Stories at the Intersection of Passion and Competency
One of the activities I need to spend more time on during the next year is telling stories about some of the great people I see at Obtiva everyday. We tend to be a fairly understated bunch, so it’s easy to get lulled into the sense that what we do is normal and that there’s not much to write home about. Yet, when I stop and look around once in a while, I can see some amazing happenings that should be shared.
One thing that energizes me is growth. I love all kinds of growth. I love watching my daughter grow taller than my wife. I love growing my knowledge of how to apply software solutions to business problems. I love enabling the growth of an inexperienced programmer into a maturing software craftsman. I’ve loved watching Obtiva grow from a 4-employee company to a 30-employee company over the last 4 years.
One of the philosophies that has helped us grow a healthy culture while growing in size is our belief in people’s potential for greatness, irrespective of their previous roles. How do we consistently find people like this? We look for the intersection of passion and competency. I will highlight 3 stories of growth, where I saw people seem to “come out of nowhere” to make an impact at Obtiva.
Nate Jackson
Nate and I first met in August of 2007. We were pair programming for a couple hours, a part of Obtiva’s hiring process. We were considering Nate for an apprentice role, our third apprentice that year. Some of my first impressions about Nate were that he was super-young, not super-well-educated, inexperienced, and already strong at RSpec and Rails. He seemed to have a knack for developing cohesive Rails apps, and I also sensed a strong passion for quality in Nate. Obtiva has learned many lessons in the 3 years since we hired Nate, and so has Nate, but at least one attribute is unchanged: Nate remains committed to high quality software. Earlier this year, when our friends at a local proprietary financial trading firm (who employ some extremely well-respected software developers) asked Obtiva to write some internal facing Ruby apps, I made sure that Nate joined me and Corey on the project. If my developer friends were going to use software written by Obtiva, I wanted Nate to be involved to ensure our reputation was well represented.
Recently, Nate has gained some momentum on a personal project he’s been working on with a friend. Obtiva has always encouraged our developers to work on side projects, even if that means those projects grow into viable businesses, taking the developer’s full attention away from us. (When I joined Obtiva in 2006, I was already working on a world-beating Rails app… which never quite panned out. Kevin encouraged the endeavor from day 1.) In fact, we’re interested in taking the next step and start investing more of our resources into our people’s personal projects. Nate is leading the charge on this with The Healing Hunger Project. There’s not much to look at yet, but I’ve heard about what’s coming and I’m excited.
Ethan Gunderson
I first “met” Ethan via Twitter in 2009. I was keeping a close eye on any “Obtiva” mentions on Twitter when Ethan tweeted: “Hmm, I wonder if I could get into Obtiva’s software apprentice program. That would be fricking awesome.” If it sounded pretty fricking awesome to Ethan, it also sounded pretty fricking awesome to me that someone up in small-town Wisconsin would have heard of Obtiva and feel compelled to tweet something like that. I knew nothing about Ethan, but that tweet showed me a glimmer of passion, which certainly doesn’t hurt an apprentice candidate’s chances. After many conversations, some pair programming, and plenty of logistics-related emails, Ethan moved into our corporate apartment and started his apprenticeship in late 2009.
To a certain extent, all of our apprentices are part of an experiment, as we iterate and evolve how we try to grow software developers while developing software. Ethan was the first apprentice through our latest revamp as we shifted toward a contract-to-hire relationship with clearer milestones, so he may have felt like a guinea pig at times. One of the upsides of the crucible that is our apprenticeship program is the apprentice’s freedom to choose their pet project, along with its entire technology stack. This gives apprentices an opportunity to gain experience with the newest technologies, and Ethan took advantage of it, choosing MongoDB as his datastore.
Over the last year, Ethan hasn’t let go of Mongo, despite most of his daylight hours spent at Obtiva clients who primarly use MySQL. He has demonstrated some inspired learning about Mongo via his lean startup gathers.us. Ethan and Ryan also started ChicagoDB, “an aspiring group of database nerds learning new ways to scale their data.” I was impressed when 10gen asked Ethan to present at the Mongo Chicago conference, where he related his experiences designing a Mongo-friendly data model for gathers.us. Today, Ethan is still with Obtiva, and spends most days at Groupon, where he’s well positioned to assist in their recent MongoDB evaluation and development.
Consider the awesome growth Ethan has experienced in the last year. He has transitioned from being a developer at Menards, to an apprentice at Obtiva, to MongoDB presenter, to consultant at the fastest growing company ever. That’s quite a year, quite a story, and a whole lotta growth. I love it.
Scott Parker
At the beginning of 2010, Scott “sparker” Parker left a stable, full-time .NET gig to join Obtiva’s first (and possibly last) .NET project as a subcontractor. He was taking a calculated risk. He wasn’t wedded to .NET, was interested in Rails, and was a self-declared Obtiva fanboy. The gig lasted for most of the first half of the year, but then started winding down. Fortunately, Scott had already been burning the midnight oil learning Rails, and even paying his own way through a Rails TDD night course from Andy. So, when his project finished, he switched over to a Rails project with Adam that we had going at the same client. I was impressed with his transition, though not surprised: it’s an established pattern at Obtiva that people can switch languages smoothly.
In August, Scott joined me at Groupon. This felt like a stretch to me. Groupon is a “web-scale” client with a demanding Rails development environment that would be tough on any newbie. Yet, Scott’s enthusiasm coupled with the excellent feedback we’d heard from our clients eased my concerns. Within a few weeks, I realized I had nothing to worry about. Scott had hit the ground running. He was talking face-to-face with Groupon’s business people, he was taking initiative in development efforts, and he was lightening the load on Groupon’s engineering leadership. So, when it was time for another one of Groupon’s team re-shufflings, Scott ended up as a team lead, overseeing other Obtivians and Groupon employee-developers. I was impressed. When I asked Shinji about his confidence in Scott, he related a story from Scott’s first weeks at Groupon. Scott had screwed up some production data. And yet, Scott’s professionalism in handling of his mistake absolutely knocked the socks off of Groupon’s technical leadership. (It was right around this time that we finally pulled the trigger and hired Scott as a full-fledged Obtivian.)
Awesome. Here’s a guy who at the beginning of 2010 had only toyed around with Rails, and who many people would have written off as just another lost .NET dev. Now, he’s leading a team of Rails developers at the highest profile business in Chicago. How does that happen? For Scott, it happened through a combination of hard work, natural abilities, diligent written and oral communication, and inspired learning. Where does that happen? At the intersection of passion and competency.
