Speaker 1: All right. Well, hello, everybody. Thank you, guys, for coming out here for Cascadia. Hope lunch was good and you all settled in for this talk. Like I said, my name is Trey Amatuna, and through my journey of growth of my life, I've been everything from a waiter to a restaurant manager, a break dancer, DJ, audio engineer, and for the last two and a half years, I've made this wonderful transition into software engineering, thankful from my Hack Reactor crowd to really bring me into this. I'm also a partner to an amazing woman and three boys at my house with a little girl on the way, finally, and I have this mindset that I constantly strive to be technically creative in a creatively technical way. So I'm here to talk to you, as was said, about something that I really believe in and something that we really do a lot of where I work, which is Alvo. Right here in downtown Seattle, we are an online marketplace for legal services and advice, and through this and my entire journey of life, I've really gotten into this factor of to build a culture of growth is to build a culture of engagement. And truly, when you have that, it's key to individual and company success. So from the moment we're born, our minds and our bodies really strive for one thing. It's to grow. Now, we're going to go through why this is important and also go into some things that you can start at your own company to really foster this culture of growth and engagement. But at first, I want you to remember when you were young, and you really couldn't wait to grow up, right? But when we're getting a little bit older, we're like, wait, wait, wait, what the hell are we really thinking about this? Like, it's fun to be a kid. I look at my three boys, and I really want to look at them, it's like, well, it's really fun up here. Really, it's a trap. Hold on. But when we're young, we have those that we admire. And what we really want to do is we want to grow up to be like those people. And I really want to shout out real quick on all the firefighters that are down in California right now taking care of those fires, and hopefully a lot more young ones grow up to be like them. But throughout this entire journey, we take bits and pieces of everything that we learn, and we try to put them together in this puzzle of who we are. Throughout every single interaction that we have, we take that and blend it in with our innate personality, and they essentially become part of our puzzle of life. And it comes to this concept of growth is an iterative process. We're always growing, and we never really stop. Through all of this, there's one thing that influences us more than anything else in our lives, and it's the relationships we have with those around us. Our families, our friends, our teachers, professors, and the people that we work with. And we learn so much from all of these interactions that we really would never be able to learn if we were on our own. And this is the essence of a concept called cultural learning. What cultural learning is, is it describes a way that a group of people within a culture can pass on information and skills much faster than one would be able to do individually. With this, though, it begs the question, kind of, what is a culture? My personal favorite description or definition of culture comes from the Cambridge Dictionary, where they say, culture is a way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs of a particular group of people at a particular time. I really love this one because it also puts in that factor of a particular time. It kind of describes the fact that not only are we growing ourselves, but the cultures that we are part of are growing the entire time as well. So a culture is really formed whenever any group of people get together. So we're part of many cultures at any time in our life. We have family cultures, business cultures, cultures around art, hobbies, sports, and entertainment facilities, right? In fact, every single person here in this audience right now is part of a culture of Cascadia.js. And I want to thank you right now for being a part of this culture together with myself and so that we can learn and grow together. Last year, Indeed released their best places to work list that they do every year. The number three company on that list last year was JetBlue. When interviewed, Rachel McCarthy's SVP of talent described their culture as the DNA of the company. And this is really true because in today's business cultures, it's more than ever important to cultivate these concepts of growth and engagement because by doing this, you can pull in that factor of engagement. And of course, when I'm talking about engagement, I don't mean this kind of engagement. I mean employee engagement with their work, right? Well, last year, Gallup released their state of American workplace report where they released that 31% of American employees are actually engaged in their work, 52% are not engaged, and 17 are literally disengaged from their work. This can be really alarming in some ways. And they also talk in here about this is costing American businesses $550 billion a year. Now let's see what happens in this same report when an employee reports that they actually actively learned something the previous day. The engaged and not engaged categories nearly flip where you have 65% now engaged and only 30% not engaged. And even the actively disengaged comes down a little bit of a step. So maybe you can look at this factor of constantly learning as maybe putting a ring on those employees because of the factor that now they're less likely to leave. In fact, they might be running around saying, I am engaged, and I'm happy with where I am. And ultimately, this leads to one of my favorite quotes, which is, when you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life. But how do we build this culture around engagement? And what is it that developers really want when they're looking for a job? Well, there's plenty of surveys out there for this by showing how many people have actually filled out one of these. See? Excellent. Thank you, all of you, because hopefully, you're going to help me in this next few things right here. The first one we're going to look at is 2018's Stack Overflow, where 100,000 developers reported on this. And if you look at this, we have compensation and benefits coming up at the very top. And then number three is opportunities for professional development. Number six is the culture. But really, when you think about this and what we're talking about and building a culture around learning and development, this is going to skyrocket to the top and be the number one thing that developers are really looking for. So let's continue looking at this. We have HackerRank's 2018 report. Here professional growth and learning took number two. And then once again, company culture is down here at number six. But then when we build this, this one really probably skyrockets to the top. And I want to look at number four and five here, too, that's smart people to learn from and interesting problems to solve. And we'll kind of revisit that again in a minute. But when you ask people that are coming fresh into our industry that are students, it actually flips over. And now we have growth and learning here at the top. And all of these kind of come up. So now interesting problems comes up to three, smart problem company and teammates comes up to four, and company culture comes up to five. So once again, this is very important to the people that are looking for jobs. Same thing happens with code and game. Learning new things now comes up to the top by a larger margin. Smart colleagues, complex problem solving, and then culture comes down in here as well. So people really want to learn things to keep them engaged in this. And so the final step of this is something that I said on smart people team colleagues. So the old saying, surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. It's one of the classic sayings, right? And it makes sense by everything that we said from the beginning. The biggest influences in our life are the relationships with the people around us. So of course, we'd want to have the smartest people around us in our team, because then we can hopefully become smart by proxy there. And every organization wants their best people on their team. But which states have the best developers? They actually did a survey on this as well. And I have to say that here in Washington, we're number one. So yeah, we've got the best developers in the nation. But of course, every company can't specifically have the best developers on each team. And there comes in this thing that companies kind of are a little bit scared of investing in junior developers and trying to really bring them up. And they want senior developers. They want the best people on there. But I think this is one of the craziest reasons not to hire junior developers and help invest in them. Every developer has heard the words, leave the code better than when you found it. Well, what about leaving the developers better than when you hired them, right? Another thing happens whenever you build this culture of learning and engagement, that you have these systems in place. So if somebody does leave and you have to hire somebody on, you now have a system in place to teach them and to bring them up to speed to where you need, so where they can really contribute to your company. As one of the other little things that comes out, you see the talk of a CFO saying, what happens if we train them and they leave us? And the smart CEO really comes back and says, what happens if we don't and they stay? So there was another report by a company called Great Place to Work. They did a generation's report where they assessed the benefits of a great workplace across generations, where they found employees who experience a great workplace are far more likely to want to remain at the organization a long time. This, of course, saves companies on recruiting and training and really fosters the performance of stable teams. An interesting thing that they found is that throughout the generations, really, it's really similar. Millennials, Generation X, and baby boomers are in the 90 percentile when they're happy. The red is a happy person versus the gray is kind of somebody who's not happy in their job. When we really look at this, we're like, okay, wait a second. So millennials are now 25 times as likely to stay at their job when they're happy versus when they're not. When baby boomers really will stay, whether even they're not happy, and only seven times more likely. I mean, who says millennials are really flaky and flighty, right? This really proves that that's not quite the case. We just need to keep these people happy and they want to stay. The next one we can see how proud they are to tell others about their job. So that's another thing that comes up. When somebody is happy and engaged with their workplace, they want to talk to other people about that workplace. They want to kind of display to the world that I work in an amazing place. Look at the wonderful things that they allow me to do and learn. And so what happens with that for the company? When you are hiring somebody else, now you have a plethora of people that already kind of know about your culture and they want to be there and they want to come work for you. Finally with this, we'll talk about productivity. One last thing on here, which is the fact that when you have happy people, they're much more productive on the job. So three to four times as productive on the job when they are happy versus when they are unhappy. That's money right there for any business that has these people. That means that literally you could pretty much take a day off of work every single week and be just as productive at a four-day workweek than a five-day just by having happy people. So what can we do to build this culture of growth? At Avvo, we have a lot of wonderful things that we do, and I'm kind of going to go through these and give a little description and maybe a few tips that I have on these as well. The first off is kind of the easiest to do. Lunch and Learns are brown bag sessions. So this is a simple factor of getting together with a group of people over lunch. People bring their lunch into a meeting room and one or multiple people can talk about something that they know. And then it's really just there to help disperse information or teach something or get people kind of enticed on something, kind of like these talks here. The next is Lightning Talks. Once again, we see this a lot in conferences, five to 15-minute long talks. And the really nice thing here is they can be done really in succession. So maybe during a Lunch and Learn, you can have four or five different people do smaller talks there. Another one that I really enjoy working with is Third Party Workshops. So how many people actually heard about the GraphQL Workshops or the React Workshop or any of the other workshops that we're having here? Excellent. And I know I saw a lot of people at the GraphQL Workshop that are here tonight as well, and I thank you guys for coming out here because that was actually a product of my own work using these techniques. A Third Party Workshop can be done in a couple ways. They can be done privately for companies, which can be quite expensive for the companies, or they can be done in a more open way. And that's how I really presented these with the ones like the GraphQL Workshop. So I contacted Eve and Alex, who put that workshop on, and said, hey, my company is working with GraphQL. I would love for you guys to come out and help train my devs on this. I have a room, I'll pay for lunch, and allow you to sell tickets outside the company as well and bring the public into this. All we ask is for some tickets for our own devs to the workshop as compensation for that. And of course, since they're actually from Tahoe, Lake Tahoe in California, and not from this area, I put out my own network to get them connected with places like Cascadia.js so that they could sell more tickets and they could make money for themselves. So I'm really passionate about these ones, and it's a very nice thing that you can do and bring it in and also become part of the community as well. Another thing is learning stipends. So every manager really should have a learning budget for their developers. And we're not talking about really just, like, tossing money at developers. So it's like, hey, hey, hey, I want to learn this, I want to learn that. But they can really spend these types of things on such, like, online tutorials for you. My favorite ones being things like Front End Masters or Egghead.io, Kent Dodd's new testing course, or the wonderful West Boss courses that are out there. But this is just a way that we can help people grow in their own time as well. Another one is reference libraries. So books. I don't know about you, but I love books. I love reading them, I love going to the library, picking out new books. And having a nice reference library at work is great, because you can have all the online resources possible. But really, that physical nature of the book and allowing you to really look through that, it's a different experience, and you can really find some things in there that you won't be able to find as quickly online. Another big one is mentorship programs. So this is something that really is kind of free, but it really just takes a lot of work. You have to, of course, find people that want to be mentors, find people that want to be mentees, figure out how to mesh these people together. But really, this is a program that can touch people's lives almost in a way that none of these other types can. Mentor-mentee relationships can be lifelong relationships. And by working on a program like this at your organization, you can truly be touching people's lives for the rest of their life by this one moment. And it really also has that same impact on not just the mentee, but the mentors as well. Another great one that we're all a part of right now, conferences, right? They're a great thing. We can get together. We can learn. So, I mean, how many people got their conference tickets from their jobs? Look at this. It's nearly half the audience here. It's a great thing and a phenomenal way for us to keep up with our industry, network, and really see what's going on. Pro-tip on this one, try to get a group of people together to go on to conferences. When you have a group of your own organization going, you can really gather yourself together. You can learn from each other. It becomes not only an experience of the conference itself, but also a team-building event. The next one is a really big one and can kind of be a little bit hard to sell for a lot of companies. It's called 20% time. We have this at Avvo. It started off at Google. This is really the concept of one day a week, an individual contributor can basically work on whatever they want to. They can learn something new. They can build a little project that they've been thinking about, as long as it kind of relates to the work that they do in their job. In fact, when Google started enacting this, they had a few things come out of here. You may have heard of them, AdSense, Google Maps, and the real big elephant in the room that was the start of all this, Gmail. Some of the biggest apps in the entire world came out of this thought of 20% time. At Avvo, we have a really sleek shipping method and a way of getting testing environments, EC2 testing environments. We go to an app that we have, simply called ShipIt, and we make a few clicks of the button and we have an entire EC2 instance provisioned, terraformed, and ready to go with our company's entire app stack on it. I hit what branches I want, those automatically deploy, and now I have my testing environment. And then if I want to ship to production, a couple more buttons, my branches ship to production and it's all done. As you can guess it, this came out of a 20% time project, and it saved countless hours of our developer time on shipping. So these are really a way that companies may not look at that factor of what are we really getting back to this, but you can come up with some really cool things when you just let your developers flourish, have fun, and work on things that they want to. The last one I want to talk about is deep dive days. So this is a fun one that I'm working on right now, and essentially these are full days that a group of people will take their 20% time, go into a room together, and learn something and dig into it a lot more than they really could on, say, a lunch and learn, or a little bit individually. And as I said, this is kind of a group thing, which also allows you to interact with each other, work together, ask questions, and it can be led by a person on the team, or you can do things like go through online courses. Things like Egghead or Front End Masters, which really have these longer courses that individuals can go through, but when you go through them as a group, you get that multiplying effect of that cultural learning once again. And so I really also want to stress on the fact that, remember, you're not just a consumer of the information whenever you're doing these things. It's really also in your best interest to be an instructor. As Aristotle told the world, teaching is the highest form of understanding, and it really is. It helps you cement the thoughts and the learnings that you've had. How many people recognize this guy? Kind of big in our environment here. Ken C. Dodds, very big in our wonderful world of JavaScript, and he has a concept that he talks to that is consume, build, teach. This is the way that he personally uses or learns new concepts and new technology. He goes out, he learns them, he consumes information, he builds products with those, and then he teaches them to the world. In his talk, Zero to 60 in Software Development, How to Jumpstart Your Career, he brings in a quote from Ashley Williams that I absolutely love. Teacher is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your understanding is. When you teach concepts to people, you're going to get those questions, and truly, you're going to go, wait, wait, I'm not sure, and that's something that is that concept of you don't know what you don't know in many ways. When you teach other people and you take that time to help instruct others, then you're really also finding the holes in your own understanding and can go afterwards and start filling those holes in. Remember through this that the key to success is to build a culture of growth, which in extension builds a culture of engagement. Invest in yourself and your colleagues and leave everyone around you better than when you found them. I want to leave you with a final quote from actually the former CTO of Avvo, Kevin Goldsmith, where he says, the culture of the place that you work will be much more important to your success and happiness than the specific technologies you work with or the products that you work on. Find a place that helps you grow and thrive, first and foremost. Thank you very much, everybody. My name is Trey Yamatuna. You can follow me on Twitter at Treytuna or pretty much Google Treytuna anywhere and you can find me. Have a great conference. Thank you.