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In this episode of the Business of Laravel podcast, Matt Stauffer sits down with Jason Johnson, Chief Information Officer at Sweetwater, a leading provider of musical instruments, pro audio equipment, and comprehensive support services for musicians and audio professionals. They discuss Sweetwater’s impressive growth, how Laravel plays a key role in their technology stack, and the critical importance of building a strong company culture. Jason shares valuable insights on hiring practices, the significance of diversity in tech, and the power of vulnerability in leadership. He also emphasizes the need for continuous learning and highlights the importance of making intentional, business-driven decisions in both technology and team management.
Creators & Guests
What is The Business of Laravel?
Short, powerful interviews with business leaders working with and within the Laravel ecosystem--about business, tech, and more! Hosted by Matt Stauffer.
Matt Stauffer:
Hey everybody and welcome back to the Business of Laravel podcast where I talk to business leaders who are working in and with Laravel. My guest today is Jason Johnson and Jason, would you introduce yourself and tell us who are you and what is your business?
Jason Johnson:
Yeah, so I'm Jason Johnson. I am the Chief Information Officer for Sweetwater Sound. And Sweetwater is the largest online retailer of, I like to say rock and roll. But...
Matt Stauffer:
That's fantastic.
Jason Johnson:
But we sell anything that you need as a video creator, a musician, or even into high fidelity audio listening now. We sell all the gear that you need to enable your musical dreams. So that could be a microphone, a keyboard, an amplifier, a really nice set of speakers, or an entire multi-million dollar touring rig because you just made it huge and you're about to go on your first tour.
So yeah, that's what we do. It's predominantly B2C, direct to the consumer, and a little bit of B2B when you think about school districts and churches and entities like that that are making a lot of music as an actual business.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, and I was just gonna say the same thing I was gonna say. It's B to C, but your C's are often very big. For those who don't know, when I just say Sweetwater, all the, because I'm a musician, I also grew up running sounds in church and doing event venues and stuff like that, so I have had a Sweetwater account since I don't know when. I've ordered from Sweetwater. Sweetwater's the dream since I was a teenager, whatever. So when I tell people I get the chance to hang out with Sweetwater people, they're like, my sister was like, here's the name of my Sweetwater rep.
He's the one who sends me candy. Can you say hi to one when you go to... So like, musicians love Sweetwater. I mean, like, Sweetwater is the dream.
Jason Johnson:
Yeah, we have about 10 million customers. know, here take and, and you know, you either my experience has been that you either know Sweetwater and you love Sweetwater or you just don't know Sweetwater.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, there's no in-between.
Jason Johnson:
Yeah, if you know us, you know that one of our things that goes way back to the owner is that every order we put a little bag of candy in the order and I would challenge you to Google or get on your favorite social media network and type Sweetwater candy and you will find people. There's YouTube videos that are open box videos that are just like, they like throw the gear to the side and it's the opening of the candy or whatever and it just becomes, know, craze. I've packed boxes for lots of
Matt Stauffer:
I love it. Well, I don't want to-
Jason Johnson:
like during holiday periods and over my years here, you know, put that in perspective. Like when I started at Sweetwater, I was the sixth person on IT. My very first year here, we did $230 million. We now have 234 people in IT and, and, you know, we'll do multiple billions this year. So, you know, tons of growth over the last 13 years. But that is, that has put me in the warehouse several times packing boxes.
Matt Stauffer:
Like I gotta do what I gotta do, right?
Jason Johnson:
And I always go home and like stay up at night thinking about, did I actually put candy in that one box? What if I'm the guy that forgot the candy? You know, it's a real thing.
Matt Stauffer:
The rest of us dream about showing up to an exam not having studied. You dream that you'd pack the order and didn't put the candy in it. I love that.
Jason Johnson:
What if I fail the customer?
Matt Stauffer:
Yes, I love that. I do wanna, there's so many questions I wanna ask, but I do just wanna name something I normally don't get a chance to do, which is that I have gotten a chance to visit Sweetwater in person. And I wanted everybody here first, how big of a deal Sweetwater is, right? So we did that. But the second thing is, it's easy to hear someone at a C-suite level at a multi-international global, huge, multi-billion dollar company, stuff like that, say all these things about the customers and packing and be like, sure, right? Like, okay, cool story, bro. And I have been to Sweetwater in person. And not only is Jason Johnson an absolute delight of a human being who is a sweetheart and a teddy bear, but also the entire company is just, it feels very familial in a way that I would normally battle a company trying to claim.
Like if someone tries to say, we're like a family. I'm like, yeah, that's your way to manipulate people. And I'm not saying Sweetwater's perfect because I don't know the whole story. But when I was there, I was like, a lot of intentionality has been put together into like, this is the way things should be. This is the way a company should operate. This is how employees should be treated. This is how customers should be treated. And so it's really fun for me that like because you often go behind the veil of something and it's like not what you always dreamed it was going to be.
Jason Johnson:
Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
And so just for anybody who's listening along, who's like a musician, who's like thought things about, know, Sweetwater over the years, like I went in person and it was everything I hope they could have been. So I just want the framework of anything that Jason says to be the framework of A, the success. If you don't know the success, you should see kind of what they've done, but B, the goodness. Like anytime he says, I care about customer success, like if the little thing in you goes ding, ding, ding, okay, cool, whatever, like Jason actually does. So I just need to set that groundwork before we go any further. So.
Jason Johnson:
Thanks, I appreciate it.
Matt Stauffer:
Okay, so our next question is, where's Laravel come to play in this? Sweetwater's great and amazing and incredible. What's Laravel have to do with Sweetwater?
Jason Johnson:
Yeah, as I thought about that question, Matt, like I actually get stressed out because I don't even think that I, I don't even think that I 100 % know. I would fail to say that we have hundreds of Laravel apps in play at Sweetwater. The biggest one being a core portion of our sweetwater.com experience is written in Laravel. But also I was talking the other day, just to put into perspective, but like we had a couple of years ago, we had this queuing issue with an internal CRM system that we have that's written in a non-traditional language.
Matt Stauffer:
Uh-huh.
Jason Johnson:
And we had all these jobs and I remember late at night, me personally stayed up, was like, I bet I could write a small API in Laravel and use some of its queuing stuff and give an interface. That app is still running here four years later and in fact, it's queuing 8 million jobs a day in about 60 millisecond response times per our NPM tool that we use to NPM our.
Matt Stauffer:
Oh my gosh.
Jason Johnson:
analytics tool that we use. I don't want to say the brand, but we use a very well-known analytics tool to understand app performance, APM. And what a great story that that stuff can live on and be great. So we use it all over.
Matt Stauffer:
That's amazing.
Yeah, and I mean, when you say all over, we tend to think that Laravel gets used on the web, right? Laravel is where, so you guys are a web-based thing that people, web-based store, so that must be Laravel, but I mean, when you have, when you said not 100, you that means you're talking many, many, many dozens. So can you, I mean, I don't know, you can't share everything, but could you just like a couple examples of places that people might not expect that you're using Laravel?
Jason Johnson:
Yeah, so we use it in traditional sense of API's interactions. You know, backend stacks, front end stacks, like sweetwater.com and other web apps. We also, have built kiosks apps out of it. We've used in, you know, technologies like electron and stuff to wrap Laravel applications. And so for instance, we maintain with well over a million dollars with the gear, we maintain a sales resource library actually sits right on the other side of the wall that you're staring at right now. And it's a place where our vendors bring bring gear and they put it in the library and our sales engineers can check that gear out and use it to personally gig or to explore and stuff like that. And inside there is a computer kiosk where they tap their badge and they scan the items and go through like a self-driven kiosk checkout experience and all that is actually running on that machine and that is all driven through Laravel.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I love that. I remember when I came, one of the things that I always told everybody about, was like, there's two things that I would always tell people. I was like, there's a DVD checkout, which I don't know if y'all still have that. I was like, there's a, yeah.
Jason Johnson:
No, we don't. The DVD's finally been deprecated.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, but there's a DVD library system that people can check them out running on Laravel. And then there is a slide to get from the top floor to the bottom floor. And when you go down, it takes a picture of you and it wants to send you a text of the picture. And that's also running on Laravel. I'm just like, it's just everything. It's like, know, Wonka vision or whatever, it's running on Laravel. So.
Jason Johnson:
Yeah, my other favorite one that we have, and this is a web app that runs on our internet, but we have this wonderful benefit of spending hundreds of millions of dollars with shipping carriers a year. And so we get great rates and we share those rates with our employees. Hey, it's Christmas time. Anytime I can go ship a package through our concierge desk. And it was this, I did it, this was several years ago, but I did it once myself and it was like this, fill out this paper and I did an overnight package and I was trying to sell something on eBay.
I didn't get the tracking number back and fast enough and eBay's dinging me and I thought, man, there's just got to be a better way here. So we have a little Laravel app that you can go fill out a form and get your tracking number and check your shipping rates and all that type of stuff and it prints off a little label in the back. So, which, you know, maybe a little bit more technical, but you can spit ZPL directly at a Zebra printer out of PHP and it all just works great. And we ship about 3,500 employee packages a year through that app.
You know, providing better rates, our rates, to our employees as a work.
Matt Stauffer:
So you've mentioned a couple times that you're like, hey, I needed a thing and I just kind of spun it up in Laravel. Where do you think the origin, and I don't know if you know the story, but what was the origin of choosing to reach for Laravel at such a large company where historically you would be expecting people to use a .NET or a Java or something that's like little bit more like, this is what big enterprise uses?
Jason Johnson:
Yeah, so Sweetwater from that regard has always been flipped on its head. We're 100 % max on the desktop. We've been PHP on the website since day one. Not that we don't have .net apps. We certainly do. We much more favor Golang these days when it comes to that regard on the back end, but always been heavy Linux, heavy Macs has put us in a traditional lamp stack, if you will. You know, it's kind of since day one. So we were teed up there. We were rolling our own frameworks and really we have a great story, but really we had a couple Ruby, we had one developer who really loved Ruby on Rails and had built some Rails apps and we just, none of us liked Rails. I have nothing against Rails, Rails is great.
I love Jason, like there's no hard feelings there, but for a bunch of PHP guys, we were just like, this is weird. We don't like this. I remember sitting with a Rails guy one time. We ran a local Linux users group and this gentleman actually works for us now, but I was telling him, I said, you know, I've been debugging this Rails app all day and like I go in and there's these files and they contain nothing in them and there's all this magic and I hate all the magic, but I learned about this new project called Laravel and it's so much better. And he's like, he's like, why do you like it? I'm like, you can just run this command and it puts a file in it and you get all this free stuff that you don't have to code yourself and it's great. It's best. And he's like, how's that different from rails? And I'm like,
Matt Stauffer:
I don't know but it's different.
Jason Johnson:
I really like PHP a lot.
Matt Stauffer:
Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Jason Johnson:
And I would argue they are different. actually, that was ultimately what led us to you and to that relationship was really me standing back and going, wait a minute, these are functionally very the same. And I better go learn about the history of Laravel and where it came from. And really, before we invest huge into calling it one of our preferred frameworks, we got to understand it all. And so that was a fascinating journey in itself. But yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
I love that. So that's a really cool kind of story of like what led you there. But often I hear people say, you know, what we did at the beginning maybe might not work in the long term. So you talked about the company's scaled a lot over the last 13 years. Are you at a place where you have, you know, for example, had to transition some things from PHP to Go for performance reasons? Or is it more like you just have a preference, you know, like what kind of what's the story that allows you to choose today which things get started and which?
Jason Johnson:
Yeah, so we're really, really big that first off, we're here to solve business problems and not chase technology ever. We start with a business, we work our way backwards. Sometimes the choice between PHP or Go is actually business driven. It's based off of a library, it's based off of an integration, it's based off of something that exists out there already or an existing stack. I will tell you, even at our scale,
I always joke that like, you we're not trying to deliver internet over balloons or, you know, or, or, or stream terabytes of data to millions of people every day. The differential between a framework based advantage on speed performance for us is usually negligible. I will tell you every time we have actually chased that down to the end, we're going to switch this from PHP to node. Why? Cause node has asynchronous multi-request processing and therefore we think it'll be much faster. We get there and we go, man, we did a lot of work and really it didn't actually materially impact anything. So one thing we look at specifically when we're looking at languages, is there a metric or is there a KPI that we need to latch onto from a performance standpoint that where the difference between 50 milliseconds and 45 milliseconds actually creates a business differentiator for us, right? And if it doesn't, which oftentimes it doesn't like,
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Jason Johnson:
What I want is a framework and a tool set that my developers can use that will make them go fast and enable them to focus on business problems and not on architecting software designs or software patterns. And that's where I think Laravel really starts to shine because I tell people all the time, like, it's a toolkit. It's a toolkit like anything else. And if I hired a framer,
Matt Stauffer:
Got it.
Jason Johnson:
One option is I could give that framer a hammer and a box of nails and say go build a house or I could give them an air compressor, an air gun, a drill and all this other stuff and say go build a house. We all intuitively know which one's gonna happen faster for us.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yep.
Jason Johnson:
Laravel is an air compressor and a nail gun and all. And because of all the things that you get built into the framework, from logging to instrumentation to community, right? Understanding people that have come before you and the problems that they have solved through packages and things that can be maintained and understood and built on top of. And that's really, I think, where it comes down for us is it's speed to market. And at the end of the day, I'm a retailer. Speed to market is a huge component of how we win.
Matt Stauffer:
Is there any way, like, yeah, you're writing them in Laravel, but just more generally as a programmer and a leader of programmers, is there any specific way that you say, because we run our teams this way or because we run our deploy systems this way or because we use this particular agile processor, is there any aspect of how you all write and organize code that you feel like allows you to have both shipping quickly and also staying stable, because I think a lot of people as they kind of get bigger, they really want to make sure it's more and more stable and it becomes more rigid and locked in and they can't do anything quickly anymore.
Jason Johnson:
Yeah, and Laravel's not the only name in Sweetwater that we program in, but we have boiled it down to a very small number, I'd say kind of three main languages. And one of the things that we have been able to do...
Matt Stauffer:
Okay.
Jason Johnson:
because of that kind of prioritization and standardization, if you will, is build a platform team. We are a cloud, first we're running things in Kubernetes. That platform team has been the biggest enabler because they're like, hey, a lot of our projects are Laravel, we can help automate upgrades. We have a tool that we call...
Matt Stauffer:
Got it.
Jason Johnson:
project builder where I have a command line tool that my platform team provides me. If I want to spin up a new Laravel app, it's one command and project builder. I've got home templates injected. I've got resources spun up automatically. I've got an ephemeral environments going. I've got logging. I've got APM tools automatically injected. So by the time I go to my first deploy by committing, I've got an environment running where I have a standard set of troubleshooting tools. I've got
Matt Stauffer:
Nice.
Jason Johnson:
years of this platform team being able to watch large scale applications behind the scenes and go, this is how we're going to set up the L7 load balancer on the front end of that. This is how we're going to wrap logging to expose it. This is what the pipeline is going to look like. This is how we're going to run migrations.
It's not necessarily the framework I would say that exists for that, but it's how we've wrapped that framework and operationalized it. And that's not unique to us. You can say that against tools like Envoyer and Forge and all the other, or I don't want to name companies here, but like all the other things that exist in the Laravel ecosystem as a whole, people have solved a lot of those problems in front of you. And again, that just, that allows you to go fast.
Matt Stauffer:
And it's really interesting for me hearing someone where, again, you have such a large team and you have so much of your own internal knowledge that I think it could be really tempting to say, and therefore we're gonna do everything ourselves. And so you are doing some things yourself, right? You're building the Kubernetes setup and everything like that and this framework builder, but then you're also constantly referencing the things that exist in the Laravel ecosystem. And it sounds like you're gonna say, look, if it solves the business need, we're gonna use it and the only time we're gonna do our own thing is if there's not a functional existing tool to do it. Do you feel like that's a really intentional culture thing? Because it seems pretty special to me.
Jason Johnson:
Yeah. Yeah, but the traditional CIO CTO buy versus build conversation is something that I rack my head with all the time. The first fork in that, in that process for me personally is does it differentiate or not? If it's a significant business differentiator, I'm already leaning towards build, right? I want to control every single aspect of that angle. I don't want anyone to tell me no, or I can't or anything like that. Cause this is what I got to go do. If it's not a different, like, look, you know, I won't say the tools, but we run very standard off the shelf tools for email. Why? Cause email as.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah.
Jason Johnson:
transactional email between an internal employees is not a differentiator for me. I have to have it. I have to run it. I have to be secure, but I don't want to put a lot of money into it. And then I think there's also a subcategory of that of businesses at our scale that sometimes go, Hey, that does exist off the shelf out there, but we, can build it ourselves and maintain it ourselves internally for less money than what it would cost. There are other, there are other things. APM is a great example of one that we look at and go, man, that's really complicated and gnarly.
Matt Stauffer:
Yep. Yeah.
Jason Johnson:
We want somebody to build that for us. But when it starts, when you start talking about pipelines and deployment and CI CD and stuff like that, we look at that and we go, heck, we're actually fortunate enough to be at a scale that it's not, don't respect the outside tools. It's that we can do it ourselves and we have the engineering might to be able to maintain it.
And then when we do that, obviously we're looking at and talking to a lot of those other vendors and trying to learn from them. In all cases, we're building a lesser product. I always say that because when you only have one, if you started a company tomorrow, Matt, around one customer, you'd do exactly what they wanted, exactly the way they wanted. If you didn't need multi-language support, you wouldn't build multi-language support, right?
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah.
Jason Johnson:
So that allows us to kind of move down those paths. And so we're always looking left and right going, who can we learn from? The sum of many is always greater than the sum of one.
Matt Stauffer:
That's really cool. As you structure your teams, do you have any really strong opinions about what you think a most functional team, you for example, if you had a product idea right now and you needed it to move as quickly as it could possibly move and you have access to the entire engineering team, are you gonna put together four cross-functional teams with a designer and developer and each of them is gonna take a chunk? Do you have one mega team and I don't want to ask all your kind of secrets of how you do it but are there any kind of kind of shared you're like well it's always going to look like this it's never going to be bigger than this or any kind of ideas you can share about how you build your teams.
Jason Johnson:
So in the last two years, we have stood up a new category within Sweetwater that's actually in eight digit revenue in its first year. We went into band and orchestra that we decided that the way to win band and orchestra was by building an incredible educator portal experience. Most band and orchestra parents are non-musicians and their local teacher has a lot of opinions about what the instruments that they want to see in their classroom.
Matt Stauffer:
Okay.
Jason Johnson:
So we built industry first, like ability for each, for those directors, band directors, teachers to log in and build profiles and actually customize that experience with a custom. So you as a parent, Matt, if you know nothing, I had this happen to me exactly the way it was. Like I showed up and I work at Sweetwater, this was pre-band orchestra, but I show up to band night and my son wants to play trombone. I don't know anything about trombone. Take my $35 a month for a rental and just.
Matt Stauffer:
You don't know what's...
Jason Johnson:
I just want to make sure my son has a great instrument that he can play. And so we built an experience there where the parent can log into a portal and basically say, this is my school, this is my director, and we get a customized experience. And then we actually empowered the band teachers to drive that and have input into where it is. And when I say input, I mean a portal where they log in and actually configure their kind of custom branded pages and stuff. We also additionally went into used gear. And so the Sweetwater marketplace where our differentiator there,
Matt Stauffer:
Okay.
Jason Johnson:
is if you sell, you can get the value of your sale back in a Sweetwater gift card with zero fees. So if you want to sell a piece of gear, like the microphone that you have, you decide to sell it, you sell it for a hundred bucks, you can turn around and use that.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, you don't take that 13 % hit.
Jason Johnson:
Yeah, you don't take the 13 % hit. And if you do, there's a, you you can get cash out of it, like other used marketplaces, and you're going to pay a fee because we have processing and stuff. But certainly the one for us is the uplift in new gear sales, right?
Matt Stauffer:
That's so cool.
Jason Johnson:
In both of those cases, we built as standalone teams as humanly possible, meaning that, no, I didn't put a platform team member in there, but I did go over to platform and say, hey, you have to have a dedicated resource for this. Some shared services, but as standalone as possible development teams that are in the five to six people range, not huge, not two people, and said, hey, we're going to empower you to go top to bottom with product manager and really focus on and hone in on this art of
Matt Stauffer:
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jason Johnson:
of building this. I think that's the way you win those types of conversations. And on the opposite side, on the enterprise side, have project teams, we have quick hit teams that are relatively similar in size, and we're floating work back and forth amongst those teams, more in a maintenance mode type capacity where those teams oftentimes are pushing. Sweetwater does over 300 deploys a week and literally thousands
Matt Stauffer:
Love that.
Jason Johnson:
of changes, but on those mature platforms that have been around for years and years and years, it's a hundred small tweaks every week with maybe a big project injecting in there every once in a while. So that's how we organize people and we are constantly reorganizing and shifting people around and moving them in and out of teams as needed. We try to maintain some healthy balance there of giving people a home and keeping them with people they like to work with and stuff against...
The other side which is we're business and our job is to serve the business and that means we have to morph everything we do all the time to make sure that we are providing our very best selves back to the business and that requires, you know team shifts so.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah. You, man, you're just giving me so much good. I hope you don't mind that I just keep going...
Jason Johnson:
Yeah, keep going.
Matt Stauffer:
I talk often about when companies get bigger, you know, they often run into a rift between product and engineering or design and engineering or business and engineering, whatever it is. And, and they get to the point where the relationships between the two are so fraught that when we come in and try and help the company, and they say, can you code? And also, can you help us figure out what's wrong with engineering? Nine times out of 10, one of the biggest problems is that engineering doesn't trust product and product doesn't trust engineering, and they have this really bad communication together. What does it look like for you all to build healthy relationships together? How do you ensure that those groups are feeling like they're collaborating versus kind of like, well, I want this and you're not willing to give it, and you're demanding this because you don't understand, and how do you build that communication well?
Jason Johnson:
First off, think, I know culture, culture, culture, culture builds strategy, culture beats strategy any day. You just, you have to build a culture of open and collaborative communication. You have to ensure that both sides understand.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Jason Johnson:
Whether that customer is internal or external, that everything that everybody's doing, I always say like there's an assumption there's a customer behind it. If my phone rang right now and it was a sales engineer on our sales floor, I would assume that they're calling me not because they want to talk to me, but because there's a customer behind that. So you have to really start laying that foundation that like, we're all here to serve the customer. And in some cases on the engineering side, you know, I see this dramatic pull against like, hey, you can't just have apps that are out of date. You can't have apps that have out of date dependencies.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Jason Johnson:
We live in a security driven world, compliance privacy driven world, especially as a retailer here, where there are real pulls on these engineering teams of things that we either shouldn't do or don't make sense and work that product managers don't really love to care about traditionally.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah, technical debt?
Jason Johnson:
Technical debt and what the business needs. And I think really just it comes down to really, think getting people in a room together virtually or physically and saying, hey, what is it that I need and what is it that you need and how do we make this better or what version of this can we come up with it that solves the problem and makes it happen? I think that there has to be a lot of respect between those teams and there has to be a deep understanding of what the win is, how we're going to measure the win. And I will tell you like,
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Jason Johnson:
I tell engineers that work for me, say, look, like...
If you're struggling with your job, if you're struggling with getting the work done, I will work with you, the team will work with you, we will provide you the best amount of resources that you've ever had in any company to try to get you where you need to go. If you're struggling with the kindergarten rules, which is treating people nicely, respecting boundaries, communicating, if you're struggling with those rules, I have zero tolerance for that. You just won't exist on my team. And I'm not trying to be a jerk about it. It's not like you're not gonna get a warning or two, but...
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Hmm.
Jason Johnson:
Like these are things that are our easiest love language to have with each other is being humanistic and, you know, breaking bread together and speaking nicely with each other and understanding the other person's position. We have zero tolerance as a corporation for missing on those fronts. And I think that helps lay the culture that...
Matt Stauffer:
I love that.
Jason Johnson:
We all have the same logo at the bottom of our badge and we're all trying to serve the same larger set of customers, but certainly within there, every team has needs and you have to understand those needs and understand what's driving them.
Matt Stauffer:
I'm gonna steal that kindergarten rules from you because that is it's such a great distinction, you know and Culture fit is something that people have often used in the past to weaponize, you know well, you're not like me enough but kindergarten rules is like it's you don't have to be like me. But you have to treat people with kindness and respect and you know, I don't know. I just I love that I really appreciate that.
Jason Johnson:
Yeah. Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Okay, so speaking of the people that you have there, one of the things that's unique about y'all is that everybody is together in the same physical space. And I don't know if that changed at all during the pandemic or what that was like, but overall, of any technical team you know, especially in the PHP world, you're one of the only ones I know where that's the case. So I always ask everybody, what's your experience been like in hiring Laravel developers? But it's a especially interesting question for you when it's Fort Wayne.
What has your experience been like in hiring Laravel developers in Fort Wayne, Indiana?
Jason Johnson:
Yeah, just a big old company right here in the middle of a bunch of cornfields.
Matt Stauffer:
Yes, exactly.
Jason Johnson:
Look, we have been fortunate to continue to find great talent and continue to sway people into moving to Fort Wayne. And I really believe living a better life than most places. I think, ya know, shame was plugged, but Fort Wayne was recently named one of the number one city in the country for cost of living and both culture and environment. Ya know, so Fort Wayne is a great place and we have a very, very active recruiting team. And at the same time, I can tell you, story after story after story of somebody who was in our warehouse distribution center washing dishes in our diner or whatever who said, hey, did you happen to know I'm going to college to be in computer science? And we've brought them in as interns and we have built a lot of our own too.
Matt Stauffer:
Really?
Jason Johnson:
And their successes, I think of every hire as somebody, do I need somebody who's going to lead me someplace or do I need somebody who I can lead someplace? And you need a good mix of that across every team. And we've had great success in building people and also going and finding experts and getting them to come to Four Wayne.
And I think I would call it a non-issue for us really. We still are all work in person. We do hybrid. We're fine if you want to work a couple of days from home. We have a very liberal policy around that. But we do think you need to be in our area, in our region. We have a couple people these days that work remotely, but I could count them on one hand for various reasons. In fact, most of them were in Fort Wayne and had some family event that they said, hey, I got to go back home to where my mom is for the next couple of years. I think I'm going to move back. I don't know.
We said, hey, we can make that work for you. We can support that. But at the end of the day, the process of making music is collaborative. And the process of designing and working with musicians is collaborative. You don't find a lot of musicians playing over Zoom like we did in the pandemic. They're together. And that is really, really built into the DNA of our company.
Matt Stauffer:
Is, I mean, you see there's a guitar in the background right now. For those who are just listening to the audio version, do you find that there's a more than average number of musicians working at Sweetwater, do you think? Yeah.
Jason Johnson:
Absolutely. Yeah, I used to joke that I was part of the dirty secret. I'm not a musician, even though I own a couple guitars. I always joke that I play the QWERTY keyboard.
But more and more, and you've never had to be a musician to work here, but there are, obviously we attract a lot of musicians because they wanna be where they are. In the same way that when you build a great technology stack and you do that in a fun way, you will attract technologists because people wanna work on fun things.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that's very cool. So if somebody wanted to be where you are in your career, we've talked a lot about kind of Sweetwater, the organization, but let's talk about Jason Johnson, the man. Somebody looked at what you're doing in the, and I just want to be really transparent that sometimes when, you know, and this is for the listeners, sometimes, you know, want to be in that position is want to have that level of success and acclaim. But often folks look at someone like Jason and want to be like Jason because I'm like, that's the impact I want to make in the world. Like I see how he talks about his employees and I would like to make a positive impact on employees lives. So I'm asking the whole way across the board, if someone were to want to be in a position like you, where they were able to make the impact that you're making, and they were just, let's just say they were a programmer or a project manager right now, do you have any piece of advice? Do you have any books or videos or anything where you're like, you know what, like this is the first place I would turn you?
Jason Johnson:
Yeah, first off, I would just like, you know, have a level of humility, you know, just be a try to every day I try to be the best version of myself in no way shape or form saying I'm perfect, even remotely close. But I think if you if you have a level of vulnerability and a level of and a level of service to the people around you, you will find out your blind spots and you will find out the things that are holding you back. I tell people time and time again, like the very first thing you have to do is be really, really good at the job you have. Sometimes I find people chasing growth so hard that they forget to be really good at the job they have. And it's like that is your biggest platform for successes right where you are right now.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that's so good.
Jason Johnson:
I think the other thing, and I'll name off some very specific books here, I would tell you, and I would think people would tell you about me if they were sitting here next to me, you have to be an information and knowledge vacuum. I read constantly, I'm obsessive, I use a tool for subscribing to RSS feeds and finding stuff. I obsess over information, frankly, because I got 230 people that could walk in my office at any point in time and tell me I need to do something. And if I'm not even remotely educated on that topic,
I could be saying no to something that's the best idea that that person ever had, right? Or that has ever been presented to me and not know it. You have to constantly be reading and understanding and gaining knowledge. That old saying, know, leaders are readers and readers are leaders, I believe is so true.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah that's awesome.
Jason Johnson:
My favorite books, Jaco's Extreme Ownership, great, great, great book, especially if you talk about being really good at your job. There's a book called Upstream, which is all about upstream thinking and moving around and thinking of things in upstream and downstream dependencies. And when you talk about like, I'm a developer and I want to do a really good job, well, what's my upstream dependency? It is a project manager. You have to embrace that. You have to figure out how do I move upstream? How do I communicate with these people?
Matt Stauffer:
Hmm. Yeah.
Jason Johnson:
168 Hours is a wonderful book. actually have it sitting here on my desk. We do a mentor program here and I'm going through it with my mentee right now. I want you to think about the most...
Matt Stauffer:
Alright. Cool.
Jason Johnson:
important person in the world to you. I want you to think about the best person in the world, the person that you look at and say, man, they get it all done, they do it all. They have the same amount of number of hours in a week. Hours in a week is the great equalizer in our world. And the book would argue that if I asked you, Matt, for 10 hours of your time tomorrow, you'd probably tell me, Jason, I don't have 10 hours. And yet if you woke up tomorrow and your hot water heater broke, that hot water heater would be fixed by the end of the day, right?
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah.
Jason Johnson:
So we don't manage time. That's I think the biggest fallacy in the world. Time is not something you manage. The last minute is gone. It doesn't need to be managed. You manage priorities. And those priorities have to align with where you wanna go. And that leads me to my last tip, which is you have to schedule it. You have to do it with purpose. You have to understand where do I wanna be in three years, where do I wanna be in five years, and turn those goals into action and actually dedicate time. And time and time again, when I mentor people or I talk about peer leaders, they say, hey, I wanna do X. And I'm like, great, let's look at your calendar. And their calendar will have 100 % of Y on it. And I'm like,
Is X a dream? Is it a hope? Do you think it's gonna magically happen through for it? Like you're just gonna will it to happen?
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Huh.
Jason Johnson:
Like you're not actually aligning with where you wanna go. You have to spend your time pointed in the direction you wanna go. that can be really hard. There's lots of holes at all of us, especially kids, family, even stuff inside work, outside work. You gotta make it important.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Hmm. I don't know about you, but my, one of the things I've found is that to manage my ADHD, I look at the beginning of the week and I put everything I'm to do that week on my calendar. Even if it's not a meeting, I'm like, well, I need to write this thing or whatever. And that's kind of a way that I schedule it. And looking back on my calendar is a way for me to figure out, did I focus on the things that I wanted to focus on in part by saying, are those the right items? But they also part of saying, did I actually do those things when I said them or did I get pulled into urgent stuff and then I skipped the important things? So that's really kind of a helpful reminder there with that book. And listeners, as always, you'll know, we'll put all those in the show notes. So just check them out if you need links to them.
OK, so let's say it wasn't somebody who wanted to hit your same point in your career, but rather another person, maybe their business is not the same size as yours, or maybe it is and they're either considering Laravel or they're using Laravel.
Jason Johnson:
Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
If somebody's in that place where they're at a CTO or CIO level and they're trying to figure out, you know, what is the best technical architecture for us to use? What's the best frameworks to use the language? Do you have any one piece of advice to help guide them as they're making the decisions, you know, either towards using Laravel well, or even towards using Laravel or whether or not to use Laravel in the first place of what metrics to use? And you kind of talked about this a little bit earlier, but if like there's one way to say like, this is how you make decisions about your big technical architectures. Like what, what, what are you trying to guide against?
Jason Johnson:
Yeah, I think one of the things that I, that I think about a lot is like, do we actually even know what our technical architect, like, can't, are we even in a position? Some, I always had a friend who said, tell me how it's going to fail and I'll design around it. Right.
And the problem is, is that I think a lot of times we don't actually really even understand what those technical architecture needs really truly are. So we run into until we run into them and then they're very, very apparent. You know, the things that I look for, especially in choosing, you know, whether I would choose a closed source paid product or an open source product or is there strong support? Is there a strong community? Are there people that potentially are going to have been there before or done that? Or does the framework have an opinionated way of doing this?
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Jason Johnson:
That then has optionality in it or can scale well. And I think that...
I think queuing in Laravel is a very good example of that. Should I be queuing out of the database? Maybe at a scale where that makes sense. But you have optionality in there, drivers and different backend plugins that can manipulate like that and allow you to grow behind the scenes into some of those different areas. And so there is power in numbers there versus rolling my own framework or starting from scratch. I think that becomes the true
Matt Stauffer:
Hmm, that's really good.
Jason Johnson:
power is like, hey, if I need to go get help, can that person, can I go get help? Can that person jump in and go, I conceptually can see what's going on here pretty quick. And I think Laravel as a framework allows you to do that. And I think that's when we've gotten into, I wouldn't call it jams, but when we've run into something and said, hey, we think there's a better way to do this, leaning on the greater community or going out and looking at patterns of how other folks have solved things has been those unlocks that we've looked for.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that's really good. When you have as many programmers working for you as you do and you're thankfully you haven't done it all yourself. You know, you're working in existing ecosystem What does it look like to help those folks all kind of stay up to date on those things? Cuz you know you've got what you already have but in order to even take advantage of that optionality you're talking about they have to understand the framework they have to understand the advances and maybe the optionality is something that didn't exist when they joined and now does.
What does it look like to keep that large of a team up to date on things technically?
Jason Johnson:
I think again that... I think the foundation of that is in culture, is in saying, we're a continuous improving culture. How do we freely share information, setting up vehicles for that? We layer on top of that. We are fortunate enough to be able to have what we call the education team, which is a couple of folks, but we actually have a couple of people dedicated to developer experience, to putting out new information. And then the capstone of that, which is really great, is we do this thing called Sweet Geek Speak every month. And Sweet Geek Speak started in my office. I had two leaders in my office that were having some friction between the two of them and I stood back and I remember they left and I had a different leader who's now my right hand guy next to me and I looked at him and I said, man, it's so frustrating to me that sometimes these teams only see the worst of each other. They only ever get the opportunity to talk to each other when one project causes pain for another project or hey, you changed this and you never told me and so it broke this thing over here and now I'm dealing with it. You have to find, and Sweet Geek Speak was like, show and tell. Like, what if we brought everybody together once a month and we got people got to present on their projects, people got to present on the architectural decisions they made, and people got to show all the good stuff. And then you could understand that there was, you know, 99% good and 1 % friction, right? Which I've always felt at the top, really, really fortunate to be able to look down and see all that. And it was like, how do I share that with everybody? And the guy next to me goes, man, I really have wanted to become a better public speaker. And that's started our very first, you know, SGS.
Matt Stauffer:
That's so cool.
Jason Johnson:
We use that platform now. One of the things we negotiate oftentimes in contracts when we're signing on as software as a service is like, Hey, will you come down and present to our team? Will you provide architectural support in the rears and, and, and do business updates on how, what's the latest in your product? Cause I think that's another thing you can buy an engine that's a platform, use a small chunk of it. And you also then have to track that platform. How are they progressing? What are the new things they're injecting in you aren't using? say all that the same, it just has to be with purpose. You have to decide...
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that's brilliant.
Jason Johnson:
that people need to learn. And so we do that with tech leader lunch and learns. do that with with man Matt, you'd be surprised what you can get people do for you just buy lunch. A lot of this stuff is like, hey, can I will you give me an hour over lunch to talk about the latest thing in Laravel and and and we'll order some pizzas and people like, yeah, you know.
Matt Stauffer:
That's great. That's awesome.
Jason Johnson:
So we are intentful and purposeful with injecting that information and hiring curious people helps too.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. So one of the things you keep saying in each of my questions is, well, I saw the problem and then I addressed the problem as it was. But you don't say is, this is how I'm seeing other people doing it. I'm not saying you don't do research and learn what other people are doing. But one of the things I've seen as a constant problem when we're coming in to fix people's organizational issues is I say, well, why'd you build that process? Well, they don't say this, but the end result is because that's just what you do.
Right? know, we had a problem and we looked how other people are solving that problem and it looks like this is what they did solve the problem, so we just implemented it without really fully understanding how or whether it actually would kind of solve the problem. How did you get to be this way where you feel like you have the ability to kind of approach the problem and actually address the issue? Is that a mindset thing? Is that a culture thing? Is that a training thing?
What puts you in that position to feel comfortable and confident that you can do that?
Jason Johnson:
Yeah, I think that first off, again, I go back to vulnerability. Like I am no, you know, I don't know all the answers. But when you and a team of people can decide, yes, this is a problem.
Matt Stauffer:
Mmm, yes!
Jason Johnson:
Right. You know, I oftentimes I hear people say like, want to make this change and, and, and oftentimes I'm talking outside of this company, like, I want to make this change, but nobody wants to do it or I'm struggling with doing it. And it's like, do you guys even, do you have an agreed upon problem? Because I've personally found that when you have an agreed upon problem, most people are willing to make change to solve. And, a lot of stuff has just been like, Hey, I think we need to spend a lot more time talking about lean manufacturing in the software development process. I think we need to spend a lot more time talking about how we think of an MVP and iteration in software as how we not treat people, but how we organize and think of how workflows through our team. We have a problem. What do we think the MVP is to solve that problem from a process standpoint? Let's implement it. And then let's all agree that we're going to continue to iterate on it over and over and over again until we all look at it go, we solved that. It's not a giant reorg. It's not a waving the hand and going, here's a magical solution.
Matt Stauffer:
Just buy my book, you know?
Jason Johnson:
Buy my book and I don't want to get into some big philosophical debate, but I feel like that a little bit with Agile. People have this like, take it 100 % or don't take it at all type vibe. And it's like, man, take it. And then when you find the parts that don't work for your organization, don't do them. Like, it really is that simple.
Matt Stauffer:
That simple.
Jason Johnson:
Or or or mutate them to what does work for you and what is there but underneath there you do have to have a set of guiding principles you do have to have a clear understanding of who we are and who we're serving and what the outcome is that's gonna make everybody happy and then you just wrap process around it, you know over and over and over again until there you go. We do blameless post mortems on everything. I bet this week we will have 20 blameless post mortems on something that happened in our organization that everything from we had an authentication outage that was caused by
Matt Stauffer:
Wow.
Jason Johnson:
an A-B test this past week to the tiniest little hiccup on somewhere. But we are committed to getting in a room together, documenting that process, going through a standardized process that asks the right questions, and then turning that into actual action items. And I've done some consulting on the side and dealt with other organizations too. And I will tell you the number of times that I hear or I've witnessed folks getting together and going, yeah, wouldn't it be great if we did this? And then that would never happen.
And then that just goes into either like you have to be locked tight in that feedback of going I failed because... My corrective action is going to be and that is now tracked work and we're gonna do it and I tell our teams time and time again like You know our job is to fail fast. That doesn't mean fail recklessly
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Jason Johnson:
But our job is to fail fast and as long as we're not repetitively making the same mistakes over and over again as a leader I'm good because I know that we're gonna make the mistake. We're gonna put a corrective action in place and then we're gonna make another mistake and that's how you get better That's how you get better as a team. That's how you deliver faster and when people aren't afraid to fail. They do their best work.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. And part of the reason why they're not afraid to fail is because their leadership is being vulnerable to their own shortcomings. And so if the whole way down the stack, we're all being good people, we're all working hard, we're being honest when we make a mistake and we know how to fix that mistake, we don't make it again, it's magical, right? I love that.
Jason Johnson:
Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and, and, hopefully this doesn't hit too close to home for you, Matt, but like, I will tell you, so many, many years ago, we had a particular contractor that was working for us that deleted a terabyte database of ours, right. And caused a massive outage and we didn't have good backups. And that account, that contractor had an open, had access to an over-provision account. Still to this day on that day, we have what we call Postgres Day. And we make cookies. We actually have a local company that makes us customized elephant cookies that prints the Postgres logo on. And every year we stop and we say, here's all the improvements we've made over the last year to prevent that from happening again.
Matt Stauffer:
Nice.
Jason Johnson:
And Postgres Day has become much more than just Postgres. It's been representative of every database engine in our organization. But we had something happen to us, you could argue, that would have been really easy for us to just go, that's that person's fault.
They should have never done it. They're an idiot. You know, whatever, right? But we didn't, we looked at it we said, that should have never been possible to happen. And that's on us. That's on our leadership. That's on how we're running our technology stacks. The very first year we did that, there was over, there was like, I think it was 54, don't quote me on that, but was 54 unique changes that we had made to our stack that year to prevent that. And we're still making changes. And I use that as a point to say, like, you just have to think about the long game there and go, these aren't things happening to me, these are things that are happening. And my job is to make sure that there's a culture that says, if something happens that we didn't like or didn't feel good or exposed risk to the business, we're gonna go do something about it and we're gonna make that fun and healthy.
You should have seen our CEO's face when he came in and ate a Postgres cookie and was like, here's this thing that almost not destroyed that would have been way over, but here's this major event that happened in my business. And my entire IT team is high-fiving themselves and laughing and having fun about it, right? That's how you make your biggest challenges turn into a great place to work.
Matt Stauffer:
I mean you know, I know we're both parents. That sounds like a parenting thing. That sounds like a life thing. Yeah, you're saying it's not happening to me. It just happened and we can kind of move forward with it. That's pretty incredible.
Jason Johnson:
Yeah, rip the rear view mirror off, man. There's a reason the rear view mirror is so much smaller than the windshield, for sure. You have to look forward.
Matt Stauffer:
Okay. Yeah, I love that. I want to talk much longer, but I do want to wrap it. I want to honor the time we have. So I have my last three questions I ask everybody. So number one, are you hiring or do you plan to hire any time in the near future? And if so, how can people find out about it?
Jason Johnson:
Yeah, so I would say we're always hiring at different paces, but yes, you can find out about it. We post our jobs on LinkedIn. We post our jobs at sweetwater.com/careers. And so you can check first party there and apply. And we love to have conversations and meet, you know, meet new people all the time. So yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Okay, second thing is, is there anything you'd like to plug? Any link that you wanna share with people, they should go check it out.
Jason Johnson:
I going to have to prevent myself from tearing up here. Just so know, Matt has no idea I'm going to go here. But when you came to visit us several years ago, we sat in a big long boardroom and we had lunch with my team.
And you personally called me out in front of my team. So one of the things that we've struggled with is diversity in our workplace. We are in Fort Wayne, Indiana. We are in the middle of a cornfield. It is hard. And I remember you sitting there and you go, Jason, this table kind of looks all the same. And I said, yeah, Matt, that's because my HR department isn't bringing me diverse candidates. My HR department's not doing this. My HR, my HR, yada, yada, yada. We can't find them. They don't exist in Fort Wayne. And you looked at me in front of my entire team and you said, that's BS.
He said, I don't, I don't believe that for one minute. And you said you have to be purposeful about it. You have to, you have to spend time focusing on it. You have to choose to want to have a diverse team. And listen, I'm not just talking about, you know, the color of your skin or anything else. I'm talking about diverse engineering aspects. I'm talking about diverse backgrounds, diverse languages, diversity in its truest sense. And that hit me at my core at the time, and I never really shared that with you. But we took that and put it in the same engine that you and I have been talking about this entire podcast and we said, we're gonna go do this with purpose and we're gonna hold a high standard. We're not gonna do it because, hey, we wanna have diversity and so let's just check a box and have diversity, but we're gonna go find real diverse candidates in all these categories and it's gonna be something that we do because we think and we know it will build better teams and I will tell you, I have experienced that, I have lived it. I had someone that I respect call me out on it and say, hey I don't think you're thinking about this right and so my biggest plug would be first off choose to go build diverse teams with diverse backgrounds. You will have better products You will make better relationships and it will be everything never lower your standard to get there.
And then the second thing is surround yourself with people who are willing to tell you the things that you don't want to hear and embrace and love them when they do, because it hurts. It hurts deep. I've had people sit in my office and tell me things that I have walked away going and you know, there's a roller coaster there. That can't be true. And I never said that. But like appreciate the people that are willing to tell you the things that you don't want to hear in your life, because those are the unlocks.
It's someone sitting in front of you and going, I know you want to grow and be a vice president, but you're not actually really good at the job you have now. That is gold. It is a gift and you need to treat it as a gift because those are the things that are going to propel you past everyone else. You have to do what the 99% won't to be in the 1%. And I really think it's as little as listening and appreciating the people around you because oftentimes it's there. It's just, you're not, your receiver's not on.
Matt Stauffer:
Hmm. It's hard to receive that kind of feedback. mean, we're trained not to. We're trained not to be vulnerable. We're trained that that makes us, you know, I mean, one of the things you said was, excuse me, it's dusty in here. You said, all right,
Jason Johnson:
allergies in season is crazy.
Matt Stauffer:
It's terrible. And one of the things you said earlier was that it's it's you. was asking about the thing about like, how do you remain open and how do you things allow things to change? And everything you said, well, you got to be vulnerable.
And the word vulnerable can mean this kind of very simple and narrow and, you know, unmeaningful like caricature. But at its core, it's like it's a combination of sharing that you've made mistakes but in order to do so, you also have to share that you might make more mistakes and have to be open to that possibility that you were imperfect. And I feel like you almost like one of the first words out of your mouth in this podcast where I'm not perfect, I don't have anything right or whatever. But it didn't make you seem any less capable or strong or accomplished in doing so.
And that comes from this kind of like this confident vulnerability thing. And so I really appreciate you sharing that because we are trained that our strength comes from posturing, right? Our strengths come, strengths comes from at least somewhat believing eternally, but certainly telling the whole world, I already know everything and I already have it. And that's why you should put me in this new position. And so the idea that the goals we want to accomplish and the growth we want to have and the things we want to aim for can be had by putting ourselves in that hardest place of being told you don't have it, you're not right, you know, whatever. And then also, but there's space and that you can grow. That's some real emotionally complex, mature kind of things that we want people to get to. But I also feel like you make it sound so approachable.
You know, like I want to ask you like well, how do we do it? But i'm like you've already kind of laid that out three or four times on this podcast I don't think there's anything more to ask. But it's just really beautiful. I really appreciate you sharing it.
Jason Johnson:
I really think it is a lot simpler than we as human beings make it out to be. If I'm scared in a situation, you're probably scared too, right? I mean, and I think that's a, I think it's a thing that...
Matt Stauffer:
Hmm, yeah.
Jason Johnson:
I have found, and obviously I live in a very unique world here, but I have found in every case in my life that when I put myself out there and I expect to be stomped on or judged or whatever, that what I actually find is connection. I find people that go, I was thinking that too and I just didn't want to say it. And that gives you, I think what your number one power is as a leader is authenticity. And when people realize that, you know, that if you're a chief executive officer or whatever, you just wake up and put your pants on the same way that everybody else is. Your kid tells you no and yells at you the same way everyone else is getting it. It kind of levels the playing field. We're just a bunch of smart people in a room trying to figure out how to do our best work. That's the real unlock, for sure.
Matt Stauffer:
That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for sharing that. Yeah, I'm gonna be watching this one back later. Okay, the actual last question. No, it's good. The actual last question is if your boss whatever walked in the door today and said as a result of some business happenings that happened to the company today here's a hundred million dollars. You don't need to come back tomorrow. Thank you so much for your service to the company. What do you do tomorrow when you wake up?
Jason Johnson:
Okay, so it's the same thing. I love this interview. This is my favorite interview question, right? I snap my fingers. I usually say, my favorite interview question is like, hey, Matt, I snap my fingers, you just won the lottery, you never have to worry about money again for your life. Tell me what you're gonna do with the rest of your life. And the answers I don't want are, I'm gonna pay off my house, I'm gonna buy my mom a car, I'm gonna buy my, of course, everybody's gonna do that if they had an infinite amount of money, great. You've now fast forward a month or two months. If you your vacation, you're bored, what's your purpose?
I will tell you, I think there is a huge learning disparity in the technology industry. Maybe not as much on the software development side. I do think it exists, but like for instance, if I ask people all the time, or people ask me all the time, like...
Normally folks in their senior year of college, they're like, hey, I want to go be a programmer. How do I make the most money? And I'm like, you want to make the most money? You want to optimize for fame? Because the world needs a lot of RPG AS400 COBOL programmers right now. If you want to go make $350,000 a year in two years out of college, have a personality, know how to program in one of these legacy languages, and you will be a rocket ship, right? Most people look at that and go, I don't want to do that. That's not really, that doesn't sound fun, right? Okay, great.
Matt Stauffer:
Yes, yeah, yep. Okay, well then optimize for that. Yeah.
Jason Johnson:
Yeah, go do that. How do you even start that? I don't even have an AS400. I don't even know how to get access to that.
You know, so many network technologies, right? Or cloud technologies, like there's an information gap out there. Some of them have a high lift or high barrier entry to actually learn on them. I have a Cisco certification long ago. I remember scrapping up gear and it's like, well, can I go to work and learn on gear? Well, no, they don't want you learning on the only production gear they have that's running everything. Well, and I can't afford a lab gear.
Matt, I would go start a data center in Fort Wayne. It was a giant playground that allowed people to come in and learn and have access to technologies, tools, and equipment to actually better our industry. I think that we are stunting the growth of our industry a little bit because information is not as accessible as it should be to students. How many, I'm sorry, but how many college kids do we need coming out building a to-do app?
Matt Stauffer:
In JavaScript. Yeah. Yeah.
Jason Johnson:
in JavaScript or in Swift or whatever. And then they're going to turn around and come to me and I'm going to go, that's Q, but have you ever interacted with a database engine and not a database engine that has 20 rows in it, but a database engine that has 20 million rows in it where indexing and normalization and all these kind of critical things start to hit a mass where that creates problems and you're going to actually run into that.
That's the environment I would just love to go build and have a hole into if I had $100 million sitting on my plate. And then I've always thought for me, how cool would it be to have a giant playground of stuff that, you know, if it breaks at five o'clock on a Friday night, you're like, yeah, go home for the weekend, we'll fix it on Monday, it's not running anything important. Yeah, I like the idea of.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, right. That sounds very peaceful. I like that idea. Yeah. Well, that's incredible. I really, that's such a fascinating answer. This entire, I literally, I'm gonna go back and rewatch this multiple times. This entire interview has got my brain spinning in so many different directions. And I'm just really grateful for you spending so much time sharing your hard earned, not only in terms of just like hard earned in terms of time, but hard earned in terms of vulnerability and in terms of intentional growth.
Knowledge and experience with everybody in this podcast like this was this was really special.
Jason Johnson:
Can I tell you my favorite answer I got in an interview on that question?
Matt Stauffer:
Yes!
Jason Johnson:
So I had a gentleman, he works here now. He goes, would garden. I would spend all my time gardening. I'd go build a beautiful garden.
Matt Stauffer:
Great.
Jason Johnson:
And I said to him, said, that's awesome. Like, are you into like, you know, organic food? Are you into this? And he goes, no, flowers. And he pulls out his phone and he starts showing me this massive garden that he's built in his house and he starts going really really deep into all these flowers and different types of flowers and all this type of stuff and the root of the question is like tell me what you're passionate about and for me as a leader like I don't really care what you're passionate about as a person I just want you to have passion.
Matt Stauffer:
Yes.
Jason Johnson:
And so that was my favorite answer. I've gotten all sorts of answers over the years, but my favorite answer was this guy. And I learned something about that human being that he's like super into flowers and way over my head, I'll be honest with you. I always, I'm like a plant hospice worker, slowly issuing them off into death, but super, super cool to learn from people.
Matt Stauffer:
That's wonderful. And yeah, it's just so great to have people that are full and complete human beings and they don't exist only to code.
Jason Johnson:
That's right. Yeah, totally. Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
That's great. Well, again, it was an incredible pleasure having you. I know it kept you longer than planned and thank you for your time. Thank you for your expertise. We'll make sure that everything, Jason and LinkedIn and everything like that are all posted in the show notes. If you want to follow him, please feel free to check that out. Yeah, thank you again, Jason.
Jason Johnson:
Thanks, Matt.
Matt Stauffer:
And with the rest of you, we'll see you all next time.