That's a great question. I think it's important to use technology to achieve what is constantly evolving. Like upskilling, it's not an option you have to make. It is a kind of imperative organization and you have to improve your skills. Otherwise they will be left behind.
In terms of how Red Gate does that, one of the first principles we are operating is that we always try to hire people who are curious and I think that means people who have a craving for learning. And you might wonder how you find such people, right?
And you know it's difficult. One of the simple filler questions we use is, just to ask people, what is the last book they read, the last technology they played? What excites them?
It can give you a great impression of whether someone has that curiosity and the idea of learning and adapting. Another principle we try to try is before you need it, before you introduce the technology, you really need to understand why it is.
You need to feel the problem that technology is trying to solve. For example, if you are trying to learn Kubernetes, a container orchestration framework, and you are not feeling the problem Kubernetes solves, it will feel like a complicated solution to a problem you don't have.
The way to create that space for people is to not run workshops that deal with things in an abstract way. It gives people the opportunity to play with the technology and encounter problems on their own, and learn to discover and implement those solutions.
Some of the ways we try to do it. In Red Gate, this is what is called 10% of the time, and gives up every Friday afternoon to embrace learning and development. And that may be through the story of lightning.
It could be about trying to fix a particular customer problem in a new and innovative way. Or maybe you just try to get a grasp of new technology with the toys app where you order your team's lunch every Friday.
And the last thing I think is really important for people to expose expert thoughts. And I think that's really key to seeing the decision-making process actually work.
Again, it's one of the things we introduced, and it took us a long time to get the value we really show this is the architectural decision record.
So when you ask people to make it, or when you make changes to the software at Redgate, we ask you to fill in a brief explanation of why they are doing it, the options they have considered, and the reasons why they chose the path they chose.
I think we put this around five years ago. Now we have a library of nearly 500 architectural decisions detailing why we did something. And it's great.
It is the organizational repository of knowledge that new starters can look to understand why decisions have been made. They may be wrong. We are still going to make the wrong decision. Everyone does, but at least you can see the thought process underneath it. Valerie Potter
