how to incentivize developers w/ nick frederick

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Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco, VACO.com is how to get in touch with me old-fashioned email social media at tdesntdesen and finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. Nick, enough with me running my mouth. Get the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do? Shout out your pod and then we'll go from there. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, I am Nick Frederick. I am the CEO of rebar technology.

We are a Nashville and Chicago based technology company that focuses on e-commerce, specifically subscription and recurring billing and payment systems. So think the type of systems that power Netflix in the background. We have a platform, a very modular platform that does that. We also build front-end sites for subscription commerce. So we kind of think of ourselves as the Shopify of subscription services. So yeah, that's who we are. And of course, yes, have a podcast of our own called Subscription Scaled, where we talk about building, helping growing your subscription business. And Taylor, you came on. We just got the episode published this week. So definitely check it out.

Was a fun episode. Of course, we talked about all things recruiting. But yeah, if you're in that world, then definitely check it out. Absolutely. And then, Barrett, it's great to see you, Juan. It's great to see you this morning. So Nick, let's dive in, because I'm just gonna be some questions, or some thoughts, around incentivizing developers, right? So Nick, Nick and I were chatting off air, and he was like, we should just start running this thing, just have this conversation, like we're having behind closed doors. But Nick said it best, like, this is here to stay. Like when we say this is here to stay is this working environment, right?

This global virtual all hands on deck, everybody can go work anywhere. What I'm calling the free agent kind of lifestyle now. I mean, I, you know, I saw a, one of my buddies sent me a TikTok of Mark Cuban saying something he regretted early in his career and he said he wished he was more kind to his employees because he now realizes that essentially employees you're free are your players. And if they aren't happy, they're gonna bounce. So Nick, kick it off, man. What are just some thoughts you have that you've maybe thought about or experimented with within your organization on how to retain and incentivize engineers right now?

Yeah, you highlighted it pretty well there. I think this new way of working is here to stay. It's not going away particularly for tech, right? We're gonna be working in either full virtual or at least hybrid environments now going forward. I mean, the market dictates it, and we've all proven we can make it work, right? So you just gotta meet the talent where they are, and talent is scarce these days. I mean, tech continues to be hot and across every single discipline. But the one thing the pandemic also did was made it, you already said it global, right? I don't necessarily need my developers to be here in Nashville at all.

They can literally be anywhere in the country or anywhere in the world. In fact, we just started with our first offshore developer kind of as part of the team. So we'll see how that works. It's a bit of an experiment. Have somebody working on the other side of the world and different hours from ours, but that was also strategic as well. So it's just a different environment now. And part of that is you can go anywhere. If you're not happy with your job, you can pretty much leave it without needing to have another one lined up because you can get one pretty quick. Right? Right.

So yeah, back to that Mark Cuban quote, and this was always true by the way. It was never not true, but yes, you should always treat your people well and be kind to them because they have always been the lifeblood of any successful business. But unfortunately, there were just too many leaders who didn't realize that and there were too many frankly employees who didn't realize their worth, you know, and were afraid to leave a job or quit or go on to something new. But now with this environment, there's a lot more people comfortable with it. So yeah, you need to be kinder for sure. Do you have you and also too, by the way, we're going to get to it.

I think developers should be on a commission plan to a certain extent. So we're going to get to that in a second. So but if you all have any thoughts about how to incentivize developers or how you would want to be incentivized, please throw it up in the chat and we'll get to it. But I want to ask you this, Nick, as a leader in organization like yourself, have you has your mentality changed on how you approach retention over the last two years because for me, I have this like thing in the back of my head. It's like any of my people could leave it any day.

And I kind of operate that way. And it's a little stressful. And I try to suppress as much as I can. But has your mindset shifted at all and kind of what you think about more about retention now than pre COVID? Yeah, without a doubt. Yeah, you got to find the balance, right? Because you can and stress yourself out every day with, yeah, and that's no way to live or work. But yeah, you do have to think about, you know, all of my team, they have options. And I have to keep that in mind and keep them incentivized, keep them engaged, you know, train them, keep them up to date on the business, not just the piece of it that they're focused on.

They care about all of these things. It's more important than ever. And so finding ways to communicate with them the way that they want to be communicated with because there's, you know, there's another fun thing. There's different ways of communicating. Some prefer just send me the Slack message and that's all I need to know. Others want the, you know, long form email. Others want the conversations, right? So you have to figure out, you know, how they want to be met. And I'll say that one of the challenges with developers in particular and that personality, you know, stereotype or not is that you kind of have to extract it.

You don't get a whole lot of them coming at you and saying, this is how I want you to talk to me. You really have to figure it out. Yeah, right. So that's probably the biggest challenge is training how to treat them like individuals and not commodities. Let me ask you this, kind of a two-fold question. First part, What have you implemented from a communication perspective? We're talking about the different forms of communication, right? Is it an email? Is it a one-on-one? Is it a group meeting? Is it a text? Is it a phone call? What have you implemented just from a communication style? Over the last two years that you feel like you're doing a pretty good job with?

Well, the one thing, and we did talk about this on our last chat, was this Friday informal meeting. It's not long, but it is the one point where the entire team gets together for a chat. And I'd spend the first part of it just going through, hey, here's what's going on in the business. Just so everybody hears the same message. I probably repeat myself a lot, but just to make sure everybody got it. And then the second half of it is real informal where we're just kind of chatting and we rotate around a just kind of a personal question of the week where you can ask and everybody on the team answered it.

We tend to have a laugh around that. So that's good. But that's probably, I think, the one of the things that has been the most effective, but the one on one chats, set them up. Set them up with everybody and be sure to have them. Yes, some of them will go very quick because that's not really that person's way of communicating and it's not something they really need, but still have it. Even if it's a 10 minute chat, I mean, schedule a half hour, still have it, but you're gonna find that others are like, yeah, let's let, you know, you just start talking, right? But I think having those checkpoints are pretty important.

So the next thing that I want to, oh, before I move on, you've mentioned it twice now and I want to dig into this a little bit. Why is it so important to talk about what's going on with the business, right? So you've mentioned that saying now twice in the last like minute and a half that you want to communicate what's going on with the business and not just what that person's working on. Why is it important for business leaders, especially in tech specifically to communicate the overall vision of the business and not just the pockets, I guess. Yeah, it's a really good question. There's probably a few different reasons, one of which is, again, there's options, right?

You want to know that where you're at, the time and effort that you're putting and contributing to the team is there for the long term, and that you're a part of the right mission. Right. Again, with options out there to work for different organizations, they want to feel like this is something that they really want to be a part of. And there's no better way to do that than tell them about the health of the business. But another reason we do it, and I go over pipeline, like opportunities that may be coming down the pike and tell them, hey, we might be working on this project.

I had a chat with this guy. We're talking about a partnership. So this might be happening. It just gives them a sense of number one, What a day is like for somebody not in their role, right, that are trying to bring in the work that's going to ultimately feed them, but also give them a flavor for what might be coming in the event that they might want to prepare for it. I've had some developers when I've talked about a pipeline opportunity come back to me a couple days later and talk about the research that they did. They went out to a particular partner or somebody that we were talking about integrating with and they looked at their developer docs, their API guide and were like, hey, looked at this.

And I think it'd be pretty easy and had some thoughts on it. I was like, man, that's super helpful. So the benefit goes both ways in talking about the business and not just what we're building right that at that moment. And I think it goes back to Simon Sinek or Sinek, whatever his last name is. I think it's going back to him and it starts with why. I think business leaders, I think forget that there people want to be a part of something bigger than themselves and that sometimes actually talking about just the direction of the business is what people crave more than like actually talking about their work, right?

Like where are we at? Where are we gonna go? How are we gonna get there? What can I do to be a part of it? I mean, I think people want to be along for the ride right now. Again, I think it's one of the many nuances to how to retain talent right now. You have your pay, your comp overall blah blah blah. But I think people too want to be a part of a company lifting and they want to be a part of that story. And I think the only way to do that is to tell them what's happening. You want 100% and, you know, like I said, there's options, right?

They have different places that they can go. But what I've found rewarding for me is the more they know about the business of what we're trying to do, the more they can, they can and will contribute to it. And to your point, they want to feel a part of something. And without maybe feeding them that information, how else are they going to know? Because right there, they're off building the next product or the next project, you know, developing, deploying, testing, doing their part, but they don't get involved in some of those upstream conversations. So I think it's important to loop them in. Yeah. So I so I want to transition more towards now incentivization.

I don't know if that's the word or not. And incentivizing individuals, I know we've been talking about a little bit, but is there anything maybe you've put in place at at rebar from an incentive as As a incentivization perspective or I'm curious. Well, yeah, not, not anything significant. I'll be honest because, but we've had plenty of conversations around it. And I was excited to see a bunch of people jumping on here because I'd love to get feedback on this. Like what would motivate you? What have you heard from others that would motivate them? Um, when you start talking about things like commissions or, uh, project-based bonuses, spot bonuses, those types of things, which can all be good.

Number one, those are all monetary. That's good, but it's also not the only thing. But in this hybrid and virtual world, the types of get-togethers or company parties that you would do in the past, those are more difficult in some cases than possible. Plus, if you have a hybrid environment of some local and some remote, you don't want to make the remote people feel left out of the loop, So you got to find ways to include them. So everything now feels like it's met with some sort of challenge when it comes to implementing it. Yeah. And if you all are watching Barrett, you know, I'm calling you out just because Barrett Barrett's a former guest of the show definitely has a lot of thoughts around compensation and incentivization.

So if anybody watching this, like, how do you like to be incentivized? Please throw it up in the chat. It doesn't have to be like groundbreaking. It can literally just be like more PTO. I don't know. But I think that's what's difficult, right? Because as a leader, I feel like, so let's talk about commission plans, right? So my tweet was like, hey, I said, hey, I think developers, am I missing something? Developers should be on commission, and here's why. They affect, if it's not for developers, the line of code would not be written for a multi-million dollar piece of software. I feel like they should get a cut.

Now, the pushback I got from that, from individuals watching, and also Nick, people are like, well, what are you gonna judge it on? You can't judge it off of lines of code. You can't judge it off speed because then your code quad is gonna be terrible. You probably can't base it off of, part of me is like, could you base it off of like project tiers and it'll incentivize your engineers to maybe like try to level up in your organization, like your staff engineers only have access to these projects and their high visibility projects with bonus potential. I'm just curious, how do you think that plays out?

And while you all are watching and have thoughts, definitely chime in, but let's break down the commission first. And I wanna hear your thoughts on how somebody would even go to approach that. And it doesn't have to be right. Yeah. Or even what you've seen or heard of others implementing and how that's played out. We can have a good idea until we put it in practice and see how it works. Right. But yeah, the commission thing is always gonna be struggle because how do I calculate what that commission is? So if you're a SaaS startup and building a product right now, that doesn't even have revenue or maybe not material revenue, like how are you going to base it on that?

Right. And then you get into cost accounting and how you attribute cost to a specific project or client and things get real messy. Yeah. Yeah. Let's see here. So Trey talks about opportunities to grow outside of the job setting. So I'm curious, Nick, do you allow your folks to have like side hustles and stuff? Is that something? Um, I don't believe that any do to be honest, but I wouldn't fundamentally have a problem with that. Yeah. Um, at all, you know, our jobs getting done and you know, the effort's being put in. What, you know, if you spend it playing golf, sitting on the couch or doing a side hustle, go for it.

That's quite frankly, none of my business. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Barrett goes, the biggest struggle I've found is different people motivated by different things. Absolutely. Some want money, some want flexibility, some want new challenges, some want promotions, and so on. No one, no one program motivates everyone. Yeah. And so how do you, how do you as a business leader like to address that? Just conversations. Just conversations. I mean, there's no other way around that. You're not going to uncover of these things, what motivates them more than communicating and talking with them. But I will say that presents challenges in and of itself because I think people aren't always honest with you or with themselves about what motivates them.

They might say money or they might say, you know, the next promotion. But really, it's yeah, I've got a lot of expenses at home. I just had another kid and really I need more money, but they're afraid to ask for it. Yeah, you know, so it takes some digging. Yeah, absolutely. And going back to Michael, thanks for tuning in. The question about incentivized employees to find new hires and incentivizing anything. Incentivizing employees to find new hires, I know some companies have pretty robust referral programs, which I think is super smart. If you're really trying not to use an outside recruiting agency like me, I think you need to incentivize your people a lot to find talent because I think that's a VACO.

You know, to be honest, went through this last year, year and a half, they incentivized our us internal employees tremendously to go find top talent. And honestly, it's worked. You know, we've kind of hired a ton because of that referral program. But yeah, Michael, anything. We're more talking about keeping employees around, so incentivizing for quality of work. And I think the big thing too, Nick, is what I'm hearing. a lot of people is just they also just want to feel heard, right? I think it's I think it's on so many levels, right? And you know, for me, you know, my team's younger, they want to travel, you know, flexibility is big for them.

If they can go travel and work anywhere, you know, I'm just like, listen, just go like as long as it works, I don't really care where you work. And so I think I think as leaders, I think as leaders, I think letting your people manage themselves and that's harder. Easier said than done. Easier said than done. But I think for me, Nick, I said this the other day, I'm curious here of thoughts when an employee starts with me and my team, I have 100% trust. You started 100 with me and then you just whittle down the trust from there. What what what is your thoughts on employee trust and kind of where people start with you?

I would I would largely say the same. I mean, you start with a full bucket of trust and then you know, you kind of go from there. With that said, to validate the trust that you put in somebody, you tend to pay attention to them more in the beginning, pay closer attention to the quality of their work, the output, the adherence to your own standards and the direction that you've been trying to give them, to make sure that you're setting them on a good path, right? This isn't about about micromanagement by any stretch of the imagination, but it is about making sure that this is the right fit for both of you and that you're clearly communicating expectations with them and they're delivering and then they're getting the feedback on what they're doing.

It's really important to set that stage at the beginning. Yeah, absolutely. Barrett comes in asking them is also difficult sometimes. Oftentimes when the manager comes asking those types of questions, people wanna say what they think you wanna hear and say what they really want. And this goes back to leadership. I mean, I just think, I think it goes back to what Nick said with the one on ones. The one on ones have been able to allow me to build rapport extremely well. And I feel, I feel like, I mean, there's always work to do, but I feel like my, my team can come to me and actually tell me the truth and maybe I'm wrong.

But I do think I think the one on ones help with that because I think you have to build rapport first before you actually start getting the truth. Absolutely. Yeah. the honest difficult feedback that you need or messages that you need to operate effectively unless you have that rapport. I mean, nobody's very rare that someone's just going to come in and unload without having established that first. One of the biggest pushbacks, I'm still getting Nick. I don't know if you've heard it, but you can't build culture remotely. It's been interesting because do I think companies need to be fully remote and that's it? No. I think companies that want to have people come into the office, I think it needs to be more of just suggestion.

I think the moment you start demanding people, I think it's a very slippery slope. But Nick, what are your thoughts on building the culture remotely? If you can do it. And one of my colleagues said this the other day, I thought it was so profound. He said, if you allow your people to work remotely, you've already solved most of the culture issue because you're allowing your people to work and do life the way they want to do it, which is part of the culture issue with having people on site because they can't do the things that maybe they want to do. the business forces, the pizza parties and the open bars and the 4 p.m.

snack time when actuality, people don't really actually wanna do that. People wanna be able to go get their kids and stuff. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that. Very interesting topic there, Taylor. And this might be a little bit unpopular. I get the arguments and there's a lot of narrative around giving people flexibility to be a parent and take care of personal things throughout the day, I get all of that and there's fundamentally no problems with them, but we have, across the board, struggled with accountability throughout the pandemic. I know of, not on my team, but I know of people. I've had friends who talk about how they're signing on for like three, four hours a day, or they're going out and golfing in the afternoon and completely tuning out.

And again, there isn't anything fundamentally wrong with that provided that the work's being done, but it gets abused. It totally gets abused. And in an in-person environment, there's just a lot more accountability, personal accountability in that situation. So I don't know what the right answer is here. I get people wanting to work remote and have life be a little bit more overlapped with work and again, nothing wrong with that. But I think personal accountability has very much taken a hit the past couple of years. And we talk about productivity and people saying, I'm just as productive, but those measurements are always coming from the people who are grading their own productivity.

When you talk to business leaders, CEOs across the board, large and small, most of them are saying our organizational productivity is taken a hit. And the ones that aren't saying that are in a lot of ways saying that because they're trying to recruit and they wanna say, oh, we're super productive being remote. Please come work here, I need anybody. So if they're saying that from a PR perspective, but we have to get a hit across the board. But do you think making people go into the office like two to three days a week fixes that though? Cause like to me, it's either, to me with that argument, it's either all or nothing.

I don't think it is. I honestly don't. No, I don't. I think you can find this middle ground We're coming in a few days a week, number one, and we just started this week, by the way. My team started coming back in for those that are here in Nashville, we're doing three days a week. And throughout the pandemic, we had a couple of days where we came in and we swarmed on a project to get something over the finish line. The feedback I heard time and time again was, oh my gosh, that was the most productive we've been as a team in a while. Like for us to just be able to stare across each other from the table when you got stuck, ask a question, to keep on going, testing live, and doing all of that stuff, that was the overwhelming feedback.

And when I said to the team, our office is open, you can come in anytime, please do it. Very few took up on that. But when it was, okay, we are going to three days a week and the team agreed on what days, like this wasn't dictated, it was, let's shoot for three days a week, what are we gonna do? And everybody aligned on that, and we're now doing it, we're seeing the benefits of that. So I think we can be productive in some sort of middle ground here. And by the way, we do still have fully remote people as well. I've got so many in Chicago and some day in Indiana and now won overseas.

And, you know, we're doing both. We're doing both. It's a lot to manage, but it can be done, I think. Absolutely. No. And, and, and, and I love what you said. So, um, I totally agree as well. Um, Tiffany, it's great to see you. Uh, it's so true about working remote allows you to do what you need to do while also getting your work done. 100% again, totally get what Nick saying too. Honestly, I bet my wife probably wishes I probably had the opposite, which is what you said, the work three hours and take the afternoon off. I have not done that. I've pendulum swung too hard and I've taken on too much work.

So I'm certain like, yeah. So Nick, as we wrap up here and I knew this would happen. 30 minutes flies when you fly by. I know we're talking a lot about the hiring manager here. Any tips for job seekers, right? Because I mean, you're interviewing people constantly. Anything that you're seeing, maybe some job seekers lack or miss out on, just the last kind of little bits of wisdom for the people on this call. Yeah, any of your viewing is never a perfection there, right? There's always some shortcomings in trying to get to know somebody quickly and figure out if they're going to be a fit for your organization.

But I have, we, the whole team has tried to put more emphasis on cultural fit than true technical experience skill set fit because you got to be able to work and be flexible here. I say to the team all the time and we work primarily with AWS services that what the services we use today and are going to be different than what we're going to be using two and three years from now because it changes so quickly. So it's more important that you learn than it is what you're coming to the table with having already learned. That's important too, big factor, but being able to learn and adjust is just as important now.

Yeah, absolutely. Samantha, for me personally as a single mom who lives in the country an hour from a small city, I'm mostly looking for full remote work. If I live in a bigger city than I would mind going to work in person. Yeah, exactly again. I think meeting people where they are and where where they need to be, especially for seasons, right? I mean, I think, you know, I think if there's a, you know, a new dad or a new mom and they need to be at home and I think allowing them that flexibility, but then obviously saying, hey, listen, the office is always open.

If you have an appointment, you need to come in, you know, we would love to have you. But I think it's meeting people where they are, which is incredibly important. Yolanda Remote Work also gives more opportunities to people with disabilities as well, 100%, something we all think about, especially if more companies want to be inclusive. Yeah, I mean, again, totally, you know, kind of what Nick just agreed on. I mean, I think it's meeting people where they are. Um, and, and I totally agree with this, um, for sure. A hundred percent. Um, well, Nick, that was a blast per usual flu flu by, like you said, flies by.

Um, so for those of you, go connect with Nick Nick Frederick on LinkedIn. Uh, go check out his podcast subscription scaled, um, especially his latest episode. I heard it was the best one. So I heard it's a good one. Yeah, so and again check out render at l I will be there first week of June It's gonna be a blast if anybody's gonna be at react to Miami in two weeks three weeks. I will be there as well Nick, I'll just try to find some react people for your organization Would be fantastic And yeah, you all have a great Tuesday. I'll see you tomorrow. I'm talking with a staff engineer from netlify I'm angry.

She's overseas. It's going to be a blast. I'm excited to hang out with her. I got tagged on Twitter. And we got connected. So I'm really excited to hang out with her tomorrow morning, 9.30 a.m. central. You all have a great one. Nick, stay on real quick. But I appreciate you all time. I'll take it easy. Thanks. Enjoyed it. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode and I am very grateful because you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes and I myself rarely have any questions. I'm really excited about this. I'm really excited about this.

I'm really excited about this. I'm really excited about this. episodes, and I myself rarely finish an entire episode. So I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the app store. I want this to be discoverable to others. And the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it, please like right now, unless you're driving, then don't do it. So thank you again. If you need to reach out to me, Taylor at Vaco.com or at T. S and on all social media handles and I hope you have a fantastic day.