Anna Hermansen, Linux Foundation Research | OSS North America 2023

This is Techstrong tv. Hello and welcome back to the Open Source Summit. We're here with Anna Hermanson, who's from the Linox Foundation Research Group, and we're gonna be talking about a new report they have on tech talent.

Anna, welcome to show. Thank you. Happy to be here.

There's always these reports about tech talent. They come, they go, they all have the same basic conclusion. We don't have enough people to do X, Y, and Z in this latest report.

What surprised you in there that you didn't expect to see? I think one of the, one of the findings we had that really surprised all of us, because we hear in the news all the time right now that there's a lot of tech layoffs happening and a lot of these big companies, you know, having massive, massive layoffs. And one thing that we found from our results is that there are a lot of disruptions happening when it comes to hiring this year, given the economic concerns from the past year moving into this year.

But there's actually a lot of, uh, still interest in hiring for these emerging tech areas like cloud computing, ai ml. So there's, there's definitely some freezing happening and there's a little bit of, um, you know, there, there are some layoffs happening, but there's still a, a relatively positive trend in hiring. Do you think we're seeing maybe a redistribution of the talent?

Because a lot of 'em used to work for these very large webscale companies and a lot of enterprises and even smaller companies couldn't get that talent. So will we probably start to see some of those folks move to traditional enterprises or smaller companies and there'll just be more talent for everybody walking around Potentially? Yeah, I think, I think there is a shift towards hiring around, um, what is, what is maybe a traditional resource and keeping within that traditional resource, and yet at the same time, how do we use the resources we already have to upskill and to train to move into these emerging technologies?

And so you might see in these enterprise, at this enterprise level, you have developers already in place that are being trained to work on these emerging technologies because these are resources that these companies can trust as opposed to putting efforts into trying to hire, which is costly and often not as efficient as upskilling. And so we're, we, we also saw that as a finding in the report is that, um, there's a turn towards internally, how can we upscale our developers and train them to move them into those areas. There's everybody in the world is having a AI is gonna move my cheese conversation right now.

Do you think that part of that upskilling is kind of getting them ready for this next generation of technology where a lot of the low level stuff may become automated, but it's never gonna be completely automated? So are we just kind of getting ready to change functions and roles and upskilling as part of that conversation? I think so.

I think the, we had an, uh, a board meeting the other day yesterday with our research advisory board meeting, and Jim Zemlin from the Linux Foundation was there, and he spoke a bit about the four quadrants of generative AI and how we see AI in the kind of low-touch, low context area that's becoming completely automated. And yet in the, in the opposite quadrant, high-touch, high context, there's um, AI can support, for example, you know, we can write a forward to our research report using generative ai, and then in that high touch, high context area, an individual can come in and edit that and make sure that the content's correct. And as we move into this generative AI that is still maybe a bit sloppy or makes mistakes, we can use that kind of high touch, high context, um, thinking approach to using this AI in a productive way.

Um, but yeah, I think there's a lot of upskilling also, as we saw in the, in AI and ML with our, the hiring managers who answered our survey, Did you get into any salary considerations? Because that's always top of mind for folks. They want to know what they're worth.

And if you're working for a company, you don't really know how much other people are paying for the same skill sets. So what's your sense of the general demand for developer talent or the areas where maybe they make more money in some segments than others? What's your thoughts?

We didn't get into, um, salary. Salary can be hard to measure, especially in a global survey like the tech talent report we just released. Um, just given how much, also how much is an open source, um, resource costing as opposed to an individual's general compensation where they might be a little bit, you know, working a little bit in open source, but they work in other areas as well.

So we didn't look so much at what salary the, at, at the salary levels of our, uh, respondents. But, um, we did talk about what is the financial cost of hiring and how, as I said earlier, that financial costs can be rerouted into upskilling as a way to avoid the, the financial burden of, of hiring. A lot of folks, of course, want to work from home these days, is that a factor in people's thinking is where they're gonna either go work for somebody or where how somebody's gonna hire them is a lot of pushback lately for going back to the office.

Did you guys get any vibe for where are the talent and where do I find them and what do they need? We did have a section of questions on what kind of benefits that, um, uh, companies are offering to individuals as an incentivization to either stay or to to onboard onto the company. Um, the, the survey was, uh, from a hiring manager's perspective, and so we didn't talk so much to individuals who were looking for jobs or were in jobs, but more on the, on the hiring manager perspective, but definitely benefits, um, our shifting as we enter this new world of, of remote work.

And some of the benefits are, you know, related to financial compensation, but also other benefits such as remote work. And you know, we see that even in Canada with the federal workers strike asking for more time from home. I think it's a really important consideration as, uh, hiring managers are really looking to keep their really, their really strong talent and and to avoid this kind of turnaround that we have with hiring.

Do you think the best talent wants to work for organizations that contribute to open source projects? And that's part of the equation as well because you have a lot of companies that consume open source, but they don't all give back equally well. So is that kinda entering the mix as a place of where I wanna go to work?

I would like to think so. I think, I mean, open source is such a collaborative, innovative space to be working in at a company and um, a lot of open source developers do also do that work voluntarily or, you know, have to go outside of their, their day job to, to maintain those kind of projects. But I think, um, there, there would be a lot of interest in working for a company that has a more built up, um, initiative around open source, like an open source program office.

Um, so I would imagine that would be a draw for developers, um, who are interested in contributing to open source and yet, um, don't wanna do it off the side of their desk. Um, so yeah, I think, I think that's a big component of, of open source kind of hiring is, is having that open source program office. What do you think that's attracting developers to work for one company versus another?

Do you think that they're, that the companies understand the developer mindset because I think they struggle with the hiring managers don't always understand what is it that makes developers happy. They kind of view them as this kind of Venus and Mars conversation or something. But you know, from what you've seen in the research, are there things that hiring managers should be thinking about more than they're not?

I think a compensation is a big part and this, this idea of remote work, um, there is a lot of, we were talking in our, in our board meeting about the idea of being able to track developer sentiment and understand how developers are feeling just by the way that they're contributing and, and the comments in their push in their, um, in their repositories. So I think there's, there's definitely an important way to track, you know, how to track developer sentiment as they contribute this code. Um, but I think that's, it's, it's definitely a, something to keep in mind as you move forward in this, in this space of, um, hiring technical talent being challenging with with economic recession.

Are there other areas that you're looking to do some research now that you got the results here? Are there things you're looking at and go, hey, we should explore this? Um, in terms of following up on our tech talent report, I think the, there, as we've only discussed or the sur the survey only took the perspective of hiring managers.

I do think there's definitely more space to look into how those who are being hired and developers are feeling about the economic recession. You know, finding the, the results from a hiring manager perspective is really useful for enterprises to glean insights on, on what other hiring managers are doing and how to attract developers. But from the flip side, you know, how do we engage the developer community as we go through this, this, a lot of news around tech layoffs.

So I think that could definitely be a almost spinoff from, from this current research. And then just generally speaking, LF research has so many projects on the go right now. We, you know, I'll be in Paris in a, in a month to talk about our energy research, our sustainability research, um, you know, we have a global spotlight into what the state of open source is.

So, um, a survey on the evolution of the open source program office. We have so much coming out right now, so there's lots of research to be done. Is it your sense maybe that in a downturn that a lot of developers may just decide, heck, I don't want to go work for a big company, I'll just be a contractor and freelance and do my own thing cuz the demand for their skills is so high, but maybe they don't feel the need to go work for a company.

And is that something that we should just recognize that there's a lot of independence out there and they're happily so Potentially? I think there is a lot of, um, you know, the findings from our research found that there is less interest in hiring from a freelancer or hiring a consultant because of the cost of, of hiring that a developer as opposed to having someone in-house. And so, at least from a hiring manager's perspective, I'm not sure that that is an approach that these companies are willing to take in an economic downturn.

Um, in terms of a higher, in a developer's perspective, we didn't entirely capture that in the survey, but I think the, um, you know, as, as we transition away from, you know, a more traditional work environment as we're talking about with remote work, there must, there would be a lot of incentive to, to work from home and to, uh, be a freelancer. But I think there's also a lot of stability with an enterprise or a larger organization. Um, and as those organizations start to understand what those, what what they can provide as a benefit to those developers, as we're starting to see in our research, these hiring managers are aware of what is beneficial to when they're hiring a developer.

And so as enterprises start to, um, engage in terms of providing better benefits in this period, I do think there's still, um, a lot of room for developers to negotiate a type of, uh, you know, situation that they're, they're happy with professionally. Alright folks, you heard it here. We live in uncertain economic time, so there's definitely a lot of changes of foot.

But take heart, I think demand for your skills will be around for quite some time to come. Anna, thanks for being on the show. Thank you so much.

And we'll be back in a minute.