My day job, as it were, is managing the Open Source Applications Foundation. From time to time I'm going to post a manager's journal reflecting the kinds of issues I am thinking about. This is not meant to give detailed information about what is going on at OSAF. Mitchell Baker does a fine job of that with her periodic status reports. It is meant to make more transparent what my OSAF priorities are and how I'm approaching addressing them.
Hiring has become a major priority. Our head count has been fairly flat for some months at about 12. (How we count is an interesting issue in itself, given the many variations of status we have here: full-time paid staff being only one of half a dozen categories that also include part-time and full-time volunteers, part-time employees, full-time employees on part-time loan to other projects, contractors, etc.) Our plans call for a maximum size of over 30 in order to complete Canoga and Westwood in the next two and a half years.
We can only absorb, on average, two or perhaps occasionally, three new people per month without creating more chaos and disruption than I deem advisable.
For a while we were having problems filling the pipeline with highly qualified candidates, but that is no longer the case. There are lots of qualified folks. Our web page continues to list specific positions we need filled, but the reality is that we're also looking for superbly qualified developers (with experience, maturity, high productivity, high code quality) of any stripe believing that we will find a place for them. In a sports metaphor, this is sometimes called the "draft the athlete" approach, as opposed to drafting for specific positions.
Michael Toy, our development manager, has been focusing intensely on hiring, and Bart Decrem has been acting as a hiring evangelist, surfacing promising candidates (as he did at Eazel). We need to, and are in the process of getting more organized about our internal screening and interviewing process.
Now that we are located in San Francisco, as opposed to down the Peninsula, it's likely our new folks will live in or near S.F. Right now only about one third of us live in or near S.F. In general, most of our Peninsula-based employees are commuting to work in S.F. three days per week, currently Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, and work at home the other days. My hypothesis is that this would give us the face-to-face time we need. We're starting here and will make individual adjustments in the face of experience. So far, people seem to be adjusting, but a regular commute is a major stress point and I will be monitoring how it's going.
Some people have questioned having a requirement that full-time folks live in the Bay area. I've come to the view we want to break this barrier soon, but that we will have to have a different set of criteria for hiring and working with people who have a base elsewhere. For one thing, I think their responsibilities will have to be more clearly delineated in advance and the boundary between their work and the project as a whole will have to be made clear because the difficulty of coordination increases with distance. For another, I think we will have to get better (more comfortable, more practiced) at using IM, IRC, and other tools to bridge the distance gap. Finally, it's also clear we will need a second development manager if we're going to do this, as Michael is already maxed out between managing the existing group and focusing on hiring.
We're also in the midst of recruiting for a senior Human Resources person who will work both with OSAF and also the related set of non-profits all housed at 543 Howard St (about which more at another time). The Silicon Valley mind set unfortunately, tends to discount the importance of HR, relegating it to a second class function. I think a strong HR person is an invaluable asset in helping create a healthy culture and structure (about which more at a later time as well).
Posted by mitch@osafoundation.org at August 03, 2003 01:00 AMRegarding full-time remote developers:
I've worked for Sun since 1994. 94-99 in the bay area, 2000-present out of Utah. People tend to have all sorts of big requirements for remote collaboration (IRC, IM, etc) but it is actually simpler than that. Here is what is needed:
* High quality audio in the conference rooms for teleconferencing. I can't emphasize this enough.
* VNC for "desktop sharing" during design and code reviews, and for conferencing.
* Conference room presentations projected from a PC while that PC is simultaneouly a VNC server. That way, the teleconferencees don't have to wonder what page the presenter is on. An alternate is to have all presentations available online so the remote people can download them and follow along - the presenter has to remember to say "next page" and it is a good idea to have page numbers on all presentation pages.
* This one is the hardest: *SHARED* electronic white boards. By sharing, I mean that anyone should be able to see and contribute to the whiteboard - including the remote people. There are a number of products that allow a normal whiteboard to be "broadcast" but they don't cut it - they are not bidirectional.
* Instead of IM, etc., email is fine - and if you need quicker response, just pick up the phone and talk directly too the person. The voice contact is good to keep the remote person human.
Regards,
Harold
Posted by: Harold Carr at August 3, 2003 06:45 AM
I've been a victim of Sun's high-end internal teleconferencing, and I have to say, though I'm egregiously biased -- I find Workspot, with telephones and a conference call, to be nearly as effective in most remote situations. And much simpler. And much cheaper.
I agree that audio quality IS everything -- so, REAL telephones, not speaker phones, give you the best quality. And nearly everyone already has one.
Typically, I use a couple of Workspot shared VNC desktops at a time: one for GAIM, one for whatever we're working on, and another for a joint sketchpad. It beats lugging machines to conference rooms, or forcing people to leave their desks all the time. The only conference room that I enjoy using ... is a café.
Posted by: Greg Bryant at August 3, 2003 05:27 PM
How are you doing with the HRD position? Are you getting the kind of candidates you were hoping to get?
Posted by: Oceana at August 4, 2003 01:46 PM
Mitch,
I would like to make a suggestion regarding the Human Resources hiring you were talking about.
First some background.
Recently I have had to take on more projects than I, or my full time team can personally handle. As such I have been hiring part time employees and outsourcing, with my team fulfilling the roles of project managers.
This and the fact that we have a very short time frame to fulfill our requirements, has led me to a lot of reading about Extreme Programming, and other Agile development methods.
To make a long story even longer ;-) I have found the people centric approach to these methodologies particularly refreshing, especially considering that I am now working with part time employees and consultants, who I want to feel they're respected members of the team.
I would suggest that you re-title that role away from Human Resources to something more people focused; perhaps Personnel Director, or something of your own creation.
It may seem like just semantics, when people actually think about it, they do not like the fact that the company considers them a human resource.
In many companies HR is considered the enemy (e.g. Catbert.) Finding a way to change this perception starts with the title and then goes on to a reevaluation of the role, with the goal of making that position a resource FOR the employees.
Just a thought.
john
Posted by: John David Felt at August 15, 2003 10:29 AM