I'm Rachel Leacock, a market tech principal in the New York office at ThoughtWorks.

I'm Jeff Norris. I'm out of our San Francisco office and I'm a tech principal in one of our projects.

And Jeff and I are going to talk about growing technologists.

So how do I grow a technologist? I guess a lot of water?

Yes, lots of water. On our projects,

it seems to be more beer, but whatever. Beer is mostly water, I heard. Now, growing technologists is really all about giving people the opportunity to do the things that they're already

good at. It's about figuring out intentional spots where they can do things that stretch themselves,

but not stretch themselves too hard.

It's that key sense of making sure that they've got an opportunity to do something

that is actually really hard for them.

But at the same time, there's enough of a

safety net so that if they do mess up, it's not going to be a catastrophic problem. Yeah, exactly.

So one of the ways that I do that is try and make it really visible to the people on my team,

especially some of the more senior technologists of what are all the things

that I'm working on outside of the everyday coding that everyone is up to. And then trying to

understand, you know, what are their goals, what are their strengths, what are their weaknesses,

where are they trying to grow, where do I need them to grow? Because I have other commitments,

so I can't necessarily be on the ground all the time.

And so it may be that they're particularly interested in something along DevOps, for example,

on my last project.

Everyone was trying to understand, you know, puppet, because they previously had experience

in chef.

...