Bait and don't switch: Using FOSS4G to attract bright young talent
CC Attribution 3.0 Germany:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
Nordan, Robert P. V. (NORKART AS)
In Norway, the demand for technical talent in our field far outstrips the supply, so when you want to recruit the best, you have to sink your teeth in them at an early stage. Since 2010, Norkart has run a summer internship program where we assign students projects with a lot of freedom in how to reach their goals, and encourage them to explore new technologies. Unsurprisingly, this often means a lot of Open Source software! Some projects end up as writeoffs, some have modest returns, and one has even made a 1000% return on investment... This talk aims to show how the program has recruited good talent, enchanced our image, and given us new impulses that have changed our corporate culture and led to an expansion of our market offerings.
 Hello, everyone. Thanks for coming. Please welcome, sorry, it's Robert Norden. Please welcome Robert Norden from Norcat from Norway who will talk to us about the Scarship program that they were on at Norcat since 2010. Thank you. Thanks. It's great to see you all here. I realize I might have some prestigious competitors in other rooms. I admit the town was a slightly scary name for you, but I hope we'll all see it light at the end of the town by the time we're done here. So I'm going to talk to you about the summer job program we run at Norcat and how we use it on open source in the program. For those of you who were here before lunch for Alexander's talk, you probably know a bit about Norcat already, but for anyone who wasn't, I run to it quickly. People ask me at Phosphor G, so this Norcat place where you work, what is that? I kind of go, you know, it's just Norway's biggest proprietary software vendor for GIS kind of, but we're a lot more than that now. We've made some big changes over the last few years. The Tornium office is leading the charge there, really working on open data, open source, but I also think that the summer job program we've been running contributes to that change. So this is an actual quote from the end of summer presentation that myself and my friend gave back in 2010. You know, Barcelona was where we had Phosphor G, Norway had the Eurovision, Germany one. I still thought that Minocca N900 was the future of smartphones, and very few people in Norcat really knew that much about this here, open source software really cared about it, because, you know, Norcat had been doing proprietary software for 30 years and was doing fine, thank you very much. Summer job process was quite ad hoc as well. So basically, I had two years left at university, and I sent in an unsolicited application, you know, do you have a summer job? Question mark. And my friend basically just talked to the man who'd become a boss. And he took a chance on us. We were hired for the summer and more or less just given a goal and then just, you know, get on with it. We'll see you in six weeks. I wrote a program that converted our proprietary startups to SMD, and my friend was working on how to store our data in post-JRS. So, you know, it was fun. We had a presentation show there for work, and we did a little educating on Phosphor G while we were at it, as you can see. And yeah. So this year, not so much from, no, we needed to be educated on Phosphor G at the ending presentation. Some people had to be sent out to get more chairs for the meeting room, because too many people had showed up to see it. And my friend and I were finished at university in 2012. We were both hired by Norcat. And since then I've always stuck close to the summer job program, because I like to pretend that I'm still young, hip and cool. Now we have an actual process with job adverts, interviews, mentors, follow-ups. So this year, I was helping to coordinate nine students in three office locations with a two-day gathering at start and one frankly nerve-racking Skype conference with the entire company at the end. It's great fun though. Now summer job projects are first and foremost learning experiences. And you have to treat them as that, because the way you try out new ideas, make prototypes, and get to know people. And if the result is a prototype that dazzles or a near-finished project, then great. If the result is proof that that approach just doesn't work, well that's also great. Because then you're going to have to fight for research internally, spin off a big project with full-time employees, and then find out it doesn't work. And no matter what, you'll gain knowledge and fresh impulses from bright young minds, and it can be quite fun too. Try out Trump interviews. Now that's something that Matt Mungweg, who started WordPress, has said. The company started Auto Matt Ich. They basically, anytime they're considering hiring anybody, they pay them to work on a project for them for a few weeks. And then they see how that turns out before they decide whether they want to hire them or not. So this is the second major factor in our summer job approach. In many ways, the summer job is actually a six-week long interview where we're considering you for potential positions two years from now. Because after all, the cost of one summer job project is almost nothing compared to the cost of hiring someone who doesn't work out. So if we're impressed by your work, you know, we'd follow you with interest to a university. And if we have an opening on the time of graduating, or for that matter, if you go to work somewhere else, and we have an opening later, you know, we remember who you are, and we'll stay in touch. And then you can maybe get an offer. And it goes both ways, of course, because, you know, students get to know us when they work for us as well. So we've had both ways. I mean, some students, you know, jump on the offer once we give it. Other students, they've said, you know, thanks, but no thanks. They had a nice time working for you. But I think I want something bigger, corporate, more proprietary. I don't know. I myself, I mean, I worked one summer for Norocart, and then I worked one summer for Taylor Noro, you know, big global telecom company. They had a lot more swanky offices, but not quite the same personal touch. So I came back to Norocart. Either way, whether you decide you like it or not, whether we decide we like you or not, everybody's a winner when you get to know each other better, because nobody makes costly mistakes. So what else do students get out of it? Well, obviously, we pay them money, which is nice. But also, students at Norway's biggest and then my totally unbiased opinion as a former student, best university for technical sciences, they required to have 12 weeks of work experience before they can write the master thesis. These six of those weeks have to be demonstrably relevant to their thesis. We can also offer to work with them on their thesis if they're exploring something that aligns with our interests. So the formalities are taken care of. You know, that's not really the important thing for me. Personally, I felt when I had a summer job that I learned more during those six weeks of summer than during a whole semester at university, you know, more about what it's like to actually work for a living, more about my craft as a programmer, and a lot more about reading OGC standards documents than ever thought I needed. Also, I generally think that summer students have a lot of fun when they spend the week, the weeks working and learning and not having exams at the end. So let's talk about the kinds of projects that make the best summer projects. We've tried out a few things over the years. Two main criteria are one that they have to be achievable within the time frame, which is typically six weeks. And the second is that they have to be independent of other projects. First one is obvious. They only have six weeks of summer, so you know, it has to fit. The other one isn't quite as obvious, but it's quite simply that you can't do any work in the summer project that any other serious projects will depend on, because sometimes some projects just don't work out. You know, if it doesn't work out, you have to be ready to just throw it away. And the other, on the other side, equally as important is summer job projects can't depend on other projects getting stuff done, because it's the summer. People on holidays, things move slowly. Nobody knows who's responsible for what when that person's away. When you're doing a summer job, you have to be able to work independently without waiting for others. So the best summer projects are prototypes or single-use applications, you know, short and sweet and defined purpose. We've had a lot of success setting one kind of, you know, one time internal tasks that need doing like I did with S&D conversion. And, you know, if they have time to spare, then they can spend that time polishing the project, making it nicer and better, rather than trying to put them on anything else just because they have time left over. And at any rate, as I'm sure you all know from experience, projects expand filled available time. So I've never experienced summer students not having anything to do at last week. Some of you might be thinking that it sounds like a lot of work to manage a student or two for the summer, but it isn't really. Because since the projects are designed to be both independent and expendable, we can give the students a lot of freedom in how they do it. You know, they get a mentor, they get a goal for the project, and sometimes we give them a few guidelines about how we want it done. But generally, we just turn the blues for the summer. This goes back to the tryout idea because letting them succeed or fail on their own terms is a strong indication of, you know, how are they smart? Can they get things done? How will they work out in the future? Now, I wouldn't be standing here talking to you about this if all it did was act as an extended interview. We've gotten some pretty good stuff after the summer job projects up to the years. I mean, back in my day, we were working on converting SLD or two SLD and seeing how this post-GIS thing works. And two years after that, we were serving a billion tiles a year on the stack with post-GIS map, sorry, geo-server and map proxy. So that was a success. A few years after that, a student used leaflet, the prototype web-based version of an Android and iOS app that we had for municipal maps. And today, the evolution of that map, of that prototype, is used by over half, not almost half of Norwegian municipalities. So over 200 Norwegian municipalities are using that map every day. In one of our more ambitious summer projects, which Alexander was also talking about during his talk, when Norwegian cadastral data was opened, we set a group of students working on that in cooperation with local newspaper. And they produced a platform for integrating that data into the local newspaper's internet sites. Basically, who's bought what for how much? And everybody loves that kind of gossip, you know? It's great for local papers. And we were the first on the market with that idea, so we actually sold quite a bit of it. I did a rough estimation in my head about exactly how much we got back. And for every corner we spent on the summer students and a bit of marketing and stuff like that, I think we got 10 back. So in a way, it's a bit like venture capital. You have lots of projects. Some of them don't work at all. Some of them are okay. And some of them just pay off spectacularly and allow you to spend more money on other projects. Also, another nice effort is that it gives us something to boast about. Obviously, I'm here now talking to you about this. But I was also at Phosafety last year talking about our work for putting the region data sets into Mapbox RexTides. And I was doing that largely off the back of the work that our summer students did. And basically, I took a lot of credit. That was fun. I'm kidding. I did say that we used summer students for it. You know, we blog about it. We talk about it. We think it's good PR for us. So we like to spread the word. Of course, we think we've done good. But, you know, another way of knowing that you aren't something good, that's when competitors start doing suspiciously similar things. The project with the 10 times return on investment I was talking about, half a year later, one of our competitors came out with a product that was so functionally similar that, you know, we could only be flattered. If we were Oracle, we probably would have had some other emotion. But we were flattered. This being, we saw the same company put out a job ad work for a summer internship, which I have to say reminded me a lot of some job ad works I'd been writing lately. And also, it came completely with promises that candidates would be allowed to work with leaflet, post-gis, and user. Speaking of these technologies, I mean, why is it that our summer projects end up using large amounts of open source software, especially considering that all our traditional software suits are just, you know, proprietary and big and massive? Two, sometimes, you know, the goal is explicitly explore this technology. And then, you know, they go and explore it. But mainly, it's just because our students have a lot of freedom. We say, this is the goal we want to achieve. You figure out how to achieve it. And then they choose open source because open source is what they know. It's what gets them the results they need and it gets them the results they need in the short time span they have. Because, you know, negotiating for some proprietary software package probably takes like three weeks sometimes and then half your summer is gone. Also, who wants to spend money on summer projects apart from what we're paying them? But most of the time, they never even consider anything that isn't open source because the very idea of it is alien to them, as I imagine it is to many of you in this room. Talking back to some other things that Alexander mentioned in his talk, how have, I mean, how has this transition been going and how have all these projects of open source tech affected our company? Well, as I said earlier, it's helped us make some good hires. And not all of those good hires have been people who have been in the summer job program. Some of them are people who were interested in open source and, you know, had heard that we had started turning the boat around towards open source and they talked to people who had been to the summer job program and Bob's your uncle, they decided to come work for us and they were helping push the change even further. Also, you know, this culture shift is not just, you know, a field good thing. I mean, we go to the foster G, we sponsor foster G in a way we, we start using open source tools when we know they're the best tools instead of, you know, proprietary things. But I'd say that it also helps us with new revenue streams, as Alexander was talking about earlier. This contact with the Norwegian Army, the military geographic service, which was developed and published in the open. My colleague tomorrow, colleague Otler is talking in the fireplace room tomorrow about the project we did for government which is also developed entirely openly and published as open source. And I have to say, I mean, I was in that company in 2010, that would have been pretty unthinkable back then to do anything like that. Finally, I want to say this, you should do it too. You don't have to make a big deal out of it. You know, you can just start with one or two students and get them to feel them. I mean, I know a lot of companies already do that. Let's give them the right project, freedom to do what they want. Running a good summer job program is good for the students. It's good for your company. And it can even be good for your profits. You don't have to take my work for it. I mean, I'd like it if you did. But we do actually have two previous summer job students from our company at the conference now. And they're here because the organizing committee has their own summer or student job program. So I'd like to applaud the Phosphorygian organizing committee for having the foresight to provide a student job program. If you want to talk to me or talk to them, there's one right behind that camera over there. Then, you know, just come find me and we can talk about this. So thank you for your attention. Thanks a lot for this talk, for this presentation. We do have five minutes for questions. So is there any questions in the room? Yes. It's Greg from Septima in Copenhagen. How do you deal with the failures? Because of course there will be failures. There always are with anyone. So how do you deal with failures? How do you make sure that people don't go back depressed? I don't think anyone's ever left us the best. Yes, this is Alexander who also works for us. Yeah, well, it's not like they're failing utterly. Like it's a really bad product that to me. I think we only had more or less successful technical projects. It's just that it's not a commercial success in the end. So, and I mean, student interns, if they leave our company and doesn't come back, they don't care if it's a commercial success or not. It's fun if it is, but they don't care if it's not. So it's not on the commercial side of it, I would say that it's not as successful often. Yeah, and like I said, part of it is really on this interview. That if we feel that it didn't gel and you didn't work with our environment or our environment didn't work too, then it's fair it's a fair thing, you know, it's just you have to be honest about it. We don't think that we don't think that this is a relationship that's going to last me in the future sort of thing. But I mean, apart from that, we're very fair. I mean, we give them all references and it paid well for the time and everything. So I don't think anybody goes home to fast. Yeah, you've talked a lot about hiring students and everything will be fine. But in my opinions about hiring the right students, you have any words on that? Yes, I mean, we do because this year, we have nine students last year, we had eight students, but I think we had 20 something applications. The thing is that as I'm sure you all aware, our field is actually pretty narrow. So there aren't a tremendous amount of students in order with the right skill sets. You know, at my university, a typical year, maybe two or four graduate. So there's been years where we basically hired every student, but there is. And there's also been years where we've basically given offers to every student there is. But this was something I think I wrote more about in the abstract and actually ended up saying at the talk here. But I mean, part of it is simply the competitive edges. It's not just that we're evaluating students to see if they're good enough for us. It's that we're marketing ourselves to students and saying, hey, we're good enough for you. Because I mean, we're a great company and people love working for us, I say. But we don't have the absolute highest salaries in the business because that's basically anything that has to do with oil has automatically the highest salaries. So we just have to convince people that we're a nice place to work. And the best way of doing that is having people work for us. And then they can tell others about it. Just a question on the mentoring. Because you said they come in the summer when people are away. So I'm just wondering, are they actively taught things or are they expected to pick it up on their own? Well, we have, I mean, yeah, the mentors are basically, the mentors are picked in advance based on their holiday plans. So a mentor won't be on holiday for more than two out of those six weeks. So they'll be available. And we give them, I mean, now we spend two days at the start of their summer job period where we, because they're at three different office locations, but we gather them all together at the main office. And we have one full day of propaganda of how great this company is. And this is how you do your time sheets. And this is how the company was founded and stuff. And then we take them out and wine and diamond. And then next day we have a full day full of, well, it's the company wide GIS internal conference. They kind of, we all update each other and stuff. And they get to be on that as well. So we do a fair bit. Again, that's a development back when I was a site, you know, it was just like, here's the desk. And when I was finally, when I was permanently hired, everybody assumed I knew everything about the company. And in fact, I didn't know, didn't really know quite a lot. So that's kind of figured out, which is why when I got my hand on the summer job program, I decided to push for proper way of things at the start of it. More question. We have time for one more question. Maybe one last question would be, do they have, do the student have access to a month or like every day or do, like, you help them get organized at all? Or, and can they ask questions to anyone anytime? Oh, yes, definitely. I mean, that's, yeah, I mean, sounds very corporate, but a core company value for us is that we're friendly and available questions. And I mean, for some of the students and everybody. So, you know, they, they, they can ask the mentor and the mentor, if the mentor doesn't know the mentor tells them who to ask them, it's no problem at all. Okay. Yes. Well, thank you. Thank you very much. Select with high quality audience. Thank you. Thank you very much.
 Hello, everyone. Thanks for coming. Please welcome, sorry, it's Robert Norden. Please  welcome Robert Norden from Norcat from Norway who will talk to us about the Scarship program  that they were on at Norcat since 2010. Thank you. Thanks. It's great to see you all here.  I realize I might have some prestigious competitors in other rooms. I admit the  town was a slightly scary name for you, but I hope we'll all see it light at the end of the  town by the time we're done here. So I'm going to talk to you about the summer job program we  run at Norcat and how we use it on open source in the program. For those of you who were here  before lunch for Alexander's talk, you probably know a bit about Norcat already, but for anyone who  wasn't, I run to it quickly. People ask me at Phosphor G, so this Norcat place where you work,  what is that? I kind of go, you know, it's just Norway's biggest proprietary software vendor for  GIS kind of, but we're a lot more than that now. We've made some big changes over the last few years.  The Tornium office is leading the charge there, really working on open data, open source, but I  also think that the summer job program we've been running contributes to that change. So this is an  actual quote from the end of summer presentation that myself and my friend gave back in 2010.  You know, Barcelona was where we had Phosphor G, Norway had the Eurovision, Germany one. I still  thought that Minocca N900 was the future of smartphones, and very few people in Norcat really  knew that much about this here, open source software really cared about it, because, you know,  Norcat had been doing proprietary software for 30 years and was doing fine, thank you very much.  Summer job process was quite ad hoc as well. So basically, I had two years left at university,  and I sent in an unsolicited application, you know, do you have a summer job?  Question mark. And my friend basically just talked to the man who'd become a boss. And he took a  chance on us. We were hired for the summer and more or less just given a goal and then just,  you know, get on with it. We'll see you in six weeks. I wrote a program that converted our  proprietary startups to SMD, and my friend was working on how to store our data in post-JRS.  So, you know, it was fun. We had a presentation show there for work, and we did a little educating  on Phosphor G while we were at it, as you can see. And yeah. So this year, not so much from,  no, we needed to be educated on Phosphor G at the ending presentation. Some people had to be  sent out to get more chairs for the meeting room, because too many people had showed up to see it.  And my friend and I were finished at university in 2012. We were both hired by Norcat. And since  then I've always stuck close to the summer job program, because I like to pretend that I'm still  young, hip and cool. Now we have an actual process with job adverts, interviews, mentors,  follow-ups. So this year, I was helping to coordinate nine students in three office locations  with a two-day gathering at start and one frankly nerve-racking Skype conference with the entire  company at the end. It's great fun though. Now summer job projects are first and foremost learning  experiences. And you have to treat them as that, because the way you try out new ideas, make  prototypes, and get to know people. And if the result is a prototype that dazzles or a near-finished  project, then great. If the result is proof that that approach just doesn't work, well that's also  great. Because then you're going to have to fight for research internally, spin off a big project  with full-time employees, and then find out it doesn't work. And no matter what, you'll gain  knowledge and fresh impulses from bright young minds, and it can be quite fun too. Try out  Trump interviews. Now that's something that Matt Mungweg, who started WordPress, has said. The  company started Auto Matt Ich. They basically, anytime they're considering hiring anybody,  they pay them to work on a project for them for a few weeks. And then they see how that turns  out before they decide whether they want to hire them or not. So this is the second major factor  in our summer job approach. In many ways, the summer job is actually a six-week long interview  where we're considering you for potential positions two years from now. Because after all, the cost  of one summer job project is almost nothing compared to the cost of hiring someone who doesn't work  out. So if we're impressed by your work, you know, we'd follow you with interest to a university. And  if we have an opening on the time of graduating, or for that matter, if you go to work somewhere else,  and we have an opening later, you know, we remember who you are, and we'll stay in touch. And then  you can maybe get an offer. And it goes both ways, of course, because, you know, students get to know  us when they work for us as well. So we've had both ways. I mean, some students, you know, jump on  the offer once we give it. Other students, they've said, you know, thanks, but no thanks. They had a  nice time working for you. But I think I want something bigger, corporate, more proprietary. I  don't know. I myself, I mean, I worked one summer for Norocart, and then I worked one summer for  Taylor Noro, you know, big global telecom company. They had a lot more swanky offices, but not quite  the same personal touch. So I came back to Norocart. Either way, whether you decide you like it or not,  whether we decide we like you or not, everybody's a winner when you get to know each other better,  because nobody makes costly mistakes. So what else do students get out of it? Well, obviously, we  pay them money, which is nice. But also, students at Norway's biggest and then my totally unbiased  opinion as a former student, best university for technical sciences, they required to have 12 weeks  of work experience before they can write the master thesis. These six of those weeks have to be  demonstrably relevant to their thesis. We can also offer to work with them on their thesis if they're  exploring something that aligns with our interests. So the formalities are taken care of. You know,  that's not really the important thing for me. Personally, I felt when I had a summer job that I  learned more during those six weeks of summer than during a whole semester at university, you know,  more about what it's like to actually work for a living, more about my craft as a programmer,  and a lot more about reading OGC standards documents than ever thought I needed. Also,  I generally think that summer students have a lot of fun when they spend the week, the weeks  working and learning and not having exams at the end. So let's talk about the kinds of projects  that make the best summer projects. We've tried out a few things over the years. Two main criteria  are one that they have to be achievable within the time frame, which is typically six weeks.  And the second is that they have to be independent of other projects. First one is obvious. They only  have six weeks of summer, so you know, it has to fit. The other one isn't quite as obvious, but it's  quite simply that you can't do any work in the summer project that any other serious projects  will depend on, because sometimes some projects just don't work out. You know, if it doesn't work  out, you have to be ready to just throw it away. And the other, on the other side, equally as important  is summer job projects can't depend on other projects getting stuff done, because it's the summer.  People on holidays, things move slowly. Nobody knows who's responsible for what when that person's away.  When you're doing a summer job, you have to be able to work independently without waiting for others.  So the best summer projects are prototypes or single-use applications, you know,  short and sweet and defined purpose. We've had a lot of success setting one kind of, you know,  one time internal tasks that need doing like I did with S&D conversion. And, you know,  if they have time to spare, then they can spend that time polishing the project, making it nicer  and better, rather than trying to put them on anything else just because they have time left over.  And at any rate, as I'm sure you all know from experience, projects expand filled available  time. So I've never experienced summer students not having anything to do at last week.  Some of you might be thinking that it sounds like a lot of work to manage a student or two for the  summer, but it isn't really. Because since the projects are designed to be both independent  and expendable, we can give the students a lot of freedom in how they do it. You know,  they get a mentor, they get a goal for the project, and sometimes we give them a few  guidelines about how we want it done. But generally, we just turn the blues for the summer.  This goes back to the tryout idea because letting them succeed or fail on their own terms is a  strong indication of, you know, how are they smart? Can they get things done? How will they work out in the future?  Now, I wouldn't be standing here talking to you about this if all it did was act as an extended  interview. We've gotten some pretty good stuff after the summer job projects up to the years.  I mean, back in my day, we were working on converting SLD or two SLD and seeing how this  post-GIS thing works. And two years after that, we were serving a billion tiles a year  on the stack with post-GIS map, sorry, geo-server and map proxy. So that was a success.  A few years after that, a student used leaflet, the prototype web-based version of an Android  and iOS app that we had for municipal maps. And today, the evolution of that map, of that prototype,  is used by over half, not almost half of Norwegian municipalities. So over 200 Norwegian  municipalities are using that map every day. In one of our more ambitious summer projects,  which Alexander was also talking about during his talk, when Norwegian cadastral data was opened,  we set a group of students working on that in cooperation with local newspaper.  And they produced a platform for integrating that data into the local newspaper's internet sites.  Basically, who's bought what for how much? And everybody loves that kind of gossip, you know?  It's great for local papers. And we were the first on the market with that idea,  so we actually sold quite a bit of it. I did a rough estimation in my head about exactly how  much we got back. And for every corner we spent on the summer students and a bit of marketing and  stuff like that, I think we got 10 back. So in a way, it's a bit like venture capital.  You have lots of projects. Some of them don't work at all. Some of them are okay.  And some of them just pay off spectacularly and allow you to spend more money on other projects.  Also, another nice effort is that it gives us something to boast about. Obviously, I'm here  now talking to you about this. But I was also at Phosafety last year talking about our work  for putting the region data sets into Mapbox RexTides. And I was doing that largely off the  back of the work that our summer students did. And basically, I took a lot of credit. That was fun.  I'm kidding. I did say that we used summer students for it.  You know, we blog about it. We talk about it. We think it's good PR for us.  So we like to spread the word. Of course, we think we've done good. But, you know, another way of  knowing that you aren't something good, that's when competitors start doing suspiciously similar  things. The project with the 10 times return on investment I was talking about, half a year later,  one of our competitors came out with a product that was so functionally similar that, you know,  we could only be flattered. If we were Oracle, we probably would have had some other emotion.  But we were flattered. This being, we saw the same company put out a job ad work for a summer  internship, which I have to say reminded me a lot of some job ad works I'd been writing lately.  And also, it came completely with promises that candidates would be allowed to work with  leaflet, post-gis, and user. Speaking of these technologies, I mean, why is it that our summer  projects end up using large amounts of open source software, especially considering that all our  traditional software suits are just, you know, proprietary and big and massive? Two, sometimes,  you know, the goal is explicitly explore this technology. And then, you know, they go and explore  it. But mainly, it's just because our students have a lot of freedom. We say, this is the goal  we want to achieve. You figure out how to achieve it. And then they choose open source because  open source is what they know. It's what gets them the results they need and it gets them the results  they need in the short time span they have. Because, you know, negotiating for some proprietary  software package probably takes like three weeks sometimes and then half your summer is gone.  Also, who wants to spend money on summer projects apart from what we're paying them?  But most of the time, they never even consider anything that isn't open source  because the very idea of it is alien to them, as I imagine it is to many of you in this room.  Talking back to some other things that Alexander mentioned in his talk,  how have, I mean, how has this transition been going and how have all these projects  of open source tech affected our company? Well, as I said earlier, it's helped us make some good  hires. And not all of those good hires have been people who have been in the summer job program.  Some of them are people who were interested in open source and, you know, had heard that we had  started turning the boat around towards open source and they talked to people who had been to  the summer job program and Bob's your uncle, they decided to come work for us and they were helping  push the change even further. Also, you know, this culture shift is not just, you know, a field  good thing. I mean, we go to the foster G, we sponsor foster G in a way we, we start using  open source tools when we know they're the best tools instead of, you know, proprietary things.  But I'd say that it also helps us with new revenue streams, as Alexander was talking about earlier.  This contact with the Norwegian Army, the military geographic service, which was  developed and published in the open. My colleague tomorrow, colleague Otler is talking in the  fireplace room tomorrow about the project we did for government which is also developed entirely  openly and published as open source. And I have to say, I mean, I was in that company in 2010,  that would have been pretty unthinkable back then to do anything like that.  Finally, I want to say this, you should do it too. You don't have to make a big deal out of it.  You know, you can just start with one or two students and get them to feel them. I mean,  I know a lot of companies already do that. Let's give them the right project, freedom to do what  they want. Running a good summer job program is good for the students. It's good for your company.  And it can even be good for your profits. You don't have to take my work for it. I mean,  I'd like it if you did. But we do actually have two previous summer job students from our company  at the conference now. And they're here because the organizing committee has their own summer  or student job program. So I'd like to applaud the Phosphorygian organizing committee for having  the foresight to provide a student job program. If you want to talk to me or talk to them,  there's one right behind that camera over there. Then, you know, just come find me and we can  talk about this. So thank you for your attention. Thanks a lot for this talk, for this presentation.  We do have five minutes for questions. So is there any questions in the room?  Yes. It's Greg from Septima in Copenhagen. How do you deal with the failures?  Because of course there will be failures. There always are with anyone. So how do you deal with  failures? How do you make sure that people don't go back depressed? I don't think anyone's ever  left us the best. Yes, this is Alexander who also works for us. Yeah, well, it's not like they're  failing utterly. Like it's a really bad product that to me. I think we only had more or less  successful technical projects. It's just that it's not a commercial success in the end. So,  and I mean, student interns, if they leave our company and doesn't come back, they don't care  if it's a commercial success or not. It's fun if it is, but they don't care if it's not.  So it's not on the commercial side of it, I would say that it's not as successful often.  Yeah, and like I said, part of it is really on this interview. That if we feel that it didn't gel  and you didn't work with our environment or our environment didn't work too, then it's fair  it's a fair thing, you know, it's just you have to be honest about it. We don't think that  we don't think that this is a relationship that's going to last me in the future sort of thing.  But I mean, apart from that, we're very fair. I mean, we give them all references and  it paid well for the time and everything. So I don't think anybody goes home to fast. Yeah,  you've talked a lot about hiring students and everything will be fine. But in my  opinions about hiring the right students, you have any words on that? Yes, I mean, we do because  this year, we have nine students last year, we had eight students, but I think we had  20 something applications. The thing is that as I'm sure you all aware, our field is actually  pretty narrow. So there aren't a tremendous amount of students in order with the right skill sets.  You know, at my university, a typical year, maybe two or four graduate. So there's been years where  we basically hired every student, but there is. And there's also been years where we've basically  given offers to every student there is. But this was something I think I wrote more about in the  abstract and actually ended up saying at the talk here. But I mean, part of it is simply the  competitive edges. It's not just that we're evaluating students to see if they're good enough  for us. It's that we're marketing ourselves to students and saying, hey, we're good enough for  you. Because I mean, we're a great company and people love working for us, I say. But we don't  have the absolute highest salaries in the business because that's basically anything that has to do  with oil has automatically the highest salaries. So we just have to convince people that we're  a nice place to work. And the best way of doing that is having people work for us. And then they  can tell others about it. Just a question on the mentoring. Because you said they come in the summer  when people are away. So I'm just wondering, are they actively taught things or are they expected  to pick it up on their own? Well, we have, I mean, yeah, the mentors are basically,  the mentors are picked in advance based on their holiday plans. So a mentor won't be on holiday  for more than two out of those six weeks. So they'll be available. And we give them, I mean,  now we spend two days at the start of their summer job period where we, because they're at three  different office locations, but we gather them all together at the main office. And we have one  full day of propaganda of how great this company is. And this is how you do your time sheets. And  this is how the company was founded and stuff. And then we take them out and wine and diamond.  And then next day we have a full day full of, well, it's the company wide GIS  internal conference. They kind of, we all update each other and stuff. And they get to be on that  as well. So we do a fair bit. Again, that's a development back when I was a site, you know,  it was just like, here's the desk. And when I was finally, when I was permanently hired,  everybody assumed I knew everything about the company. And in fact, I didn't know,  didn't really know quite a lot. So that's kind of figured out, which is why when I got my hand  on the summer job program, I decided to push for proper way of things at the start of it.  More question. We have time for one more question. Maybe one last question would be,  do they have, do the student have access to a month or like every day or do, like,  you help them get organized at all? Or, and can they ask questions to anyone anytime?  Oh, yes, definitely. I mean, that's,  yeah, I mean, sounds very corporate, but a core company value for us is that we're friendly  and available questions. And I mean, for some of the students and everybody. So, you know,  they, they, they can ask the mentor and the mentor, if the mentor doesn't know the mentor  tells them who to ask them, it's no problem at all. Okay. Yes. Well, thank you. Thank you very  much. Select with high quality audience. Thank you. Thank you very much.
foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_0_215.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_216_875.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_876_2687.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_2688_3743.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_3744_12131.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_12132_15935.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_15936_18431.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_18432_19391.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_19392_20483.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_20484_21791.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_21792_23507.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_23508_26075.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_26076_27395.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_27396_27527.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_27528_27695.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_27696_34655.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_34656_34811.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_34812_35543.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_35544_35591.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_35592_35687.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_35688_36695.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_36696_36767.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_36768_36983.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_36984_37031.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_37032_37223.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_37224_37271.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_37272_37631.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_37632_37679.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_37680_37847.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_37848_37955.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_37956_38015.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_38016_38183.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_38184_38231.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_38232_38279.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_38280_38327.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_38328_38375.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_38376_38423.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_38424_38471.png foss4g-2016-1232-bait_and_don_t_switch_using_foss4g_to_attract_bright_young_talent-hd_38472_38578.png