Over the last few months, Obtiva's leadership team and senior consultants have decided that we won't plan to hire any more senior consultants. Instead, we have expanded the pay scale for consultants and only recognize new senior consultants after we have seen them live up to our values, hopefully stretching our definition of senior consultant and raising the bar on the people already in those roles.
This recognition is bestowed by our senior consultants, and it must be unanimous. Consultants are nominated and then championed by someone who presents their case to the group. We discuss, vote, and then recognize. Last week we discussed and voted. Today it is time to recognize Obtiva's two newest senior consultants.
As we reviewed what both of these guys have accomplished over the last year, all of the senior consultants felt at least a little uncomfortable about the level of awesomeness these guys were achieving. This is good, Obtiva's purpose is to be a role model to our industry, and the only way we're going to live up to that is by steadily raising the bar of what we expect of ourselves.
While there are a lot of differences between these two people, one interesting similarity was the way they started at Obtiva: in a contract-to-hire relationship. Due to a variety of variables, when Obtiva first met these guys, we weren't 100% sure they were going to be successful with us and wanted to take it a bit slow. In hindsight it seems like we were silly to hesitate. But I wonder if starting our relationship without a full commitment actually accelerated the progress these guys made toward their achievements. It's something we need to consider.
I first met Ryan at Software Craftsmanship North America in 2009. He was visiting from Ohio and expressed interest in moving to a bigger city like Chicago, New York, or London. We kept in touch over the following months and when the time came for me to find someone to replace me on Mad Mimi, we chose Ryan. He left his wife Stephanie behind in Ohio while he lived in Obtiva's corporate apartment with our apprentice Ethan Gunderson. Ryan was confident he would quickly win our confidence, receive a job offer, and then bring Stephanie to Chicago. He was right, but he didn't squander his time living with Ethan.
Ethan was an apprentice at Obtiva from November 2009 to May 2010, and Ryan played an important unofficial mentoring role in Ethan's apprenticeship, which I believe has contributed to Ethan's success. Ryan befriended his flatmate and the two of them have launched two successful endeavors together in the year they've known each other.
Ryan quickly proved himself to be invaluable on the Mad Mimi project, and we hired him within the first two months of working with him. As Obtiva's day-to-day relationship wound down with Mad Mimi and they ramped up their own development team, Ryan transitioned into a slightly larger client. As with Mad Mimi, Ryan was a reliable, productive developer at Groupon, a good example of what Groupon CTO Ken Pelletier described in his interview. Ryan rolled out of Groupon in March to lead a project at one of Obtiva's key clients in Chicago where he has shown an ability to consult simultaneously at the technical and organizational levels, and has received rave reviews from his clients in the process. (You'd appreciate this feat more if I could tell you which company he was consulting at.)
All that said, the aspect of Ryan that really stands out is his passion for community engagement. Ryan is an ambitious, fearless extrovert and has thrown himself headlong into the Chicago development community, representing Obtiva at countless user groups. He has spoken at half a dozen conferences in the last year, most recently at the Scottish Ruby Conference where he spoke on a topic he plans to eventually adapt into a book.
The future is certainly bright for Ryan Briones, and we feel fortunate to be able to recognize him as one of Obtiva's senior consultants.
I met Scott Parker in late 2009 after he responded to an email I sent to the Polyglot Programmers of Chicago group (which is now in hibernation). One thing led to another and since Scott's professional programming experience was exclusively on the .NET platform, Scott started with us on one of our infrequent .NET projects. Because .NET is outside of Obtiva's typical project portfolio, we were tentative and brought him on as a contract-to-hire. You can read a lot about Scott here, where I told a few stories about the intersection of passion and competency.
But there's more to tell, and a lot of it is too wrapped up in Groupon details to talk about, but suffice to say that Scott has created a multitude of raging fans for himself (and Obtiva) at Groupon. If you didn't click through to my previously written story about Scott, you'll need to figure out how in less than a year this guy went from .NET subcontactor to epic Rails project leader inside the fastest growing company in the history of history.
In Scott's copious free time, he has co-founded the Chicago Software Craftsmanship group and is currently working on a fall software craftsmanship workshop series at some university called Notre Dame. Like Ryan with Ethan, Scott also took the time to mentor someone in his off-hours who later became a full-time Obtivian, the fantastical Dan Melnick.
In the opinions of Obtiva's senior consultants, both Ryan and Scott should be recognized as Senior Consultants. They have set the bar high for future (and existing) senior consultants and we're excited to recognize them today.
