Embracing Diversity in Industrial Automation with Alex Marcy (LinkedIn LIVE)

Nikki: Hey everybody. Welcome to another LinkedIn Live edition of Automation Ladies, we have Alex Marcy with us from Corso Systems today. We've known Alex around the way on LinkedIn for a while now, and I managed to liten to one of his episodes of the Inductive Automation podcast, I think, what is it called, Alex?

Inductive Conversations. Yep. Am I getting that right? Yeah. A little bit about how he got his start and how Corso systems came to be. They do a lot of Ignition work and, and things like that. So I was just very intrigued and I've seen his posts around diversity in the workplace and building company culture and his hot take on some things, and I tend to agree with him quite a bit.

So it was lovely to get him to come onto the show and talk about some of the stuff and especially to be willing to do it live because I know that we have, you know, quite a bit of community and people that we know in common, but I'm sure also maybe audiences that either haven't heard of our show and know Alex or vice versa.

So this is season two, and what we're doing is a little bit different. This time we're recording some episodes as audio only, and then we're doing some that are LinkedIn Lives, and then we turn them into audio. They usually get released about couple of weeks afterward. We have a little bit of a queue now.

But it's definitely fun. And unfortunately today, Ali is not able to join us, not because she didn't wanna be here, but as you guys know, sometimes her fieldwork and in this case remote, but very time-pressing work took over. And that's why it's also wonderful that there are two of us. 

So I wanna thank our sponsors before we get started.

Clarify and Factory Fix. If you guys haven't heard of them, hopefully, you have by now. And then of course, Ali's wonderful company Process & Controls Engineering LLC.

And the official sponsor of this episode is once again Quotebeam, my wonderful employer. We can help you get parts. Any part of that bill of materials that is just taking too long from the factory, or if you don't have a great distributor or somebody that you know to go to to request a quote, Quotebeam can help. We are an online platform. We work with a bunch of authorized distributors to kind of be an online arm or outlet to help them sell their inventory.

And then what we do, particularly for systems integrators, machine builders, and everybody else in our community is hopefully make it easy to get the quotes that you need, and especially find those parts in stock. We just got a nice project with somebody that I know from LinkedIn: They're looking to quote some spares to their customer, and a lot of these items come in on equipment or sub-assemblies to them so they don't have all of the items in their ERP system to be able to easily create quotes for their customer or even source them.

So we're putting together a quote for sort of a spare parts package. It's not something that you'll find on our website, but we just love helping and adding value where we can to everybody in our community. Keep the requests coming for random stuff that we can help you with. There's a chat icon right on Quotebeam.com. You can talk to us. We're real people. One of them is me.

Anyway, with that said, Alex, thank you so much for coming on the show and welcome to Automation Ladies.

Alex: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Nikki: So it is the afternoon. Where are you at and what is time zone?

Alex: I'm in Washington, DC and it's Eastern time, so 4:00 PM Okay.

Nikki: Well, I bet you're happy with the new timing then, so you can do this and, and get home at a reasonable hour.

Alex: Although I'm home.

Nikki: Okay, you're at home.  That is actually ideal.

Alex: One of the good things about Corso is we've been remote since day one, so long before the pandemic ever crossed anybody's minds.

Nikki: Woohoo!

Alex: Yeah.

Nikki: So can you tell me, answer our only standard question here on Automation Ladies, which is can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about how you got to be where you're at today?

Alex: So I'm Alex Marcy, the CEO of Corso Systems. My initial background and entry into all of this was I got a degree in chemical engineering in Reno, Nevada, where I'm from, from the University of Nevada Reno.

I graduated in 2006. I don't know if there's a good year for jobs ever, but it was not a good year for jobs that year. I applied to like 500 or a thousand things and interviewed at like 50 or 60, and I got like one offer in Tallahassee, Florida, and did not wanna move to Tallahassee. So I went to Sonoma County, California, and I went to their permitting department and applied there.

And I went to the interview and there were 10 standard questions, and my answer was like, I have zero experience with any of these 10 questions. So, I am the least qualified person in the room and they called me a week later and are like, you got the job! I'm like, okay, that makes no sense at all, but it's the only job I have, so I'll take it.

The general manager of the permitting department was a chemical engineer and he said I was the only chemical engineer that applied. It was an entry-level role, so they wanted somebody with no experience. So that kind of fit the bill. So I worked there for a year and then moved back to Reno and started working for a system integrator in Reno that was based out of the Bay Area.

And I had really enjoyed process controls and automation in school, but I didn't really know that that was a thing that people did or how to get into that or that system integration or even a PLC or anything existed. It was kind of an older generation of professors and they were more focused on theoretical things than practical things.

So I got a job at the integrator and it was like, this is my dream job. I get to work with process controls and automation and computers and databases, and ultimately I should have gone and gotten a degree in computer science. Like, I didn't even know that that was a thing when I went to college. So going down that path opened some doors that I would've opened in a different way had I known that was available.

But yeah, got involved there, worked there for a few years, worked on a lot of water, wastewater, a lot of mining and minerals in Nevada. There's a lot of gold mining and silver mining and things. A lot of food and beverage and then went to Italy to work on solar plants for like six months straight.

It was like an all-expenses paid, get to go work in Italy. It was pretty cool.

Nikki: That's pretty cool.

Alex: Yeah, and I felt like I had always wanted to own my own company or be involved as like an executive or kind of running the show and understanding the business side of things and move away from the technical side.

When I explained that after being there for a few years, it was sort of like, well, the career path for you is to become really deep on the technical side, and there are other people that we want to do with the business side, but we don't wanna lose your technical abilities. And we had also gotten bought out by a publicly traded company from Australia that kind of changed the whole culture from customer-focused to shareholder focused as it has to be.

That combined with a couple of projects that kind of went south for various reasons that were out of my control. And another guy that I worked with in controls, he and I both gave our notice within a week of each other. I felt like I worked at the best company in town at the time and didn't wanna leave and go work for somebody else.

So I felt like it was the right time to start my own company. I don't have really much tying me down. I don't have kids to deal with or anything at this point, so it's as low risk as it will ever be.

Nikki: Yeah, that is a good time, I'll concur with you on that one.

Alex: So, so I started it up. I naively assumed that I would just make a ton of money and make my salary back and that would be easy.

Ended up kind of freelancing and not really struggling. I had enough to pay the bills, but I wasn't in a hiring employees or growth mode or anything for about five years, and then ended up getting a project through the Inductive Automation integrator program. That was the first large-scale six-figure project that I had ever worked on on my own, and that allowed me to start hiring employees and that was in late 2015.

So hired the first employee in 2016. Ended up getting work with Johnsonville sausage and Tesla, did some work with Amazon, and kind of started growing our roster of companies over the last few years and figuring out, you know, really how to grow a team. And it's been in the last year that I finally have chosen to give up the technical side more and actually move into running the business and steering the ship.

I've talked to some people that have also gone through that path and they said that was the hardest decision they ever had to actually make to actually do that, even though they wanted to do that for so long. So, no, I know that's not an easy one. And it can be hard not to revert as well.

Nikki: Especially after some time away when you start itching for that. or missing it. Yep. But yeah. Okay. Sorry. Keep going. I interrupt a lot. 

Alex: Oh yeah. So that basically gets me to here.

I think just a side note, I had been on LinkedIn since like 2009. A sales guy in Reno named Jack Perkins was in a meeting with me one time and was like, you gotta check this out. You're young, you like social media, like here you go... So I signed up in 2008 or 2009 and I had no guidelines or limits on who I would accept as a contact and kind of getting back into it after I had gone through a lot of growth and mindset changes about my hiring practices and how I want to be as a person and all of that, which I think is some of what has gotten me involved in some of the communities that we have mutual acquaintances in.

Nikki: Mm-hmm.

Alex: I started getting back into LinkedIn in the last year or so and it was just terrible and toxic and it was just not a good place to be.

So I actually just fully deleted my account. I think I had like 10,000 connections and it was just like, I'm over it. I can't deal with this anymore. Then I was talking to somebody and they shared something on our Slack from LinkedIn and it was like, oh, I actually do need to be involved in the conversation.

And maybe I take it a little far sometimes and run my mouth and I get people's general counsel looking at my page sometimes. You know, I'm, I'm not saying anything that isn't true about some of these conferences and things that I have seen. And yeah, I'm also trying to share my story and be very positive and help people get to the point that I've gotten of understanding as a white male in this industry. 

 [00:10:00]
I need to think differently about the world than I do by default to try and grow a company that doesn't entirely look like me. Yeah, and I think part of that is also trying to help other people see the light there and start those conversations and, and push people in the industry.

Kind of go through the path that I went through cuz I, I did say those things myself before and like, did do a lot of learning and growth of like, it's a numbers game. There are not enough women in the industry. Nobody's applying, like thinking that's a problem with everyone else and not a problem with me and what I'm presenting as a culture and all of that.

So my ultimate goal is to move the industry forward in the sense of making our industry look more like the general world in terms of demographics and opportunities and things.

Nikki: And I think that's what resonates with me so much. Maybe some of the messages that you, you know, get those looks, hopefully, it's just looks from general counsels and not Letters.

Alex: Oh, yeah.

Nikki: Letters. Yeah. Not that, that would really matter. A lot of people get, you know, cease and desist letters for all kinds of things that really are, they're just a threat. Right. But that is an interesting point that I. Have not been looking at who's looking at my profile. I don't think I make very many controversial statements, but um, I don't think I do either.

Alex: I think they're more just like making sure I'm not defaming them. And that's fine but it's like, here's a picture of who's at your conference, and like, I don't know what to tell you. There's mostly white people and like one person of color and two women on the screen, and like 99% white, middle-aged dudes.

Come on. Let's do something different here. .

Nikki: Yeah. Andrew Crowe wrote a really good blog post, or a LinkedIn article today actually, about how, maybe what you think of as diversity or what is showing that your company is diverse, for instance, doesn't resonate like you think it does. It has changed so much that a lot of our, our efforts, and I say our, a lot of the companies that are in charge, even their efforts to show that diversity, maybe their notion of what that really looks like is so different from, let's say, the workforce that's coming into these jobs now coming right outta high school or college, that they don't see those token three people in the picture and go, oh look, progress, right?

They look at that picture and they go, oh, that's the same BS that you know, I'm not interested in and I don't wanna see. And yeah, I encourage people, I'll post a link to the article and I think I shared it on my page earlier today. I know it's hard to look at ourselves and go, oh, I have been the problem.

Because most of us don't mean to be the problem, right? It's not, it's not that we're malicious and that we're out there perpetuating these things because we wholeheartedly agree with them and we, you know, it's just like whatever work culture or community background that you have, you're not gonna know what you don't know until you get outside of your comfort zone and what you're used to, and you start to listen to other people and their perspectives, particularly in like groups of people that you know, you're maybe not used to being in.

I actually, you know, same thing. I grew up in like a really small, not diverse place.

Alex: Mm-hmm.

Nikki: And although I always viewed, like I saw people from elsewhere and that looked different from me on TV, it, it was different. So coming to the US like there was a lot that I had to learn and then a lot that I had to kind of, it was hard for me to internalize cause I'm like, well, I'm not from here. So it's not me, like it can't be me.

But the point isn't necessarily whether it's you, it's also just, you know, how, how do you make the people around you feel, whether it's your, your own intention or just something that you're, you know, not speaking out against. And I think all of us that do speak about it in the industry are doing so because we want positive change, but we also care about our industry and we're not here to tear it down.

Alex: Mm-hmm. 

Nikki: We just see that this is like a necessity. It, it's, it was a want before, now it's a necessity cause we really need these people. Yeah. So from your perspective, do you think it was easier for you to grow your company with your new mindset into what you have now than it would've been in the past?

Alex: So I think like if you look at, and I'm speaking only to manufacturing and systems integration. And I'm not speaking to the larger tech community, so I'm sure if you were to go look at the Googles and Facebooks and Netflixes of the world, that maybe the same concepts apply, but the execution looks a lot different cuz they have so many more people that they're hiring. 

But I think a lot of the companies in the manufacturing world are looking in the same places for people. So we're going to like Rose-Hulman College for engineering students or going to Stanford for computer science graduates or that, you know, it's, there's yeah, popular schools for that sort of thing.

I also looked, I spend a lot of time on Reddit. There's a good PLC subreddit. That's where I met my first employee and I think the third or fourth person that I hired as well came from Reddit. And that's a place that I am, and I'm making a blanket assumption, but I think a lot of people that are on Reddit look like me based on what I've seen and who I talked to.

Yeah, so it was kind of expanding where I'm looking. It expands the pool of people I have available and I'm not competing for the same 500 people that are gonna come into this industry out of school this year. I'm not competing with 40 other companies trying to hire the same group of people. Cause I'm looking in other places.

Nikki: Our friend Andrew's here giving you a round of applause for this. Thank you Andrew for coming. I did, I was not trying to give you a shout-out knowing that you were here, but now that you are here, that article was bomb. So yeah, it, it opens, opens things up quite a bit.

And then of course, the remote work is, is a whole nother part of this, right? Yeah. And, and I think that was, the remote work was more out of necessity than out of like, I have an ulterior motive or, I'm being altruistic. It was like I don't, I can hire somebody out of like outta school entry level and I can train them or I can find somebody who doesn't.

I was in Chicago at the time, like lives outside of Chicago and I don't have to necessarily pay. , like a Chicago tech salary to, to bring somebody on board. And you know, since then we've, I, I think based on other companies in the industry that do what we do, we pay very competitively for this line of work.

Again, looking at the tech world, I think if your goal is to make money going into manufacturing is, is maybe not the best approach. , just to be honest and fair with, you know, it is honest and fair. . So it was a little bit. and it's also, I don't have to [00:16:00] deal with office space, so I don't have to pay rent for that.

I've paid the employees benefits fully since they've been on board. Here's one of your employees. We don't know who it is. He says Corso found me on Twitter. Ah, there was two, two of them, so I think I know who that is, but you know, it saved a lot of money there. . Looking back, I didn't fully understand how being fully remote is causes a lot of time at the beginning of the quarter and the beginning of every month dealing with, I think we're in 15 or 16 states at this point, so I have to pay 15 or 16 unemployment insurances and 15 or 16 like payroll taxes and summer, monthly, summer, quarterly, summer.

Some are biweekly and it. . Oh my God. . Yeah, . Like if I, if I knew then what I know now, maybe I would limit the states that we're in or whatever. But you know, ultimately it allows me to hire the best people, period. Not the best people that live where I have an office, or the best people that can move to Washington, DC where I am.

And you know, I started in Reno. I went from Reno. My family lives in Vegas. I lived there for a year. I followed my now [00:17:00] wife to Chicago for her to go to law. and then now she works in DC so I was like, I'm not gonna open an office and then make everybody move with me. Yeah. But being remote made the most sense and then that's allowed me to hire a lot of people and it also provides a lot of flexibility if people want to, you know, I had one employee that was living in Brooklyn, in New York City.

I wanted to move out to LA and it's like, okay, you just have to fill out a tax form as if you were getting hired in California and then we'll close down the New York thing. And that's, that's it. And like you can move and it take a couple days off to drive across the country. And uh, there you go. And I also think it benefits us because a lot of the work that we're doing, like how allie's dealing with something with a customer, you have to go onsite to do that.

Mm-hmm. , like, we're not bringing the customers to the office necessarily. So having people spread throughout the country can also lessen the travel. For people going from, you know, if, if we have a project in, I don't know, in Boston, we have people in the Northeast that can go deal with that. We don't have to have people fly out from Chicago all the way to Boston to, to do that, or [00:18:00]people on the West Coast or whatever.

So I think it provides a lot of flexibility there. And I think, you know, if you look at, I don't know, a company like D M C who does integration is taking kind of a hybrid approach where they have offices all over the country, but you have to work within the office. But that helps them kind of achieve the same goal of.

Having people close to where the work is so you don't have to incur as much travel costs. And I see Gina just commented, I didn't read all of it, but, cause she works here. Yeah, here we goes. Bring it back. Being remote allowed me to move out of state when my husband got a new job in Colorado and not have to look for a new job here.

So, so for Gina to move, it was literally like you fill out like two or three tax forms in Colorado. and like move and that's it. . Well, and here you would've lost a really good employee, right? Yes. Not because they wanted to leave you, but because the, their circumstances took them somewhere else. Just like your circumstances took you to dc.

Exactly right. And, and then I think you throw the pandemic in and we, we did learn a lot in the pandemic about how to be a remote company, cuz we'd never had done, I mean we used [00:19:00]Slack and when we didn't use Slack in just email, that was brutal. No, well I can, I can only imagine. We started using Slack on our project and it was like, oh, we're doing this.

This is amazing. But we never did like a virtual happy hour or virtual game night or anything. And then people started doing that and it was like, oh, there's another way that we can get together and connect. that it had never occurred to any of us all. I think being engineers, we also lean towards being a little more introverted.

Mm-hmm. . So being social wasn't necessarily our, our prerogative, but we did learn a lot, lot through that. And I don't know, even you, you had Ali Walker on your show recently. Yep. From Gray Solutions. And when I had first met Walker Maddox from Gray Solutions, he was like, I'm envious of you having people all over the country and working remotely because like then you can hire anybody, you.

and it doesn't matter where they are, like all these benefits that I've seen from it. And he is like, how do you do that? I'm like, just do it. . I dunno. Like him and I had a, a few discussions about that and like, cuz they were all in Louisville at the time and mm-hmm. , you know, I think merging with Stone, that [00:20:00] stone was the first.

I think they were the inspiration for me to do remote. Cause they proved that as an integrator back in the 2010s when I first learned of, of Stone Technologies. They were all remote and it was like, oh, an integration company can do that. I can do that too. Even if they've been around longer and have more name recognition and whatever.

Yeah. Like you just have to, to stand up and do that. So Gina says we even have a coworker in Japan. Yeah, we actually, I was working with a. who worked for a distributor and they sold some parts to one of our customers and he was on site installing like the parts and I was working with him to, I. the, the things.

And we went out a second time to kind of go through round two of the, the installations and he, he's like, well, I'm leaving on Monday cuz like I'm going to Japan. And the first time I met him was like, well if I never want to be the guy who goes up at a conference and is like, if you ever need a job, let me know.

Cause I hate when people do that to me. Saw Jason Hamlin just commented. He made some comments about that when we first met as well about people doing [00:21:00] that at i CCC and. . So I'm never gonna be like, Hey, you're, you would be a really good fit if you ever want a job. But he's like, well I'm moving to Japan.

And then it was like, oh, well if you need a job, we do remote work. Like, I don't know what your situation is over there. And it turns out he's, his wife is in the Navy and she's stationed there for the next couple years. Okay. Yeah. So we get to, you know, work with this guy, give him an opportunity to not have to deal with finding a job in Japan for a couple years, being a, a military spouse, which has its own level of difficulty.

Mm-hmm. , we have somebody that works off hours if we need support, cuz. almost opposite time zone of the rest of us. And we get to, you know, have that and then when he moves back to the states, then he moves back to the States and takes a couple days off to move and starts right back up. So yeah, personally I'm a huge fan quo.

Bim, we are also all remote. It was not necessarily always the plan. Mm-hmm. , but. . It just, every time it comes up, we don't see the reason to get, uh mm-hmm. , you know, to get a, a physical office. Even though, you know, my, my founding team is in the Bay Area. They could easily have a Bay Area office. Mm-hmm. . [00:22:00] But a, it's also a, it's a huge cost to avoid with the real estate, especially when you're in the early stages and you're growing.

Yeah. It's great to be able to put more towards the benefits. , you know, towards your people and there's also a bunch of new tools, you know, lo and behold, to manage all this stuff. I started using Slack actually, so I left a, a job back in like 2016 I think. Cause I wanted to work with startups. I'd gotten really tired of using like, out of date software that was managed by some company overseas.

You know, just I wanted automation and. some AI or some machine learning in my tools, which had just started around that time. And so I, I went in and worked with a bunch of startups and I was like, how do you do all this stuff? And I, one of the startups I worked with was a hardware startup and they made me sign an nda.

And one of the things that the NDA covered was how they use Slack in their organization because that was one of their, like, competitive advantages. They thought operat. Which I'm not gonna share how, but it was actually pretty brilliant and it made me think like, okay, I'm never going back [00:23:00] to work for a company that doesn't use this tool or something equivalent or doesn't see the advantage, whether it's a remote company or not even, you know, having people on site, having some way to accelerate collaboration.

Mm-hmm. . And nowadays, I mean, with the types of projects that we run, it's not simple stuff like calling and emailing and passing forth PDFs and, and all these things with like, no good way to. Everything. I know there's, you know, project management trackers and all kinds of things like that, but just for kind of like your day-to-day work mm-hmm.

it helps a lot to have these tools that act a little bit more like a community. So for us at copa, a lot of our team is, is in Europe, different places in the US on the East coast, on the west coast. I'm Central. So for us, it again has multiple benefits. It's much easier for us to hire talent. We, you know, can be competitive pay-wise without having to have only, you know, Silicon Valley sort of pay to, to worry about.

Not that I would say that we should take advantage of, you know, paying less in, in less expensive metros. Mm-hmm. , I mean, a lot [00:24:00] of our people still live in other, other expensive cities, but, and we have an app on our Slack that's called random. And it's just a bot that like randomly pairs people together for having coffees.

So it's nice cuz you, we have group things like happy hours, which are not mandatory by the way. Nobody should be mandated to drink, whether it's on Zoom or anywhere else during work hours or not. But then we get these like random one-on-one opportunities cuz there are, you know, some things you miss out on.

by having that workplace, the water cooler, the, you know, the high in the morning, so on, so forth. Oh, I, I think that's a benefit to our industry and being an integrator specifically, is when we do go on site with projects we can like pair new people with people they haven't met before and go on site and work together and then like you go out to dinner afterwards and like get the, the in in-person time.

Cause I do think that is important and I think there is a lot that you gain being in-person fee versus being fully remote. Mm-hmm. . I don't think you're at a loss if you don't. We have people that don't travel at all. I don't think they're at a [00:25:00] loss necessarily overall. I just think they're, you know, it's, there are things you get in person that you don't get remotely.

So projects, and I've also made a point to get people together frequently, and we have a lot of work in the Chicago area, so I have an apartment there that we call the Corso Cottage are like, oh, smart, free to, everybody has a key to it and there's a lockbox. . Like we have somebody going out like St.

Patrick's Day weekend to go see the river, get dyed green and they're gonna stay there. And like for people who wanna go visit Chicago, it's like you save money on a hotel room and then if you're working there, you get to go home and you don't have to go eat out every single night if you want to cook.

And you know, it's just kind of one of the, the things that we can do. And I'm not paying for office space, it's. easy to like get an apartment or something here and there when we need something like that. And we, we've had that for a few years at this point. So yeah, I've been Talli, kopi, I mean, it's maybe a little bit further out, but I was like, just get a Bay Area house.

Mm-hmm. that we can all come to . I personally, I used to live there as well, so I, I used to work in the East Bay. I had territory outside, sales territory with Kia and Santo from the Bay [00:26:00] Area to Reno down to Fresno. So personally I wouldn't trade my time in the field for anything, although now I love not having to be somewhere at a specific time other than just, you know, in front of my computer.

At this stage of my life, I have two kids that are two and five, so it's very different for me than you know. . I, I didn't mind the travel back then. Mm-hmm. , you know, driving. It wasn't, it wasn't a lot of air travel. I'm happy for that, but, you know, the, the four to six hour drives and that sort of thing. But that's the other thing about, you know, remote or just flexible work in general, right?

Mm-hmm. is, if you think about it, a person's entire career, I think it's not necessarily realistic to expect either the people stay their entire career with you, with your company anymore. But if they want, if they wanted to, if it was a good fit, then, you know, people have d. emphasis on what matters to them in life at different times in their life.

Mm. . Right. So I would assume that, you know, you were to have kids, then things might change. Same thing with your employees or like when your employee that's in Japan, when his wife's deployment's over mm-hmm. , he's gonna have different things that he wants. Have you [00:27:00]thought about, like, do you guys, and I don't wanna put you on the spot, you don't have to answer this, but like, Maternity leave and paternity leave policies, for instance.

That's something that's really, I feel like not thought about too much in our industry. One of the things that as a, I don't know how old I was, five years when I was in my early thirties, I guess I'm 38 now. When I first started, started hiring people, I had never, I don't, I don't think in my career I had even seen anyone take parental leave.

At that point, so I never even thought about it, like at all. It just didn't. Yeah. Like, oh, I've seen it on TV or something. And I hired a, a person who I think had a baby right before he ended up starting. and was like, well, I have a like really generous parental leave policy at my current job. I would like to either stay and use that, or I would like to leave at this point for like financial reasons, but this like parental leave benefit is really big and we worked out the details of what worked for him for that [00:28:00] and then made like a a blanket policy that.

we'll have parental leave. And I don't think at that point we put a number on it or anything. And then when my wife started working for the government, they have a, like a standard 12 week policy or something. And I had also, after I moved to DC started working, we subcontracted to another integrator on, on a big project and ended up working with a lot of their women engineers.

And they said, I, I think it was the timing of somebody had come back on site and they had negotiated their maternity leave. And I'm like, wait. , what do you mean? And she's like, well, we have a policy that we have access to parental leave, but every single person has to go negotiate that for themselves.

Like there's no standard. Interesting. And I was like, okay. Immediately after that I was like, I'm gonna just take whatever my wife's work offers. And it was a a 12 week policy, which having just concluded my 12 weeks of parental leave myself is like, if you didn't have that like that, [00:29:00] terrible. Like if I had to go back to work a week later, like I can take a week of vacation or something and then I have to go back and I miss out on all of that time.

Like that would be terrible. We also have to balance, like it would be great to give people a year or something like they do in Europe. Yeah. But there has to be a balance somewhere as a small company and whatnot. Mm-hmm. . So I think that's a, that's a good balance and that's kind of a standard outside of our industry.

I don't think it's standard in our industry at all to have parental. No. So for me that was one of the things that was like, how do I pair down all of the asks that I have for people to come work here to make it easy so there's no barrier to entry to apply, and how do I build things up culturally that make my company attractive for people to want to come and apply?

And it was a very. Easy thing to say, let's have parental leave. And I say parental leave because it's, to me, it's not just maternity leave. Right. I think it's very important for the, the dads or the partner or whatever the situation is. And we even would do for in the [00:30:00] policies, if you adopt somebody, yeah.

If you adopt a child, you can also take the parental leave because I think there's some value and importance there. But it was, you know, creating things like that work from home. A another thing that as a like, to be blunt, as a company owner, it would make sense for me to get the cheapest insurance, health insurance possible for everybody and like save that money for myself, but to make it better for people to quan come work here.

It was like we went and got, and it was the same person who had the child. He's like, why have this killer insurance here? I was like, well, here's what I'm looking. because at that point it was, I was going through like the healthcare exchange mm-hmm. , because until you, I don't know how it is in 2023, but in 2017, I think it was, unless you had like 10 people, you couldn't talk to an insurance broker.

Yeah. So we had to go through the healthcare exchange, which is like brutally expensive. So I was like looking at a, a silver plan as the, like, this is the most expensive thing I'm comfortable with [00:31:00]and it's. Really freaking expensive. And he's like, well, we need to at least step up to this other, like it was a gold plan at the time, I think, and otherwise, like it doesn't make sense to leave.

And I sat down and crunched the numbers and it was like, we can actually offer like really good insurance. It was the same insurance plan as they offer at the United States Senate at the time. Good, really good insurance and. once we could talk to a broker, which at that point we could, once we had him on board employee account wise.

Yeah. Then it was like, we actually, it's cheaper to get that than it is to get the bronze plan through the exchange because now we get a discount and like Right. The politics aside, like the fact that people have to pay as much as they do in America for the insurance that's available is like, is ludicrous.

No, my, my dad ran a small business when I was growing up and at some point he had a lot of employees and then, you know, there was some regulation that changed. Mm-hmm. and he scaled back his business and didn't rehire, and he fell below that point where he couldn't keep the insurance that he was getting mm-hmm.

from the broker anymore. And it [00:32:00] got to a point where it was easier to just pay everything out of pocket that the employees had, in addition to the crappy insurance plan that he. Than to try to pay for the better insurance plan, but like on that sort of individual or very small business level. Yep. Which seems ridiculous, but he was like, you just expense all your medical bills, guys,

But that's, I mean, that's sad. That's, that's it really is. Yeah. But no, it was how do we build, build things up like that, that. , you know, make it attractive. And I, I don't even think it necessarily needs to be tangible benefits or things. It's even how we, you know, word the careers page. And I don't have a study that I've read, but anecdotally I've heard that men will tend to apply for a job no matter what.

They could have no experience at all. They just like saw a YouTube video about automation and they're gonna apply for a senior controls engineer. and women won't apply for jobs unless they meet every single requirement that's listed. And you look at some of these jobs that have [00:33:00] five or 600 things, and it's like, you need to know this and this and this and this, and all these programming languages, and you need to have worked with all of these vendors.

And for me it's like, You need to know how to learn and we can like help you learn how to learn, but you also need to want to learn. Yeah. And you need to have some sort of technical desire to do programming and do technical thing. Like if you want to do things that we do at Corso Systems. And you can learn.

That's pretty much the bar. If you have seen some of these other things and you're fluent in some of these technologies, maybe you can come in, you know, at the, we have associate standard and like at senior engineer levels, you can come in at a higher level and we'll work that out. But it's like really minimizing the requirements so that it makes it easy for people to apply.

As a technical person, myself, it's easy to, to vet somebody's experience even through just questioning. Yeah, like I can tell. . I can't, maybe, I can't tell exactly how you would solve all these different problems that you'll ever face during an interview, but I can tell if you at [00:34:00] least know what you're talking about and like are being honest about your experience so we can put you in the right bucket.

Mm-hmm. , and then we can always, mm-hmm. adjust after that if we need to. But figuring that out and also figuring that out through our current interview processes. We do like a phone screen. With either our administrative director or our operations director. And that's more just to see are you a good fit?

And then at that point, I'll come in or somebody else will come in and do the interview. Mm-hmm. , and then we make an offer after that. We don't do a big technical, you don't do the four week, like five step I did at the beginning interview. Let's do, let's process, like the first interview I ever did was, you know, the guy came in and, and met with me and it was, let's, here's a PLC you've never seen before.

It was a Siemens plc he had done like Rockwell, and here's ignition, like turn on the light. The, I connected an l e d to the, the plc. Like, turn the light on with a button on the screen and like, boom, like done. It took him 10 minutes and he'd never seen any of it before, but he like knew what a PLC was.

Yeah, and I did that [00:35:00] with a couple other people. , and then it was like, why am I wasting our time? Because that adds an extra, like two hours for me to set it up and troubleshoot it and like make sure everything's installed and works correctly. Yeah. And then like, it doesn't provide me any additional information than just asking you like, how would you solve this problem?

And I, I've heard people go through like six or seven rounds of interviews, or you go through like a, a trial period, or I know people that interview at Tesla, you have to like do a project and people invest like 40 or 60 hours. of work, like into a product that now Tesla. , go use your code. Even if they don't hire you , it's like, wow, why are you putting this amount of effort into getting these jobs?

And like, of course, also to be honest, we're not like doing rocket science. Mm-hmm. , I mean, it's relatively straightforward programming that we're doing and you know, I'm not hiring people to go develop like a new accelerator at cern. Right. That I'm sure needs a different process entirely. But yeah, to do anything in the manufacturing world, including.

you know, data [00:36:00] analysis and dashboards and trending and even getting into machine learning and that sort of thing. We can figure it out and we can teach you and find the resources and go from there. So yeah, I ended up in a streamline the process. I ended up where a job where I, I used to build a bunch of Tableau dashboards and stuff.

Mm-hmm. and like, if, if you had asked me to check that box on a application, I would've never applied for the job. Yep. Because I had no idea how to do that. Yep. And it wasn't my idea for me to do it when I had the job either, but as a capable person that can learn when I'm interested mm-hmm. , it made, it made a whole lot of sense.

But I will absolutely concur with you. I, when I look at job description, . Mm-hmm. A I am not the type of person that fits most standard job descriptions that have never been. My experience is kind of, some people might think of it as all over the place. To me it's, I connect these dots all together and they may be a little bit disparate, but over time they've actually come to.

be a lot more under the same umbrella now that, you know, machine learning and hardware and these sorts of things, you know, have converged. We've got digital [00:37:00] twins, so I've experienced across a lot of a lot of this. But yeah, there are a lot of jobs that I would never apply for that I am probably more than qualified for.

Mm-hmm. and then now looking at this, having kind of seen and heard and, and just been aware. the discussion about this because yes, this is a tr tried and true stat at this point. Like you are going to deter qualified women applicants, and I'm sure all kinds of other people too, that a see no representation of themselves on your website, on in your marketing material, on your career's page.

They don't see anybody in leadership that looks like them or even remotely feels like, you know, they can relate to. And yeah, the, this, this sort of, you, you look at a job description that's so detail. that you're like, I, I could never even thrive in an organization like this that just wants me to check a hundred boxes and like, where's the room for my human creativity then, or something that I bring to the table, right?

You just wanna know, make sure that I have a hundred years experience doing exactly these 10 things, like mm-hmm. , I, I don't see [00:38:00] who. is who that sort of job appeals to anymore. And maybe it is. If there happens to be a person out there with a hundred years of experience in those exact things, that is the G that's who you're gonna get, you know?

Yep. But I have found myself, I love to work with people that are also open to feedback and growth and learning. Mm-hmm. and change. Because, I mean, I think there's, if there's one thing we can all agree on with all the people we disagree with, all kinds of things, is that there is change, right? Mm-hmm. , there is, there's no way of stopping.

change. So we have to figure it, you know, try to figure it out the best we can lean into it a little bit. Somebody, people ask me a lot actually, how can I get more women to apply for my jobs? So did you go through and look at, did you have any kind of time where you were like, wait. , I should make these changes to my jds and like my page and stuff.

Or was that from the beginning? Something that you knew to, to make sure, to try to be inclusive. And that was something initially I, I put up, I wrote the job descriptions and the [00:39:00] posting and like, I think just to add to the. . The other piece of the puzzle that is also like becoming legally mandated in a lot of states is a salary ranges.

Mm-hmm. . I think posting that is also one of the things like minimizing job requirements and also posting job posting so you're not short-changing people or you know, you could even, like, I've had people come in and be like, well, I wanna make X, and it's like, well, I would be stealing from you if I'm paying you x I.

Pay you more than X and that's fine. But putting the ranges on there helps people feel comfortable with where they're at. And also not apply for jobs that they can't afford to work here, or if they feel like they have to negotiate, it's like, here's the range. If we need to negotiate around that range, then we need to like figure out why you need to be in a different bucket.

And like we can have those discussions, but that at least provides some guidelines and, and frameworks for that. You know, initially it was, here's my, here's my page. Here's what it is. It's got, I, I probably copied it from somebody else. Like, I don't know. These big companies are hiring a lot of people. Yeah, I guess what they're doing, they know what they're doing, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And, and they're all [00:40:00] copying each other too, and they've done it for the last 10 years. So and it was like, no, no, women applied. I mean, and initially nobody applied cuz like nobody knew who I was or anything. But yeah, once people started applying, it was like, oh, it's. , like people who look like me, like they're in their late twenties, early thirties, white dudes.

Like, okay. And I was also, you know, posting on, on Reddit on like the Y Combinator Hacker News site, which is like a startup news aggregator site, probably on like the automation forums and different college boards and Craigslist and all that. And you know, talking to my wife, she was like, you can't look where you go to find people that don't look like you.

Yeah. And, and I. . I will also say, when I say, don't look like me, I would say like physically and like non-white dudes. That's, you know, including women and people of color and all of that. I would also say people that don't have an, a background or experience like me in life. Mm-hmm. , you know, we've partnered with some, some groups, one in particular called underdog devs that [00:41:00] provides help and it's kind of a, a bootcamp and mentoring opportunity for people from disadvantaged backgrounds I see.

To get into the tech world. Yeah. So I would say that, you know, people who. Who don't look like me, encompasses people who may look like me if you're standing next to me, but like we have a very different life experience or you don't have any sort of technical education or a degree or you know, anything like that.

But if I'm looking where I typically hang out, I'm probably gonna find people who look like me. So it became. Reach out to other places and start spending time going to places that I wouldn't normally go. And so that led to things like looking at the Peace Corps. And if you look at their website, it's like we hire or we don't hire, we, for those who don't know, you sign up for like a two year stint in the Peace Corps and they, and this is all pre pandemic.

I don't know if they still do this now, but you go to. Country generally somewhere in like Africa or China or some like third world type of place and volunteer and like set up [00:42:00] organizations. A lot of it's like health related and things. And their website was basically, you know, we, they, they call them returned Peace Corps volunteers and they have job fairs and, and things and it was basically our return Peace Corps volunteers get done are self-sufficient and are.

and like willing to do work. Yeah. They're willing to jump out of their comfort zone to somewhere they've never been, to do something that they're probably not experts at. Yep. Those, those types of people are hard to find just out in the wild. Right. . Exactly. So we, you know, went to a Peace Corps job fair and like found one of our senior, now senior engineers and like she's been an amazing employee and a great addition to the team and like, I never, ever in any reality would've come across her resume.

unless I went to that job fair. Yeah, that is crazy. And that's a really good tip guys, if you listen to this, if you're a manufacturer and you're hiring or a systems integrator, controls, go to the places like Factory Fix. . Mm-hmm. where people are that are looking for these jobs. But think outside the [00:43:00] box as well.

If you're not meeting all your goals in terms of hiring, you know, filling all your positions, getting the diverse candidates that you're looking for, then you can't keep going to the places where you know those people are already coming. You gotta, you gotta go look elsewhere. Peace Corps volunteers. Is, is a very good tip for any kind of business that wants mm-hmm.

people like that, that can think on their feet, that have put themselves out there. I, I'm gonna put that in my little notebook of next time we're hiring. I, I will say, just to be honest, like I'm not trying to scam anybody on any of this. The amount of people coming back from Peace Corps deployments that are looking for tech jobs is not super.

Yeah, I can imagine. So. So don't expect to go be like, I went to a Peace Corps job fair and I hired, there was a thousand people there and I hired a hundred. Yeah. It's like there was a thousand people I might have talked to 10. Right. And five of them didn't even give me a resume cuz they were like, I don't want a tech job.

And you hired one though, right? Yeah, and we did, and then we went back to another one early in the pandemic and we got a couple resumes, but it was like people who [00:44:00] didn't really want to be in tech, they just wanted a. because they needed a job and that wasn't anything against the Peace Corps of those people.

It was just like not good timing for anybody. Yeah. I think also going to conferences, you know, I met Jason Hamlin at the Ignition Conference. I've met a couple people through training classes. I have hired a couple people through Twitter. I'm active there and I think, you know, today I posted on LinkedIn, I, I get a lot of people that message me on LinkedIn and are like, I'm selling this thing.

Come look at it. Gimme an hour of your time. and I'm like, no, I don't wanna talk to you. If I need your thing, I'll come find you. Twitter's the same way where you need to invest a lot of time and energy to build relationships there. Like I think one of the people, Adrian, that was probably the one that commented earlier, I think I talked to her on Twitter just because we were like in talking about 3D printing stuff for like over a year.

Mm-hmm. and I had no intention of like ever thinking she would come on board or want, but I was like, you would be a great personality fit if you wanna come work here. But I'm also not gonna say that cuz I don't wanna be that guy. . And then at one point she was [00:45:00] like, well, I'm looking for a new thing. Like, you seem really cool.

I see what you do. , that was a good fit, but it, it wasn't a, I went to a job fair and I hired a person two weeks later. It was like you Yeah. Put a lot of effort into that relationship and like, I think for things to come out organically like that is, is a really powerful like opportunity to, for people to find jobs.

And I think if there are companies that you wanna work for and you're looking for a job, starting to interact with their content on LinkedIn and comment on things, and if they start seeing your name, Period. And you don't have to interact with every single thing that they ever posed, but when it's relevant and you can add to the conversation, I think you, and that, that's even without any goal of getting on your show or anything that was like, I see your name popping up a lot.

I'm gonna start to interact and then we start to overlap. And then, I dunno, Andrew Crow gave me a shout out on a podcast a couple weeks ago, so I'm talking to Jim at the Manufacturing Culture podcast in a couple weeks on your, on this show. And like, I think building those relationships and. , if there are people that you wanna work with or hire, I think you can also do the same thing as a [00:46:00]company, but I think it's a little, a little bit harder in that direction for sure, because it is more about people, right?

Network building. Mm-hmm. , you do get an affinity for certain types of companies. Like once you meet somebody from a company and let's say their culture's really great. , you end up hearing about it not officially. Right? You don't like the person, the company standing on the corner going, Hey, my culture's great.

My culture's great. , . Those are actually kinda the the cringe ones where you're just like, no, I'm gonna stay away. If you feel like you have to be doing that, you clearly don't get what you're doing. Yeah. But it's really, it's about investing your time into that network, right? Mm-hmm. and, and. I, I completely agree with you.

I think I commented on, or at least liked your post that you posted earlier about that, you know, people coming to your inbox to sell you. You know, I've been in sales, I've been in in sales in my career, and at one point, you know, the LinkedIn message was the new way. To, to get sales after, you know, email marketing and when things were, I came across somebody that I connected with back in 2015, 16 with the message.

It was like, oh, hey, I'm Nicki. My company does this. If you're [00:47:00] interested to talk about that, you know, let's, let's connect or something. Granted, this person connected and I clearly didn't follow my process cuz I didn't pitch them on anything afterwards. We've just now been connected for like 10 years, but I, I learned also that.

after my first job, which I did put on LinkedIn cuz when I first joined LinkedIn was like, this is your resume online. Mm-hmm , you know, make sure to keep it up to date and then connect with people that you work with. These would be your colleagues. And like this is how, it was the beginning of like building this network.

And so it was great. I connected with all my customers and colleagues that I knew of that had LinkedIn or if I met them at trade shows, whatever. And that's how before I was ever really active on LinkedIn producing any kind of content or even. , you know, posting anything. Really, by the time, maybe a couple years ago, I had like 7,000 something connections.

Mm-hmm. . And these were genuinely, for the most part, people that I had either, you know, invited to an event or genuinely interacted with or had met at some, you know, stage of my [00:48:00] career. And you start to realize like, wow, you know, some of these connections though that you make are not the most obvious ones.

Like, you think that you're gonna have something to talk about with one person. Mm-hmm. . And then just as you interact with them over a period of. It can turn out to be something completely different. I ended up on the team at Quo Beam after I worked with Roman at Festo. Then we had lunch when he was at his next job at Apple and I was at my next job.

And then we met at a conference after that where we were both invited by the same, you know, group of VCs. And then we met again. And that was kind of like, and, and in between we interacted on LinkedIn and then by the time they offered me a. that had been kind of like in the works for a long time. For me it was a no-brainer because I knew exactly.

Mm-hmm. what they were doing, why they were doing it, you know, at what I think the only few questions I had during the interview, because the, the founders are to men, was, what are you gonna do about maternity leave and stuff? Mm-hmm. or parental leave. Because we've also settled on, it's the same, right? It's [00:49:00] just parental, whether you're a man or a woman, doesn't matter whether you're adopting or, or whatever.

And that was something that they were like, you know, we, we wanna do something, but we haven't really thought about it. Mm-hmm. , it's like, well, yeah, I get it. You know, why would you think about it? You are the person that generally has not had to think about it. But I had to think about it because I ended up in this situation where I had a premature baby and I had a four week maternity.

Mm-hmm. . And it was a job that I used to work way too many hours on. And at four weeks my daughter wasn't even have supposed to have been born yet, and I was feeding her every two hours and not sleeping at all. Mm-hmm. . And I was like, this is, wait a minute. Like, no, this is not possible. And everybody's situation is different as a parent, and some people can take short time off and go right back to work.

I'm not saying it's not possible, but most cases it's not feasible. You know, and I was just really happy that they listened to me. Another thing I brought up was like I've had mental. issues throughout my career with my issue is anxiety. [00:50:00] Mm-hmm. , that's attacked me a couple of different times, like it's not something I struggle with all the time, but in my last startup job, there was a period of time where I had such bad anxiety that I thought I was gonna have to like go on medication or something, which I don't mean to say that in like it's.

The worst thing ever that people could go on medication for. It's just I was so afraid that it would change my thinking and like my work ethic and like the way I am and the way I do things, that I was really hesitant to just go get a prescription for my anxiety. And also as it turned out, I was able to fix it without getting a prescription, which kind of maybe tells you something.

It isn't just a. You know it, it can be situational. So I changed some things up at work and I got acupuncture, and that helped a lot. But just being able to talk to the people I work with about those sorts of things, candidly. and them actually caring. Mm-hmm. , to me that goes a long way in addition to what the actual policies are.

And I was thinking back to your answer earlier about the, the insurance, for instance, I'm sure it meant a lot to that person. Mm-hmm. , yes. [00:51:00] That you were able to get the right insurance that he needed, but B, that you listened and that you did something about that. , even if you had come back and said, Hey, I, at this time right now until we're like this many more employees, I cannot get that insurance for you.

But I understand the situation you're in and why that's important. It's just my, my, you know, thought here, but I'm pretty sure that that alone would have. made him wanna come work for you as a company. Yeah, I know. In addition to what you were actually able to accomplish. Yeah. It's be willing to listen and, and hear people out because whether it's something I've thought of myself and like, we are not doing it for X, y, Z reason, then I can explain that.

Yeah. Or it's something that has never come up before or we haven't dealt with it. before, like if it's not something I've ever experienced in my life, but it's something you've experienced, like, let me know and we'll work through it and figure it out. I'm not, not considering it because I'm a jerk, I'm not considering it cuz it's literally never happened to me.

Yeah. Yeah. And that was like the maternity leave thing. It was like, I've never experienced anyone. Do that before. So I don't [00:52:00] have any frame of reference in my life, like other than seeing like, I mean, people joke about it in movies or something like I've seen that, but you know, I've known people, like my sister had kids and is a stay-at-home mom, so she never had a job that she had to like.

Take leave from. So, yeah. And my mom was the same way. And I think the couple people that I worked with in integration that had kids were both dads and like, they took a two week vacation and then went back to work. And I think that was partially by choice, but like there wasn't ever a discussion of paternity leave beyond, oh, I have two weeks vacation saved up for this.

So yeah. And I think that the younger generation in particular is starting to care more about things like that. Mm-hmm. , um, because that old paradigm of like mom staying at home and dad just working all the. Yep. And missing the, you know, weekend activities or you know, putting their career first. I hear this a lot about, from people that have come up in the industry.

They're now in management. They're like, well, you know, when I was coming up I had to do all this stuff and we all just thought it was normal and okay. Mm-hmm. , and I don't see why, you know, people don't wanna do that [00:53:00] anymore. Well, I see it easily, like, why would you have wanted to do that in the first place?

Mm-hmm. , and B, now that we have all of this technology, in the world to make us more efficient and give us this flexibility. Why on earth would you try to stick to this whole, like you have to tough it out and you know, give up your family moments and all these things when you really don't have to. Like somebody can do just a good a job, if not better.

if they have the right flexibility to support themselves and their family. This whole thing puts me on a soapbox. I I'll probably talk too much and we're, we're right at time, so thank you for everybody that has stuck around for hour, an hour. I'm not gonna turn this off unless you have a hard stop right now, Alex.

No, I'm good. And give it a few more minutes to wrap things up. I, I think, and Andrew made a comment earlier actually, and I'm gonna read it. I put it. But he says, this is how we reexamine an old industry and reposition it for the future. More manufacturing companies fighting for talent need to hear this conversation and hear the realtime employee feedback.

And [00:54:00] the reason I wanted to read this now is because the rest of the comments are pretty much from what I can tell your employees, and former employees that love you, they most of them have the setting turned on on their LinkedIn that we can't see who they. , but yeah, they were, oh, this is maybe not. Okay.

So Andrew. Okay. Andrew also made a comment from earlier, all you controls guys look the same. I, I think people have a tendency to, yeah. Look at any group. They don't belong to , and go, oh, whatever. You know, and, and like I'll say it to me even. , all you controls guys look the same to me. Mm-hmm. from the outside.

Most of you are guys and you're kind of, you know, similar. But when I get to know you guys, every single one of you is different and there are a lot of you that aren't guys and that don't look the same. Mm-hmm. . Yeah, this is, I'm not sure who you are, but thank you for the comment. It's a great way. For potential hires to get a feel for who you are as a person.

I'll also say, yeah, for our open [00:55:00] positions, which have not been many, we're still a small team here at cope, is that a lot of the, the candidates I talked to were through. our network. We did post some, especially our developer jobs, but in terms of everybody else, I, I even have people that I'm like, I know I'm gonna tap when we have the right position for that person, if the timing is right for them.

That have found us through our network and my role, thankfully right now in interviewing is that first pass. Like, Hey, do you like quote beam and you know, would we work well together? Mm-hmm. , I'm really happy with that role cuz I would hire literally almost anybody cuz I just, I'm really into. , like looking at people's potential.

Mm-hmm. . And so it's, it's harder for me. My last question is generally, what should we expect to see from you in the near future? And where can people find you if they wanna learn more about what Corso Systems can do for them, or connect with you as a person? Tell us next where they should find you. Corso systems.com.

Uh, for Corso systems. [00:56:00] We have a great blog that we post every week or more getting our case studies written up for everything I've put off over the last few years, cuz I hate writing case study. We've been doing a lot of improvements to the site to make it better. I'm on LinkedIn almost every day. Happy to have conversations and connect with people there.

Learn from me. Learn from you. , like I've met a bunch of great people and excited to be part of the conversation moving forward. And then if you want some non-auto automation stuff, I'm also on Twitter at just Alex. Marcy. You have to teach me how, how to the Twitter ways. I don't know. You have to find something you like on, like I got into like 3D printing Twitter, and then that kind of opened the door.

You can't just like go. It's kinda like Reddit where it's like you have a subreddit. Yeah. That like, this is interesting to me. I'm gonna follow these topics in these people and then it's really great. But if you just like go to Twitter, it's. useless. It's terrible. . Yeah. I feel every time I try, I'm like, wait, I don't know what I'm doing.

And I, I came on Twitter a long time ago and I was [00:57:00] interested in metamaterials research at the time. It's not exactly where I find myself these days though, so I might need to just do what you did, which is delete my old one and just start over. Which is what you did with LinkedIn? Yeah, I did that with Facebook recently.

Actually, Allie and Courtney kept sending me links, or maybe it was Megan Ziemba, but I was like, I can't look at any of these cause I don't go to Facebook anymore. So I just created a new Facebook account and then I creeped them out by adding them as a friend. and it's like a new account with no friends with my face on it,

I'm like, no, it's not a bot. I swear it's me, . But nowadays you can't be too careful. They're like, wait a minute, somebody that looks like you is cresting to be friends with me. Be careful out there. People, you know, cybersecurity and social media and all that stuff. We gotta, we gotta think about that now.

Well, thank you very, very much. Thanks for having me, for coming to have this conversation with me. I enjoyed it immensely. I wrote down a bunch of notes and more questions that I didn't get a chance to ask, but I That's okay. I would love to talk to you again, and thank you everybody that joined us live, and if you listen to this on podcast [00:58:00] later, there will be some links to Alex's pages and things in the show notes, and then you can find 'em on LinkedIn.

So thank you so much everybody. Thank you, Alex. You have a wonderful night. Thanks. Have a great day.