Steve Thomas

[00:00:12] And go.

[00:00:14] Okay, so I've done some stuff, but the most interesting thing I've done is work on Project Athena. Project Athena is an apprenticeship program at Verizon. And Athena is the goddess of strategy and wisdom, but let me show you a real goddess: Jacqueline Damiano.

[00:00:30] Her strategy was to talk to anybody who would listen. She talked to board members, executives across all the business units, got leadership lined up up and down the ladder to make this thing happen. She is a goddess. Oh, she also asked me to -- she couldn't be here -- she asked me to hug everybody because she misses you. That ain't gonna happen.

[00:00:48] But what's the business case for businesses? Forty-four of the Fortune 500 companies are led by females. Those 44 kick the financial butts of the other 500. If diversity works for leadership, why can't we do it for the rest of our company?

[00:01:03] But what about the business case for apprentices? Okay. I can send my kids to college for four years, $80,000 to $120,000, and they're loaded with debt. Or they take an apprenticeship where they're paid a livable wage to learn, and then the company pays for their college education.

[00:01:20] Now apprenticeship is a forcing function for DevOps-ish. You have a constraint: apprentices on my team need to push to production within two weeks. To do that, you need positive behaviors. They can build and run the system on day one. I heard one company in Slack saved $5.3 million by doing this. They also need preventing mistakes. We have CI/CD platforms, automated tests, security and compliance checks. Topo, Jason, could you give a talk on this or something?

[00:01:48] All right. So then we need to find good mentors. Where did I find one? He was a ride operator at Six Flags. He was also a member of Project Athena. He stopped working on his projects in the middle of the week so he could teach others and help them succeed. He was knowledgeable. He wanted everybody to succeed, and he had the heart of a teacher. That's also a good leader. Good mentors are your future leaders. You need these people.

[00:02:12] All right. You don't find talent. It's not resume bingo. You look for character: people who can listen, they can empathize, they care about the quality of their craft. And I have three amazing apprentices: Raven, a store manager whose work ethic made her improve tremendously over apprenticeship; Martine, a camp counselor for kids with disabilities, has taught our other programmers how to improve the accessibility of our sites; and Amanda has automated away toil not just for us but for other teams. These are friends who never coded a year ago.

[00:02:45] Okay, but what do we teach them? We teach them the scientific method. We teach them to create hypotheses, to run experiments, learn from them, rinse, repeat. Okay, but we need feedback loops that focus on learning. If they learn something, the actions will follow, right? And we actually do feedback. I do it every day. I do it after meetings: regular feedback.

[00:03:09] They need to learn to communicate, and I talk about demos with working code. Talk code to me, baby. Okay, but we also need them to talk in ubiquitous language, the kind the business understands. They can empathize. They can listen, empathize. They can go work at Disney.

[00:03:27] Okay, so now, if you have crappy audit documentation, give it to the apprentices. Let them fix it. Not only will you have better audit documentation, the scar tissue from doing this -- they will be committed to running good documentation, updating it, and then automating away the toil. They need to learn to ask good questions, like: what's preventing you from deploying to production right now? Do not let Brian near the apprentices. We don't want to scare them. Psychological safety is important.

[00:03:56] Okay, they need to practice more and suck less. They should be coding every day: mob programming, pair programming with experts. What the heck is my time? I can't tell. Okay. We need to teach them to go meta. No, not that company. I don't want to teach clickbait, collect a bunch of data, and then use it just to make money. I mean, hey, what could go wrong? No, we want them to think about thinking. Think about how they think about problems, to think out loud, and reflect on that.

[00:04:22] We want to test all things in a safe way. We test, debug, and refactor their code. They should also test, debug, and refactor their mental models. Okay, we want to channel our inner Spear, right? See a problem, solve a problem, share what you learn.

[00:04:37] You want to teach them that I ask to be corrected. It took one person six months to tell me something I said was stupid. I said, thank you. They've been telling me I'm stupid ever since. They're right.

[00:04:49] Okay, we want to learn from the history of powerful ideas. No, I don't expect them to read everything from The Fifth Discipline, but we can plant seeds from the ideas from Theory of Constraints, from systems thinking, that eventually may grow.

[00:05:02] They're viruses we send off into the world. There's a couple of them. Then we get more, and we've got a bunch. Maybe send them to other parts of New York, to the whole...

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