Leveraging Tech Trends in 2023 with Justice Erolin, CTO at BairesDev

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Justice from BairesDev about the explosion of tech talent outside of cities and more. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:15) Hey, hey, Joe. How are you? I'm excited to hear about what you're doing at BairesDev. Am I saying that right, by the way? Is it BairesDev?

(Justice at 00:00:21) Well, it depends where you're from. So most US-based customers will say BairesDev, and we're totally okay with that. But the name is an amalgamation of Buenos Aires Development. So the actual pronunciation is BairesDev.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:33) Oh, okay. Very good.

(Justice at 00:00:34) But I'm not a native Spanish speaker, so I could be butchering that as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:39) Where did it start? Did it start between those two areas?

(Justice at 00:00:42) So, yeah, Buenos Aires is a city in Argentina. It was started by two .NET engineers, Paul and Nacho. Both of them are still with the company. Nacho is our CEO, based out of San Francisco now, and Paul is our CMO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:56) Oh, very cool. And what's your primary line of business? How do you guys make money?

(Justice at 00:01:01) Good question. So we provide technical resources to about 450 current clients, all based in the US and Canada with some European clients. And we provide staff augmentation, autonomous delivery teams, managed teams. Essentially, we are a software department in a box that we can help any client, whether they're a startup or an enterprise client, to get the engineering resources they need.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:26) And people, they need that. That's really popular. I get to talk to a lot of different technical leaders, and they'll get a goal to grow the engineering team by 50% or 100%. And so they need a way to plug in that engineering capacity. And I've noticed that all of these companies have popped up and exploded, and they'll have these big groups of really talented engineers, and then they let the other companies tap into them. And I think that that's pretty great.

(Justice at 00:01:58) Absolutely. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:59) Yeah. And have you done this before, or is this your first go around at this type of business line?

(Justice at 00:02:04) Yes, this is my first go around. I started off in technology as an engineer. I was in the startup world for quite some time in Los Angeles. We call it Silicon Beach, which is a play on Silicon Valley. And then from there, I worked in the advertising world, but I was working for brands like Volkswagen, for Beats by Dre, to build out some of their tech advertising products. And I became a potential client for BairesDev. I was working with one of their sales reps. We had a project that needed to be built out, and the product went a different direction—tends to happen a lot with advertising. And I fell in love with the value prop. And so I decided to jump ship and moved on to BairesDev in mid-2020, almost at the beginning of the pandemic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:56) How much did the culture there impact your decision to make that transition?

(Justice at 00:03:02) 100%. They were very process-driven, very transparent of what they can offer. So when you sell well, you end up recruiting well. And so that's what they ended up doing with me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:15) Very cool. And so when you are connecting these customers with the teams—you correct me if I'm wrong, but it's north of 3,000 people at the company, correct?

(Justice at 00:03:25) Correct. I think the latest numbers we have is 4,000 total employees. Yeah, 3,000 of them are engineers, 3,000-plus are engineers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:32) So with all of those engineers, how do you connect the right group at your company with the right group at your client's company?

(Justice at 00:03:42) It's a lot of juggling balls, so to speak. One, we make sure that we understand what everyone's doing at any given time. So we know when their projects are going to start, when they're going to stop. Because of that, we know when they will start being available and when they can start working on new projects. The last thing that we want to do is take an engineer from one of our clients and say, "Hey, we're no longer going to use this person. We're not going to use Albert for this project. We're going to move them into a new client that's shinier and better," because we don't want any of our clients to feel like they're second-rate. So we want to make sure that they are timed correctly. So that timing aspect is all handled within our internal processes. We have a fully built-out ERP system that allows us to do that. But on top of that, we also have a pipeline of about roughly 1 million applicants waiting for us to get them their next engagement.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:39) Really?

(Justice at 00:04:40) Wow. So about a million over 140 different countries. We hire and we place and staff for about 200 of those engineers per month. So year over year, we've been growing fairly well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:56) Have you done any interesting data projects? So you have all of this information regarding where there's talent, and you can obviously grade the talent through your acceptance. Have you seen pockets explode recently in different parts of the world?

(Justice at 00:05:13) Yeah. So there's two key areas where we're seeing a lot of tremendous growth. One is outside of capital cities. So while most folks will think that a specific city will have the right talent, what we're finding is that engineers, because they can work remotely, they move back to either their hometowns or they move to a place where they can raise families. And so they'll be in non-capital cities. So that's one key area. And the second part is we see growth that coincides with population trends. So Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico—those are our top four markets.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:50) So that makes complete sense because, as I told you when we went on our adventure, we ended up buying a small farm about an hour outside of Nashville, and it had just gotten through the rural program of the government, the fiber optic internet. So now I get to be out on my farm, have my studio and high-speed internet, and I go outside and it's trees. You know, you don't see the neighbors or anything like that, and we have a little chicken coop. So you're exactly right. Once that happened with COVID, we said, "We can be anywhere. Let's go where it's"—well, frankly, where it's cheaper and nice. Our money could go farther here in the town, and we can still grow. So I'm really excited to see how that plays out long term, but I think we'll just see more and more of it, especially with Starlink coming out now and being widely available.

(Justice at 00:06:41) Yeah, I was just on a plane a few days ago where Starlink is going to be their primary Wi-Fi provider of choice because it's going to be available anywhere. And Starlink and companies like that will help enable more remote work. And I think culture, or at least work culture, will have to catch up to that where you're going to have some great engineers that aren't necessarily five miles away from the office.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:07) And are your engineers 100% remote, or do some work on-site?

(Justice at 00:07:12) So for the vast majority, they are fully remote. We do offer offices, co-located offices within the countries of our choice. And we also offer to bring our engineers on-site for some of our clients, especially for some of the larger engagements where we need to have, let's say, six to nine engineers working in close proximity with product owners, with designers, et cetera, to get that project started and get full alignment within the team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:41) That makes sense, because then they can build relationships and bonds.

(Justice at 00:07:44) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:45) Do that in person. And, honestly, the beginning of the new product is the hardest part, right?

(Justice at 00:07:50) Absolutely. And we've seen that successfully executed multiple times, especially at the tail end—I don't want to say the tail end of the pandemic because we're sort of still in it—but more recently, when travel has been reopened, I would say Q2 of last year, that's when we started seeing companies be more amenable to that sort of working model where we bring in engineers for two to three weeks, and then we send them back out to wherever they live.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:19) Yeah. I'm curious to know in regards to what you guys consider a great developer. So my background, software engineering—I did that for 17 years—and there's all different spectrums of how people analyze programmers or determine if they're a right fit for the team. How do you determine acceptance at your company?

(Justice at 00:08:41) So our acceptance criteria is fairly difficult, or it's fairly robust. The first part, we assess based off of their technical skills. So depending on their tech stack, we will test them according to that language or framework that they know of. The second thing that we'll do is do live coding challenges to see how they think, right? How they think live. That's going to play into exactly how they will work on the job itself. It's less theory and more practical knowledge. The last part is around some of their soft skills. That includes English fluency. So we test off of the Common European Framework, which is a European Union standard of fluency. So that's part of that. But we'll also test on situational awareness, on how they communicate, how they deal with conflict, because as a developer, there tends to be a lot of conflict. We need to understand, one, what the product owner is envisioning, and two, the reality of how difficult that vision is to implement. So that conflict resolution is going to be a very important part. And part of that is going to be how do you communicate, how you resolve some of these communication issues, whether it's written or spoken.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:52) How do you test that with somebody?

(Justice at 00:09:55) So on the written side, that Common European Framework, that's the main test that we do. It's a standardized test that we don't write. It's something that's a third party. But the spoken English part, that's something that we interview for. And we put them in hypothetical situations of how do you get to a resolution.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:15) Okay. So the conflict portion of it is handled in a verbal interview, and you give them a mock scenario, and they describe what they would do.

(Justice at 00:10:26) Yes, absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:27) Okay, cool. Do you ever get to do these interviews yourself, or no?

(Justice at 00:10:32) Well, during my interview process, I was part of that interview process. The one thing that we do is because we've standardized our acceptance criteria, it doesn't matter what level you are or what role you're in. You have to go through these tests. So I was in that two-and-a-half to three-month vetting process where I was put in these situations, both on a commercial aspect and on a technical aspect. And I was put in very interesting situations of how would I work with a client that didn't, let's say, marry the reality of what can happen versus the vision that they had.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:09) Got it. And so that was one of the questions they gave you?

(Justice at 00:11:13) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:14) How did you handle that?

(Justice at 00:11:15) Well, I use a story. So I think one of the best ways to communicate anything, especially in your life, is about a previous story. So my previous story was that I had a product owner that essentially changed the requirements about eight to 10 sprints into the product. And it was a 12-sprint project, or at least we estimated that at 12 sprints. So about 67% of the way, he completely changed a whole facet of the product. And in my mind, all I could think about was I failed my team. I failed the people that report up to me who have worked eight to 10 sprints already. And now all their work, or a lot of their work, is wasted. What I found was that because of the trust that we built over time, because of the rapport that me and my team have built over time, they essentially took the bullet from me. They were able to say, "Look, Justice, we know that this is outside your control. And we know that the product owner wants this thing. So we built out the solution. We're going to propose a solution. It's not 100% to what the product owner is looking for, but it's about 90%. And I think that this could be a good solution." So I went back to that product owner. I gave him the proposed solution that gets us to our final deadline on time, and he accepted. And that's—I think that was a good lesson, at least from my perspective, of what leadership looks like. Leadership is not just influencing the people around you, but allowing them that opportunity to rise up and to make those tough choices.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:53) Do you read or watch content a lot related to leadership?

(Justice at 00:12:58) Yeah. John Maxwell—I think you've talked about him in the past—is one of my favorite authors.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:03) Dude, I love that guy. I did this talk all around the world, and I used him as my example because when he said, "What is leadership?" and he went and defined it, he had the best arguable defense against what it actually is. Because if you say, "What is leadership?" everybody has—they'll come at it from a different angle, right? They'll tell you a story, or they'll give you a specific definition, or tell you what it's not. And so I really like him. He's got so many books, too. They're motivating, but also educational. So—

(Justice at 00:13:36) Absolutely. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:38) Yeah. That's great. So one of the topics everyone wants to talk about is layoffs. In general, we've all been seeing things like Salesforce just made their cut. There's a website called layoffs.fyi—I think that's the extension—and you can see that there were more layoffs this past quarter than there were when COVID happened, right? And so it's a lot. A lot of movement is happening. Are you seeing any trends in the marketplace at all?

(Justice at 00:14:09) So aside from the trend of layoffs happening, which by itself is always difficult to sort of wrap your head around—each layoff to me represents families that need to figure out where they're getting their next meal, how they're paying their mortgage. It's—there's a lot of baggage and a lot of, I would say, sadness around around these layoff news. To me, it's beyond just a business trying to cut costs, but it's also the people that are being affected by it. But one thing that I've seen, and one thing I've seen on LinkedIn, is that a lot of folks within the community are reaching out very proactively. Like, so when I saw the Salesforce layoff, I'm seeing a lot of posts saying, "Hey, for all the Salesforce engineers or employees that have been laid off, please use my network, or please use me as an intro to my company. We have these openings." So the community itself, the tech community, they're embracing a lot of these people that are being laid off. And I think that's a great story in any way. I think we're not focusing on that part where we, as a tech community, we're embracing our own, and that's an amazing story.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:23) I do love that. You know, you've given me a lot to think about because that angle that you just brought up, I hadn't heard before. So I have seen it, though. I saw on LinkedIn, there were several lists going around. Those posts were trending when it happened. Someone even did a—they condensed all the random, the popular post lists into one Google Sheet and shared it, and then it went crazy viral. And so it's fascinating how everybody rallies around each other to help, and I think that's pretty cool.

(Justice at 00:15:53) Yeah. And when we're looking at what their future entails, because of remote work, it allows them to now find positions or companies that were not just based in the San Francisco area or based in the Seattle area. It's all based somewhere else. You'll have startups—I was speaking to a startup in Wisconsin, in Madison, Wisconsin. And it's not necessarily a tech hub, but now they have the full remote US as their pipeline of potential candidates.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:25) And you get to work with a lot of startups, right? Because they're customers often. Are they, or is it more enterprise?

(Justice at 00:16:31) Very good question. So when we're looking at our data, it's a very good mix between startups or greenfield projects and enterprise. I would say the enterprise level tends to have higher revenue, but for a specific, let's call it client count, where we lean more on the startup world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:53) I talked with a startup. They're still startup phase. They're a little bit more mature than that, though. They're out of a country called Georgia, and they were telling me about how the country incentivizes this type of work, this technical work, through tax incentives and things of that nature. And apparently, they're fairly aggressive as far as, you know, wanting to export their technology skills.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:19) Are you seeing other countries do this as well, or is this not on your radar at all?

(Justice at 00:17:24) So there's the tax benefit. I believe Canada does the same thing. But what we're seeing in Latin America is the investment in education. So because there are about a million, I believe, yeah, I believe a million software engineers currently in Latin America. Latin American countries are also actively investing, heavily investing within their education system to produce more software engineers. And recent studies show that I believe there are about six times more startups within Latin America than there were in the past.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:56) And then Latin America, is that mostly overlapping with the United States time zones?

(Justice at 00:18:03) Yes. So there's a slight difference with Brazil. I believe it's a two-hour difference between East Coast, or New York time and Brazil, but the vast majority is within that, the East Coast to West Coast time zones.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:18) So then that would be called nearshoring?

(Justice at 00:18:20) Yes. So the difference between nearshoring and offshoring is, for at least for an American company, offshoring will be Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, where you'll have a significant time zone difference. I've been on calls with offshore companies where I'll have to be able to call at 10 p.m. or at four in the morning. But with nearshoring, because they're all time zone aligned, they're working pretty much the same time zone as you. And that allows you to work for your normal hours, not have to do a status update late at night or early morning, but maintain a good balance between work and life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:56) The person that does our ads is in Brazil.

(Justice at 00:18:58) Oh, awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:59) Juan. He's awesome. He's been on the team for about two or three years now, and he does all of our social media campaigns. And it's great because he speaks English perfectly fine. We can jump on calls.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:13) He is in our time zone, and it works really well. I mean, in all fairness, we just posted, you know, for the job, and we just hired the first qualified person that came. He just happened to be in Brazil. But for me, I hadn't thought about that a whole lot, and I've also seen a large emergence down there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:31) So for one example, I think Uruguay would be considered in that group. And I had seen this spike of listeners in Uruguay on the podcast early on. So it's about five, six years ago. And I started to look into it, and people added me on LinkedIn. I noticed that they were from Uruguay doing interesting tech projects, and so I reached out to one of them that had messaged or that had looked at my profile, and I said, hey, do you wanna jump on a quick call? I'm just curious about what's going on with Uruguay. And we talked for like an hour or two, and it was fascinating about how the country, because I believe Uruguay is in between two different larger countries' economies, so they have this weird mixed economy. And they did this program where they gave all the kids in the country laptops. Like, the country financed it so that they could have these computers, which sounds awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:23) And then you get all of these kids on the computers at a young age where they might, you know, not otherwise have them, and then now they can join the global community. And, honestly, to me, that's one of the most beautiful things about technology is the fact that you can go drop off a pack of laptops in a country that just got power, and within weeks or months, they can be participating in the global economy, maybe writing code for BairesDev.

(Justice at 00:20:48) Yeah, exactly. So one of my previous team members, Catalina, she's actually from Uruguay. And so when you said that story, that hits home for me. And then when you said about just drop off a laptop and then learn how to code, that's exactly how I learned how to be in technology.

(Justice at 00:21:05) My mom bought me my first computer when I was 14 and said, you need to figure this out. This is the future. At first, I didn't believe her, and then I'm here now. But it's giving folks the opportunity, whether it's through equipment or through education, and that's what's gonna drive them to push the needle. That's what's gonna drive innovation.

(Justice at 00:21:26) It's gonna be where you give folks that normally don't have that opportunity either access or the information in the internet. The technology does both. That allows for a huge improvement in not only lifestyle, but in access for a lot of different people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:45) And then, do you have a 14-year-old right now or no?

(Justice at 00:21:49) No, I don't. My kids are nine, six, and four.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:52) Okay. Imagine they were 14. What would you hand them and say this is the future today?

(Justice at 00:21:58) So my daughter, I've started her on coding for girls, or Girls Who Code.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:05) Girls Who Code. Yeah.

(Justice at 00:22:06) Yes. And she absolutely loves it. So they're learning how to write pseudocode, so to speak.

(Justice at 00:22:16) Yeah, pseudocode. And so we've started that process now. Do I expect her to be an engineer? No. I just think that the mindset or the idea of understanding systems and algorithms is beneficial for anyone because it's a way of thinking.

(Justice at 00:22:31) But yeah, that's how I started my kids, and I started them early. I think when she started reading, that's when she started pseudocode.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:39) I think by the time she enters the job market, she'll just be telling ChatGPT what she needs, and it'll just output the app.

(Justice at 00:22:47) Yeah. With ChatGPT, there was this meme on Instagram. It's not about AI taking over your job. It's about people who know how to use AI that will be taking over your job.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:57) You know, so we started using it at the company, and, well, I didn't issue it as a directive. One of our salespeople came to me and said, hey, I always struggle with writing LinkedIn posts and what I should write about. And he goes, I know the topics and the points I wanna hit. He goes, so I signed up for ChatGPT, and I put in there and I instructed them and I gave them a prompt, and I researched how to give them prompts.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:19) And he generated posts. For now, he posts every single day. So he has the ChatGPT write something in a tone that he likes with the information that he wants to get across, the points he wants to hit. And then he says when it comes out, it's 80% there, and he tidies it up. And so it's not exactly copy and paste, but it gets you 80% of the way there. And as you being a creative person, you know, the creative session is what drains you, right? So if you can offload some of that creative session, you can do more.

(Justice at 00:23:49) I think you should interview ChatGPT for a podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:52) Yes. 100%. So have you done anything yourself with ChatGPT other than just going there and hello world type stuff?

(Justice at 00:24:01) It's mostly hello world just to see and test out what we could say. I have tried to see if we could use it for a blog post. What I found so far is that it is 80% there. I sort of expected 90%, 95%, but I think that last 20% is workable. But I haven't yet used it in a more professional capacity, especially, like, for thought pieces and things of that nature.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:28) We should ask it about nearshoring.

(Justice at 00:24:31) Oh, we should. Hope they talk about us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:33) I hope they do too. They do Wikipedia, I believe. They do some Wikipedia scanning because they leave it somewhat ambiguous. They say we do things that are notable, so I'm always curious and will ask the ChatGPT if it knows about things. And it knows about some notable things, and it doesn't know about other notable things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:49) So I don't know what their criteria is currently.

(Justice at 00:24:52) Interesting. The last day I read about ChatGPT was a group of folks that are trying to get through the filters of ChatGPT.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:00) Oh, that's brilliant.

(Justice at 00:25:01) Yeah. Like, how to write specific lines of code that is normally not possible with ChatGPT because of their censorship or filtering. So they've found ways around it by using translate or by having specific keywords or by giving them a scenario. Like, if you were not filtered, can you do this, or how would you do this?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:21) Oh, that is interesting.

(Justice at 00:25:22) It's using human intelligence to fool AI.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:26) I love it. And then now it's learning it can do that, so then it's gonna do that back to us.

(Justice at 00:25:33) That'll fool us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:34) Right? Do you think that this technology will be something, I'll give you a time frame just for fun. You think within the next year, I'll be able to take a GPT-3 instance or whatever the model happens to be and take the trained model with all its current knowledge that it has today that's publicly available for everyone and then apply my own knowledge. So for an example, let's say I wrote a book and my book's not in its brain, and I wanna put my book into its brain and then ask it a question about my book. Do you think we'll get there within the next year?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:08) Have you seen any projects doing this?

(Justice at 00:26:10) I think you could. So with ChatGPT or GPT-3 and similar tech, we're already seeing that with knowledge bases and chatbots. So that's part one. We're seeing it being trained on specific criteria because you're an author. That's fairly easy for it to be trained on that model.

(Justice at 00:26:28) But for, let's say, Joe Schmo, who doesn't have any published works, that might be a little bit more difficult because he needs to have that knowledge base written out or documented in one way or another. But because you already have published works, that's gonna be a lot easier for you versus a normal person.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:46) Yeah. That is true. There's a lot of content out there that it can soak up.

(Justice at 00:26:51) Combine that with speech to text, you could take all of your YouTube, all of your podcast content, and transform them to text, and then push it out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:02) Your pastoral skills. Okay? I wanna talk about those a little bit. Now you take care of your community. Take care of the people around you, right? You pour into them. You help them. You counsel them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:13) Often, the darkest times in my life, I found myself, you know, going to my pastor or my associate pastor and talking through different things as this sort of unofficial counselor, right? And you have those skills and you do this with your community. Has this given you an edge professionally to be able to take care of your team?

(Justice at 00:27:37) So could I answer that in two different ways? I would say, if, because we brought up the pastoral side. The first part would be, I don't believe it's a skill, because skills can be learned, but, skills can be learned or you're either born with it. I see it as a gift. It's a gifting.

(Justice at 00:27:55) But two, I also believe that leading people is part of your calling in Christ. And so has that given me an edge? I don't know because I don't know a life outside of that. I think that it's fairly natural for me to want to shepherd and lead other people, other folks, whether it's in their spiritual walk or in their career growth. I think part of leadership, and John Maxwell also talked about this, is knowing what their goals are and helping them walk through that.

(Justice at 00:28:36) As an example, I had to deal with a, I don't call him a low performer because a low performer shows comparisons to other people, other folks, and I'm not a big fan of that. He was underperforming based off of what was required. Instead of, I would say, the traditional managerial aspect would say reprimand and then challenge them to improve. I took a different approach and I worked with him in understanding what was blocking his way.

(Justice at 00:29:08) What is it that is preventing him from getting to that place he needs to be? We talked about it. We uncovered a few nuggets. And so my job as his manager was to remove those blockers. And after it was removed, we've seen a huge increase in his capability.

(Justice at 00:29:27) So, but what the point of all of that is, is by pastoral moonlighting, my pastoral skill wouldn't give me an edge. I think it just gives me a different viewpoint on how people react and people behave.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:44) When did you start to notice this about yourself that you had this gift and this desire to help lead people?

(Justice at 00:29:50) It was in late 2008. So about 14 years ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:58) Like college? Or?

(Justice at 00:30:00) No. That was post-college. I was already working. I was already deep into technology. And then I was saved, started working with the youth ministry because I had a heart for the youth, especially for young men that did not have a father figure because that fell in line with my story.

(Justice at 00:30:18) And then when I read John 21, you said feed my sheep three times. That's what called me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:24) That's awesome, man.

(Justice at 00:30:25) Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:26) I like to wrap the end, like, the last 15 minutes or so, so that we get all the calls to action. If people wanna learn more about this and they're curious, they think that maybe BairesDev is gonna be the partner that they need for nearshoring, where do they go? What do they do?

(Justice at 00:30:43) So they go on our website, BairesDev.com. You can find more information. It can be a static website if you want it to be, or you're just browsing for our case studies, our resources, our thought pieces. There was an article I wrote, well, this past Monday, but it might be a few weeks based off of when we launched this thing. But it can also be very interactive.

(Justice at 00:31:03) So that chatbot, or that chatbot in quotes is not really a chatbot. It connects us, it will connect you to a live person on our client engagement team. And that is a real person that you will talk to somewhere based here in the United States, and we can get on a call with you within 15 minutes if that's what you desire. Or we can schedule one out based off of your availability. So we're very flexible in understanding what potential clients will want or what they need.

(Justice at 00:31:31) And at times, I'm even that person that gets on the call, just because I like being on these introductory calls, because I like hearing what people are doing. There's so much new tech out there, so many existing companies that are working in what I call boring tech of migrating and refreshing their old enterprise software. But there are also companies that are working on Web3 and need qualified engineers. So whichever way in the spectrum you're on, and in the technical spectrum, we can supply for that need.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:07) I like that phrase, boring tech. That's something I haven't heard, but it makes a lot of sense because there's a ton of it out there. And engineers will find ways to make it interesting, right? Because I get fixated on the problem. Like, I can make the problem interesting, or solving, the act of solving the problem is interesting, but I haven't ever heard the boring tech referred to as that, so I think that's pretty cool.

(Justice at 00:32:30) I call it the boring tech because it's the unseen work. It's the stuff that powers businesses in the back end. It's their homegrown CRM or homegrown ERP that only internal users see. It's not something that's a SaaS or a wide platform, or in our case, let's say, Pinterest's application.

(Justice at 00:32:52) It's not that. It's not their mobile app, but it's the stuff behind the scenes that helps power decisions that almost every business has. They have so many different integrations that need to work in order for them to keep the lights on, and that's where I think a lot of short-term benefit comes from.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:11) We have an internal app. Yeah, I thought when you said boring tech, I was like, I don't have any exposure to boring tech. And then as you described it, I realized, wow, our analytics app is exactly that. It's this homegrown analytics app that does exactly what we needed to do, and it's kind of boring.

(Justice at 00:33:29) Everybody has boring tech, but that's what powers it. That's what helps you maintain your business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:35) Yeah. I've got two more questions for you. Okay. The first one is about, I saw here on the notes about JavaScript and Python. Why are you seeing a large increase in JavaScript and Python experts?

(Justice at 00:33:48) So just for context for everyone, JavaScript, what we're seeing is roughly a 250% increase year over year. Python, about a 179% increase year over year in terms of number of engineers that have that skill set. So what we're seeing is the proliferation of web applications. So React, Angular, Vue, include Nest and Node in there. That's going to be one major thing. Another part that we're seeing, and I've seen this on a few calls this week, you have all these different devices, whether they're OTTs, smart apps, smart TV apps, and those are all based off of JavaScript. So now you have not only mobile apps, but devices that are being powered by JavaScript. On the Python side, that is a little bit different. So we have your typical web apps that are powered by Python, but you also have large ETL pipelines that use Python for its data capabilities and the ability to crunch a massive number of arrays and, well, mathematics to get to your final analysis. So with your web apps and with your data needs, those cover pretty much those two languages.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:10) That is so interesting, man. Like, I kind of miss sometimes being in the engineering world as far as writing code on a daily basis. So I stopped after the podcast started to get popular and became my full-time gig. And like I said, we maintain an application or two here at the company, but it feels good to talk about programming because we do mostly leadership, right? So we don't get really deep into the technologies, but I do read the Stack Overflow annual report to see which technologies have exploded and what's, you know, what direction it's headed. And, inevitably, there's almost always one I haven't heard of that's gained, you know, half the market share every year.

(Justice at 00:35:51) Yeah. And, especially, I think Stack Overflow within their last report mentioned Vue.js as one of the top frameworks within JavaScript. And so we're also seeing that within our client base.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:03) That's the one that I saw, like, that came out of nowhere, and it just completely domed. I had to Google it. After I saw it in the repository, what is this? How did it become that so quickly? And then I saw the project. I was like, well, it's really easy to use, and it's kind of beautiful. So that makes sense.

(Justice at 00:36:18) Absolutely. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:19) John Maxwell. I'm going to wrap up with some leadership. What is the best advice that you've ever heard or was inspired by John Maxwell and then you put it into practice in your life?

(Justice at 00:36:30) So when I'm looking at John Maxwell and the best advice, I think I'm not sure if they're correlated, but for me, it's about servant leadership. It's about leaders that serve, that you're there not to just command or dictate what your team or what your organization will do, but you're there to work for them. You're there to essentially, like I said earlier, to remove any blockers that come in their way, but to also help elevate them into the people that they need to be or that the people that you hired them for. A lot of times when we're looking at management and leadership, we see it as a way of constraining people into the mold that we have in our heads. But we hire them for a reason. We hire them because of their talent, their skill set, and what they can bring to the table. So the best thing to do is get out of their way and serve them by allowing them to work in their full capacity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:29) Well said, my friend. We made a podcast. How do you feel? I feel good. Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.