00:00:17.000
uh so I want to welcome you to to my talk um it's yes you can you can raise
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your hand now uh I gave him the job of raising his hand anytime I say so or um at the beginning at the S
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so um we're going to talk about building kickass internal education programs uh
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uh sometimes when you don't necessarily have a mandate from your boss uh or from
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the organization but it's important right we need to be able to build these programs
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and we need to be able to educate ourselves and so we sometimes have to just do
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it I have one thing though before before we start uh I want you to know that if I raise my hand like this or if this
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fellow down here raises his hand uh that's I want you to raise your hand as well so let's practice this really
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quick yes very good okay good this is how I'm going to get your attention uh
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usually it means uh it's time to shut up but not always uh but we're going to do some activities and I have to get your
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attention somehow so that's effective for now I would would like you to we've been sitting all day right and
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how can you keep your brain going if you're sitting so I want you to to stand up and take a three minute stretch break
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if you're able to stand uh and introduce yourself to your neighbors so we have three minutes
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ohow you guys are so good at that this is really great one of my favorite things about
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that activity is that everyone every time I do something like that people
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tell me nerds won't do activities they won't stand up they won't talk to each
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other that's crazy H and every time it goes over Gang Busters in fact I think we gained 50 people just because we were
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making tons of noise it's good we're going to talk about inspiration partly every every
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rails comp I I go for the inspiration track they don't actually have that listed but there's always clearly those
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talks I'm going to try and inspire you to take action on education at
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home I have I have a one point takeaway because you've been like how much how
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much knowledge can you really retain in a day of conferencing so I want you to remember one thing and and that's that
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internal educ is easy I'm going to start it on Monday hopefully you'll be able to
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say that by the end of The Talk The twoo takeaway because there's
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slightly more content is that you don't need to know everything to teach and also that education isn't
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particularly expensive or hard to do I make it look difficult because that's
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how I get paid but you don't have to do it that way
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so I had a number of I had a number of titles that uh my wife vetoed uh one of
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them was covert education sneaking in education without them knowing um I also
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had uh how to educate when you don't know what the hell you're doing which is very
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true but like I said they got VTO so uh like like I said my name is Chuck Laos I
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have bright hair you can find me around the conference if you have questions about education uh I like ferrets food
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photography um I wish photography had an F cuz I'm kind of like that was the
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founder of the Portland code school and I'm an education engineer at New
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Relic uh also I like magnets and ponies and pets wearing
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clothes and my co-workers are
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jerks but I love them so uh first I want to start and talk about some inspiration
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uh for myself Kira Mata who I don't know if he's in the in the room at the moment
00:04:38.800
but uh was just doing a talk over there two years ago I saw him at Rubi on ALS and the thing that was so cool was that
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at the time this was uh I guess this 2012 he uh he didn't speak a lot of
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English and he decided he wanted to talk through code because we all it was our
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common language right and uh he was very nervous he was incredibly nervous but
00:05:05.039
the thing he did by accident was by very he very clearly demonstrated what he
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expected of the audience what he said at the beginning was the beginning of his talk is said every time I pause I want
00:05:18.400
you to reassure me by clapping and so I want to ask you to do
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the same thing this is my first talk and I'm I'm a little nervous I'll be honest so every time I have like a
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you see like a big title slide or something or every time I I pause and and look nervous I want you to just like
00:05:37.360
applause the out of me that'll be really helpful for
00:05:49.160
me thank you so much that was so much better than I had
00:05:55.560
planned okay so I want to talk about how I got started in education and unfortunately it's an incredibly
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embarrassing story for me how many of you know Eve online all right so you all know that
00:06:08.720
this is the like the nerdiest nerdiest MMO game uh commonly referred to as
00:06:14.960
spreadsheets in space so that's how I got started teaching and uh the reason is that you
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know this is the sort of common learning curve thing Eve is Eve is the black line
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with the the dead bodies everywhere and and it's so true in fact it's so
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difficult to learn there's an entire Alliance of I think last count 2,000 people all educating each other because
00:06:42.360
it's just that damn hard well not satisfied to to just join euni or the
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eve University I wanted to do my own thing they were doing they weren't doing what I wanted to do at the time so I
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started my own Guild and we got 80 people people which I think was a huge success um we had weekly speaking events
00:07:03.960
by prominent PVP players but it was the first time I'd done public speaking ever
00:07:09.479
and I have to say that that was way more intense uh and way more addicting than
00:07:15.440
space piracy or PVP um just so so
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scary uh after that I uh apparently added in a lot of
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Animation slides um that bside digital was a 40 person company um this is
00:07:33.840
actually at work now um but education was not a thing it was something that I
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had to sort of hack in around the edges um I still at this point didn't
00:07:44.879
realize I was educating but I was doing things like lightning talks and and little jasar Ralls um so I started small
00:07:52.440
and I I tried to share success with other people and it actually went really well by the end we had lightning talks
00:07:58.840
that the entire company came to and were wildly heralded and we started seeing
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other things popping up like uh pair programming workshops and other cool things so it was really neat to to not
00:08:11.960
have any mandate to do this and still find ways to to take a little bit of
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time each week um and as it was successful it grew and grew and we got more financing and and we were able to
00:08:24.080
buy lunch for everyone and it's just cool to demonstrate that success uh sort of still at that that
00:08:31.280
school or at at that company bside digital I started an intern program gone
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terribly wrong um and I say it went terribly wrong because it was supposed to be
00:08:42.000
three people every three months and ended up being 17 people uh shortly
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afterwards but I still didn't know how to teach I still had no idea in fact I I
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think I had only barely accepted the fact that I might be educating at that point but I had a really smart guy
00:08:58.560
talked to me in the beginning and he said that an educator at least in the math and Technologies is not someone
00:09:05.079
who knows everything it's someone who creates a space where people can
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learn I think that's such a crazy difference of thought to say to realize that they weren't
00:09:16.600
expecting me to know all the things just to set up a place where people could go
00:09:21.959
and read their book uh and and get it done right and I can definitely say that
00:09:27.680
PCS was the most INSP iring experience of my life definitely the most proud I
00:09:33.240
I'm still connected to all the students and it's still kind of uh I don't know if it's the highlight
00:09:39.800
of my life it kind of makes me sad to think that that might be in the past uh but I wonder what I go towards in the
00:09:46.519
next now now is different though I work for New Relic and New Relic really cares
00:09:52.240
about education and I didn't I didn't quite know how much they cared about it and
00:09:59.399
till month six but uh so I I work on building
00:10:05.320
internal education for engineers they're way smarter than me like terrifyingly
00:10:11.320
frighteningly smarter than me and I I can't teach them anything I I literally
00:10:16.959
don't know anything more than that um but I can create a space for Learning
00:10:22.320
and I I can I can help do some things that allow Engineers the the extra time
00:10:29.040
to get back to their day life like they can communicate to me and then I can build curriculum for them so I I can do
00:10:35.240
things there and I can help organize events too which is a huge time sync for most Engineers Believe It or Not
00:10:41.639
Engineers are not good at organizing events for the most part so that's something I can do um so this was this
00:10:49.639
was our mandate when I first talked to them at New Relic make the already awesome engineers at New Relic
00:10:56.440
awesomer like that's cool that's a cool holy I don't know how to do that like
00:11:03.560
I've been trying I've been applying here for 10 years I I can't like I want to come here so I can level up um wow
00:11:11.079
that's super
00:11:22.720
intense I totally have to recommend that that's like the best tactic ever okay so
00:11:27.800
you don't need to know everything that's the one thing I want you to take away from this well okay that's one of the
00:11:33.079
three I kind of lied um you don't have to know everything you need to be passionate and inspiring and you need to
00:11:40.200
give of yourself in this activity I still have no idea what I'm doing um I'm
00:11:45.639
learning it too and you can do it
00:11:59.399
okay activities so I want you to spend 30 seconds thinking about an Effective
00:12:05.000
Education experience from your past I want you to share this with your neighbor two minutes I'll raise my
00:12:23.399
hand wow that was like half the time you are continually impressive to
00:12:31.760
me
00:12:39.880
so okay so a good educator pushes people out of their comfort zone I know that
00:12:44.959
most everyone else I I haven't seen another presentation where people have forced you to talk to people and I think
00:12:53.040
it's important um so I really like I really like that quote and I like this
00:12:58.639
image in if we're growing we're always going to be out of our comfort zone so in some
00:13:04.240
ways you know we we talked about an educator is just someone who creates an
00:13:09.519
effective space for Learning and part of that is pushing people you saw me walking around and if anyone wasn't
00:13:15.839
talking I'd forced them to talk to me which is way scarier so I think that's a that's a
00:13:22.800
huge part who knows these guys yeah everyone this is uh Bill NY
00:13:31.199
and Neil degrass Tyson I didn't know Neil degrass Tyson when I was a kid but Bill Nye I sure as hell knew um and I
00:13:38.360
really love how much they they inspire people that seems to be their their main
00:13:44.079
thing now right I know that I know Neil degrass Tyson at least still has a classroom somewhere but I don't know
00:13:49.519
where it is his his primary thing for me is just the inspiration to continue to
00:13:55.639
continue learning he keeps exposing me to new new things about space that I never thought about before and for me
00:14:03.680
when I educate you I'm expose I'm going to expose you to the idea that you could
00:14:08.880
in fact do these things you could be the teacher and I hope that when you go home
00:14:15.160
and talk to people you'll Inspire them to learn the code that you're thinking
00:14:20.240
about the last thing I think a good educator does is gives of themselves out
00:14:25.720
of love I and I think this really applies to the open source Community as well and the open source
00:14:31.839
ethic and I this is is partly a preparation for you that
00:14:37.800
education may take some time outside of work sometimes but so does open source
00:14:43.600
and I can tell you that it's worth it so turn to your neighbor and give him
00:14:49.720
a high five
00:15:12.360
I don't I don't think this would work in many other communities in the Ruby community so I I actually thought about
00:15:19.440
making that activity uh applaud for the next thing only by using your neighbor's hand but de Sayed that'd be very
00:15:26.920
difficult so uh how many of you have seen this XKCD strip about nerd sniping
00:15:34.399
uh if you haven't so I I taught my wife this a little while ago that one of the
00:15:40.079
so nerd sniping is where you just sort of um talk you say one little thing that
00:15:45.680
forces someone to just spawn off like a number of different thought processes um
00:15:51.519
it's it's basically a mental Fork bomb if you know that term um and one of the
00:15:57.160
best ways and this is a very dangerous tool I'm giving you very powerful tools here one of the best ways to do this is
00:16:03.399
to say Hey Joe what's the most efficient way to do whatever doesn't even matter
00:16:10.120
what's the most efficient way to sweep the floor they're done um
00:16:15.440
so efficient is this funny word I'm talking about being an efficient
00:16:21.639
educator and uh so I apologize in advance because I I hope this destroys
00:16:28.120
you um mostly I'm going to talk about some one of the things you mentioned was how do
00:16:34.199
you create a space conducive to learning is it a physical space is it an actual thing like do you have to have a
00:16:40.519
classroom and the answer is no it is not generally a physical space however it
00:16:45.759
does tend to involve some real estate somewhere but it could be mixed use space it could be the couches whatever
00:16:52.920
so the first one my most favorite the place I started was lightning talks and
00:16:58.279
uh the thing I've seen work the most was 30 to 60 minutes before lunch on Friday
00:17:04.959
the reason I think that works is that uh as you as you finish the talks people
00:17:10.919
can continue their discussion through lunch very effective the other thing is that if it goes well you can move it
00:17:17.640
back by 30 minutes and get your company to buy lunch thus increasing your happiness and
00:17:23.240
your uh number of people coming which is great um lightning talks are super easy
00:17:28.439
to do uh you just need to find a couple people who can do 5 to 10 minute talks on
00:17:33.559
whatever I've seen effective lightning talks done with no technical content I would recommend some technical content
00:17:39.840
just you know for reasons but I've seen I've seen lightning talks that were very well received on home brewing um in fact
00:17:47.039
I've seen entire presentations on home brewing I've also seen really effective ones where you demo a product especially
00:17:53.720
if you have a big thing like New Relic it would be really useful to me if I could just see one person's take on one
00:18:00.400
feature every week I might actually make it through my product by the end of three years it's so big um but also
00:18:08.679
showing off a new gem or just generally inspiring the people around you this is education is so much about inspiring
00:18:14.919
people you can't force someone to learn right you can't well you can sit them down if you have the Mandate but they
00:18:20.880
don't have to learn unless they really want to so it's all about inspiration the last Pro tip I have for you about
00:18:26.480
lightning talks is that if you bring food they will come it's great so that's how
00:18:33.039
we ended up with a whole company Faithfully showing up every single Friday to an event that involved sitting
00:18:39.159
on the couches which I realized is probably not that hard of a proposition
00:18:44.360
but so the other the other one um some of my co-workers have been working on this recently mob refactors in fact uh
00:18:52.120
Ki was the person who introduced me to this idea that you get everyone in a room try pick some bit of C you really
00:18:59.200
want to hack on and everyone hacks on it together um it's important to review the
00:19:05.400
code not the author because that can be really offensive to the author especially if they're in the room and if
00:19:11.080
they're not in the room that could just be bad in general but uh you rewrite the code together and then and this this is
00:19:17.559
the part that kind of blows my mind you throw it out afterwards it's like mind Maps they're not really that helpful uh
00:19:24.960
after the fact and the code you write during a mob refactor is probably bad but the conversation you have during a
00:19:30.640
mob refactor is very good so this has been working really well for us and in
00:19:35.679
fact looking back on it I saw groups doing this but it wasn't called mob refactoring I didn't know what it was
00:19:41.120
called then I just saw them doing it and it being really effective par programming uh is
00:19:48.480
something that everyone knows they're supposed to be doing right but no none of us do because it's hard uh and and
00:19:56.400
the thing people don't talk about is that programming to me is a tradeoff of speed for
00:20:03.360
quality and and I think that's really important so if you find yourself or your product in a place where things are
00:20:10.480
not going as smoothly as you would like I don't know if anyone's had that problem um pairing may very well be one
00:20:17.440
of the the big power tools to look at so I have two two sneaky little methods to get pairing happening because I know a
00:20:24.320
lot of you have tried getting your company to pair you've tried like getting manager mandate and they can't
00:20:30.520
make it happen there's two methods that have worked well at New Relic so the first one is my method is called the
00:20:36.840
sneaky Monitor and what you do here is you set aside some time like you make an
00:20:42.200
appointment with your your teammate you literally bring your monitor to their desk and it's annoying because then
00:20:49.280
you're going to sweep like half of their off their desk um and then at the end you try and
00:20:54.720
be a nice citizen you help them like put all the things back in order and and you know maybe it's the first time their
00:21:00.080
desk has ever been dusted but that's cool it's nice uh and then the next week you come back again and you sweep all
00:21:07.080
the off their desk and put your monitor there and by the third week you know maybe they just haven't put their
00:21:12.840
desk back into shape and you just plop your monitor down and and by the fourth week you find a little monitor there
00:21:20.600
you're like oh that's nice thank you and then by the fifth week you've got an
00:21:25.840
actual monitor there and you thank the IT people and and then you go find someone else and
00:21:31.919
start it again and I've I've it sounds silly right like you can only touch one
00:21:37.960
person at a time but then then they start taking their monitor somewhere after they've seen the fun of it and and
00:21:44.840
then you've got two two people doing it and I've seen this happening at New Relic to to both great effect and great
00:21:51.520
detriment because we're totally out of space and now I see these monitor like pairing stations popping up everywhere
00:21:57.440
and the management is pissed at me cuz I've taught them pairing and so uh there
00:22:03.840
was another cool method that came up recently that I really like uh this is uh Emily's method um Emily Highland in
00:22:10.080
the insights team and what she recommended was uh sending out an open
00:22:15.159
invite to anyone who wants to try pairing to bring their monitor to the lunchroom and I'll I'll find you a buddy
00:22:22.840
to work on for that one hour or whatever we'll talk about some style some you can
00:22:28.640
practice and then go to town that's it it's a great way to get those who are
00:22:33.880
already interested in it going because they don't have friends who they can do it with on their team maybe so they
00:22:40.080
can't practice and there therefore they can't know well enough how to convert their teammate they just don't know
00:22:45.320
enough yet it's a great idea there's only a couple more uh so
00:22:51.000
workshops I mentioned these uh basically you pick a theme we did this uh maybe a week ago on refactoring and it was so
00:22:57.919
cool so we uh Katie Miller picked a topic uh some rails cast on re on the
00:23:05.240
service object pattern so we we all watched the rails cast she showed us
00:23:10.440
like 10 minutes of her code where she tried to apply that and we talked about it a little bit then for 40 minutes we
00:23:15.880
paired on trying to do that on a random snippet of code to various effect you
00:23:21.279
know sometimes it didn't work sometimes it did but it was really cool and then for the last 20 minutes we we came back
00:23:27.640
together and we all demo and it was so like I feel like I got two days of education out of that hour and a
00:23:34.520
half and it was shocking to me I mean Not only was I exhausted afterwards which maybe not super great but I really
00:23:42.880
felt like I learned a lot and it's it's an education experience I had never had before I had never tried this so it was
00:23:49.640
really cool
00:24:00.559
thank you I um I have to tell you like I've been rushing a little bit because I was
00:24:06.559
worried if I pause long enough that you you're G to clap at me again I feel like
00:24:13.080
this is actually ideal though like I would rather feel embarrassed by how often someone is clapping than the opposite so this is good
00:24:20.120
um so this one this one I've only seen a couple times at New Relic but it was
00:24:26.760
amazing this was literally one of the most amazing things I have ever seen or experienced uh and it was a
00:24:33.840
total accident they had no idea they were doing it um I only later found out it has a name later basically all of our
00:24:40.120
smartest Engineers got around the table like they usually do but this time there were too many of them to have the
00:24:45.440
discussion so they did it in our lunchroom and our lunchroom has two monitors that are paired together and
00:24:51.559
it's also open enough that anyone could hear so they were sitting around the little table talking and what I noticed
00:24:58.039
is that there was a growing crowd of about 40 people listening and looking at the second monitor the paired Monitor
00:25:05.000
and they were discussing amongst themselves they were clarifying the concepts because the super nerds um were
00:25:11.159
over here talking about this really hard concept and we were just trying to understand what the hell they were talking about but it was really cool to
00:25:18.399
hear our elders speaking like what what do they worry about during the day I don't know um
00:25:25.640
and and and also these these are normally like closed door uh you don't
00:25:32.039
normally have any impact in this and so being able to like sort of listen in was
00:25:38.840
definitely like one of the most enlightening and eye-opening things I think I have seen in a long time so I
00:25:45.000
would highly recommend something like this I think this works for anything I think this works at the director level
00:25:50.360
like as long as you're not talking about employees I would love to hear what your
00:25:55.919
VPS or your executives are talking about super
00:26:01.159
cool um and then I think this is second to last one but the last real one um so
00:26:09.200
the last one I had never heard of this concept but now that I see it in effect I love it basically when you get a new
00:26:16.120
hire assign someone to them for a day it's nothing big um maybe if maybe if
00:26:24.640
you have have the resources you can assign someone half time for two weeks
00:26:30.320
or maybe even four weeks and what I can tell you is that if you do that uh so
00:26:38.080
new when New Relic onboards we think it takes about six months for someone to truly get up to speed and I actually
00:26:43.679
agree with this um what we've found is that if you have an onboarding buddy helping you through that first month it
00:26:50.240
drops to about three months which is crazy you get one one engineer's half
00:26:56.799
time for one month that's three months of extra productivity that is money that
00:27:02.480
is a lot of money huge huge difference for us so we now do this 100% of people come into New
00:27:10.240
Relic and they have a person guaranteed for four weeks if not two people dedicated to them in addition to their
00:27:16.399
team and one of them is usually me so very
00:27:21.600
cool um the last one dedicated trainers I wouldn't recommend it I mean
00:27:28.399
unless you have a lot of people or the quality of trainings is like absolutely critical or um but it's just the
00:27:36.679
dedicated trainers have to be crazy efficient and so if you're at the size where you have two three 400 people yeah
00:27:43.480
all right dedicated trainer time but most of us aren't there most of us are 40 person companies right
00:28:01.799
all right uh yeah I'm just reading the side sorry I forgot what these are yeah turn to your neighbor talk very very briefly
00:28:08.080
not three minutes about what these have tried or which of these you've tried and which you think would work in your
00:28:15.080
or and I'll tell you the
00:28:22.600
secrets I'm sorry we had to cut that one short I'm running out of time it's all the clapping
00:28:30.720
okay my my plan for your organization if you do this you will have education and I will be happy and and pleased with
00:28:38.919
you as if you need to work for my pleasure uh so I want you to to next
00:28:44.720
week next Friday at 11:30 I want you to do lightning talks it's the easiest
00:28:50.679
thing you can do it's super easy to find three people who want to talk they need to make three slides how hard is that
00:28:59.519
also I want you to ask your team to review your code at some point if you're willing bring some snacks and they will
00:29:05.279
like it a lot better uh third one set aside some time for pairing bring your monitor you know
00:29:11.080
the sneaky monitor trick now and also I think the next time you have a new hire try it I think you'll find that it's an
00:29:17.799
immensely pleasurable and pride-filled
00:29:23.320
Endeavor uh for this activity I would like you to say these things on the screen
00:29:29.720
so yes so uh I'm going to count to three yes thank you I'm going to count to
00:29:35.039
three and then we're all going to say this thing all right one two three internal education is easy I'm going to
00:29:42.320
start on Monday yeah excellent I am fulfilled you know the two-point
00:29:49.000
takeaway you don't need to know everything you can teach right now education isn't expensive or hard to
00:29:55.799
implement Chuck just makes it look that way yeah