So I thought kind of we could just maybe have a chat about what it's like

From your point of view what you're looking for from people

And what you know what people should be thinking about when the you know what a period is

Thank you. That's a great question. I mean I hire about ten people a year a lot of them go into

What I would call a jason sees to computing so for example. I've got a team. That's working on sensing in the life sciences and

The Big Data is hitting everything right?

So if you're a data scientist which most computer scientists have some inclination towards at these days

And it is a huge premium you will have those kinds of fields as well open to you

Just so people know right you know the organization you are at for us

I'll try to be concise, but I'm in Hp labs

and I'm in the position where I direct a large group of people around the world in everything from mechatronics and robotics to

3D printing software

To what we call security printing the security printing also ties in a lot to the internet of things if you use that cliche

Being able to interrogate a physical object whether it's a label packaging 3D printed object manufactured object

And then be able to get useful information to yourself off of that and so

The software folks that I'm looking for involved in everything from analytics Big Data

to algorithms being able to add to the

Sort of signal and image processing that I believe it - with sensing so a broad set of skills in there

We do also need people can roll up the sleeves and make this stuff leggy

Right so because it's really nice to talk about these algorithms

but I've got to put them on a mobile phone in the end and

So I do need people who are good with you know everything from Xamarin to you know the follows on to

Droid and Ios programming pretty much everything right now has a

processor somehow involved in it and the ability for you to code at the level below just the

UI you know the Ui based software is going to help you in

Terms of hiring what we're looking for obviously our people who have a very can-do attitude who have experience across both

Web technology and non web technology right? It's better not to edge and halt yourself and just focus on algorithms, or just focus on web

Generally speaking because I'm in a research

Lab we will tend to hire people who are better at the algorithm side and at writing those types of things

but we do have webby type things as well because any

Technology now is going to go live it's going to go mobile

It's going to go on the cloud and so we're looking for people who have had experience

Along the lines of what I saw here last year when I went through with the I think it was a third-year

Competition and with the third-year competition you saw a lot of students kind of rolling up the sleeves

Bringing different technologies to bear and saying oh yeah, we need a webby aspect to that because that's going to make it

Demonstrable at the Fair

But it also has to do something useful and so I think you see this real combination people always talk about

You know older Coders like myself who grew up writing you know ones and zeros literally at the start

to folks now who know how to exercise an apI for the web

people people on the website say boy

I wish those old guys would just do something interesting and the old guys say I wish those young guys would just do something that

Meant something right, but it's actually there's a real good commonality between there

And I think what we're seeing is that because so much technology now is

Intimately tied to needing good software to be written for it

You really need both of those and so people who have that ability to

You know do something with raspBerry Pi or Arduino something where you're kind of really getting your hands dirty and looking at

sort of the older Style programming languages whether it's C C++

even Java

To people who are much more webby

You know building out websites using Jason or something else if they'll people have both of those things or even python

I really like python because I think it gets people's hands dirty, but at the same time

they're able to percolate up from that so that's what we're looking for and of course being in research if you're good at R if

You're good at Matlab if you go to some of the open source types of approaches we're looking for that as well

those are just a starting point though, so

What we're really looking for and particularly in a research lab is we're looking for character

right so I I

Get to be pulled in I've got much more technical people in the various areas on my team of course than I am

But we pull people in and I try to ask them off-the-cuff questions to see how to handle them

So one guy, and it was surprising. I said, what's the worst thing you ever did that you didn't report?

You know to Eh&s so environmental health and safety and I didn't expect an answer, but he actually gave me one and so yeah

we had this radiation leak and

Covered it up and got all the material put away and all that and I'm like wow this is kind of disturbing

But the way he handled it

He said it wasn't the big deal, and it would have shut down the lab and it was you know, so it was tritium

Or something that was actually relatively easy to clean up in the end

We ended up offering the guy a job and hiring him

but if this is astonishing

Admission and so I'm looking for people like that because even though the story could have been potentially embarrassing him at first

I was like do I have to call the hMS

It was he had hindsight the guy was very honest with me

and he told me what he did and why he did it and that he took responsibility for

Cleaning up the situation and not getting the lab closed down for a year, so you have to kind of learn

off-the-Cuff questions really help

asking people that kind of shakes them out and you find out a lot that way if you get somebody kind of off the

Normal mark for things they'll end up telling you something they've done. That was very

Fascinating that won't show up on the resume because they might have been embarrassed about it

And so that's one of the things that I definitely look for in a software person somebody who's done something that

Had nothing to do with their classes

And they did it because of their love for what software can do as we all recognize that now?

We're going we're in a real transition right now in the world

We're going from a world where open-source software has become de rigueur and people know how to go out and get software that can do

Certain tasks we know which type of software we can actually use we've watched the you know the evolution from hadoop to spark etcetera

things change over time but it's more and more open source for the

Sort of Pedestrian things that we need to do to exist in a cloud-based mobile world

That's about to happen to hardware and so you look at Nottingham University of Nottingham here

There's some fascinating work being done and added of manufacturing and new forms of manufacturing

I have teams that work on that the majority of the people that are on my teams working in 3D printing are software people and

It's because 3d printing if you're doing additive manufacturing and you're looking at merging masks customized with Mass production

Parts, so all the mass production parts are the same

Somebody's parts merge onto that in the end. You know it's that's easy enough to do

We're just going to snap those parts together like a lego set not that easy

How do you actually produce those parts? How do you track them? How do you validate them? How do you forensically?

Analyze them all of that takes

very strong algorithmic

Expertise it takes somebody who can actually put together the software in a modular fashion

And somebody who's smart enough to figure out?

I need to go look at what a manufacturing line looks like and see what they're they're addressing and so for me I

See a lot of this going on where people say yeah 3D printing

It's going to replace manufacturing no, it's not going to replace manufacturing

It's going to augment it if you look at what manufacturing is now

people have the largest capital assets most companies have if

Their manufacturing company is what they have in a manufacturing line. They've got robotics. They've got

You know very fast production line that assume the same product is going through multiple times

It's the old assembly line mentality and so everything has been streamlined optimized

Overproduced so that I can get as many parts through here as possible because I make more money if I do

That now goes away, and you say well, what do I do?

With you know let's say I've got a 30 year capital asset that I'm losing money off of if I get rid of it in

The next you know 10 20 30 years so that's a big part of what's going on is how we can merge?

What we're doing with additive manufacturing with existing manufacturing lines. It's not going to happen with hand-waving

It's going to happen with software and so that's a good example people

Who've actually addressed that that's one specific area look at healthcare for another one if we want to draw in other areas

So I've got teams working on what are called surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy sensors and what that basically is is these tiny little?

Nano fingers that when they collapse on an analyte

There's an enhancing effect by the materials that we use gold tips ETC and very small

You know just a few hundred nanometers in length for these fingers when an analyte or a simpson?

single chemical gets trapped inside of here

I Hit it with a laser light and the raman scattering that I get off of that is enhanced up to 10 to the 12 times

So up to a million million times

enhancement of the signal that I would normally get off of that analyte because of the architecture I put around that as

We start looking at that and you can see imagine the future

I've got some kind of a smart rag or a smart plastic surface that I just take rub across this table

Take it out and sense everything that was on the table right so it's going to make forensic analysis

Extremely fast and as you can see down the road that might include things like polymerase chain reaction or PCR

Which means that I can get automatic dna sequencing or rNa sequencing off of what I picked up if it's proteinaceous?

So there's a lot of different things that I can do with that technology all of that is software

Bioinformatics is what makes me be able to analyze the dnA in the rna all the normal signal processing that I would normally do for

Audio you know, so you're an audio expert. You know about that. You've got one key signal processing that's going on

I've got imaging which is 2d signal processing that comes on there, so I'm looking for those types of things when I bring in a

Candidate for hire, and I'm looking for somebody who's got of strength in one area and then

Breadth across the area and so people talk about this this is I'm pologize again to the non states people

This is States jargon. We look for a

T-Shaped software engineer which means somebody who's got a lot of Breadth in this direction and can go deep in one area for research

I'm looking for a comb shaped person, so once somebody has got that Breadth, but they can go deep in several areas now. They'll be

typically from my lab

They'll be a master or phd so we know they go deep in one area because they had to get that dissertation

Approved and they've got smart people like the professors here nodding him walking them through that

But I'm looking for somebody who also took it and went deep in another area so for example

somebody may be very interested in

Electrical engineering and because of their thesis they had to do one thing let's say working on you know

The sayers that I talked about the surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy

But because they were interested in signal processing they spent the rest of their time

Doing music and so they figured out how to build you know analog and digital circuits to do

Electronic music or something like that if I see something like that

then I know this person really is interested in that they're not just doing it because

It was a convenient path to a degree or a degree that they thought they'd have a you know livelihood in

And so we're really looking for that, and I try to throw students not you know with that

that being said I'm

One person and the other people on my interview team are going to be looking for those specific skills to make sure that they can't

Sneak away with that and so for me

I will typically cover the few areas that I'm qualified to look at Perhaps imaging perhaps or statistics or analytics

But other people on my team will be taking them very deep into what's under the hood in terms of a cloud deployment

They said they did right or what's under the hood for some type of an intelligent system that they?

Supposedly designed and in most cases you'll find out the student will admit very quickly

Oh, I actually relied on Bob or Susie or whoever to actually do some of that work

And they think that's they're afraid to bring that up in an interview as far as interviews go

That's that's when we know we've hit goal, right?

because we want people who can admit they need somebody else to get a big project on if

It's somebody who actually did the whole project by themselves hmM might not be that good of a project, right?

But if it's something where they worked with a bunch of other smart people, and that's what I've been lucky at in life

I've worked always with a lot of people smarter than me and the project that I'm working with you dig into the

Expertise they have in you're like wow

Thank you now. I don't have to sweat the details

I need to understand what you did

But I don't have to do the details and so we're looking for people who can admit?

They've actually worked with people and at least an area of their project who are better than them