10 years of Liferay

These days, we’ve got an unexpected package. What came inside it was even more surprising! What was going on?

An iPad box with a card on top of it. The card has the number "10" written in golden color.

Well, it turns out a few months ago I just completed ten years working for Liferay! This is not only a remarkable tenure, but also one that led me to a lot of growth. I lived in two cities, traveled to a few more around the world, learned to work remotely with very diverse teams, worked with numerous stacks and could see the LATAM branch grow from a dozen people to hundreds.

A card with a header written: "Happy Liferay Anniversary."

Below, handwritten in Brazilian Portuguese:

"Adam,
It is an honor to write this card for you to celebrate your 10 years at Liferay.
Work done with commitment and dedication always bears good fruit.
I am very proud to have been part of your journey. May you continue to be an inspiration to all of us.
Happy 10 years at Liferay!! Here's to many more to come..."

These days, it’s unusual to stay in the same place for that long, especially in a tech career. But Liferay is indeed a nice place to work and there are always new things to learn, new challenges both technically and in teamwork and serving the customer. I surely grew a lot and, as it seems, I have room here to evolve even further!

So, thank you, people, for the gift, but more importantly, thank you for the great time, growing and challenges. And brace yourselves, as I plan to be a delightful “nuisance” among you all for many more fruitful years to come! 😄🎉

(Originally posted on LinkedIn.)

The surprising mainframe longevity

(I wrote this this post some years ago in The Practical Dev. I found it by chance and wondered, why not put in the blog? So here it is!)

Days ago, I read a post that said something like this:

There’s a lot of mainframe developers that are currently out of a job because they refused to look ahead. […] now, many of them are scrambling to catch up on 30 years of technology.

Well, I never worked with mainframes myself, but that sounded dubious. I had contact with mainframe developers, they did not seem in low demand at all. What happens is, the dynamics of the mainframe environment are surprising for most of us new developers.

Sectors such as government, banking and telecommunications still have a large infrastructure based on these machines. Those systems are decades old and work quite well until today. Sunsetting them is really expensive and, in general, they do not cause problems. For this reason, many organizations have no plans to migrate them to other platforms. As a consequence, there is always someone hiring programmers for these platforms.

85% of our typical daily transactions such as ATM withdrawals and credit card payments still go through mainframe systems. (Source)

In fact, these positions tend to compensate well. There are few mainframe developers for a steady demand. With many of them retiring, the demand can even get higher. In fact, the labor costs used to be one of the reasons to move out of mainframes.

Experienced COBOL programmers can earn more than $100 an hour when they get called in to patch up glitches, rewrite coding manuals or make new systems work with old. (Source)

Anyway, these platforms did not stagnate. IBM just released a new machine some time ago. Neither are they an exclusive choice: most often than not, these systems pair with newer technologies. My bank Android app, for example, consumes data that comes from mainframes through many gateways. Or see this amazing story of integrating some old systems with new tech.

Because a mainframe offers reliable performance and strict security, it is often the on-premise component of a hybrid cloud environment that processes and stores an organization’s most sensitive data. (Source)

What makes mainframes less common is, I believe, their price. Their cost has a good reason: A mainframe can be as powerful as a cloud data center — indeed, some are cloud data centers. However, most companies do not start with enough money, or even the need, for such power. For many of us, it is more cost-effective to start with inexpensive platforms and grow them into distributed systems.

Of course, there are concerns in this ecosystem. The best developers are retiring. Also, much of that code is hard to maintain, made before we even knew much about software engineering.

The mainframe boxes themselves are not aging. In fact they outcompete Microsoft and Linux on features like performance, scalability, security, and reliability. It’s not the machines but applications and programmers that are aging. (Source)

However, the most experienced ones agree: the solution is not merely to rewrite it all. Some communities bring new blood to this market. Given an organizational culture shift, it is also possible to bring agility and good quality to old applications. Indeed, refactoring these applications is necessary even if you want to move off the mainframes.

It sounds weird to us because we do not follow this carer path. Yet, the mainframe market is very much alive.

The Evolution of Remote Careers

How can remote works grow in their careers? Since remote work is a recent revolution, it is a challenging question. In general, white-collar employees tend to grow more by changing companies, and, in my experience, it is even more common in remote environments. Nonetheless, it’s possible to grow in the same company as a remote worker—if the company did its homework. Since I started a community about remote work (in Portuguese), I’ve met many of those remote-first companies which worked hard to develop their collaborators and decided to look for a bit of their knowledge.

Careers in a blue sky

I invited my old friend from UnB, Fabricio Buzeto, co-founder of bxblue (a growing fintech here from Brasília), for a (virtual) coffee on October 5, 2020. He told me how bxblue’s career plan works: “We don’t do anything different from in-person companies. We have periodic evaluations and a promotions calendar.”

In their case, the career plans have two parts: a compensation and roles plan to ensure recognition to growing professionals, and a competencies plan, which will help them grow even more. Each department has its own evaluation criteria. For example, customer support has closing metrics, while engineering doesn’t.

Criteria should be clear, objective and, notably, collective. “Here at bx, the metrics are the entire team’s average,” Fabricio told me. “Our customer-facing department, today, is ten times more productive than the best individual attendant from the past.” This strategy, which focuses on the team and not the individual, makes it easy to find the real concerns behind the metrics. “If the attendants are not closing, which skill is missing to close more? The software can present inviable offers. Or maybe the attendant can be too slow to call, or doesn’t complete the call and doesn’t try different channels.”

Distributed planning for distributed careers

Intrigued by bxblue’s career plan, I decided to talk to other companies. Then I recall my dear friend Karina Varela from Red Hat—you may remember her from the brilliant tips on working from home with family (in Portuguese). She told me how, being a child from the 90s and 2000 free software movements, Red Hat has always been international, distributed and remote-first. I schedule another coffee with her and her leader, Glauce Santos, Latin America’s acquisition manager, for October 8, 2020. Then, I asked: how is the career plan at RH?

To my surprise, they don’t have one!

Glauce explained that the career development at Red Hat is more localized. “We don’t have a career plan, as in a Big Four. We have an open culture and individualized performance evaluation with the direct manager.” In this case, the accountable persons are the collaborators themselves. “The responsibility stays in the hands of the employee,” Glauce informs. For that, the manager’s support is fundamental, as Karina tells us: “The manager helps the collaborators to get where they want to be.”

While this is a very different approach from bxblue’s, there are similarities: criteria are defined by areas and teams. “The consultant is evaluated by customer’s satisfaction, maybe by worked hours. At support, one sees how many requests were attended and how many SLAs were met. Sales teams have targets,” Karina told me. Glauce complements: “Employees are evaluated for main responsibilities, goals, targets, and objectives. And there is a development plan for each one, developed together with the manager.”

Growing sideways

One of the most interesting points from the conversation was about something also encouraged here at Liferay: exchanging roles and teams. I, for one, changed teams many times. It happens both at bxblue and Red Hat.

“We are incentivized to change teams through internal selection processes,” Karina told me. The good side is that, when there are no vacancies or budget for promotion, the employees can develop themselves by expanding their horizons. Glauce complements: “At RH, there are always opportunities. Sometimes we don’t have the budget or the ‘next step,’ but we always have more responsibilities. There are horizontal, vertical or forked careers, it is possible to change areas of expertise, become a specialist, etc.”

Are sideway moves a solution for career growth? In my opinion, it can be a good complementary tool. Naturally, though, they do not replace promotions. Both collaborators and HR departments need the awareness that those do not substitute growth. On the other hand, I believe it can help a lot. By changing teams or departments, I myself have solved problems I thought demanded a promotion. I still looked for an upgrade, but the change was a breath of fresh air.

Summing up

Today, maybe even more than at the time of the interviews, companies have to make an effort to keep their collaborators. With more and more companies adopting remote-first, the challenge is yet more significant. Well-defined career plans, such as bxblue’s, are a great benefit to keep professionals. They are not mandatory, though, as Red Hat’s distributed model has proved. Team and area changes are also helpful, although, personally, I believe it is necessary to pay attention to avoid stagnation.

What do you think? Please comment below!

(This post is a translation of A Evolução da Carreira Remota.)