Building Engineering Communities and Cultures

Sean Allen (: 00:01

Welcome to the More Than a CV podcast, a podcast where tech and talent acquisition leaders share their knowledge and experience on improving hiring practices, innovative ways to approach hiring, and how we need to look at candidates as more than a CV. I'm delighted to be joined by Richard McIntyre, chief engineer at BJSS, now part of CGI. Richard's a wealth of experience in both the UK and Japan, working with well-known brands such as Dazon, Sky, and BBC to name a few.

Rich boasts vast experience of not only building and developing teams, but building and developing communities of engineers. VJSS, now part of CGI, are a technology and engineering consultancy helping clients deliver solutions used by millions of people every day. Welcome, Rich. Thank you for joining us today. How are you?

Rich (: 00:48

Yeah good stuff, nice to see you Sean, always good to see you mate. Looking dapper as always.

Sean Allen (: 00:51

Always good to see you too, Buddy. So I think you always look better than me though, Rich. So thanks for on video, not in person today. But it's a pleasure to have you with us today. I think for our listeners, it'd be great just to hear a little bit more about you and your career today, just to a bit of context of who you are, Rich.

Rich (: 01:09

Yeah, sure. No, yeah, it's always good to share in forums like this, but I've had a bit of an unusual route into software engineering initially, because I got thrown into it by living in another country. I studied Japanese for like three years, and I don't know if any of you have studied.

different languages but I was told by my mother you will not be able to learn Japanese because I was so terrible at French I got an F at French in school so I thought well mum I'm gonna prove you wrong so I went down the library every day and studied for four hours it's kind of boring but I realized after like a year or two I could

I could speak Japanese, I could read Japanese, I could write Japanese and I could do something that someone had told me I couldn't do. And that made me realize, well, actually, maybe there's nothing that you can't do if you put your mind to it. so when I kind of thought, well, I'm done with the Japanese learning for now, I thought, well, what else can you learn yourself? And actually, software engineering or

particularly programming was quite similar to learning a language because if you think about syntax, it's kind of similar to grammar in a very different language when everything's in the wrong order. So in Japanese, everything's kind of in the wrong order that you expect it to be. But once you get your head around it and you get comfortable with it, it's really fun to express yourself in that new

context. And so, so I studied coding and started writing like all sorts of websites and doing them for free for people and, you know, friends who had little charities or whatever. was just like, well, what can I do? How can I help you? And, and that kind of led into a freelance business. And in, in Japan, there's a lot of smaller companies

Rich (: 03:24

lot more than you think actually, where it just like one, two, three, four people. Cause you think when of Japan, you think of like Honda or Toyota or whatever, and you think all these huge organizations, they, of course they exist. but they also outsource a lot of work to real small, kind of, freelancers. And so, yeah, I, I spent good 10, 12 years freelancing in Japan, which really helped me get a different

mindset and grid that when I arrived here in the UK, it was actually really straightforward and easy because I had spent so much time trying to grapple with this Japanese business culture. And yeah, I start when I got back here, I guess the most similar thing to that style of working was contracting. So I started contracting at the BBC in a very exciting time. I know you're at the BBC as well, Sean. It's a great place to work, isn't it?

Yeah. So yeah, just kind of going into even though was the other side of the Pennines going in and saying, I'm, I'm making iPlayer today or I'm making more pages on the BBC sport iconic website, you know, makes makes you feel really good to be part of a team that are doing things and doing things properly with great engineering excellence.

I remember some of my leaders there just talking about engineering excellence on one day one or two. And you get enthused by that by doing things properly, doing it well, doing it securely, doing it in a way that scales to millions of people and being able to see people using stuff on their websites on the seat next to you on the bus. And you're like, I made that. Or I made parts of that, you know, as part of the team that

created that it feels so good. And then as I, as I kind of got more and more involved in not just the creation, but how you create as an organization that led me more into software leadership that I've been more involved in at Skydazon. And now here at BGSS as part of CGI where we help clients such as the NHS, such as Specsavers, you know, such as all of the other

Rich (: 05:51

great clients that you can see on our website there.

Sean Allen (: 05:55

think it's a super interesting career and some of the brands you mentioned there that the listeners that maybe aren't based where we are in Yorkshire, you know, a lot of scaling of teams. look at the sky, the zone, for example, I know VHS has seen our part of CGI, but it's just gone through a lot of growth, not just up north, but globally as well. From that sort of pivot to leadership, I guess, before you perhaps may be involved in

hiring a lot, but when you sort of on that mantle of actually driving hiring from the engineering perspective, how much did you help drive a lot of that or was that a lot of that dictated by talent or recruiters? So I you scaled a lot at the zone and grew leads out there very rapidly from what I remember.

Rich (: 06:49

Yeah. So, so that working together with recruiters was so important and, and you know, we, we go way back to our sky days as well, Sean. So, I just remember the synergy that you have between that we had between the recruitment team and the engineering team. At the end of the day, the engineers want to find brilliant engineers. That that's their goal. You're like, there's the goal to get the best people that you can to work with.

But that's because we also want to work with great engineers. It's not just about, you know, boasting that you've got the best talent around. It's about creating a place where everyone's thriving off of that new knowledge and that learning new stuff and building things in ways that we haven't done before that is genuinely exciting. And so we very much wanted to be a part of building that

kind of culture within those organizations. And so if you as as a, you know, a hiring professional know what the sort of person I'm looking for, the sort of culture we're looking for, the sort of expertise that we're looking for. And I think a lot of the time recruit, recruiters focus on the expertise and they, they kind of miss out on some of those other parts, which is more about

the culture and the thriving place to work. The more that we both understand that together, then the easier that is to do and the easier that is to build. And so when we had a lot of freedom at Dzone, it was three engineering managers who ran the leads office pretty much. And we got in the recruiters that we felt got that, that understood that. And that really helped us to get to build this kind of

recruitment pipeline that, that helped us to hire real DevOps engineers and people with a DevOps thinking or who could have that DevOps thinking. And by, having that stream strong teamwork with the recruitment folks and the hiring folks enabled us to do that and to do that really quickly. So we, were, we were going from CV to.

Rich (: 09:15

higher in a week. But doing that pretty consistently over a number of weeks, which was incredible.

Sean Allen (: 09:26

What do have to consider to do that? Cause I think that's everyone's dream. You know, if you, from my side, whether your agency or in-house that ability to get into a hiring team's diaries, to move at pace is the dream land, right? But there's a lot of considerations in that, that when you get to the point where you want to hire that person, you can extend that offer quickly and you're not blocked by more approval processes or whatever it may be. how?

Rich (: 09:39

Yeah.

Sean Allen (: 09:53

I guess, did you achieve that? What made that CV to hire in a week successful? Because that doesn't just happen from you asking me to go to market and I chuck some people at you and then it suddenly falls into place. what are some of the pitfalls you avoided to enable that?

Rich (: 10:07

Yeah.

Rich (: 10:14

So I think part of it, we chatted about this earlier, Sean, was making sure that you know you can hire that person from the beginning. It's so important. so many, you see so many companies trip up on this. And I've been in it before. I've been in an interview with someone not knowing if the budget's been signed off or that the role has been approved. And you're sort of feeling a bit guilty for using that person's time when it.

when it isn't as signed off as it could be. So we just made sure we had the budget there. We made sure that the people were approved. We knew the sort of salary brackets that we could hire against. And we knew that if someone was outside of that, then we'd need to try and get pre-approval before even bringing them in for an interview. So that really did help. And knowing that it was then

in our control to do that and making ourselves available to the hiring managers. And I think at the moment it's a candidate driven market. So I think we've lost sight of that need to hire quickly. But I think some of the principles are still very true that it gives the candidate a much better experience. It makes them feel welcome. It makes them feel wanted. And it means that when they arrive day one,

in your office, that they've got that kind of enthusiasm about them because they know they haven't been left kind of dragging along when, you know, in some cases you don't even get an interview until like three weeks after you submitted your CV and you're like what, it just leaves the candidate confused, right? And it just stops.

the ability to foster that enthusiastic engineering culture from the beginning a little bit. so that that's just some of my experience that I felt there. And I still stand by, yeah, I'd like to do that. But it's a lot, it can be harder when you do get busier. So, so now I'm doing all sorts of work for our clients at the same time as balancing little

Rich (: 12:37

bits of hiring when I can. And so it's a little bit harder to prioritise than when you're building an engineering function, but having that time to focus on that and clearing out times in your diary, just to spend with your recruitment team, talking through some of the CVs together, making sure that you both know what you're trying to get out of the hiring process makes it go so much easier.

Sean Allen (: 13:06

enables as well, doesn't it? That closeness of a relationship also means that your talent teams are going to feed in market insights a lot quicker to you rather than if it feels a bit disjointed, you know, they might gather a load of data or eventually send, not say eventually, but it'll come over to you and you're thinking, well, if we were speaking, could have nipped this in the bud a lot earlier by flexing on requirements or you having those conversations with who you need to around budgets or whatever it may be. To your, or you mentioned earlier, fosters that real collaborative approach to

Rich (: 13:26

Yeah.

Sean Allen (: 13:36

doesn't it, where you sort of wait on the same wavelength. You spoke before about obviously spending a long time in Japan, still to this day, remember the first time I heard you just speak Japanese when we were sat together on some public transport and it blew my mind.

You talk a lot around that culture. So has living and working in Japan for, what was it, 12 years, 13, 15 years, 15 years, has that had an impact on how you hire and what you look for from candidates now, even though you've been back in the UK for God knows how long now. Yeah.

Rich (: 13:58

Hmm.

Rich (: 14:04

15 years I would say.

Rich (: 14:13

Mm.

Rich (: 14:20

Yeah, good. 15 years again, but yeah, it shows how old I am now.

Sean Allen (: 14:24

So how's that, how's that way? It's not, you look good for it. How's that way indoors? Do you still live by a lot of some of the culture from Japan?

Rich (: 14:32

I yeah, so I think a lot of that. So I moved to Japan when I was 20 and I kind of gained some of those sort of formative years in my career in Japan. So that's given me a lot of the mindset of how I think about work, how I think about work culture. And as you know, Japan's very hardworking and they,

And I don't want this to sound negative, but I think now when it's quite competitive market, I do try and find out those people that I know are going to be quite passionate about their work and the job and dedicated to that. Everyone has responsibilities. Everyone has to juggle work with life and we all do that in different ways. And I'm totally

totally appreciate that. But at the same time, when you get that mindset of somebody who you know is completely dedicated to this craft, you know, and if you liken it to ancient crafts, which a lot of the Japanese mindset is kind of built on, if you go to Japan and you have the nicest sushi in the world, it's because that person making the sushi has been making it.

every day with love for 20 years. You know, and when you have the nicest Lamen, for example, it's not because they just whipped it up 20 minutes before you arrived. It's they've been there all day letting it soak and breathe that up and soak up that taste so that the Lamen that you have is beautiful. You know, it goes way beyond what we can buy here.

Um, and so it's almost the same is what I try to spot in other people is that you, you, you find people who are immersed themselves in software engineering. No, not just because you want to get the most out of them, but because you want to know that that's their passion. That's what they're about. That's what drives them. The last thing that a hiring manager wants to do is hire someone who they think is going to get bored in six months.

Rich (: 16:55

So when they're looking out for that passion, it's because they want to that focus on that craft develop and mature over time rather than just fizzle out. And so that's some of the things that I see in Japanese culture that you can really see so well.

and it shouts so loudly you can't help but ignore it because it's so different to how we often try and squeeze work into our everyday lives.

Sean Allen (: 17:31

think if I was talking passionately about recruitment, it'd probably be a passionate rant these days. It's like an older and grumpier. But I think how do you sort of assess for that then through a process? know, cause I guess there's there's two, a few parts you mentioned earlier. There's the technical level or ability someone's at and obviously their aptitude for learning. So you can keep teaching them and developing that person, but then also what they bring in to,

that culture that you've got within your engineering team or capability. How do you sort of and bring that out of people? Because I guess interviewing can be quite a nervous process. how do you allow them to pry into what they're passionate about, whether it's problem solving or the industry that they're working in, they may have the passion in or tech itself.

Rich (: 18:08

Hmm.

Rich (: 18:21

Yeah

Rich (: 18:29

And I think you've alluded to it there already. mean, some part of the problem with hiring the right person is that there's so many facets to a great engineer or a great hire or a great talent. And some of that is about the way they think, some of it is about the way they communicate, and some of it is the way that they code. And so you're trying to get a feel for each of those things.

and I've been thinking about it a bit more recently when again talking about the switching of the kind of hiring driven market to a candidate driven market. Now we can think a little bit more about what are we really looking for here and the ability and I advise any candidates out there to show

how they've built things and how they've got a passion for building things. And you'll see a lot of the boot camps and they try and get people to do this and it's fine. But you can, I can smell a bootcamp project a mile away, you know, because it doesn't feel like it's something that they've been trying to use to help someone in a particular scenario or situation. So the way that I built

software was because I had one of the clients that I had in Japan, they're a car sales small export company and they wanted to better be able to sell their cars overseas. And it's like, well, why don't you mine a load of car data and put it on your website and make a proxy auction system? And you know, it's like,

And it goes like the next step to building something actually quite interesting, intuitive, innovative, helpful. And when, when you have people that think along those lines of, they're creatively solving problems rather than they're just doing a project that's been suggested to them by someone on a bootcamp. So.

Rich (: 20:47

So even in my position now, innovation is a big thing that gets asked of me. It's like, how do we innovate a given client, whether it be NHS or anywhere else, and just spending time thinking about how you can use technology to solve real problems. That is a skill that will never be irrelevant.

always be super relevant. We've got a lot of AI around us now. So what problems are we really going to solve with AI? Not just, you know, pull it out because it's the next cool thing to do. And I think now we've got a lot of people coming up through software engineering academies and the like that feel like that's the right thing to do. But it's more about being a technologist, being an innovator.

be using your thinking and applying what you know about software engineering, what you know about AI to real world challenges, whether they're business challenges or whatever.

Sean Allen (: 21:53

like that, starting with the problem and then working out from there rather than building something for the sake of building it. okay. And you, touch on AI and I don't think you can have a podcast or any conversation, without talking about AI, let's be honest. So I think there's, there's a couple of things I'd like to ask you around this, given your role and your experience, but

Rich (: 21:56

Yeah

Rich (: 22:00

Yeah, absolutely.

Rich (: 22:41

Yeah, it's interesting. And I think we've all seen on Instagram or whatever of, see how I helped my boyfriend basically cheat on their interview or with their interview and they've got like some chat DPD device that's listening to the conversation and just spitting out answers back at them. And I think we're in that world where that's a little bit more real now. And

I don't know how much I can trust a candidate just through a video call alone. But I think I'm always looking to meet someone in person anyway, because all that stuff that I shared about being a technologist and being an innovator, when you're in the room talking to a technologist, you know it, you know that that's what makes them live and breathe.

And you don't need to worry about this technology kind of giving them that extra leg up. At the same time, I think at the moment we're seeing as a potential, you know, here's a way of cheating your tests. But at the same time, in a year or two's time, I'm not going to hire anyone who doesn't have great AI usage.

initiative in them. I don't know if you remembered the chap who outsourced all of his work to China and he got fired but immediately someone else hired him because it's like, well, that's genius. So I think there are two sides of the coin there where this is something that we need to embrace and we are all going to be embracing it.

Sean Allen (: 24:24

you

Rich (: 24:37

And it's hard when it almost puts your own skill or kind of belittles your key skills because we think that our key skills is coding, but our key skills are actually communicating. They're actually being able to apply this technology to ideas and things. And if we need AI or AI helps us to do that, then great.

But in the process, I think we've got to make sure that AI isn't doing all the work, but it's doing some maybe. So is that 20, 30 % input from AI? Great. Let's embrace that. But if that's 90 % AI and actually the depth of the individual is not where you'd want them to be, then they're not going to be a very good hire. They're just going to be someone that uses that as a crutch.

But then there's also great opportunities that you can use to, to create coding tests. For example, I'm sure if any of us have done hiring for a long time, having the same coding test all the time, it becomes quite monotonous for the interviewer as well. using that to, sort of say, well, how can I hire someone? How can I create a hiring set of tests or

or whatever to, in order to be able to assess someone well. I think there, there's some great ways of using AI there. So yeah, from a lot of areas, there's great stuff about what's happening in AI and also stuff that's just, yeah, a little bit of a concern, but that, it's here, it's here to stay. So we're all going to grapple with this, but let's get over it all together.

Sean Allen (: 26:29

think that when you're working in technology, it's constantly evolving, right? New things come up, some last, don't. But it's how you, to your point, how you move with it and adapt. But you're still that person who's understanding a problem and finding the best way to solve that solution, whether you're using AI as part of that or not. It's going back on the tech, I remember when you, the past drawer, the same one which you used, could literally copy and paste someone's answer into GitHub and find where they'd copied it off.

someone three years ago, know, and sometimes badly where they've copied a one that wasn't great as opposed to a really good one. So I think there's always that, it's not to catch people out, but just refreshing, refreshing the process, especially if someone has a good experience, but isn't successful and goes away to learn and comes back and tries again.

Rich (: 27:12

Yeah.

Sean Allen (: 27:21

It's good to try something new out. think conscious of time. So I guess any advice or tips that you'd give to our listeners when it comes to hiring, whether they're engineering managers or town acquisition specialists that are listening, there anything that you've learned over your career that really stands out that you would share as a bit of advice or tips,

Rich (: 27:50

That's a quite broad question, isn't it?

Sean Allen (: 27:53

Yeah, let's keep it open.

Rich (: 27:57

I think, I think enjoy the process is kind of quite important. I've ended up spending a lot of time recruiting and hiring more than I ever thought I would. And as I think about what I really enjoy, I like solving technical problems. That's, that's the thing that makes me happy as an individual. But because I was working with great people, I really learned to enjoy

the hiring process as well. And so if you don't enjoy that, I think you're missing out. I think that's going to make it feel a lot harder for you than it should be. Meeting new people, knowing what's out there, who's out there and really enjoying each candidate. But also looking at those candidates to say, well, what is it that you want to build? Just like

I might look at code and say code is helping build software in hiring, hiring. I know you will know this so well. I don't, I feel like I'm, preaching to the choir or someone who is probably a lot more knowledgeable than me. But if you, in the same analogy, the candidates and the people that are coming in, they're helping you build your culture and your organization and building that, what that looks like.

is so much more important and that's why things like diversity and inclusion are so important and if you're a very technical recruiter like you know I was a technical hiring manager it's easy to put that technical side of it more important than some of the other things so it's always keeping that balance the whole way through and that's why we really do need inclusivity and diversity in our hiring process and I know you're a big

a big believer in that as well, Sean, because that's what makes your organization shine. And that's how you can help it shine. so making that recruitment process part of that springboard to that person joining, a springboard to that person being part of that culture and designing that culture around that process is really, really beneficial, I'd say.

Sean Allen (: 30:21

I love that. I love that that leans on culture add as opposed to culture fit. And if I hear culture fit as an excuse, people don't hire someone. You know, again, I think I'll just hang up the boots and call it a day because it's frustrating. But I love that building and adding to the culture and just enjoying the process is key. obviously, BGSS, not part of CGI, always, always

Rich (: 30:25

Yeah.

Rich (: 30:30

Yeah

Rich (: 30:35

Yeah

Sean Allen (: 30:50

I'm sure you still are. You always seem busy and lots of great clients. So how can people connect to or contact you, Rich, if they'd like to know more about what you've spoken today or they just want to find out more about technical careers with VHSS, now part of CGI.

Rich (: 31:05

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for that, Sean. Yeah, so please do reach out to me on LinkedIn, which is probably the easiest platform to get me on. I do run LeedsJS, so feel free to come to some of those meetings as well. We do have hiring folks to come along as well, which is good. I also run Leeds Digital Health, which is a health tech focused community.

So please reach out there. But we are hiring. We've got a number of roles open. I think we're especially looking at data roles. A few.net is really popular with our clients right now. And platform engineering. So please do look on our website if you're looking for those sorts of careers. I will reach out to me and I'll put you in touch with our hiring team.

Sean Allen (: 32:01

I'll make sure to include all those links. Your LinkedIn, LeedsJS, Leeds Digital Health and the career site in the show notes to make it easy for everybody to access. But just want to say a massive thank you, for your time. It's always a pleasure chatting with you. So thank you very much. Cheers, Rich. Take care.

Rich (: 32:19

Absolutely, thanks Sean.