as said IRC is like a social catch up and We work from home. We're all over the country where you know globally separated That's the best way and honestly my experience is um, I left red hat and because I would now wait from home I felt a little I felt distance. I had no colleagues. I'm a quite a social person So I was quite lucky and then this isn't a rack space anecdote. This is a red hat anecdote They all created a chat room in free node so they could talk to me So that is and there's an entirely social room. It's separate from red hat. So we hope red hat doesn't know And we just like I have the ability to sit there and chat and be social and I also have that with the open stack people rack space people Let's do the flicky Um Also, like uh, yeah, it's all about treating stuff as humans and not robots Uh, you've got my god. How cute is that picture? Like you've got to remember that people are people and they have issues too, you know You can't expect people to wake up every morning and be okay And nor can you wake like you can't wake up every morning and be okay yourself So we're trying we do that by being flexible with leave Um, and not necessarily going by the book and this isn't to say we break rules or we're breaking any rules by Rack spaces standards We try to just be flexible and treat people like they treat people like you would want to be treated to And that tends to work best for us. I haven't I've actually gone now two jobs with Lana because I find her management style that enticing I'm like, we let's go Can we do this forever? Yeah, so that allows for family life social life health and fitness. I mean Someday Joe, I know personally leaves work sometimes at four o'clock half past three goes to the gym We actually quite a lot of us leave leave work to go to the gym in the middle of the day or whatever. Um I think it's it's something I've said Yeah to people quite frequently is You know, you've got to have couch time couch time is a is is a human right as far as I'm concerned Um, you've got to have gym time gym time is really important and a mantra that I've picked up from an old boss that Alex knows as well is is that it's um, it's health family and then work. That's that's really important to me We also have a number of our colleagues with young families And you know, it's important that they know that they can look after their child and we're not chasing them down That's what happens when you have a single parent for a manager Yeah, you kind of get used to school runs are perfectly acceptable Yeah, or if you have yeah, I have a western facing offer the western sun comes right in two o'clock in summer I am out of there faster than you can say anything. I will be off I will go read downstairs or something and come back work late at night. It's just not worth sitting in the sun I am extraordinarily pale Doesn't matter. I will burn through that window it's has I think the the line we had in the notes at one version of this talk was um It's much more important that you get your deliverables And you do what you need to do rather than working your 38 and a half hours a week or whatever it is worth signed up to do Oh, this is me again. Okay finding the right people This is something I'm fairly passionate about and anyone who follows my blog when I have recently been ranting about this exact topic So it was kind of apt for me to to go in and do this hiring great people fast and Working network seems really obvious um If you want a job in it that job on i that job is probably not going to be advertised on linkedin uh, i'm sorry, and I know it's some massively incestuous But you've you've got to work you you've got to work your networks and you've got to be talking to people people hiring managers They hire their friends and I know that's appalling and we should probably be doing something in the industry to fix that because I think it creates diversity issues But if you want a job, that's where the jobs are you need to go and be networking with people I'm not going to stress that point anymore because I think we're getting out of point like you know kudos to all you guys This is my first lca and this is an extremely welcoming environment Like I genuinely feel like I will come back on you know I will network further with you guys and that's that's really great That's something that I haven't like I went to the open stock summit in paris in november And I didn't quite have that vibe. It was a lot more sales and marketing But that's just that was it was a totally different totally different set of Rules to live by over there and here it's just sort of like hi I'm so-and-so here. Let me light up your belt, you know I um I I come back to lca every year because this is where my friends are That's a that's a really good point for the recording For the recording we're talking about I reckon any everyone here's Probably had some kind of work or other contracts through lca. Can we have a show of hands? You've had some kind of contacts or lca that's gotten you something That's really great. Excellent. Well done guys. It was about a third of the room. I think who's first lca Okay, that was about half the room. Wow Thanks for coming guys, and we hope you come back next year. It's it's valuable. Maybe we just proved that Yeah, it really is and hopefully you guys get something out of this as much as I have Or if you haven't I'm sorry Um So the other the other point I wanted to mention here is as a hiring manager as opposed to someone who's looking for a Job um always google potential hires Um resumé's lie. I think we all know that I've put a lie on my resumé. Is anyone it's a supportive environment here. Is anyone else lied on a resumé? Stretched the truth omitted information Put down time management skills. Oh, yeah, I know It's good ability to multitask that one's a lie You just you just do more things less well um So, yeah, I I like to hire people. I know personally like I said I think that's probably something that needs to change if I don't know some of personally For example, I didn't know Joe personally before before I hired him. I did however know his friend Um, and his friend came to me and said oh, hey, I think you should meet this guy He's really awesome And so I made a point of going out and having coffee with Joe first I think I had I didn't have a coffee with Darren because he was in Canberra I had a good long phone call with you though, which is when we worked out We actually shared a degree and and bonded over bitching about Bonded over being nasty about lecturers That kind of that kind of contact to me I've tried to make it really Really clear that that initial contact isn't an interview And it will never be an interview That's just me and you as two human beings talking to each other And that's where you get that first idea of do do I think this person will fit in with the team? you know, do I You know do I do it's not really about skills at that point. It's about culture because to me I think I said this earlier The culture thing always comes first if you're gonna if you're gonna fit into the culture We can work on the skills skills. I can train you Um, I can't always I can't always mean that you're kind of can always get you into the car Can't train you to become part of it part of a culture Um We're doing really good at this clicky thing on time. I know We're doing good at this clicky thing I wanted to tell a little Slight anecdote here. Does anyone know who this is? It's not the most popular photo of our Um, her name is Valentina Tereshkova. Does anyone know who that is? Ah, yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Does anyone want to Does anyone shout that out? She was the first woman in space Got nothing for you The reason I have you I feel like I should have chocolate um The reason I've chosen Valentina here is Because she wasn't an astronaut Before they decided to put people in space She was a skydiver and that that's why this picture isn't the one you see of her most I mean you normally see her with all her helmet on in the in the in the um In the shuttle or whatever She was actually she was actually a skydiver She also didn't tell her mother that she was accepted to be an astronaut. Her mother found out about it on the radio And the the the reason I choose her is because sometimes it's about going out and finding the right people and then Working out a way to get them in Um, I think I've done this with every single Employee so far. Uh, you find great people and then work out a way to hire them Not to say that you should necessarily break your Your your hiring practices in your in your organization. Uh, rack space did explicitly give me permission to do that So, uh, when I it was definitely a little harder at red hat red red hat would have been more difficult to do that kind of thing so instead of having uh, Requisition and writing a job description and then going out and trying to find someone to to meet that criteria What I did is actually go out and found great people. Um, I met Darren on a mailing list And I'm like, hey, you look like someone I'd be really interested in talking to and we had a chat I then went back to hr. I actually warned Darren. It was going to take a little while, but I really liked them And uh went back to hr and said, how can we hire this guy? He's a rock star And therefore then went and built the job around the person rather than finding the person to fit the job And that to me is really really important and yeah It's it's about finding the people with the right skill sets and then working out a way to hire them You don't always need an astronaut You can you can train them for that Oh, this is me too And I I actually started sort of talking about this too. The flip side is Not just about hiring, but if you do want a job network, it's about networking. It's about talking to people I'm not going to belabor that point any further. I think I'm sorry awesome picture. Yeah Ah toolchain systems. Oh, yeah, I think We're sort of getting to the boring end Toolchains and systems are what hold it all together and having a great culture is great And it means that we go out to dinner and we have a whole heap of fun together and we chat on irc And it's it's all, you know, very amusing. We do have to actually get work done And toolchains and systems are what hold it all together Thank you To start with I allowed the tool chains and systems to grow very organically It works when you're building so fast when when you're hiring people so fast We didn't have time to lay down tool chains and train people how to use it We had to train we had to we hired smart people To train themselves we hired smart people who could come in and work out what tool chains they needed Guess who committed to master like four time from master about four times before she learned What to do If I hear that or not, I see any more time. No, no, I committed to master again Yeah, anyway, very good at making my own branches guys. Um The the point being when you're growing so quickly and you're moving so fast You don't know what you don't know what you need until you don't need it When all of a sudden you've got this thing and you realize it's massively broken and it doesn't work And it's just making everyone's life difficult and then you've got to work out a way to get rid of it Um, if you've got too many too too many processes and everything wrapped in in that tool chain Then you can't get rid of it And so when you're growing really quickly the point is to to try and just Allow people to choose the tools that work for them. And I mean open source is great for this too. It does mean It's like I need this thing As you can go and google it and I can go and find some little open source project somewhere and I can make it work for me Um, and that's that's really really cool run rather than having to be Having to be uh tied to to off the shelf systems Thank you Still you God I can talk Once I Once we had enough of a team that we we started to actually produce some really serious work and That the copy and paste methods of a one-person team wasn't working anymore, which was pretty quickly Um, I actually got slightly horrified the first time I saw how how documentation had been done previous to me Because there was a lot of copying and pasting from wikis and conversion to and from html And it was a little bit terrifying And so one of the things we did is Then went and went out and found he's a matt in the us is is kind of awesome I went out and found a guy who had the the technical chops to be able to do more of the The technical side of things and to be able to control tool chains But also had an understanding of docs I didn't want I didn't want just someone who is a dev who'd never written documentation before I needed to know I needed to have somebody who understood the challenges that a documentation team faced So matt cassawa in the states was an open stack docs contributor. He just made docs core actually He and I made doc score at the same time actually So he just made docs core So I knew he had an understanding of docs even though he hadn't worked in a documentation team in a professional sense before But he had worked in a large documentation team. He had worked on documentation using the Same similar kind of processes as we had in rack space But he also had the technical background to be able to help me out with tools And so what I did is actually just handed him a vision Anyone anyone here who was at my monday mini conf talk about every page is page one One two. Oh, I have a few of you. Okay. So basically I said go and read this book by mark baker It's called every page is page one. I just bought it and I kind of really like the idea Like, you know, just claim it without when lana finds a book that she likes Back to have to read it too. Yeah, you just get too expensive and everyone gets to read it Has to has to this is your bedtime reading for the next two weeks Um, yeah, so I said I said look go out and buy this book and have a read and tell me what you think And so he came back after a few days having read it. He says wow, this is really cool and I'm like, yeah, right? Let's build that and we haven't got there yet Hard whenever it is hard PDF pages It is hard because you've got to you've got to bring not just the culture of your team at the culture of your entire Organization with you when you're fundamentally changing the way you deliver your your product You've got to you've got to bring mind share with you as well. You can't just dump it on them I actually tried that and red hat and failed Make too many waves Yeah, you actually end up with massive backlash. No, we can't do it this way because it's too fundamentally different And humans don't like change So what I did is provided matt with this vision of every pages page one and we are now working towards that vision But i'm giving him the free reign to do that how he sees fit I hired someone who was qualified and technical technically able to do it And i'm giving him the the free reign to say this is where I would like to be with an open timeline Just get us there So that's yeah, have a vision. I went towards it This is oh, you don't need that. Yeah, I know So I think what we're trying to say is there's nothing is set in stone and if there's a better way to do something we're quite happy to adapt and I mean it may take a while to get to get to an end goal But you learn a lot along learn a lot along the way. Wow. That was surprisingly hard, wasn't it? And you know, um adapting is is It's part of nature, right? We all adapt we adapt to our new surroundings And that's I guess in a way it comes all comes back down to culture and treating people like humans You've got to understand that they've got a vision and they've got something new and maybe they want to go with that and yeah open source really Is probably the best for that And it means that At some point Darren can stand up and go look, you know, there's all github thing. It's not working for me You know and we can have an open and honest conversation about that not to say that Darren's not good at github. It's just a random example It means that we can have an open um honest conversation about that and go well hold on if it's a problem for Darren Maybe it's a problem for Joe and for Alex and for Matt and for all the other people as well We can actually go. Okay. What's broken about it? And what's that bit? How can we how can we pull that piece out and put something else in to make it work better? What can we do to improve this situation? Um, I think what I'm creating here is creating systems around the tool chains that work Yeah, yeah, so once you've got the tool chains that work then you can actually go Okay, well now we can create a system about this which means we can start documenting what we're doing Which means we can more easily bring new people in and train them what we're doing and bring them into the fold Um, I've got run down here, which is pretty much exactly what we just said acknowledge that tool chains and processes are not perfect But work to are perfect. That's interesting But work to make the imperfect ones where they can't be did completely as painless as possible I think you wrote that bit. I think I wrote that bit too. So let's not trust me Okay Basically, I think what I'm trying to say here is that if we can't move forward and if we we have to keep using this You know, Darren, we still have to use git and Darren absolutely hates it We will try and work around this.  I think that actually speaks for itself generally You can't It is not possible to maintain this kind of momentum. We we hired eight eight riders in eight months Um, we still have eight riders and it's now been how long have I been at? 15 months there's a reason for that Because you you just can't keep going at that kind of pace and just don't even try it I don't think there's anything wrong with doing that to ramp up quickly I don't think there's anything wrong with ramping up quickly, but you do have to level off That is actually you. This is me, but we can probably both do this You start When lana first came to me I left red hat because I thought oh gee I'm going to go into the big wide world and get this job And I got the most horrifying job of my life with a woman who expected me to read that's not the job with me I was a woman who that was a different job in between And lana heard I left red hat and she messaged me and she was like meet me like come Come on have breakfast with me So I came and she was like I need a superstar. I need a rock star. I've worked with you before I know I can work with you again. Do you want a job? And you know back side story to that is I stated this job for three months before I absolutely collapsed under this woman's weight my god Does that mean I'm not allowed to sit on you? Absolutely. Yes Glad you cleared that up We we've completely ceased hiring for now and although we're still keeping our eyes open for those superstars Those rock stars are people that are going to change our minds and hopefully help us change our bosses minds I'm getting about a resumé week at the moment um I don't really want that to stop because At some point I'm going to get a resumé that's going to make me drop everything and go and have a coffee with that guy or that girl um Yeah, I'm still on the lookout for rock stars even though I'm not officially in any sense hiring In fact, I'd probably have an uphill battle to try and convince my boss to hire someone at this point too But it's not as though I want to stop receiving resumés Anyway, I think we've skipped over a topic Have we? We're talking about tools and processes and we're saying that you we are putting more effort into improving the docs getting tool chains, right? Yeah, and you know being able to continue that momentum. So I guess the point is we've stopped hiring We're uh, we're not really changing In major ways anymore because we we really did have about a year of constant and crazy amounts of change Which which does everyone's head in and just creates burnout if you don't for too long what we're doing now is concentrating on hardening It's about getting those those tools and processes right and making sure that they're right for us and tweaking them until they are It's about making sure that the people we've got fully understand what their role is And are comfortable doing that role a lot of the conversations i'm having with stuff now are about okay You're here now and you know what your job is. Where do you want to go next year? What's what's your next step on your career path? What kind of thing are you enjoying working on so that we can make sure you can do more of that? And so when I talk about hardening, it's not just about tools and processes It's also about people and making sure that people are getting that right first step on their careers Or next step on their careers, and I think that's us. How are we going for time? Joe? We are five past 12 Excellent Fabulous minutes any questions questions The young man in front Thank you Lana. I was wondering what Practices you have in place to maintain a healthy culture when you've got it going Oh Um, so the question is about maintaining the culture. So this is where the hardening comes in right and it's where stuff's going I'm just gonna pour concrete over It's it's hardening, but it's also stuff like the management by me We do have a lot of fun. We have a lot of in-joke and one of the things if you've done any In the stuff I've the education I've done about culture There's there's sort of you you always end up with this us and them thing and that can be very negative and destructive in some ways But if you do it correctly, you make it a positive thing rather than a we hate those guys So we love what we've got here Right, so you make it a positive interaction rather than a negative one and it's sort of almost circling the wagons It's yeah, we have all these fun in-jokes and it's like I know that if I left this team and walked out and walked Going to went into a different team. I have to learn all that all over again to be able to feel that sense of belonging Um, that's probably the best answer. I've got is yeah It's about belonging and creating that that feeling of a family a rec space I was actually have a core value called we refer to it as friends and family Uh, so we do treat other rackers as friends and family and we try to take that very much to heart as well You said you work with a number of people from around the globe What do you do to keep everyone sort of like connected throughout the week or is it just you rely on that weekly meeting? Where you do that's a really good question. I really actually I'm I'm I'm glad you asked that because it's something that didn't make it into the talk Um, so what we actually do is we have a handoff Well start as we pair people when we've got smaller project if we've got a big project It's all hands on if we've got smaller projects, which happens to us quite a lot What we just pair people up. So at the moment you're paired up with Eric Rob, I'm sorry paired up with with rob in the u.s So every time we we choose someone on one side of the globe to work on a project they have a pair on the other side Um, this works really well and what they then do is an individual handoff at the end of each day So that could be an email or it could just be a quick chat and I'll see as the as the day is overlap Um, it's normally just a one sense. Ah, hey rob did this thing today And then also we use the pull request system in github So when you when you commit your change You you commit your change and you leave it there and you you might just send me my go this pull requesters in there They'll go in look at your changes and pull it so that they understand where you're at Which a comment on that last part is a really good way to figure out how your partner works because personally I worked with Eric on swift documentation up until recently which I switched over now working on vm Where docs with um rob and that's a huge change on other than technical content, but in what we are doing um And I certainly found that the way eric works is a lot different to rob and just to say that anything is bad the change over about your like I guess in that sense your partner figuring out what they do And that's a really interesting way to learn about someone and learn more about what they're going to do When we do the all hands on deck and how that's going to work, which is quite interesting We also try to make sure that we don't pair the same people up all the time. It's constantly changed Blue in front So working across an ocean I've done and it's actually quite hard to keep the interpersonal even with video conferencing and irc and whatever Do you make an attempt to make sure that there's People traveling to and fro periodically The docs on it Yeah, we actually have recently started doing like uh, we call it a sort of like a Docs doc summit that we do internally at rack space do that about once a year The probably the best we can manage at the moment I think due to budget plus we're going to conferences where we are all meeting everyone With this yeah summits we do open stack summit and we do the doc summit So that sort of makes it about twice a year actually Yeah, we all meet up and we chat which is really quite great Because that way you get to know people and you go out for dinner and you socialize other than that That's probably the best we can yeah manage in terms of hard goals That I actually have written down that I'm accountable for to my boss Um, I'm supposed to have a trip to the US once a year for just to a visit because I have I'm manager manager over there Where every writer should attend the doc summit which is once a year Every writer should attend at least one open stack summit Every year so that means for the Australians because open stack summit goes back and forth between North America and the rest of the world It means normally the the rest of the world There goes the the rest of the world one is normally a bit closer for the Australians and the Americans will tend to go to the North American one Um, so there are actual hard goals around how much travel we do at the same time though It's um because I'm a single parent. I've made sure I've built in controls there Where if you go actually, you know what I've spent too much time away from my family in the past six months I actually just need to be home for a while. That's absolutely fine You know, we do have people with small children and wives and husbands and families So it's really important to me that everyone has that opportunity to section. You know what? I'm not going to do this one I'm going to sit this one out. So while I do have goals and I sort of have a set idea of how much each person should be traveling in terms of Maintaining that culture and those relationships across the ocean It's also it's also still very important that people do get to sit them out if they want to Any other questions? Any other questions? We have time for more questions I've only ever managed local teams teams. I can see physically in my office Some they work from home, but you still saw them regularly. I'm wondering how you Handle the inevitable Mental health problems that crop up in a workplace when they're not you can't see them Mental health is so much more important. Everybody's mental health is so much more important to me than any book we could ever write I think I think that I think that I said that to Joe first actually I'm much more much more when he started he was very concerned about how to quantify his time when he was working from home And I'm like no, it's much more important to me that you have great mental health So you look after your mental health. It's it's health family then work. I think I said that earlier it Yeah, it's I talked to everybody So obviously I am Karen is my manager on the ground in the US She has one of ones with all her staff anything that she picks up on gets alerted through back to me We then as management teams have done a work out the best way to handle that if that means giving them time off If it means relocating them if it means, you know Giving them easier work to do like Karen herself had had her upstream break where she stopped working on rack space stuff for a while Just because she'd done too much of it before before the rest of it came in She went and worked for three months on open stack So there's zero expectations She could pick up as many bugs or as little bugs as she wanted to and that was a nice alternative for her as a mental break to be able to Take the pressure off and get rid of those expectations and be able to guide her own work again And then when she felt comfortable with it, she came back Does that answer the question? We have time for a few more questions No, they're all just checking an email up there Thank you so much. The question was am I happy? Yes, I am happy. I'm extraordinarily happy I managed less staff now Than I than I did at red hat. However, I had never managed managers before that was new for me I Love having so much more autonomy Than than I did before I was working within a much more rigid practice before Now rack spaces is fitting me very well and I'm very happy. Thank you very much for asking the uh friends hiring friends thing and also Hiring people who've got similar culture and what have you does occasionally have the danger that you Encourage similar thought patterns and discourage diversity simply because you know there I got on really well without spoken noisy people for example, and so I would tend to surround myself with those I I agree And I'm very conflicted I wrote a blog post about this just recently. I am very I am very conflicted about I like being able to hire friends. I think it's a really good hiring practice. You get great teams and You end up with really successful teams, but by the same token. Yes, there is a diversity problem. I'm I'm sure everyone he knows I am a feminist I'm very much considered an activist. Um I like to think that I try and overcome those Those hurdles and that privilege like like leslie was talking about yesterday I like to try and think I overcome as many of those those privileges and those hurdles as I am Possibly able to overcome while acknowledged obviously that no one's perfect and at least of all me Um, we did actually sit down and working out. We have an amazingly diverse team and I'm not entirely certain how that happened Um, I I didn't necessarily set out to hire the most diversity I could find You know, I'm certainly not about to start going well, I would hire you but you're white And you know what we what we what we really need is personal color in our team now Absolutely and we do have a nice range. I think at the moment we definitely have people who are more You know who are quieter and more say I Going going back a job. I actually got criticized. Um, I promoted a particular person who was very much an introvert very quiet Very rarely spoke up. I had other people come up to me and go Why would you why would you promote her into a management position? I'm like actually she's massively capable She just doesn't stand up and tell you about it And it's the type a type b personality thing So you've got to actually make sure you give the type b personalities that opportunity I think a lot of managers would have walked up to someone like her and and not even asked her if she was interested They would have just assumed she wasn't And that was certainly the feedback I got was that people around me had assumed She wasn't capable or wasn't interested in having a management position And I'm like, well, I'm a manager. You know your staff. Are you interested and she might actually here I am I think Once again while acknowledging that I'm not perfect I feel as though I don't do too badly in that area, but I reckon it would be really difficult For for people if you weren't very conscious of of what you were doing and it wasn't in the forefront of your brain all the time I've had a couple of like Arguments discussions. What have you used to call them about that hiring practice of hiring friends? And I actually Personally unpopular opinion award don't agree with it I feel like it can as long as said create really great teams But having personally still got a lot of friends at university and I got my job because I was an intern at red hat and that's how I was hired But I knew a lot of other very very very capable people that just didn't have that opportunity How are they going to get hired? How are they going to get a job? And it I say that they should probably put themselves out a bit more. They should come to things like this They should potentially do a lot more themselves networking but again they don't know a lot of this stuff exists And I just I have a lot of empathy for a lot of uni students who are stuck Where do they go? What do they do? Because we keep hiring our friends and we're in this Where it's cyclical. We're never going to get out of it. We're just round and round and round and round Which is fine, right? We're hiring great people and you know, you can recommend someone and we've now got Joe But yeah, there's still a lot of people out there who are thinking. Why am I so like why have you got a job? But how did you get a job? And I'm like, oh, I knew someone that's that's not helpful This is not a usual job No Yeah, the last of the last, yeah, I know Yeah, yeah, yeah they too I um, I would also argue that some people they could be told you've got a network and you've got to go to meetups And you've got to be on social media and all that stuff. They can be told that but they're just the kind of people We would just never do it And I I completely acknowledge that I'm not reaching those people. Yeah, that's just more than an opinion more than anything else is just Sorry guys Yeah, I'm afraid we've reached time for today, but just to say thank you for presenting today We have a small present. We'd like to pass on to you both So, please thank our presenters


I just got done watching The Creator, a brand new big budget sci-fi film. How exciting. You see The Creator is begging to be watched on a big screen. It's got amazing visuals. It's got a cool sci-fi story. Sure, it's familiar, but it's very competently executed. What makes my theater experience so grand was the jackass sitting four seats over from me on his phone every five minutes. I love that. I love when people sit on their phones during a movie. Like, hey, let's plop down $15 to check Facebook every 10 minutes. You're not special.  Long story shirt. The Creator is absolutely worth checking out. I'll have a full review on my channel, Adam Does Movies, and try to staff your phone while you're watching it, unless you're watching it on your phone, which, in case, that's fine.


Hi there, today on Typical Books I'm going to be talking about The Haunting of Gillespie House by Darcy Cotes. Now The Haunting of Gillespie House is a 2015 book by Darcy Cotes and it's very small. It's a self-published and I believe she still self-publishes but has registered as a publisher in her own right. I believe she does do a mix. She's a hybrid author, as far as I can tell, that does publish traditionally and self-publishing and with small houses, big houses. So yeah, kind of becoming a bit of a hero of mine as far as writing craft goes. Now this particular book is, as I said, very slim. So it was a nice quick easy read and I'll always use Merse from Heartbeats in the Trees term of a creepy cozy book because that's exactly what Darcy Cotes offers us. I've also used Merse scoring the bookscorer from her page. So if you're not already following Heartbeats in the Trees, definitely do so and thank you for coming up with that amazing spreadsheet. I'm a spreadsheet sucker and I guess I've just not been as determined to come up with something as perfect but I always do want to give some sort of out of five score or an out of 10 score would probably be a little more definitive but the scoring method of having it out of three gives certain aspects of a book. Like is it creepy enough? Yes, no, maybe. You know, yes, no, 50-50. That's sort of how I'm thinking of it. So it takes a lot of the thinking out of scoring a book because I just give everything five out of five if I read it in zero if I didn't bring like that's kind of bad but thank you again for devising that because this is one of the first ones I'm going to use that table and I'd like to use it going forward so that I can subscribe a star method. I also do other book reviews that are sometimes they don't make it on this channel but sometimes are ghost written as well and they often do ask for a star rating of some sort and I'm just not good at doing that. So anyway, Elle finds herself in a haunted house that is the stuff of dreams. This is a haunted house that has been modernized on one hand yet has all of the remnants of its former glory shoved up into the attic and that to me is just it's every little girl's haunted house dream right. Some houses breathe. Elle is thrilled to spend a month minding the beautiful Gillespie property more than an hour's drive from the nearest town and surrounded by forests the aging mansion is ideal for someone seeking solitude but things start to go very wrong very quickly. Elle discovers a crumbling graveyard nestled in the woods that contains a generation of a house's residents all with an identical year of death. Scratching up the walls, slamming doors, whispers in the night a locked room. As Elle explores deeper into the house she begins to unravel the property's dark and dangerous history. At its center is Jonathan Gillespie a tyrannical cult leader and the house's original owner and as Elle soon learns just because he's dead doesn't mean he's gone. Now this includes the short story Call Space on which this book was set. Now one thing I like is its length if I haven't said three times already but it couldn't have contained anything more. You know this story is an expanded version a very different version from the short story contained with this as well so it is a very different story but there isn't any more story to tell and I really do applaud an author. I mean you can write a Kleenex box-sized book if that's the story that is in you that needs to get out in its entirety. You can also write a 20,000 word novelette too short to be a novella too long to be a short story something like that if that's the story that needs to get out and that's where Huntington Gillespie house seems to sit is somewhere in that novella novelette sort of range. Now this reminded me a lot of Darling starring Lauren Ashley Carter if you dig this lone girl in a weird house of strange unexplainable things happening to her and maybe somewhat unreliable narrator sort of thing going on whether it's the house kind of driving her nuts or she comes with a little bit of a touched frame of mind or the house owners themselves or what. There's a little bit of that more so in Darling of course so if you like that lone girl in an unexpected haunted or somewhat haunted scenario I definitely seek that film out. Now this isn't really the top of the pile as far as Darcy Cote's books goes but I enjoyed it very very much. I had a lot of fun with this I like some of her newer stuff and of course that goes to say like when an author is is growing and maturing their older work is definitely getting better and better and better as it goes on. Like I said previously about Grady Hendricks if we sold our souls was not as good as Horror Store there'd be something the wrong way right so her more recent work is much better and there's more recent work that seems to be even more sinister than I want to get too soon. Now I enjoyed the atmosphere of this very much this old mansion in the woods and it not only reminded me of growing up on an old farmhouse myself with a lot of these sort of elements in the house it also reminded me of Lovecraft's work and not from the mythos angle because Lovecraft seems to be a very different type of writer to me than than he is to other people but this sort of growing claustrophobia this unreliable narrator that becomes birthed within somebody who at one point had been 100% reliable or came to us as somebody who we would judge as a person of sound mind and body and we even begin to doubt that as we go on through the book. Now this is a lot less purple and prose than somewhere like that it's not the most eloquently written book it's very utilitarian but it's not quite like YA or Goosebumps level writing it's just a lot more fun it clips along it's somewhat casual although not being trendy and I really like that balance that coats strikes in a lot of her work. So with the bookscorer this got 77 out of 114 which sounded dire at first but then looking at it that boils down to four out of five which is maybe a little higher than I would have suspected but it sounds about right to me it's not perfect by any means but it is super fun I had a great time with it it's a very light read and it did its job as far as entertaining me in that creepy cozy way haunted houses, graveyards, cults, history, time jumping all contained within a very short sit oh yeah I enjoyed it very much so if you've read anything that is really similar let me know if you're currently reading anything really similar or if you've read The Haunting of Gillespie House let me know in the comments below and make sure that you have an oaky spooky day The Haunting of Gillespie House by Darcy Coates it is a typical book