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Finding talent – it’s hard, isn’t it? Every detail needs to be just right: years of experience, cultural fit, coding skills, comparable projects, and then we have to add timing into the mix. Hiring teams need to coordinate; compensation and budgets must be aligned. Location, too, as on-site and off-site need have to make sense for both the hire and the company! Once that match is made and an offer accepted, orientation attended and trainings completed, the attention dims and glamour fades as the daily grind kicks in.

The courtship is contagious. It feels good to be wanted, every field of grass greener in the distance. So how do we keep them invested? How do we maintain that same enthusiasm a new hire feels on day one?

For starters, how about if developers are encouraged to pursue the very interests that attracted us to each other in the first place? If recruiters spend more time scouring sites such as Github to find great talent, or when Gild Source catches on and hiring leans on aggregated scores and coding reviews to determine quality, then why should we expect that same talent to stop engaging in those outside interests just because they accepted a new position? In all likelihood, they won’t. It’s a passion. It’s why we pursue them. Companies have to learn to either embrace it or be content with watching our best talent get recruited away.

It’s complex enough to find and attract elite talent, but might it be even harder to retain them? Perhaps, but not if we provide them an atmosphere that fosters creativity and innovation.

Meet Matt

Gild hired Matt, an Operations Engineer, a little over a year ago. He started as a contractor and was ultimately hired, an essential addition to the team. Matt works on the in-between application, the virtual machines. In other words, the part we don’t see. He’s tasked to ensure speeds, up time, performance, SLA’s with customers, and the overall integrity of the data. As Gild pushes out new products, Matt’s there to make sure they’re up and running, that all services are provided quickly.

This is his passion, his art.

His Project

As an Ops expert, Matt was unhappy with the options available for managing systems at-large in Amazon’s cloud. It lacked flexibility and there was no end-to-end tool for starting up instances for deploying the product.

So what does one with Matt’s skills do when unhappy with lack of options? He builds the options he wants – and that’s exactly what he did.

He created Gild Tool (now called Gaptool), the missing ingredient that he was able to integrate in cloud. Prior to this tool, a company relied upon Platform as a Service (PaaS) options, a cost of several thousand a month for a company like Gild.

Matt knew he was on to something, so he began to rewrite the Open Source tool. He wrote in options for plugins, access control management, and security keys. Up next? Matt will be building out the additional documentation and configuration management so that it’s fully deployable on a widespread level. But on his own time and driven by his passion for solutions, Matt’s created an incredible tool that will have applications beyond the walls of Gild. The upside? It’s all Open Source and you have get a sneak peek at Gaptool here on Github.

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