Seasoned entrepreneur Sean Languedoc shares his extensive experience in building companies and navigating the treacherous waters of leadership in tech. Sean discusses the importance of letting go of the ego to foster a culture of innovation and adaptation, a principle that has guided his journey in establishing five successful companies.

Sean highlights key leadership challenges and the critical errors that iconic companies like BlackBerry and Motorola made—failing to adapt to emerging technological trends. He emphasizes the strategic necessity of anticipating market shifts and adapting business models accordingly, underscoring the need for a proactive rather than reactive approach.

Listeners will gain insights into the importance of cultural fit and the strategic deployment of engineering resources across global markets, including emerging tech hubs. Sean's company, which specializes in facilitating the outsourcing of engineering teams, exemplifies his approach by aligning client needs with the right expertise, ensuring seamless integration and operational efficiency.

Want to learn more about Sean's work? Check out their website at https://www.outforce.ai.

Connect with Sean on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanlanguedoc/.

Key Points with Timestamps

• 00:00:30 - Introduction to Sean Languedoc and the focus on leadership beyond personal success.
• 00:01:13 - Sean discusses the pitfalls of ego in leadership and its impact on company culture.
• 00:03:12 - Lessons from the decline of major tech companies due to lack of innovation.
• 00:07:06 - Importance of allocating budget towards disruptive innovation within companies.
• 00:09:37 - Sean reflects on the nonlinear journey of entrepreneurship and business building.
• 00:14:02 - Transition from recruiting agency to a specialized outsourcing facilitator to adapt to market needs.
• 00:25:00 - Sean announces a forthcoming guide to effective outsourcing strategies.

Transcript

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;30;20
Craig Andrews
I was in a coma for six weeks while the doctors told my wife I was going to die. When I woke up, she told me the most fantastic story. My team kept running the business without me. Freelancers reached out to my team and said, we will do whatever it takes. As long as Craig's in the hospital. I consider that the greatest accomplishment of my career.

00;00;30;23 - 00;00;51;10
Craig Andrews
My name is Craig Andrews and this is the Leaders and Legacies podcast where we talk to leaders creating an impact beyond themselves. At the end of today's interview, I'll tell you how you can be the next leader featured on the show.

00;00;51;10 - 00;00;55;03
Craig Andrews
Today I want to welcome Sean Languedoc.

00;00;55;03 - 00;00;55;07
Craig Andrews
it's French-Canadian name, but he speaks very clear English. And as a matter of fact, we have,

00;01;00;15 - 00;01;13;06
Craig Andrews
we burned almost an entire interview. Just kind of talking in the green room. This is going to be an exciting discussion by somebody who has built five companies. And obviously, he knows what to do.

00;01;13;06 - 00;01;44;03
Craig Andrews
Right? But he also knows what to do wrong. Like many of us in the process, he's stepped on the right few times and one of the things in particular we're going to talk about is watching out for the ego and releasing it. His current company is outsourcing I that's outsourced. I not ecom outsourcing I and they make outsourcing easy and specifically helps venture back companies safely source and scale engineering teams located

00;01;44;03 - 00;01;50;24
Craig Andrews
either next door to offshore and he's going to process that basically takes a lot of the pain out of it.

00;01;50;26 - 00;01;51;23
Craig Andrews
So,

00;01;51;23 - 00;01;54;08
Craig Andrews
anyway, Sean, welcome.

00;01;54;11 - 00;01;57;00
Sean Languedoc
Thank you. Craig, nice to be here.

00;01;57;03 - 00;01;57;17
Craig Andrews
You know,

00;01;57;17 - 00;02;04;28
Craig Andrews
one of the things that we were talking about and it's it's an interesting it's an interesting thing in the context of, you know, part of what you do is,

00;02;04;28 - 00;02;14;21
Craig Andrews
offshore. But you also include next door. But one of our discussions in the green room that I actually wish we recorded was about, you know,

00;02;14;21 - 00;02;17;13
Craig Andrews
about American engineering and American,

00;02;17;13 - 00;02;20;10
Craig Andrews
American, obviously saying North America, you're up in Canada.

00;02;20;10 - 00;02;23;19
Craig Andrews
I'm not trying to exclude. Yeah, yeah. No, my brethren up north,

00;02;23;19 - 00;02;24;04
Craig Andrews
but the,

00;02;24;04 - 00;02;29;11
Craig Andrews
but there is something, you know, just phenomenally good,

00;02;29;11 - 00;02;37;01
Craig Andrews
amazing engineering talent. And we've seen companies rise and fall, you know, great companies like Nortel.

00;02;37;01 - 00;02;40;00
Craig Andrews
Research in Motion and and others.

00;02;40;03 - 00;02;40;20
Sean Languedoc
Yeah.

00;02;40;22 - 00;02;42;00
Craig Andrews
BlackBerry.

00;02;42;00 - 00;02;51;01
Craig Andrews
and I don't know, as we kick off, you know, you've seen these companies rise and fall. What's what's your take on what happened? Where did we go wrong?

00;02;51;03 - 00;02;53;04
Sean Languedoc
Oh, man. Those are two great examples.

00;02;53;04 - 00;03;12;00
Sean Languedoc
and you talked about hitting it off with. Yeah, letting ego get out of the way. I had a friend who's an advisor to one of my first companies who was an advisor to Nortel, and, and he was in the room telling them that voice is dead. And data is the future.

00;03;12;02 - 00;03;27;10
Sean Languedoc
And they fired him. Hahahahahahahaha imagine what would have happened if they listened to another friend. We talked about mortar Motorola. He went in in the 19 late 1980s, early 1990s. He's he's a professor at,

00;03;27;10 - 00;03;30;27
Sean Languedoc
Rotman School of Business, which is kind of like the Harvard of Canada. And,

00;03;30;27 - 00;03;36;28
Sean Languedoc
he does business strategy. And in the summertime, he gets hired by these fortune 100 to walk through strategy.

00;03;36;28 - 00;03;58;03
Sean Languedoc
Motorola was one of his clients, and he does this as a business case for students. He says he comes in and he describes he's a futurist and a behaviorist, and he described the future of mobile technologies. And he said, just like Steve Jobs did in the introduction of the iPhone, you know, it's all these three things. And one, it's a phone, it's a player, it's video camera, you know?

00;03;58;05 - 00;04;24;02
Sean Languedoc
And he said, it's all everything's going to get compressed and it's going to get compressed into a mobile device. And and at the time mobile Motorola was killing it with the Razr like they had market share growing like crazy. And they and he literally presented it to the board and he and he designed for them the iPhone effectively at least the functionality of it not should not definitely not the design that Apple had, but the the functionality.

00;04;24;04 - 00;04;33;15
Sean Languedoc
And they said that's really cool, but it's not our business. and then same thing,

00;04;33;15 - 00;04;38;14
Sean Languedoc
you know, the famous story of BlackBerry, how they missed the opportunity when they saw what happened with,

00;04;38;14 - 00;04;51;12
Sean Languedoc
iPhone. They had probably the best messaging secure messaging system in the world. They could have leveraged software instead of hardware, but they were glorious in the hardware business and revolutionized it.

00;04;51;12 - 00;05;09;21
Sean Languedoc
So touchpoint that they didn't think anyone could eventually beat it. And guess what happened? They went out of business. So all they're out of business, but they're effectively not what they used to be. So all of these have to do with being able to let go and move to the next move, to where the market is going to go next.

00;05;09;24 - 00;05;12;08
Sean Languedoc
Famous Gretzky line, right? Okay.

00;05;12;11 - 00;05;13;26
Craig Andrews
Yeah. Good Canadian quote.

00;05;13;26 - 00;05;18;12
Craig Andrews
yeah. But that's you know, here's where that gets really hard.

00;05;18;12 - 00;05;33;28
Craig Andrews
you know, because I can think of, of people that tried to skate to where the puck was going, or at least where they thought it was going, and they got out there and there was no puck, there were no players. There was no nothing, nothing there.

00;05;34;01 - 00;05;37;10
Craig Andrews
I personally think the Apple Vision Pro,

00;05;37;10 - 00;05;42;04
Craig Andrews
is, is going to be the biggest failure since the anniversary. Mac, you know, from like that could be.

00;05;42;09 - 00;05;44;22
Sean Languedoc
It could be. Yeah. Yeah.

00;05;44;22 - 00;05;46;06
Sean Languedoc
could be.

00;05;46;09 - 00;06;22;14
Craig Andrews
So I guess the question is, how do you balance that? You know, so from, you know, from a concept of conservatism, not, you know, political conservatism, but ideological conservatism, you know, there's safety in conserving what's been proven and going off and doing the, you know, the wild and crazy is is scary. But, you know, clearly, you know, multiple companies have, you know, research in motion, by the way, for those that don't know if you had a business, if you were in business, you had a BlackBerry.

00;06;22;16 - 00;06;23;04
Craig Andrews
You know,

00;06;23;04 - 00;06;41;15
Craig Andrews
there was a day that if you were in business, you had a BlackBerry that was the phone that you had. And they absolutely dominated that market. Now they're, you know, like I said, effectively gone. And so conservatism would say, hey, you know, this is what God is here. Why don't we keep going? but they missed it.

00;06;41;18 - 00;06;50;18
Sean Languedoc
Yeah, yeah. And and it's a, you know, it's this it's the cycle of the of the of an ecosystem. The forest grows a big tall tree. Tree falls down getting

00;06;50;18 - 00;07;06;04
Sean Languedoc
one sprout off of its, out. It's a feeder tree. It's, it happens all the time. And we're not immune to it. Where companies do well is when they dedicate a portion of their budget towards innovation that is so disruptive, it's actually destroy the business inside.

00;07;06;07 - 00;07;24;22
Sean Languedoc
Intel used to do that all the time, so I'm sure it still does. Google used to provide the the 20% of the week. But you know, one day, the week you'd had to work on something that had nothing to do with what you're working on, go create something new that creates a great ecosystem of of innovation and a company that creates a culture of,

00;07;24;22 - 00;07;28;00
Sean Languedoc
of, of change as opposed to hanging on for dear life.

00;07;28;00 - 00;07;29;03
Sean Languedoc
So you got.

00;07;29;06 - 00;07;48;00
Craig Andrews
So you said something that slipped by so fast. I want to make sure people capture it, because I think it's really key. You have to have a culture. I'm going to reword what you said, but because I forgot what you said. Precisely. But it's basically a culture where you actively try to obsolete the things that are making money.

00;07;48;02 - 00;07;51;15
Sean Languedoc
That's right, that's right. Yeah.

00;07;51;17 - 00;07;52;06
Craig Andrews
You know, I.

00;07;52;08 - 00;08;02;03
Sean Languedoc
I guess you have to be thinking like you're a competent, like you're like a new company coming into the market. Who's going to disrupt this? Well, may as well be us. Yeah, right. And why

00;08;02;03 - 00;08;09;01
Sean Languedoc
why not? If you have budget to do that? I mean, some people are running a business and they can barely keep and make ends meet.

00;08;09;04 - 00;08;28;29
Sean Languedoc
But there you have to look at what innovations are out there already that you can rent through, software as a service license to help accelerate the productivity of your own teams, to generate, to actually execute on the business you're trying to execute on with a lot less friction. Yeah. And there's tons of that.

00;08;29;02 - 00;08;49;23
Craig Andrews
You know, I, I don't think I can think of a better example that of the iPod, you know, so when the iPod came around, Apple was a barely profitable company. The iPod made it outrageously profitable. and within just a few years, Steve Jobs started working on obsolete the iPod. Now you can't buy one.

00;08;49;26 - 00;08;52;18
Sean Languedoc
Yeah. And and there was a close and

00;08;52;18 - 00;09;14;03
Sean Languedoc
Apple's culture was a closed loop culture. Apple made software for its products. Nobody else did. Then they introduced the App Store. They created a development community that would that would make money off of building apps for Apple. That was a complete mind bender for a lot of people. That organization.

00;09;14;06 - 00;09;15;22
Sean Languedoc
Yeah. So,

00;09;15;22 - 00;09;26;24
Sean Languedoc
that's that's that's a good culture of innovation and, and and changing and breaking your own rules to support where they, where the market's going to go.

00;09;26;26 - 00;09;37;18
Craig Andrews
So how is it played out for you. You've launched five companies and, you know, just reality says everything didn't go swimmingly.

00;09;37;21 - 00;09;48;02
Sean Languedoc
yeah. Yeah. There's the line that you sit that people think there is. And then there's the squiggly line that goes up and down the round backwards and everything else. Like it gets to the other end, to that same endpoint. And that's the one I've taken.

00;09;48;04 - 00;09;51;05
Craig Andrews
Yeah. What would it look like?

00;09;51;07 - 00;09;55;12
Sean Languedoc
messy. Everything's messy when you're building a business. And,

00;09;55;12 - 00;10;17;07
Sean Languedoc
you know, just being aware of, like, if you're starting a business, for example, from scratch, there's no way in hell that what you're thinking is going to be the business ends up being the business. It's a good starting point and a good, thesis, potentially. And there might be enough market research to suggest intellectually that it's going to work.

00;10;17;09 - 00;10;30;03
Sean Languedoc
But people don't. People act emotionally and they justify what their actions are with intellectual as opposed to the other way around. So if you're a good thinker and you're thinking, everyone's going to love this,

00;10;30;03 - 00;10;38;29
Sean Languedoc
wait till they try it, then they'll then you'll figure out what will actually work. And and that's been the case for, for a lot of companies I've been with and the businesses that I've run,

00;10;38;29 - 00;10;41;28
Sean Languedoc
and some cases the circumstances changed radically.

00;10;42;01 - 00;11;01;25
Sean Languedoc
But this last company, most of my companies have been tech companies where I would need to use, recruiter for hiring engineers and an outsourcing agency to build extra product. If I needed to speed and quality, and that I couldn't get fast enough, I built, I built actually an outsourcing, not an outsourcing,

00;11;01;25 - 00;11;05;02
Sean Languedoc
international recruiting agency or high end engineering.

00;11;05;04 - 00;11;12;07
Sean Languedoc
So the problem in North America is we don't make enough AI and engineers, and they make them a lot in other markets.

00;11;12;07 - 00;11;14;28
Sean Languedoc
South Africa is great for mathematicians.

00;11;14;28 - 00;11;24;03
Sean Languedoc
Eastern Europe, phenomenal for full stack engineering, that kind of thing. So some of those people want to move to the country. It used to be that, you know, you'd want all your engineers in one place, right?

00;11;24;05 - 00;11;47;19
Sean Languedoc
pre-COVID, everyone had to come to the office post-Covid, nobody had to come to the office. So two things happened for me in Canada as I was bringing these people in with Covid. Nobody could come to Canada. So that business was completely wiped out. But I rethought about the opposite problem I had whenever I was trying to outsource it's water.

00;11;47;19 - 00;12;09;06
Sean Languedoc
Water everywhere, and not a drop to drink like there's just like I said in the beginning of the show, there's probably a 100 emails you'll get in a month from outsourcing agencies you've never heard of, offering you to build anything you could ever dream of, right? Right. There's just way too many choices, and you don't know what's real and you don't know what to do.

00;12;09;08 - 00;12;30;12
Sean Languedoc
So you go to your friends and you say, hey, I don't trust any of this noise. I'm going to go talk to a friend who's had an experience with an outsourcing agency. Hey, Craig, do you know anybody who's good? And Craig, you may know somebody who's good, but it's probably somebody in the telco space. And I might be in the fin tech space or the health tech space, or I might be a restaurateur and they know nothing about my business.

00;12;30;14 - 00;12;48;27
Sean Languedoc
So that's a total waste of three months training them about how the business works, the laws of the business, everything else. And even if they are the right agency in the right space, chances are they, you know, they don't have their best engineers just sitting around the office all day waiting for me to call. They've got all their

00;12;48;27 - 00;13;00;12
Sean Languedoc
best engineers deployed, so unless they've got a project that's just finishing and a team that's coming off, that's actually knows your space and in the same tech stack, your chances are very slim that you're going to get that right.

00;13;00;12 - 00;13;19;17
Sean Languedoc
With 1 or 2 agencies you might call on from friends. So the next thing you do is you go online and you look at, you know, oh, I hear there's great, you know, engineers in Brazil or Argentina or Ukraine, Ukraine or Poland. And you're taking a lucky guess. But that's like saying there's great hockey players in Canada and there are.

00;13;19;19 - 00;13;37;25
Sean Languedoc
But if you pick me, I'm a skier. So you're kind of it's kind of a bad way to pick. And you're also picking based on the ones that are best advertising. So that can be a waste of time. And then so nobody really has the time to get the data to make a good decision to select a good agency.

00;13;37;27 - 00;14;02;07
Sean Languedoc
And so I, I realized that was my, my problem as well. So I pivoted from being this recruiting agency to becoming the facilitator of a better match between what a client needs and who are the best agencies, locally or not locally, or what they wanted to do. And that's been a great,

00;14;02;07 - 00;14;08;18
Sean Languedoc
outcome for all my clients and a great service for the industry generally, because nobody really has the time to get the data.

00;14;08;18 - 00;14;36;16
Sean Languedoc
And very few people have a good process, like you would phone you, talk, you talk to the lead of the organization when you when you want to talk to an agency, right? Like, hey, I run a company, I'm going to talk to their person who runs a company or at least their head of engineering, and you'll get the best interview you'll ever have, because they know exactly how to answer all your questions, because they do it all day long, but they won't tell you who they've got on their team that's available next week to start the job.

00;14;36;18 - 00;14;57;17
Sean Languedoc
Yeah, and that's what we do. We do a bottom up process, so we only let our clients talk to the agency that has the right team at the right time, with the right skills and the right cultural fit, speaks English perfectly well if that's required or communicates among each other perfectly well if that's required. And those are generally table stakes.

00;14;57;17 - 00;14;59;28
Sean Languedoc
But a lot of people miss on those things.

00;15;00;03 - 00;15;05;23
Craig Andrews
Well, but you said something a couple minutes ago that the honestly caught me a little bit off guard.

00;15;05;23 - 00;15;06;24
Craig Andrews
you said that,

00;15;06;24 - 00;15;11;04
Craig Andrews
North America is not great at, what did you say it was,

00;15;11;04 - 00;15;16;11
Craig Andrews
expert in deep. There was some type of expertise, related to.

00;15;16;12 - 00;15;19;09
Sean Languedoc
You know, we have a shortage of engineering shortage

00;15;19;09 - 00;15;28;12
Sean Languedoc
that we're not good at. No, no, I had the best engineers in the world or in North America right now because they came here to get educated and they stayed here. Most of them. So,

00;15;28;12 - 00;15;39;03
Sean Languedoc
I don't know. No, but there are really good engineers from other countries who would love to work in North America or for North American company like Sonoma.

00;15;39;05 - 00;15;44;03
Sean Languedoc
So, you know, notwithstanding the relationships that have been strained,

00;15;44;03 - 00;15;56;06
Sean Languedoc
with Russia. But one of the great things about Russia did for all of eastern Europe was build a really good technical engineering culture. Now. So you have phenomenal full stack engineers out of

00;15;56;06 - 00;15;57;15
Sean Languedoc
all of those countries.

00;15;57;15 - 00;15;58;25
Sean Languedoc
that are no longer part of the,

00;15;58;25 - 00;16;04;08
Sean Languedoc
Russian Federation, but they're but they the legacy is the education.

00;16;04;10 - 00;16;06;06
Sean Languedoc
so that's just a good signpost.

00;16;06;06 - 00;16;13;18
Sean Languedoc
you know, like I said, South Africa is phenomenal for mathematics. Gaming industry tends to be very strong in south south Africa as well.

00;16;13;18 - 00;16;23;17
Sean Languedoc
so it just very there's pockets of really good strength in certain sectors Latin America, Central and Central America, really good at creative front end engineering, you know, just I don't know why just,

00;16;23;17 - 00;16;26;29
Sean Languedoc
Latin culture maybe, and just creative creativity.

00;16;26;29 - 00;16;28;18
Sean Languedoc
The so who knows.

00;16;28;21 - 00;16;32;05
Craig Andrews
Yeah. Well, it's it's interesting. One of the things I,

00;16;32;05 - 00;16;42;29
Craig Andrews
I heard somebody explain that there's, there's a good reason that Silicon Valley is where it is, and that AI is all coming out of Silicon Valley, and they actually took it all the way back to the,

00;16;42;29 - 00;16;49;02
Craig Andrews
what was the big movement, the hippie movement in the 60s and 70s?

00;16;49;04 - 00;16;56;18
Craig Andrews
And there's just something there's something in the way people think they're they just,

00;16;56;18 - 00;17;21;03
Craig Andrews
you know, maybe it's too much LSD or what, but they just think differently, and they come up with ideas that really help move things forward. And so it makes sense that, you know, if we could have that in the United States, that other areas, like you said, perhaps Latin America just there, you know, their culture lends itself to naturally, you know, good creative from front on end work.

00;17;21;05 - 00;17;52;20
Sean Languedoc
Yeah. No. And, and and just even at an engineering level, at the pure level, different cultures bring different value and different ways of thinking about how to solve a problem. So when all this diversity and inclusion stuff, it's great, you know, philosophically. But in practice, I've seen it a lot where, you know, some people just can't think out of the box and some of you and even another culture, some people can't think of another box, but you put those two boxes together and you go, whoa, okay, here's the solution.

00;17;52;23 - 00;17;54;27
Sean Languedoc
It's pretty cool. Really cool.

00;17;54;29 - 00;17;58;17
Craig Andrews
You know, years ago, my first job out of university, I worked with a,

00;17;58;17 - 00;18;00;16
Craig Andrews
a Polish guy who,

00;18;00;16 - 00;18;04;29
Craig Andrews
I think he, I think what ever happened behind the Iron Curtain really put the zap on him?

00;18;04;29 - 00;18;16;29
Craig Andrews
he's he's the only guy that I think he's the only guy I've ever worked with. I could legit see showing up at work with an AK 47 and shooting up the place, and he was unstable.

00;18;17;02 - 00;18;38;02
Craig Andrews
But the dude was brilliant. And I remember, you know, one time in particular we were working on this problem. They said, well, you know, why don't you try this? And and he was like, dead on. I mean, we'd been working on problem for two weeks. He just looked. They said, why don't you swap these two parts? We swap those two parts.

00;18;38;02 - 00;18;55;26
Craig Andrews
And it worked. I was excited. And so I went back and I told him, I said, hey, Bogdan, you nailed it. And my boss was standing. And I'm saying this in front of our mutual boss. I'm like, Bogdan, you nailed it. You fixed it. And he looks at me. He's like, I don't know what game you're playing, but I want no part of it.

00;18;55;29 - 00;19;00;27
Craig Andrews
Yeah.

00;19;00;29 - 00;19;06;25
Sean Languedoc
oh. That's too funny. That is so funny. So it's so I, I talk about this that in,

00;19;06;25 - 00;19;18;13
Sean Languedoc
in culture, in the way we hire in North America, we, we tend to want to hire people. We're going to like, like this old airport rule. If I'm stuck for eight hours in an airport, do I want to be with this person while I'm in the airport, like that kind of thing.

00;19;18;13 - 00;19;22;15
Sean Languedoc
Right. So there's there's a the vertical axis is,

00;19;22;15 - 00;19;36;15
Sean Languedoc
you know, likability or, you know, it's, you know, that kind of a that kind of a spectrum. And then the horizontal axis is skills. And so in North America, we we will sacrifice skills for likability. We want them,

00;19;36;15 - 00;19;40;17
Sean Languedoc
you know, not in the, in the if they can't fit in the top right quadrant, we'll take them

00;19;40;17 - 00;19;42;09
Sean Languedoc
higher up in the quadrant regardless.

00;19;42;15 - 00;19;57;06
Sean Languedoc
And we think we can move them over on the skills. And in other cultures, it's a way off on the skills. I don't care about likability. You're a mercenary. Get your ship, get your stuff done. Yeah. And that that tends to be sort of an Eastern European,

00;19;57;06 - 00;20;06;03
Sean Languedoc
culture as well. So where where you have a culture where likability is really important, you introduce somebody from that culture and they're like, nobody knows what's going on.

00;20;06;03 - 00;20;09;25
Sean Languedoc
I'm the only one who can fix this. That's the kind of culture they got,

00;20;09;25 - 00;20;27;23
Sean Languedoc
that can break a whole team apart. Right? So that's why you have to look not just for skill, but also cultural fit in whenever you're doing something like outsourcing and and, like back to your point about North America. No, no, I when we make a selection process, we say, don't pick a country, don't pick a geography, don't even pick a price.

00;20;27;25 - 00;20;55;18
Sean Languedoc
Pick the best captain that you can get to fix, to build or rebuild or fix or whatever it is you need to do. And then negotiate on price because, you know, yes, North American talent is more expensive than in other countries. But if that team is 250% more productive and your savings is 30% in another country, what the heck you're thinking.

00;20;55;23 - 00;21;07;24
Sean Languedoc
Like, think about the outcome and productivity. So I'm full advocate of of what accelerates the outcome at the best value as opposed to the best hourly rate.

00;21;07;26 - 00;21;14;18
Craig Andrews
Yeah. So somewhat recently Google made a move that kind of surprised me.

00;21;14;18 - 00;21;27;26
Craig Andrews
And you know they obviously a lot of these larger companies have been outsourcing jobs for years. That's that's nothing new. But they took some of their core functions. I think it was their Python and

00;21;27;26 - 00;21;40;07
Craig Andrews
their internal Python development and something else. And they moved those out of Mountain View and they moved one function down to, I think, Mexico and the other function over to India.

00;21;40;09 - 00;21;56;17
Craig Andrews
and that really surprised me because, you know, when I, when I was used to saying was kind of the core engineering functions being maintained in North America was some of the, you know, some of the peripheral work moved offshore. One, I don't know if you've noticed that.

00;21;56;17 - 00;21;59;06
Craig Andrews
but if you did or didn't, I? I'm interested in your take on that.

00;21;59;06 - 00;22;03;05
Craig Andrews
What what do you think's driving that?

00;22;03;08 - 00;22;04;05
Sean Languedoc
I couldn't,

00;22;04;05 - 00;22;08;09
Sean Languedoc
address that specifically, but there is a very,

00;22;08;09 - 00;22;10;04
Sean Languedoc
I would say,

00;22;10;04 - 00;22;29;11
Sean Languedoc
almost all it's almost the I don't say racist, but it's it's we have these preconceptions about where the best talent is and where it's going to work best. And, you know, in, and this happened a lot, where you have people from another country, nobody recognizes the universe.

00;22;29;11 - 00;22;43;06
Sean Languedoc
They came from. But in that in that country, that university is the Stanford of the country. Right? Right. But to get into that Stanford, with their population, it's a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the percentage that get in that school. So it is really a

00;22;43;06 - 00;22;44;14
Sean Languedoc
tough school to get into.

00;22;44;17 - 00;22;45;25
Craig Andrews
Yeah. Like I tend to.

00;22;45;25 - 00;22;51;20
Sean Languedoc
Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly where I was going. Yeah. So it in India like Google Facebook

00;22;51;20 - 00;23;08;23
Sean Languedoc
Tesla. Everybody's sitting outside the graduating class offering $250,000 signing bonus just to join the company. No interviews. No, not I mean, obviously there's interviews, but, like, that's the level of filtering that they've done to get. They could have done watercolors for their students studies.

00;23;08;29 - 00;23;29;09
Sean Languedoc
They're just that smart to get in there. So to say that they're moving it to their I don't know the specifics of it, but it might be the suggestion that they in themselves, for maybe a large contingent of that team, might have already been from that country and could then recruit more people more easily. And remotes. Okay.

00;23;29;11 - 00;23;42;21
Craig Andrews
Yeah. Interesting. well, as we wrap up that if somebody were if somebody were about to scope out something, how do we make them a better shopper?

00;23;42;21 - 00;23;51;02
Craig Andrews
for remote engineers, what would be your kind of quick advice to be a better shopper of remote engineers?

00;23;51;04 - 00;23;52;00
Sean Languedoc
Well, remote.

00;23;52;00 - 00;24;00;02
Sean Languedoc
as I said, it could be down the street. It doesn't mean India. It doesn't mean Mexico. It just means someone who's not in your office.

00;24;00;02 - 00;24;01;04
Sean Languedoc
yeah. You look at,

00;24;01;04 - 00;24;10;17
Sean Languedoc
I mean, yeah, you can look at Google and try and try and get it that way on your own. It's going to be challenging to figure out who's real and who's not.

00;24;10;20 - 00;24;12;21
Sean Languedoc
I would go to I would look at the,

00;24;12;21 - 00;24;15;02
Sean Languedoc
the hero labels on

00;24;15;02 - 00;24;19;05
Sean Languedoc
the websites to see if there's any that are in the same industry as yours.

00;24;19;05 - 00;24;43;04
Sean Languedoc
as a, as a starting point, because if they've got a good project in your space, then they kind of understand the space then then ask them if they have engineers who are coming off a project, who have worked together, that have built projects in your space, and then interview those engineers before you interview anybody else from that organization, because you want to know that those are the ones that are come on, your team now.

00;24;43;07 - 00;24;48;18
Sean Languedoc
It's still, you know, a needle in a haystack because there's so many out there. And they could tell you a lot of things.

00;24;48;18 - 00;24;51;17
Sean Languedoc
but that's a good starting point. I am publishing,

00;24;51;17 - 00;24;59;07
Sean Languedoc
a document in the next by the end of this month. That is the definitive guide to outsourcing. So it's got all the secrets.

00;24;59;07 - 00;25;00;09
Sean Languedoc
all you need to do is,

00;25;00;09 - 00;25;02;01
Sean Languedoc
sign up on our site, and we'll.

00;25;02;04 - 00;25;03;20
Sean Languedoc
I'll send you that copy.

00;25;03;20 - 00;25;18;29
Sean Languedoc
and it's it'll have all the interview questions to do during the interview process with all these engineers. You know, how the mistakes that you can make in, in the selection process and how to avoid them, whether or not use just I don't care. I just don't want anyone to waste any time talking to an agency.

00;25;18;29 - 00;25;24;05
Sean Languedoc
That is a waste of time because you can get so hoodwinked. Yeah, and it's easy to do.

00;25;24;08 - 00;25;26;13
Craig Andrews
Yeah.

00;25;26;13 - 00;25;30;19
Craig Andrews
if somebody wanted to work with you, how do they reach you?

00;25;30;21 - 00;25;33;14
Sean Languedoc
first that I. Sean as Ian, like,

00;25;33;14 - 00;25;35;07
Sean Languedoc
the Irish guy,

00;25;35;07 - 00;25;38;28
Sean Languedoc
at outsourced audio or just go to the website and,

00;25;38;28 - 00;25;51;03
Sean Languedoc
like I said, drop your name, and we have a database like 80,000 companies tagged based on which domain they're best, in, which tech stacks, they've got the most best track them. And that's a great starting point.

00;25;51;05 - 00;25;56;05
Sean Languedoc
The heavy lift is the due diligence on the teams. And we help you with that.

00;25;56;07 - 00;26;00;06
Craig Andrews
Well Sean, this has been fascinating. This has been fascinating. Thanks for

00;26;00;06 - 00;26;04;13
Craig Andrews
thanks for sharing that. Sharon. Some more stories from the Nortel days.

00;26;04;16 - 00;26;07;01
Sean Languedoc
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00;26;07;04 - 00;26;09;14
Craig Andrews
but thanks for coming on Layers and Legacies.

00;26;09;17 - 00;26;14;20
Sean Languedoc
My pleasure. Craig, thank you for having me.

00;26;14;20 - 00;26;41;14
Craig Andrews
This is Craig Andrews. I want to thank you for listening to the Leaders and Legacies podcast. We're looking for leaders to share how they're making the impact beyond themselves. If that's you, please go to Alize for me.com/guest and sign up there. If you got something out of this interview, we would love you to share this

00;26;41;14 - 00;26;43;09
Craig Andrews
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00;26;43;11 - 00;27;06;23
Craig Andrews
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00;27;06;25 - 00;27;15;00
Craig Andrews
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00;27;15;00 - 00;29;17;05
Craig Andrews
It means a lot to my team. If you want to know more, please go to Alize for me.com. or follow me on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.