- This is one of those off-beat talks

so we're gonna expect a lot of energy.

Do the wave or something, we'll see.

Welcome to Moneyball on the Keyboard,

Scouting Talented Developers.

I really do appreciate that you're joining me

at this time slot, I know there's some awesome talks

and so I appreciate you being here,

because without you there's no talk.

I am Adam Jonas, I'm the Managing Director of Engineering

at the Flatiron School where our primary goal is

to inspire people to fall in love with code.

We train some of the best Junior Developers around,

placing them in awesome companies like Kickstarter,

Etsy, Intel, and the New York Times.

I am not a teacher, my team has been working

on transforming our internal learning management system

into a full-fledged education platform,

it's called Learn.co, we're really proud of it,

we'd love you to check it out.

But it's that work that really inspired me to

start putting together these slides,

because I spent a lot of time thinking about

how we could create some sort of metrics around

how we could possibly surface talented students.

And so as I often do, I fell back to a sports analogy.

And so today we're gonna talk about baseball.

We're gonna use baseball in the ways that

talent is identified in baseball

as an example of how we can improve our own mental model

for thinking about talent and software.

And so why am I in particular talking about baseball?

It's because, thanks to the Flatiron School,

software is actually my second career.

I worked in a few different capacities in scouting,

player development for the Brewers, the Twins,

and then ran an academy and spent most of my 20's

doing this, living in and around Latin America,

and specifically the Dominican Republic.

I moved back to the U.S. in 2010

and tried my hand at founding a company

that helped drafted players better improve

their bargaining position,

make more informed decisions about their futures.

And while this venture went terribly, horribly wrong,

it did pique my interest in code, which eventually

landed me at the Flatiron School.

And so here's what we're going to go over today.

I'm going to tell you a little bit about

the Moneyball Philosophy

and why it created such a shift in baseball.

Then we're all going to go to Scout School together

and see how professional baseball talent

has been traditionally scouted.

And after that we're going to see how talented students

are identified at the Flatiron School.

And finally, based on what we've learned, we're gonna

discuss three ways to better understand developer talent

and how to better evaluate it going forward.

If you're still awake at that point,

we'll hopefully do some Q&A at the end.

Cool, one more thing before we dive in.

And there's lots to cover, but I think it's natural to

sort of think about these sorts of conversations

specifically when thinking about hiring.

But we evaluate talent all the time, we evaluate

our coworkers because it has a lot to do with compensation.

We evaluate our coworkers because it has a lot to do

with clout on our team.

We evaluate open source contributions, and pedigrees,

and everything that comes across on a resume.

We evaluate speakers and whether they're any good.

We put value judgements on a lot of things and so

I think we're wired to do that, and that's totally okay.

But I challenge you to just not limit your thoughts on this

subject to just the interview process

because it's a lot bigger than that.

On with the show.

So you might be familiar with Moneyball,

it was a book written in 2003 by Michael Lewis,

and then turned into a movie with

the always handsome, Brad Pitt, in 2011.

And the essence of Moneyball

while specifically focusing on baseball, is really about

objectifying what was previously thought as subjective.

And so the subject of Moneyball is the Oakland Athletics,

I can see one of those hats right there, awesome.

And the fact that they have smaller revenues

and constrained resources

against other teams they're competing against

on that right side of the graph, the New York Yankees,

the Boston Red Sox, et cetera.

And it's because of those constraints that Oakland is forced

to search for undervalued players in the market.

And they end up turning to these under utilized tools

of statistical analysis.

And so what have we learned from the Moneyball approach?

We learned that industry outsiders who had not been

indoctrinated with the traditional way of doing things

could identify inefficiency in the old ways and

we learned that we could use better talent analysis tools

to determine a players objective value.

So, for an example,

what's the difference between a player who

gets to first base via a single,

and a player that gets to first base via a walk?

Intuitively, we favor the person who took the action,

the person that swung the bat

and earned their way to first base.

But from a team's contribution perspective

it's about the same.

You got a guy on first base, that's about all it is.

And so, when we think about these contributions,

we often will overvalue what we think is being earned

or somehow is, has more merit to it.

But, and this is exactly what was happening in baseball.

We saw players with high batting averages

were being overvalued, and players with

high walk percentages were being undervalued.

So, the Moneyball approach took advantage of this,

this gap between perception and reality

and it was more accurately able to value

a player's contributions to the team.

So, this is Moneyball, it's this objective view,

this data driven view, this high-level view,

this detached view.

But it's not perfect because humans are complicated.

And so let's turn to a little bit more of a humanistic

approach by all heading to scout school together.

Scout school is a very real thing.

It's sponsored by Major League Baseball,

and I was lucky enough to attend in 2005.

And you have to be invited by a team,

and what you do is you spend two weeks spending the mornings

going over the theory of scouting and the afternoons

literally applying what you learned in the field.

Writing up reports and seeing different levels of the game.

And so, the first thing you learn is that all players

are evaluated in the five following categories called tools.

Hitting for average, hitting for power,

running, fielding, throwing, this is it.

This is what everything, everyone is evaluated on.

And players that possess elite talent in every tool,

well that's pretty rare.

Willie Mays stands out as sort of the prototypical

five tool player, that he could do it all.

But most players have strengths and weaknesses,

and it's these strengths and weaknesses that

help determine their role and the ways that they

can contribute to the team.

There's rubrics for all these tools as well,

and in Scout School they give it to you

in this neat little binder, if only it were that easy.

But, let's go over the running tool in particular.

And these grades range from two to eight,

as they do in all categories.

And it's measured by the time that the bat hits the ball

on contact to the time that they arrive at first base,

as measured by a stopwatch.

Now you can imagine there's some complicating factors here.

First of all, a righty is actually physically further

from first base than a lefty, also you would imagine

that baseball players being the people that they are

are not going to run 100% every single time to first base.

And so, we need to look for the right situations that

actually take down that time, lazy pop-flies,

gimme singles to left field, home run trots,

probably not the right time to do that.

And so, while traditional scouting has this reputation

of being purely subjective and sort of antithetical

to the Moneyball approach.

You can see how there's some standardization here,

you can see that there's possibly some consistency

and I think you'd be surprised at how consistent

the grades are from experienced scouts.

So the only way that this could work,

is if it were written down all the time.

And baseball has done an amazing job of leaving this robust

audit log for us to examine decisions over the years.

This is an actual scouting report,

you can see the rubric is there on the left.

It's not particularly hardened because it is

actually talking about all the tools.

You also have the five star categories that we

just went over as well as some other categories

to give you a little bit more context.

So this lets us know why we're hiring this person,

or why we're passing on this person.

It also let's us know where the candidate we see

as we evaluate the candidate, where are they today

versus where they could possibly project to the future.

Same player, a little bit more exposition.

And this provides a ton of data.

Not only data on the candidate themselves,

but data for us.

You know, this is not only about how we see

the person that we're evaluating.

It's also about the evaluator.

And so, this that means we're a lot less likely

to succumb to hindsight bias,

where we claim that we saw it all along.

At the end of the day a scout's job is to predict the future

and it's hard and it opens the scouts to a ton of criticism.

But leaving a record can be your proof,

and ultimately your redemption for naysayers.

I want to focus on three particular statements of this.

This is the "good face", this is the first one.

So, the "good face", pretty subjective, right?

Why is that even in the scouting report?

And the reason is that scouting, like a lot of other things,

is pattern matching.

And so this scout felt that he had seen faces like this

in the past, they could possibly be on an All-Star poster

or the face of a franchise.

And so he thought that this was data that

he would include in the report.

"Will be in the big leagues by age 21," pretty bold.

You're gonna go out on a limb for, this happens to be

an 18 year old, and say that they're gonna make it

to the highest level possible by the time

they can legally drink.

"All the basic tools to be an outstanding

"shortstop prospect, best raw tools of

"any position player I've ever scouted.

"Should only get better with maturity and experience,

"tools and makeup, to be a star."

This is in fact a report on Derek Jeter,

who was drafted sixth overall in 1992,

and he in fact did debut at age 21,

and he was a 14 time All-Star.

Which clearly he fulfilled the promise that was

predicted for him by the scout.

And so, if you think that this Derek Jeter

could possibly grow up to be this Derek Jeter,

then you're gonna want credibility for that,

you're gonna want someone saying that,

"I wrote this down, I put myself out there

"all those years ago, and guess what?

"I was right."