How to find (and retain) your hardest to hire positions REDUX

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Presented at DevOpsDaysAustin 2019 by

Pete Cheslock

About 6 years ago I had the pleasure of coming to Austin to speak at a conference for the first time. This talk was about how to retain your hardest to hire folks. It turns out 6 years is a lifetime in technology, let's revisit this talk, see what still works, and what can be improved.Back in the spring of 2013, I had this idea floating around in my head. I had watched so many companies spend countless time and energy in order to recruit the best staff possible. But after you were in the door, it seems like none of them really cared about how you might retain all those people you spent years investing in. I had to pleasure of giving my first conference talk ever at DevOpsDays Austin about this topic of "how to retain your hardest to hire positions". Why do companies spend FAR more resources to hire new people, when losing any one of their existing employees would in many cases be a massive hit to the productivity of the company. Now - 6 years has gone by. A lifetime in the technology space. To give you perspective - I gave this original talk BEFORE Docker was announced by Solomon Hykes at Pycon 2013. It can be hard to imagine a world before tools like Docker, Kubernetes, or even concepts like Serverless took over the day to day conversation. So much of HOW we get work done has changed in the last 6 years, has anything changed with how we recruit and retain our valuable employees?Let's revisit this talk and see what still works, what needs improvement, and new learnings from the last few years.