While it is not a new issue, managing talent continues to be an important challenge for technology leaders. Abhimanyu Saxena is the Co-Founder of Scaler, an online transformative upskilling platform for working tech professionals. In this episode, Abhimanyu and Yadin dive into retaining, upskilling and reskilling talent, discussing best practices that will help both employers and employees navigate this changing landscape. They touch on everything from standard approaches, to the major shifts in the marketplace and talent requirements presented by emerging AI technology.
While it is not a new issue, managing talent continues to be an important challenge for technology leaders. Abhimanyu Saxena is the Co-Founder of Scaler, an online transformative upskilling platform for working tech professionals. In this episode, Abhimanyu and Yadin dive into retaining, upskilling and reskilling talent, discussing best practices that will help both employers and employees navigate this changing landscape.
They touch on everything from standard approaches, to the major shifts in the marketplace and talent requirements presented by emerging AI technology.
“For a software engineering professional or a data scientist, most important is learning to learn. That is much more important than what is the framework or technology that you might know today, because whatever you know is going to get outdated in few years.”
“The most important part of any upskilling effort is that, is this active learning versus passive learning? Generally, passive learning doesn't lead to much of an impact.”
“Generally, the best performers, the most impactful employees of the company, are the people who have seen all the facades, all the faces of the product. And now they have that intuition [about] what really adds value to your customers.”
“Generative AI, ChatGPT, is exceptionally powerful. But, despite that, there will be a time where it hits it's limit and then you have to resort back to human intuition and problem solving and move ahead. So you cannot be totally reliant on that. It's very similar to how a calculator is a powerful tool for a mathematician, but a mathematician's intellect is not in a calculator. That stays with the mathematician."
(01:00) Thoughts on the need for IT talent
(02:49) What employers look for in employees
(04:25) The importance of employing problem-solvers
(07:50) Examples of how that looks in organizations
(11:51) Ways to approach upskilling and reskilling
(13:35) The benefits of retaining and moving talent
(20:47) How Scaler upskills and reskills
(22:56) The issues with a one-size fits all approach
(26:15) How has Scaler’s approach evolved?
(28:37) How are technology leaders are talking about generative AI?
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Yadin Porter de León on Twitter
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0:00:00.8 Abhimanyu Saxena: If you want to have a effective learning and development program, if you want to have a effective upskilling program, you have to start with what is your metric of measurement, whether people are really getting upskilled or not.
0:00:14.8 Yadin Porter De León: Welcome to the CIO Exchange Podcast, where we talk about what's working, what's not, and what's next. I'm Yadin Porter de León. Talent is always a strategic priority within the top leadership of organizations, finding the right talent, retaining, upskilling and reskilling continue to be nuanced challenges for CIOs and tech leaders. Abhimanyu Saxena is the co-founder of Scaler, an online transformative upskilling platform for companies who are managing and growing highly skilled tech professionals. In this episode, we discuss best practices that will help both employees and employers navigate this challenging landscape. We cover what makes a strong upskilling program.
0:00:57.0 Yadin Porter De León: Also the benefits of retaining and moving talent and what leaders are saying about their talent challenges. We touch on everything from standard approaches to the major shifts in the marketplace and talent requirements presented by emerging AI technologies. So I'll be... Talent is a really hot topic, especially for technology leaders. There's gaps in the types of technology skills that they're looking for, that they're needed. There's transformations that are happening and they're also trying to keep the current talent that they have and to lift them up. So give me a sense from your perspective, what are your thoughts on the current state of the availability of the needed IT talent to face those challenges that those companies are finding themselves in?
0:01:38.0 Abhimanyu Saxena: I think in the world of technology as we see, where probably this is the domain of an industry, unlike say the civil engineering or the mechanical engineering world of automobiles. IT software engineering, data science, these are the fields which are evolving at such a rapid pace where what might be relevant today is bound to get irrelevant within few years. And in today's world where the ChatGPT and advancement into the AI that we are seeing, probably things are irrelevant even in six months or three months sometimes as well.
0:02:14.9 Yadin Porter De León: I know. I think this is what's scaring people, is that you know things were moving fast, you know that things were changing quickly, but now it's moving faster than I think anyone can keep pace with. They don't even know sometimes how fast it's moving.
0:02:25.2 Abhimanyu Saxena: Right. So often, when we talk about upskilling and reskilling, often a lot of focus is on that, what is the hottest tech in the market right now? Do I know it or not? How do I learn it [0:02:36.2] ____? Which often there's still a lot of an anxiety to both the young, fresh grads or people who are already working. And one very interesting point there is, and of course all the industries know that this is how it is going to be. And that is why most of the employers, tech employers, the best ones across the world, what they emphasize more on is not what you know today, but can you learn the new things very quickly? Do you have that capability? So often, for example, a lot of folks come and ask me that, "I want to learn programming. I want to get into the world of tech. What is the best language to learn?"
0:03:12.1 Abhimanyu Saxena: Or someone might come and ask me that, "I have been coding in C++ or.NET for so many years. What is the best new language that I can learn?" And the answer to that is not, this is the specific language that you can learn and that will take care of your career and growth for next decade. But what you need to get better at this. But can you learn any new language quickly? Do you have that confidence? Do you have... Are you a really strong problem solver? Do you understand how to design large scale systems very efficiently? Because these problem solving abilities, these are independent of which language, which framework, which technology you might be working on. Most importantly, for a software engineering professional or a data scientist, most important is learning to learn. That is much more important than what is the framework for technology that you might need today.
0:04:03.0 Yadin Porter De León: Exactly.
0:04:03.1 Abhimanyu Saxena: Because whatever you learn is going to get outdated in few years, if not in few months.
0:04:07.7 Yadin Porter De León: Yeah. And I think that's what's fascinating, is that it's not as easy to pin down into measure if you're not looking for a specific keyword. Like I have a resume in an AI pool of resumes looking for a job, and that AI is looking for these keywords of, "Hey, at Python this many years", et cetera, et cetera. Now, how do you both as a candidate, someone who's looking for work, or I think even more importantly as a company that is looking to find people or to grow people, how are you seeing companies approach this from a non-traditional way of, "Hey, let's create people who are curious, let's create people who love learning, who can learn, who have the confidence to grow?" How are you or the companies that you work with and the people that you work with, how are they approaching this?
0:04:53.6 Abhimanyu Saxena: So most of the companies that we work with, and often what the companies are doing in their interviews is often a great reflection of that what do they really value. Because of course, interview is a very high-stake process for both the companies and the candidate. So that generally boils down to very specifics, right? Now if you look at, for example, if let's say a company like say VMware or Google or Microsoft and Amazon, when they're hiring, what do they care about? And even people who are already within those teams, of course most of these companies have existed for many decades. A lot of people who might have been in a role, there they need to switch into new kind of roles now. And what we have seen most of our partner companies to be valuing both in their new hiring process or in their interviews from when they're trying to hire new people, or even for the internal people when they're talking about reskilling them is more emphasis on being able to understand a business problem, which generally are always very ambiguous, right?
0:06:00.1 Yadin Porter De León: Yes.
0:06:00.1 Abhimanyu Saxena: And being able to break it down into more objective problem sets. Fundamentally often people say that is a better software engineer or a data scientist. Is it a person who is just better at programming? The answer to that is no, just being good at programming, just knowing a language is the table stake.
0:06:17.7 Yadin Porter De León: Yes.
0:06:17.9 Abhimanyu Saxena: Much more important than that is that given a very ambiguous problem statement out in the real world business cases, can you take that? Can you break that down into more well-defined, smaller problem statements and solve them to build the right solution, which creates the impact, which creates the measurable impact? One very interesting thing that we have seen that over time a lot of technologists, a lot of programmers, there was not a lot of emphasis on whether you understand business deeply or not. But in today's world, what is also expected is that even as a software engineer or as a data scientist, can you also talk about what is the business metric that is being impacted by the work that you do? And once you build that aptitude, then you are always able to connect the dots and see that whatever work am I doing, is it really creating impact for the organization I work for or not?
0:07:08.7 Abhimanyu Saxena: So companies, what we have seen is that they're have been a lot of cross-functional training within companies as well. A lot of software engineers being trained on how to understand the product metrics better so that once they understand the product metrics better, it is much easier for them to fit into across any different business unit, across any different team because now they have that product thinking as well along with just the specific knowledge of a specific domain or technology or framework. So being innovative and being dexterous is what we have seen companies emphasizing a lot within their employees or even when they're hiring new employees for the team.
0:07:46.2 Yadin Porter De León: No, I think that's exactly how leaders need to be looking at these types of problem sets. Having that cross-training, I think I wanted to sort of drill down into that a little bit more, that cross-training piece. I wanted to see what you're seeing that look like at a company when... Because you can intuitively say this is valuable to have a programmer have that business case, that acumen, and be ambidextrous. But what does that look like in an organization? Does it look like the engineers sitting beside the product team? Are they sitting in on meetings with finance or leadership? What is that? What is it looking like so that you're getting those engineers or those other individuals in the company the skills that they need to be able to be more productive, be able to solve, like you said, those ambiguous problems? What would that look like in organization?
0:08:29.2 Abhimanyu Saxena: Right. So we have seen, I can talk about different kind of companies and different kind of companies approaching that in different ways. So for example, if I talk about a very young fast moving startups, right? Let's say a company like Facebook back in 2010, which was a very young startup, very small, very lean team or what Uber was back in say 2015. On the other hand, you might have super large companies, the likes of Google or the Microsoft, which probably might have few tens of thousands of engineers alone in their team. The companies have created different kind of org structures to promote a very cross-functional thinking and problem solving. If I can take probably an example of Amazon, what Amazon has lived with for a very long period of time is a very small team structure, which they sometimes call it the pod. But within a pod, there would be a bunch of engineers, there would be a business guy, there would be a product manager, there would be a one UX guy.
0:09:23.4 Abhimanyu Saxena: So instead of having very functional large teams, let's say instead of having a team of 200 developers and a separate team of say 20 product managers and a separate team of 50 designers, instead of that, they break it down. They try to create often... I think this was one of the statements by Jeff Bezos where he said that Amazon is not a company. It's a group of 10,000 startups where each team is in a way functioning as a startup, the pizza rule that no team should be bigger than them not being able to share two pizzas, right? Which means typically every team being somewhere between 5-10 people, and that group of 5-10 members in the team generally have a lot of cross functions.
0:10:05.8 Abhimanyu Saxena: So there could be one guy who's expert in business metric, one guy who is product guy, let's say two design team members depending on whatever the composition might be needed for the project. But then this small unit despite being inside maybe 50,000 employee base company, this group is functioning as a startup in itself. In my opinion, this function encourages more of cross-functional learning as well because now this product manager and this graphic designer and this duet design person and this finance guy, they are all people of my team. There's not some other team with which who I have to go and try to collaborate, but this is one team.
0:10:43.9 Yadin Porter De León: Yeah. There's no us versus them.
0:10:45.5 Abhimanyu Saxena: Absolutely.
0:10:45.8 Yadin Porter De León: There's no throwing it over the wall.
0:10:47.2 Abhimanyu Saxena: So a lot of companies have been doing that, Amazon being one. Of course, most of the startups really follow a similar pod structure.
0:10:53.2 Yadin Porter De León: Yeah, Apple. That sounds very similar to what Apple would do because you have the software and the user interface and the hardware. All that had to be super, super, tightly integrated, so they'd have these teams that were just super, super crosspoint with that one. That was necessity. Some companies might see themselves as, "You know what, we're just producing a software product." There's a web interface. It's an app that goes behind that and there's a UX. It's not super integrated like maybe an Apple product would be, but still you would benefit from those engineers, those developers working cross-functionally with other individuals within the organization to have them have a better understanding, And not just an understanding, but like you were talking about in the Amazon pod example, an integration. Those are people on your team. Your metrics are their metrics, which is I think one of the key things too.
0:11:36.5 Yadin Porter De León: If you don't have... Let's say you're a company too, and you don't have your organization in this type of pods, cross-functional structure, what are some of the ways you could start to approach the upscaling, rescaling cross-functional training type of a fact that you get with an organization structure like that if you don't have it at your company?
0:11:53.0 Abhimanyu Saxena: So when talking about the upskilling within an org, what is most important is that with the internal L&D, learning and development effort, one of the biggest issue that I have seen, and this is more pronounced with the older, larger organizations, a lot of L&D efforts are without measurement. And there is this... Again, there is this famous book from Eric Smith which says, "Measure what matters." So if you want to have a effective learning and development program, if you want to have a effective upskilling program, you have to start with what is your metric of measurement, whether people are really getting upskilled or not. Because otherwise, often what we end up doing is that we would buy a fancy LMS tool, we will put a bunch of videos there, and then no one is looking at that.
0:12:40.6 Yadin Porter De León: Yes.
0:12:40.8 Abhimanyu Saxena: Like really how many people are really even consuming that?
0:12:43.0 Yadin Porter De León: This is the same story over and over again in a lot of organizations.
0:12:45.5 Abhimanyu Saxena: Absolutely.
0:12:45.9 Yadin Porter De León: We wanna see how do we turn that on its head?
0:12:47.5 Abhimanyu Saxena: Absolutely.
0:12:47.6 Yadin Porter De León: How do you make something that's really effective?
0:12:49.3 Abhimanyu Saxena: Right. And I think the most important part there is starting with that, what is the very objective and measurable goal of whatever training intervention and upskilling intervention the L&D team is planning. Let me take an example here. If let's say there is a team I have who had been doing, say, the quality assurance of the software products being built by the team. Now we know that, let's say, in the next one year of roadmap, the company is going to automate a lot of tasks and then these people probably do not need to manually do the quality assurance of the products. What that means is that the company might no longer have jobs for them, but at the same time, we also know that these are very high-performance professionals that we have in the company and we do not really want to lose them.
0:13:36.2 Abhimanyu Saxena: Now the first question here is that if you intend to utilize them in another team, what is the objective skill gap that exists? Well, let's say the plan is that maybe we can retrain them. I led one such project at my previous company before I started the company that we wanted to utilize them as a front-end developers because it was pretty hard for us to hire front-end engineers because there was massive scarcity of that. And hence, we deviced a training plan, which only focused on that part, that in three months, can we make sure that these folks become really strong with, let's say, JavaScript using frameworks like React, GSN, etcetera. Do those training programs have very short interval metric to evaluate their command on that as well? And good thing with within company training is that instead of making it a very tactical program where you are just reading stuff or just watching videos, you can make it very practical and hands-on. So most important part of any upskilling effort is that is this active learning versus passive learning? Generally passive learning doesn't lead to much of impact.
0:14:49.2 Yadin Porter De León: Yeah, I think that's a really, really good point 'cause yeah, you get people that tune out, they're not engaged. And like you said, you don't wanna throw a bunch of videos up on a learning center and then just say, "Hey, here, click on this link, do this. You get a certification at the end of the course." And people are fast-forwarding through the videos and just clicking super everything on the quiz to just get through it. And so I think that one thing though, I wanted to focus on and what you're talking about is when you're talking about those clear metrics. One of those I'm imagining too, as you said, you have high-performing individuals and you want to be able to utilize their creativity, their curiosity, and their acumen. And you are then making sure that you're having a clear goal of where they're going to go, what they're gonna do, and what their output is going to be.
0:15:35.8 Yadin Porter De León: And give me a sense too. I know intuitively a lot of leaders will say, yes, that it seems like a good idea, but it's also very tempting to say we need to be efficient, we need to do more with less. I mean, really sort of talk about what the incentive is for you to upskill or reskill individuals. You think you might need some external person with some external skill, but really you just need to tap into the talent you have right there and instead of being efficient, really talk about the benefit that you're seeing in companies that are upskilling, or reskilling rather than seeking new talent and then having attrition on employees that they may have automated their jobs away.
0:16:10.0 Abhimanyu Saxena: No, I can talk about my own experiences, that someone who is high-performance, creative professional and has been with the team, there's always so much context that is built, so much intuition that is built about the specific product and services that a company offers that anyone who is hired from outside, I won't say that they would not be able to build it, but it'll take them quite some time to build that intuition and context about the product and services that the company has. So I wouldn't say that of course every company should always be scouting for fresh new talent that could join the company, but at the same time, if your talent pool is a leaky bucket that you just get bunch of new people, new smart people, you hire them, but you do not retain them, then the compounding of the creativity, that could happen because of course, that creativity also requires certain compounding with it.
0:17:08.7 Abhimanyu Saxena: Any new person who comes in, they will take maybe six months or a year to build the context details intuition about the product and services that you build. And if everyone is just leaving right after that. For example, as we were talking about Apple, right? So one of the reason the amount of creativity and the intuitiveness of the products of Apple that we see, to quite an extent is also rooted in that there have been... For example, their lead designers, their lead UX folks have stayed with the company for decades, if not more. If people were just coming and going every other year, that compounding of creativity could never happen.
0:17:44.5 Abhimanyu Saxena: Now, as a matter of fact, let's say someone who worked in customer support for some time and then let's say brand marketing for a little while, and then goes and work in the product team as well, this guy would bring so much cross-functional knowledge about your users because this person knows end-to-end journey of what your users look for. As a customer support person, probably the person will know what kind of challenges our users face formally. As a product person, probably he would be able to implement those and address those. However, if you have a churning mill, if you have a leaky bucket in your talent pool, these kind of opportunities would never come about. And generally the best performers, most impactful employees of the company are the people who have seen all the facades, all the faces of the product, and now they have that intuition that what really adds value to your customers.
0:18:32.1 Yadin Porter De León: Yeah. And I think doing that with intent and looking at how you're gonna measure the value of the individual like you just described, who's went and worked in all those different areas and saying, "Look, we want this program to upskill, reskill, so we can retain individuals so that we can achieve this outcome of people being able to have the exposure in the context of all these different ways of working in the company." And then relationships is a really huge part of that too. That person then builds tons of relationships and then that then has a positive compounding effect on culture as well. So you have then a culture of people that have good relationships, have longstanding relationships, and also see the company putting money into them. And imagine you're seeing the companies that are doing this with intent, doing this consistently are outperforming the competition, which is sort of the whole focus of this talk, is well, what's the business case for upskilling, for reskilling? And I think it's fairly straightforward, is that you're gonna have a more powerful, more productive, more creative, more talented workforce and they can start building business cases around what's the output of that.
0:19:34.2 Abhimanyu Saxena: I can talk about an example from our own organization here. So given we are a tech upskilling company ourselves, I remember this one person from our team who worked as a admission counselor with us, no prior background in technology or programming, etcetera. So while he worked as a very high-performance individual in the admissions team, and then he enrolled in a software engineering program himself, which is a program offered by Scaler itself. After completing that, he joined while he was doing really well as a admission counselor. Then he transitioned into the tech team as an intern, worked as an intern for three months, became a full-time engineer, performed as an engineer, adding a lot of value because now he also has a lot of context from the admission process side. And then he transitioned to become a product person in the same team. And now he's building a lot of internal tools and products for the admissions team, because he himself have done that. He can relate so much more with what are the problems that an admission counsellor at Scaler faces. Now that value that he can create for the company is so much more than what an individual, even a high-performance admission counsellor can add or what a individual product manager can add. So these kind of I think cross-functional training, cross-functional movement within the company, in my opinion, create in a way super humans in your company who can create disproportionate amount of impact.
0:21:01.1 Yadin Porter De León: I like that, super humans. Yeah. That's fantastic. And so give me a sense though, how is the work that Scaler does with companies to upskill and reskill, how has that been evolving? 'Cause it sounds like there was traditional training that you talked about. There's some of that always that's gonna have some value. But talk about how Scaler, in your work at Scaler's, how has that work evolved based on the needs of talent pools, based on the needs of companies to address talent gaps and to reskill, upskill?
0:21:24.2 Abhimanyu Saxena: So as of today, there are close to 900 companies who work with Scaler to find people who fit their tech hiring needs. So what we do is that we follow our process where whatever curriculum that we will be training people on is not built by us, it's not built by any academician or any theoretical trainer who just feels that they should be taught. This however is rather taken in from the company. So all these 900 plus employers who work with us on a quarterly basis, we will understand from them that what are the skills which are really, really important for you as of today. And all this information is fed back into our academic team, which will make sure that our curriculum is serving all of those. Now this is what to train people on. And of course, as I said, that tech, the domain of tech, the world of technology is evolving at such a fast pace that even revising it on an annual basis might be too slow. Unfortunately, most of the traditional universities probably plan to revise it in a decade and that's the reason why probably those universities are not able to create employable graduates.
0:22:34.3 Yadin Porter De León: Yeah, I know. You have to have like a agile process of basically a CICD pipeline for education.
0:22:39.8 Abhimanyu Saxena: Absolutely. And then the second part is how? That fine, we know that people need to learn these particular skills, these particular concepts, but how to train them on. And we have done over... It's almost one decade since I started the company. We have been doing various experimentations into the science of learning with how do people learn and what is the best way to learn technology. What they realized is that, one is that one size doesn't fit all. Different people might be coming from different kind of backgrounds. This is I think another thing broken with our traditional education system, where a particular course will have the same flow for everyone irrespective of where you start and what your end goal might be. The reality is that everyone start with a different starting point and everyone might have a different pace of learning. So what we do is that we try to... Through certain assessments, we try to categorize that what your starting point is and what your pace of learning is, and then accordingly, you are put into a cohort where everyone else is same as you. For example, if I'm sitting in a classroom, my learning is going to be most optimized if everyone else in class is homogenous too. In the sense of my prior knowledge, why diversity in the sense of backgrounds is great thing to have. But in terms of what piece, I want to learn math and what my prior knowledge is, homogeneity there adds a lot of value.
0:24:00.4 Yadin Porter De León: Yeah, it's tough. Just on that point really too, because a lot of people will think that, hey, let's create a one-size-fits-all, which ends up being a one size fits none. You create the lowest common denominator that everyone can fit into and you get a product or an outcome that doesn't meet what you actually want, what your metric actually is too. And I think that's really, really critical, 'cause people, for efficiency, they will want to put everyone through the same pipeline. And we're finding too broader is education. I know we go deep into the educational system globally, which is in a whole other podcast, but that's been the approach for hundreds if not thousands of years. And Scaler now is in a position where you're starting to be part of the movement that changes the way that we approach learning that is not creating factory workers or creating compliant automatons. You're actually creating high-performing individuals.
0:24:46.8 Abhimanyu Saxena: Absolutely. Another very important part is, as we were talking earlier, that active learning and learning by doing rather than just listening to someone or just reading a book. For what we do is that any new thing that people are being trained on, I may take an example that instead of let's say teaching you that, how does operating system work? What are the basic protocols of networking? The traditional approach have always been that just know this sponsor app, try to memorize it and maybe just try to then write something. We rather flip it that if I need to teach people operating system or network protocols, I will tell them that you need to create a web server which can serve, say maybe half a million requests per second. Now, you start with problem statement, that you need to build such a system. But to build such a system, you have to learn the internals of operating system, you have to learn how different threads work, you have to learn what are the network protocols using which you can make it more efficient. So always making sure that understanding why behind everything that you're learning and immediately applying that.
0:25:54.5 Yadin Porter De León: So while you're learning, the whole time, you're connecting it to the output always. You start with the output within the traditional way is going like, let me learn all the different things that you talk about, the building blocks. Someday you'll figure out why you use this. Instead, flipping it and saying, let's teach you how to solve interesting problems, which is what the world needs, and then go out and find all the different pieces like, hey, I need to know how different protocols work, the networking pieces work, what's the hardware stack look like and what's the infrastructure component of it? All that other stuff. Now, it's flipping this, and has this changed? Has this always been Scaler's approach or has this evolved over time?
0:26:26.7 Abhimanyu Saxena: [0:26:26.7] ____ it has evolved over time. While we started with some initial nuggets of this, but as I often say that building an education system, building a startup is an amazing learning journey from the founders themselves every single quarter. Again I'm quoting this from Eric Smith's book, "Measure What Matters". So the process is very simple that even in the learning unfortunately I think if I again talk about our traditional education system in the schools or the universities, there is barely much of measurement that is happening and neither are we trying to figure out that someone who is being high-performance, what was that? And how can we make sure that that is extended to all the people who are learning things? And that is why probably for almost 1000 years our education system largely has just remained the same.
0:27:11.4 Yadin Porter De León: Yes, 'cause there's measurement but it's the wrong thing. It's like, let me process you, let me measure you. Do you meet spec? If you meet spec, then good, you move on. If you don't meet spec, you go back for reprocessing. That's not the kind of measurement you're talking about. You're talking about actually measuring output and performance.
0:27:25.5 Abhimanyu Saxena: So we have been learning quite a lot of things. If I may take another example that let's say if I wanted to teach people front-end engineering, I want them to learn let's say JavaScript, we have JS and all the Nexus Socket, Socket.IO or No.js, etcetera. What we tell them is that let's say you plan to go and work for Google and you need to build online Google Excel sheet. Now let's think about how would you build that. Online Google Excel sheet might have millions of rows in it. How would you wanna make sure that the system you're building can scale so much, and then you get to that, oh I cannot do this using the document object model DOM that exists, but probably I need to use virtual DOM for it. Then you realize that this is what is the internal of ReactJS, that ReactJS is more efficient because it uses virtual DOM. Generally how most of the other people train is that, alright let me tell you what virtual DOM is, and then go about that where you could use it. So I think flipping that makes huge impact.
0:28:23.6 Yadin Porter De León: And then you end up with a bunch of tools built in ways that don't work because people are like, "Well, no, I know the skill, so I'm gonna just apply this skill to every single problem, rather than I'm a problem solver and then I'm gonna look for the various things to build on that." Let me just switch a little bit because we're talking about how Scaler has evolved and the approach has evolved. This is of course extremely important right now from an upskilling, reskilling perspective and that's something you mentioned in the beginning of the conversation. That's generative AI. And one big thing that's on the topic is how am I re-changing my approach as a technology to a lot of things? And upskilling, reskilling and talent are a huge topic right now. Give me a sense, what conversations you're having. How are technology leaders expressing their excitement or fear or anxiety? What's the feeling out there with the technology leaders? You guys you almost have 1000 customers. What's the feeling there from a talent perspective? Do people feel like they can automate things? Do people feel like they need to train their people on AI, generative AI? Give me a sense of what the sentiment is.
0:29:22.5 Abhimanyu Saxena: On a high-level, I have seen people in two or three different categories. There is one category which is either massively paranoid of the technology. Although, a good thing is that I see them converting from paranoid to opportunist very quickly. That from paranoid they see that there's a massive opportunity for the business, this technology. It's not gonna take away things, but probably it's going to give much stronger tools. One parallel that I draw, that few hundred years back when we had industrial revolution and the steam engine had just come around, a lot of people were absolutely worried about that. Now the factory owners don't need human laborers to push and pull and lift. Probably the entire world is going to be unemployed. In reality, what happened was that there were these creative factory owners who realized that instead of having a small workshop where I would employ few people to do work, I could put engines here and then my production could become 100 times and maybe for that, I do not need to have 100 times more employees but still I need probably 10 times more employees.
0:30:35.3 Abhimanyu Saxena: And that is what led to industrial revolution. So similarly what I see is that a lot of these new technologies, and just the advances in the generative AI, ChatGPT-4, etcetera, that is what that's going to cause. Recently I heard someone saying that do not worry about ChatGPT-4 taking away your job. Probably someone who knows ChatGPT-4 will take away your job. Not the ChatGPT.
0:31:00.5 Yadin Porter De León: Exactly. Those people who are skilled in those. And so should people be upskilling, reskilling to make sure you're retaining your talent pool? Let's say as a technology leader, should I be thinking about making sure that I am keeping all my workforce up to speed so they don't feel like they're falling behind, so they don't feel like, "Hey, I'm gonna go somewhere else where I have a coding copilot, where I've got those different things where I become the problem solver instead of like I'm doing every single line of code." What do you think that approach is? What are you seeing? Are you seeing people doing that?
0:31:28.4 Abhimanyu Saxena: Well, absolutely. Companies have to do that. And even those who are pushing back against it eventually even have to convert to that. It doesn't make sense to force your engineers that you cannot use copilot because it just make sense. Again if I come compare with probably some 40 years back, to write code, we had to kind of drill holes in a punch card.
0:31:46.8 Yadin Porter De León: Exactly.
0:31:47.6 Abhimanyu Saxena: And insert that in a computer. Now imagine a company saying that, "No, I will not allow you writing code in C++. You have to continue creating punch cards because that's the authentic and right way to build software." It doesn't make sense. Right?
0:32:00.3 Yadin Porter De León: I love that, I love that analogy. It's like somebody... And this is, say, somebody in marketing saying, "Hey, look, you can't use Microsoft Word. You have to use a typewriter." That's madness. It's madness.
0:32:10.4 Abhimanyu Saxena: So while we probably will see six months a year of period because whenever something new comes, some people might have resistance to it, the innovation doesn't stop for anyone. So eventually of course people will have to change. That being said, despite that, I think, a software engineer probably I do not need to bother about what is the exact line of code to say, do the binary search. Despite that, as a software engineer, I need to understand what does it do because if I don't understand that, so similar to, let's say, I might use a very high-level language, but if I don't understand what is the logic behind it, if I'm not creative, if I'm not a strong problem solver myself, then often I might get stuck and might not be able to go beyond it. So of course, while generative AI, ChatGPT is exceptionally powerful, but despite that, there will be time where it hits its [0:33:00.5] ____ and then you have to resort back to human intuition and problem solving and move ahead. So you cannot be totally reliant on that. It's very similar to how calculator is a powerful tool for a mathematician, but a mathematician's intellect is not in calculator. That stays with the mathematician.
0:33:15.4 Yadin Porter De León: Yeah, I know. We'll see what the future holds 'cause things are changing quickly. I wanna just move to one set that we do in the show, which is take it to the board.
0:33:22.6 S3: In short, ladies and gentlemen of the board, costs are down, revenues are up, and our stock has never been higher.
0:33:30.3 Yadin Porter De León: Wanted to give you a chance to talk about what that board level conversation would be for like a CIO, CFO, CEO, all coming together and saying, we need to integrate upskilling, reskilling into our organization, into our IT teams, and we need to reorg in some ways or move towards reorg so we have this pod-like structure. Depending on what road you go down, it's gonna be different for different people. But what's that board level conversation business case for integrating upskilling and reskilling actively, not passively into the organization?
0:34:01.5 Abhimanyu Saxena: Well, generally, whenever I meet CIO, CEO or CTOs of the companies who ask me for the advice on that topic, my framework is that you must have a quarterly process to evaluate what is the professional growth for each individual in your company, both at the team level, individual level. People can only grow if they very clearly know what their goals are. Good thing is most of the companies, while they might have great goal-setting practices, processes, for the business goals, but often this structure is missing when it comes to personal goals and personal upskilling and growth goals.
0:34:43.7 Yadin Porter De León: Which is how the work actually gets done. Individuals do the work that shows up in the business outcome, but the who aren't always connected.
0:34:49.9 Abhimanyu Saxena: Absolutely. So putting the OKR structure, even for the upskilling goals that what is next one skill set that you can add in next three months? And you can also use that to create more impact for the company. How are you going to do that? Making it part of your quarterly performance review process or maybe to some extent, even making it part of your performance review, be it six monthly cycle or yearly cycle. I think that makes a huge impact.
0:35:17.8 Yadin Porter De León: Oh, it's fabulous. All right. Well, this has been a fascinating conversation. Give me a sense, Abhimanyu, where can people find you online, see what you're doing, see what you're working on, find out more about you, about Scaler? Where could they go?
0:35:28.9 Abhimanyu Saxena: I am on Twitter. I'm certainly active on Twitter. So my username/handle is A-S-X-N-A, Asxna, A-S-X-N-A. Or of course you can search for me on LinkedIn. You can search for Abhimanyu Saxena and you should find me. Happy to connect on Twitter, drop me a text. If there's anything I can help with on LinkedIn or Twitter, those are the places that I hand out.
0:35:50.0 Yadin Porter De León: No, Great. And I think we'll put that in the show notes as well. Well, Abhi, it's been great. Thank you for joining the CIO Exchange Podcast.
0:35:56.1 Abhimanyu Saxena: Thank you so much, Yadin, for hosting me. It was a pleasure talking to you.
0:36:00.3 Yadin Porter De León: Thank you for listening to this latest episode. Please consider subscribing to the show on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And for more insights from technology leaders as well as global research on key topics, visit vmware.com/cio.
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