Who Comes Next: Insights from B-Sides with Brian Hein and Constantin Jacob

This past Friday, DNSFilter’s own Brian Hein (Principal Threat Researcher) and Constantin (CJ) Jacob (Manager, Engineering, Security Intelligence & Solutions) gave the closing keynote at Elbsides 2026 in Hamburg, Germany. The title of their talk: "Who Comes Next?"

The premise was simple: The threat intelligence community has gotten good at sharing information quickly, but it hasn't solved its succession problem. The trusted networks that power real-time collaboration during major incidents are aging out, and almost no one is deliberately building the bench behind them.

Brian and CJ traced how the pandemic, shrinking travel budgets, and the rise of agentic AI tools have quietly compounded the problem. Junior analysts can now operate entire intelligence workflows without ever picking up the phone, which makes them productive but disconnected from the human relationships the community was built on. The people who do hold those relationships are the same ones who get sent to every conference, every working group, every call. The pool isn't growing.

The talk was a call to action aimed at two groups: The managers who control travel budgets and performance reviews, and the community builders who set the norms for how trust groups recruit. The core argument was that the CTI community needs to adopt the same feeder-system thinking that professional sports figured out decades ago. Sponsored entry, deliberate mentorship across organizations, and a named roster of who could step in tomorrow.

Watch the recording below, read the transcript, or get the slides on Slideshare.

Session recording

Full session transcript

[0:00] Brian Hein: Good morning, thank you Fabian.

[0:02] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Hello.

[0:04] Brian Hein: All right, CJ, do you want to kick us off?

[0:07] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Please, yeah.

[0:08] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): I'm an engineering manager at DNS Filter.

[0:10] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): I mainly work on Guardian Firewall.

[0:12] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): It's a public VPN service which you offer as a product directly to anybody who's interested or in the need of a good VPN, in my opinion.

[0:23] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): We also have partnerships with Brave, the browser, as well as with Eero, the Amazon's Wi-Fi division, who are great partners to work with.

[0:32] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): That's kind of like what I do day to day, just keep operations running, keep people's privacy secure.

[0:39] Brian Hein: Perfect.

[0:39] Brian Hein: And I'm Brian Hein, Moin Moin.

[0:41] Brian Hein: It's good to be in Hamburg again.

[0:44] Brian Hein: Yeah, I'm the principal threat researcher at DNS Filter.

[0:47] Brian Hein: I spend my days and nights punching bad people on the internet and having a lot of fun and hopefully a lot of impact.

[0:57] Brian Hein: Some people like Stefan (Kelm) here know me pretty well from three o'clock in the morning calls.

[1:01] Brian Hein: Hey, Stefan, there's a fire at some German university or company.

[1:06] Brian Hein: You picked up my phone call.

[1:07] Brian Hein: Can you please help?

[1:09] Brian Hein: And over time, I spent the last 15 years in North America, really, really involved in trust groups, how we build large security team SOC operations.

[1:20] Brian Hein: And this is a series of talks with a clear line of succession.

[1:26] Brian Hein: It started, or the community conversation started in 2023 when Tom Milar and James Schank spoke about, hey, how do trust groups work?

[1:35] Brian Hein: and are different ways of dealing with things, maybe better, and form the idea around action communities.

[1:43] Brian Hein: Communities of people that do not necessarily trust each other, because for me it's hard to trust any law enforcement agent, especially in a foreign country, because they have their different needs, same for people that I collaborate with constantly,

[1:58] Brian Hein: It might be military folks that have their own types of beasts, and those are also people in foreign hostile nations.

[2:06] Brian Hein: I can say I'm a big advocate for anything that the Ukrainians are going through.

[2:13] Brian Hein: At the same time, on a professional level, I have and I will constantly collaborate with Russian citizens.

[2:21] Brian Hein: understanding their unique needs, that they cannot betray their own country.

[2:26] Brian Hein: At the same time, cybercrime is an international problem, and we have to, in a certain way, play really, really hard, but fair, and go after the really bad guys on the internet, no matter what country flag there wear.

[2:41] Brian Hein: In Munich this year, James Schank and I spoke at First CTI around action communities and rephrased the conversation a bit around impact.

[2:54] Brian Hein: Because in the end, if we do not have an impact as a group, as a company, as a security team, it doesn't really matter.

[3:02] Brian Hein: It's theatre.

[3:04] Brian Hein: And we have to be better and we can be better.

[3:07] Brian Hein: We boldly said kill your vanity metrics because yes, we all love our metrics that people look at the dashboards, but the nutritional value from security perspective is almost zero.

[3:20] Brian Hein: And yeah, we can work on continuing the conversation to have a positive impact.

[3:27] Brian Hein: Here in Hamburg now, we're looking at two main concepts.

[3:32] Brian Hein: One is building a bigger bench.

[3:35] Brian Hein: And also, if you're in mid-management, I want you to go back, look at your budget, and allow your people to travel.

[3:42] Brian Hein: Give them beer money, and we'll go into details why this is so important.

[3:47] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): If you have not watched the talk with James Chang and Brian in Munich for CTI, highly recommend it.

[3:56] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Go back, find it on YouTube, take a look at it.

[4:00] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): It was really good.

[4:01] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): I really enjoyed it.

[4:04] Brian Hein: Know Met Trust is the iron principle in a lot of security communities.

[4:10] Brian Hein: You have to be known, or people have to know you for a certain capability, public works, talks like here, doing the work in various communities.

[4:22] Brian Hein: And then the met you part becomes really, really difficult.

[4:27] Brian Hein: Because we stopped allowing people to go to conferences, meeting somebody in person is absolutely important.

[4:35] Brian Hein: Yes, I'm hyper online, I'm constantly on Zoom calls with friends, family members, do you name it?

[4:41] Brian Hein: But it gets really hard to build any kind of idea for who's the other person.

[4:48] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Trust also extends internally.

[4:50] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Trust your own people with a longer leash to go out and build themselves, like continue to build themselves as persons in humanism become an asset to your organization.

[5:03] Brian Hein: Know Met Trust was not really written down outside of the intelligence community, but it became the iron principle of how a lot of the work is done and we need to look at it.

[5:16] Brian Hein: Is it really the right way and do we scale?

[5:20] Brian Hein: And how can we get maybe more trusting?

[5:24] Brian Hein: Because it's okay, I don't have to completely understand what another person's motivation is.

[5:29] Brian Hein: If two of you are needed to help at three o'clock in the morning to crush some bad guy's skulls, let's fu**ing go.

[5:36] Brian Hein: Excuse my language.

[5:38] Brian Hein: Here's my hopefully only curse on stage.

[5:40] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): I did it.

[5:46] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Yeah, KMT is a moat.

[5:49] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): It's a massive moat, but also there's a downside.

[5:52] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): It makes you less flexible in many ways.

[5:59] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): The bad guys just have to get lucky once, right?

[6:01] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): And they can just outweigh us, build better tools, and strike eventually.

[6:07] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): You're not constantly fighting the same people.

[6:09] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): It's an evolving threat at all times.

[6:13] Brian Hein: And if you look at, for example, ransomware groups at their communication internally, they don't trust each other at all.

[6:18] Brian Hein: There is constant betrayal, and a lot of it is very interesting psychologically to read afterwards.

[6:24] Brian Hein: But they have built multi-billion-dollar enterprises, making money by defrauding us, our constituents,

[6:32] Brian Hein: And they can do that without any kind of real trust.

[6:35] Brian Hein: They often don't know each other.

[6:37] Brian Hein: Well, some of them do, and then they get sloppy, and then we can help law enforcement to back them, which is perfect.

[6:43] Brian Hein: Thank you for your mistakes.

[6:44] Brian Hein: But our adversaries don't work around that static, hey, I have a big moat.

[6:50] Brian Hein: Everyone has to always be in the same group, in the same trusted environment.

[6:57] Brian Hein: And it's hurting us.

[6:58] Brian Hein: We have a problem of scale.

[7:01] Brian Hein: We manufacture exclusivity, not really bringing us as a community forward, as people forward, as the security industry.

[7:16] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Yeah.

[7:18] Brian Hein: Sorry, I just had to mentally, I thought about - over the pandemic.

[7:21] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Pandemic break.

[7:23] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Yeah.

[7:23] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Think back to it.

[7:24] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Lots of bad memories.

[7:26] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): But also good.

[7:27] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Some good memories as well.

[7:29] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Yeah.

[7:31] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): A lot of conferences, I mean, all conference kind of shut down.

[7:33] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): A lot of conferences tried to adapt going virtual.

[7:38] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Some of it worked really well.

[7:39] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Some of it did not work at all.

[7:41] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): I know like quick show of hands.

[7:43] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): How many did a virtual*, attended a virtual conference?

[7:48] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Good, bad, experiences, mix, everybody kind of makes, oh good, some good, all right.

[7:55] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Yeah, a couple of years onwards, the world kind of reopened, things started happening again in person.

[8:05] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): A lot of companies kind of realize that they can save a bunch of money, not attending conferences in large forces or just like, instead of sending 15 people, like we can do that half.

[8:16] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Like it's the same turnaround we sent for, right?

[8:20] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): And then.

[8:22] Brian Hein: And don't get me wrong, I love going to conferences, but the big international conferences, I know 80% because I've been at the other conference four months before.

[8:31] Brian Hein: And that's cool.

[8:33] Brian Hein: It's always just like “Klassenfahrt”.

[8:36] Brian Hein: I don't know the English word for it.

[8:37] Brian Hein: A school adventure.

[8:39] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): The field trip.

[8:40] Brian Hein: Yeah, a field trip.

[8:43] Brian Hein: That needs to change.

[8:44] Brian Hein: We need to understand, realize, yes, there is travel opportunities, our actual work.

[8:51] Brian Hein: And we need to empower our juniors, and we'll get to that in more detail.

[8:55] Brian Hein: But we need to allow our juniors to go out and also experience how it is to be in a community, to potentially also make mistakes.

[9:05] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): And it's not measurable like you might not get anything out of it for multiple years But when the day comes that they are in a position to have an impact and they have a network to lean on to You'll really benefit from it at that point And if we don't do that we lose an entire generation on rounding errors and corporate budgets and that's unfortunate

[9:33] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Yeah, kind of turn over the generation, like a bunch of juniors are with the help of LLMs and like a genetic lifestyle, like they're very, very good or getting to be very good at meeting vanity metrics in a way by just pointing

[9:55] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): these tools to optimize for certain metrics that are defined by leadership, but the end result might not be actually better work.

[10:07] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): And in a way, they're also lacking the network to lean on to down road.

[10:12] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Like you're missing 10% maybe, or it might be more at the end of the day that might actually help you solve

[10:21] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): a case or finish a project or finish a take down or, you know, it might end up like bad guys slipping away because they just don't have the resources that they established many years before that at some conference or some local event or like whatever it may be.

[10:41] Brian Hein: or just the inspiration to go out of the mold and say, hey, my AI result looks too good to be true.

[10:47] Brian Hein: Let's call somebody who might have a totally different background.

[10:51] Brian Hein: He just looks and says, hey, I studied African languages 10 years ago.

[10:58] Brian Hein: I have a totally different idea.

[10:59] Brian Hein: Can you walk me through your ideas?

[11:01] Brian Hein: And you just look at it and say, you had all looked too plausible.

[11:04] Brian Hein: But in reality, somebody else with a different cultural background might just say,

[11:10] Brian Hein: bullcrap.

[11:12] Brian Hein: Hey, think about it.

[11:13] Brian Hein: Let's go back to ones and zeros and all of a sudden solve it.

[11:22] Brian Hein: Identical tools are phenomenal, giving an infinite amount of answers.

[11:28] Brian Hein: except one, which is, hey, I'm not sure.

[11:31] Brian Hein: Why didn't you call an expert?

[11:34] Brian Hein: And I'm not talking about a rack system that gets more data into it.

[11:38] Brian Hein: I'm again, emphasizing, hey, there is humans among us that have very interesting knowledge that helps

[11:48] Brian Hein: Now we're in Hamburg.

[11:49] Brian Hein: We look at the beautiful port.

[11:50] Brian Hein: You have the prime area where you can interact with people that have an actual real clue about how critical infrastructure in shipping works.

[11:59] Brian Hein: This is impossible for me to in Ottawa/Canada.

[12:01] Brian Hein: We don't have a port.

[12:05] Brian Hein: There's just not that skill set available.

[12:06] Brian Hein: Yes, probably somewhere in Vancouver.

[12:08] Brian Hein: There's another group that's equally skilled, but let's form ways how we

[12:16] Brian Hein: built networks of people that can help each other even if they don't know each other super well.

[12:21] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Yeah, different constraints, different points of views, exchange of ideas is going to strengthen everybody's ability to operate at some point.

[12:32] Brian Hein: and not only strengthen, but also build a certain muscle memory.

[12:35] Brian Hein: Social interactions are hard.

[12:38] Brian Hein: I speak so often publicly, but after COVID, I had that super hard time, which is like, I don't want to stand on stage again.

[12:46] Brian Hein: This is the social interaction is something we need to practice day in, day out.

[12:52] Brian Hein: And we need to allow the generation of just looks at a console to also be socialized if we would talk about puppies.

[13:02] Brian Hein: And I'm not looking down.

[13:03] Brian Hein: I'm one of those puppies as well.

[13:05] Brian Hein: I have my social challenges.

[13:07] Brian Hein: My wife thinks I'm a nerd.

[13:08] Brian Hein: Yes, I am.

[13:10] Brian Hein: Totally fine.

[13:11] Brian Hein: Because y'all are nerds and you're my community and my people.

[13:14] Brian Hein: So that's good.

[13:19] Brian Hein: One of the things some people know, probably everyone heard about Emotet.

[13:24] Brian Hein: I was part of one of the teams that worked very heavily in preparing the takedown and also making the takedown successful.

[13:33] Brian Hein: For Deutsche Telekom, I led all the initiatives for a year and a half before they led to this all of a sudden disappearance of one of the biggest threats at that time on the internet.

[13:46] Brian Hein: And one of the key lessons learned was completely illogical.

[13:51] Brian Hein: We and law enforcement helped to analyze a lot of the captured communication patterns.

[13:57] Brian Hein: We drove them nuts because they were not reliable.

[14:01] Brian Hein: They had their customers bitching and complaining because one carrier like Deutsche Telekom did act on the global internet, reducing their KPIs.

[14:11] Brian Hein: And I did that, my team did that when we were available.

[14:15] Brian Hein: I have kids, I have a busy life and there were times where I was just out with friends drinking beer.

[14:20] Brian Hein: And yes, in that moment nothing happened.

[14:23] Brian Hein: Next morning I woke up or somebody in the team just looked at it and started to go after a certain thing really, really hard.

[14:31] Brian Hein: It had the fun side effect that we drove their customer success metrics internally down, because it was in a certain way uncoordinated, disjointed, but with a lot of passion.

[14:43] Brian Hein: And they could have easily killed one of the global carriers.

[14:46] Brian Hein: But as we build that alliance of people that know each other and had a certain management buy-in, that we constantly gave them a thousand needles,

[14:57] Brian Hein: we had a huge impact leading to the takedown of just screwing with a business case.

[15:03] Brian Hein: making life less pleasurable because their customers are important for them and it's really bad if you get bad customer metrics.

[15:11] Brian Hein: We had that discussion unrelated for our tech support two days ago where the metrics are 100%.

[15:18] Brian Hein: Yes, because anything when it dips down is an immediate warning sign for a company to, you have to invest in driving C-satt up again.

[15:29] Brian Hein: But what really, really helps succeeding is having the right people in virtual communications.

[15:36] Brian Hein: And we had some cases where people were unavailable to have enough fodder of people that were trusted enough that we could onboard them within 30 minutes.

[15:47] Brian Hein: I think I met you (CJ) later in a different campaign

[15:50] Brian Hein: Experience that and there was literally no onboarding, no training.

[15:54] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): I joined 48 hours before everything happened.

[15:58] Brian Hein: There was “operation end game”.

[16:00] Brian Hein: And yeah, certain people are vetted or people know them good enough to just say like, hey, have a challenge.

[16:07] Brian Hein: Good morning.

[16:07] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Yeah, exactly.

[16:08] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): I woke up to a couple of messages, and everything had already been decided on the other side of the world.

[16:14] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): I was along for the ride.

[16:16] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Yeah, kind of the thing to mention here, to kind of drive to a point further home, 25% of something is more than 100% of nothing.

[16:29] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): If you have somebody that can help but might not know absolutely everything and might not know everything that you know, they're still going to help you.

[16:39] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): bridge gaps in the meantime, right?

[16:42] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Like you need to bring them up to speed over time, give them the experience and then build the talent.

[16:49] Brian Hein: But the key thing is we need to look at it how professional sports teams do it.

[16:53] Brian Hein: They have a bench in their own team.

[16:55] Brian Hein: They know which players they have on contract, but they also have farm teams.

[17:02] Brian Hein: The team, I'm not familiar enough with St. Pauli, but I'm sure they have their local soccer club where the young guys train like the professionals, go to the same doctors, and if one of the big guys is unfortunately not available, yes, there is the big race of managers trying to sign contracts, get the next player from a professional team.

[17:20] Brian Hein: But in the meantime, one of the young guys can just step in if they do a good job.

[17:25] Brian Hein: Hey, they're pro.

[17:26] Brian Hein: They're all of a sudden no longer

[17:29] Brian Hein: Trying to get in there just like, yeah, you did a good job.

[17:32] Brian Hein: Let's go.

[17:33] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Grow with the challenge.

[17:37] Brian Hein: How many people in the room?

[17:41] Brian Hein: If you look around, how many people would you trust to take your job at a moment's notice?

[17:47] Brian Hein: Because you have a family event.

[17:50] Brian Hein: Congratulations, you're just becoming a father unplanned without hearing about it before.

[17:55] Brian Hein: No, I'm just making this up.

[17:57] Brian Hein: I don't want to talk about correlations.

[17:59] Brian Hein: You had a car accident.

[18:00] Brian Hein: Let's take a good life changing.

[18:04] Brian Hein: Can you look around?

[18:09] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): No, we got some way.

[18:10] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Did you just show both hands, all fingers on both hands?

[18:15] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): You missing any fingers or was it all 10?

[18:17] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): All 10, God.

[18:18] Brian Hein: So your entire team is here?

[18:28] Brian Hein: I can say for me in the room here, there's two people that I've bled with and they somehow also wear very similar t-shirts.

[18:38] Brian Hein: But I'm also here to meet more people, build those relationships, help when it's needed.

[18:43] Brian Hein: So I call to arms to the managers.

[18:49] Brian Hein: Stop sending the same person.

[18:52] Brian Hein: I really enjoy traveling.

[18:55] Brian Hein: My kids don't.

[18:58] Brian Hein: And last year I did, I think, 70 international trips.

[19:02] Brian Hein: That is too much.

[19:04] Brian Hein: We need to get to an area where travel is just infrastructure, plumbing.

[19:10] Brian Hein: It's not a perk.

[19:11] Brian Hein: It is not, oh, you work super hard, oh, do all that over time, and then we send you to that one conference.

[19:17] Brian Hein: And we don't give you the minimum that you can, what I call beer money, that you can make it a pleasurable conference.

[19:24] Brian Hein: Also, invite random people for a beer, nothing fancy.

[19:27] Brian Hein: It has to just be infrastructure, plumbing for what we do.

[19:32] Brian Hein: and not something you have to work really hard the entire year to gain it, get over time, and then your boss sends you to a conference but tells you three days before, oh, we booked you in a hotel that's 50 kilometers away.

[19:46] Brian Hein: I work in large companies.

[19:47] Brian Hein: I know those things happened to me, they happen to other people, but they're majorly because it's viewed as a perk.

[19:53] Brian Hein: It's not just infrastructure.

[19:55] Brian Hein: People that stay in the conference hotel have immediate access.

[19:58] Brian Hein: They go to the gym, see one of the speakers, and all of a sudden they're talking about, I don't know, the best new running shoes, etc.

[20:07] Brian Hein: That builds a certain connection.

[20:11] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Establish personal relationships Yeah, I know start small local events float the ideas with like juniors like we would like to see somebody represent us at some event and then see who's interested to go Start somewhere gain experiences yourself see what works within your team

[20:38] Brian Hein: The other key thing is building relationships part of the job description.

[20:43] Brian Hein: I have in my MBOs, I have very clearly defined things where the company would like me to spend time on Cybercrime Atlas, other things.

[20:52] Brian Hein: In a senior position, that is totally normal.

[20:55] Brian Hein: We need to look at job descriptions for earlier career people and just make it mandatory.

[21:04] Brian Hein: Go to your local hacker space.

[21:07] Brian Hein: build your network, expose yourself, do a conference.

[21:12] Brian Hein: I don't know how many public talks you've done.

[21:14] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Yeah, full.

[21:16] Brian Hein: Okay.

[21:16] Brian Hein: But find a co-speaker that has the experience where it's easy.

[21:20] Brian Hein: It was not a hard process.

[21:22] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): No.

[21:24] Brian Hein: Just, thank you for saying that.

[21:27] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): I mean, you're easy going, honestly.

[21:29] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): So no problem, it might say.

[21:33] Brian Hein: And for everyone in the room, but also for management, stop viewing community engagement as personal hobby time.

[21:43] Brian Hein: It is super... Two minutes? 

[21:48] Brian Hein: Okay.

[21:52] Brian Hein: Thank you.

[21:54] Brian Hein: It's totally part of my personality, but it's not hobby time.

[21:59] Brian Hein: It is work time.

[22:00] Brian Hein: It's part of who I am, what I do for a living.

[22:05] Brian Hein: If you can't name the bench, you don't have one.

[22:07] Brian Hein: Look at your Rolodex of people in the community at your competitor where you just say like, hey, I just want to quickly introduce myself and use that as a way to build your bench of people that you can ask for an opinion involved into a problem and move forward with it.

[22:30] Brian Hein: For the community builders, and I know the time, sorry for that, we should continue the conversation outside of it, but I want more senior people to sponsor a junior person into trust groups, into communities of experts, because the new generation provides new color, and we have to learn somewhere.

[22:51] Brian Hein: We have to get socialized.

[22:55] Brian Hein: Run scrimmages, do live disruptions and allow also the not-so-experienced people to at least have a very, very vocal voice because it's better for everyone.

[23:06] Brian Hein: and enable cross org mentorship and make it cheap to participate.

[23:12] Brian Hein: Thank you B-Sites, absolutely, or Elbsites.

[23:15] Brian Hein: It's part of what this community does, what others are not.

[23:19] Brian Hein: Funny thing is, the Anaheim Ducks have a farm team.

[23:23] Brian Hein: My trust group does not.

[23:26] Brian Hein: And there's two facts that I am very, very embarrassing about it.

[23:30] Brian Hein: And I don't know if it's that the Anaheim Ducks have a farm team.

[23:35] Brian Hein: Three asks for you, for the community.

[23:39] Brian Hein: Sponsor a person to go with you to a conference.

[23:43] Brian Hein: Or if you go to a conference and you know that at a peer company somebody is going, link up and see if you can drag the person along.

[23:51] Brian Hein: It helps so much.

[23:54] Brian Hein: emphasize on having juniors deliver work on the CFP to also then deliver the talk, because that builds reputation, that builds community spirit.

[24:06] Brian Hein: And we had the before, name your bench, at least mentally, and do it now, not next year, not in two years.

[24:14] Brian Hein: Take it as a challenge for until next Friday that you at least have mentally prepared.

[24:19] Brian Hein: The union industry and your larger network could be in a position to replace you when needed because that builds a certain trust and thinking about how we can all be better.

[24:33] Brian Hein: So, in summary, away with the static rules, build your feeder team, send the junior, and stop fighting like a sales guy with a roller-decks, and let's all together fight like an army.

[24:48] Brian Hein: Thank you.

[24:49] Brian Hein: Thank you, Crowd.

[24:54] SPEAKER_00: Thank you.

[24:54] SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much.

[24:57] SPEAKER_00: Brilliant talk about a very, very important topic.

[25:01] SPEAKER_00: We have some time for questions.

[25:05] SPEAKER_00: Are there any questions in the audience?

[25:09] SPEAKER_00: There, back there.

[25:15] SPEAKER_00: I think you can throw this thing.

[25:17] SPEAKER_00: There you go.

[25:19] SPEAKER_03: Great throw.

[25:19] SPEAKER_03: Great talk.

[25:20] SPEAKER_03: Thank you.

[25:21] SPEAKER_03: As always, the third iteration of a great idea.

[25:29] SPEAKER_03: Relatively early, you had this part where you said AI is giving juniors a head start in being good at static analysis, creating structure.

[25:40] SPEAKER_03: Now that we know that most of the internet is probably bots or AI bots talking to each other and crawling, and Stack Overflow is not being populated by good code anymore, but maybe just the iteration of the AI solve again, potentially.

[25:58] SPEAKER_03: If this goes on and on and we do not manually teach our juniors how to go along, do you think the AI output and the AI support for juniors will decrease in quality or segment at least?

[26:13] Brian Hein: So I have the concern that we train and build fantastic operators.

[26:18] Brian Hein: People that know that they have learned, here's a recipe, I follow, here's a way to prompt things, but they don't look at the box of like, hey, are there different sites to it?

[26:31] Brian Hein: How can I disassemble it and break the entire process?

[26:34] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): There's not enough original talk, it's on the one.

[26:37] Brian Hein: There is potentially, and I know, a scientist in the area, but there's people that warn that

[26:44] Brian Hein: that there is no creativity, no structured thinking over time if we just look at training and building operators, artificial or human.

[26:57] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Yeah, or they will eventually get good at meeting quotas, optimizing for metrics.

[27:04] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Tokenberg.

[27:05] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Tokenberg, you know, leadership loves it.

[27:09] SPEAKER_00: Thank you.

[27:13] SPEAKER_00: Any more questions?

[27:27] SPEAKER_01: Just to gain your thoughts on, because I've led a few teams at this point, and I've always tried to have people join me or start to motivate them on their ideas to then come to these conferences.

[27:46] SPEAKER_01: But they struggle a lot with people who, there's something cool about the definition of nerd, but there's also an associated shyness or not wanting to be public that automatically is associated to it as well.

[28:05] SPEAKER_01: And people will be like, no, I'm a nerd or I just want to do the technical stuff.

[28:10] SPEAKER_01: like actually being out there is like sharing with the community.

[28:15] SPEAKER_01: That's one of the most important things.

[28:17] SPEAKER_01: How do you try to get that out of them?

[28:20] SPEAKER_01: Because there's another state of quality of bravery just standing there.

[28:26] SPEAKER_01: Much like you said after COVID and all that, you know this as like a practice.

[28:30] SPEAKER_01: It's clear for you.

[28:32] SPEAKER_01: How do you motivate people, the younger ones, to grab their shyness, closets, and show themselves more?

[28:42] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): I want to say different people have different things out of conferences.

[28:44] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): One of the things we did with our team last year is we attended a death phone together.

[28:49] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): And there were a bunch of people that were first time at 10 East and were a couple of people that done the same show like 10 years in a row.

[28:58] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): And we just kind of set expectations of the first couple of days we expect you to just walk around.

[29:05] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Like that comes a kind of show.

[29:06] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Just walk around, see what you can experience and learn, talk to people that we may have never talked to that are also there every single year, and also afterwards tell us what you were excited about because

[29:25] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): you might have a completely different perspective onto the same show that I did, right?

[29:30] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): It's like, that's kind of what I mentioned earlier, just like kind of start local or something, learn little stakes, learn what works for your team, every single person is different, and then try to nudge them or point them in the right direction to see what might be best for them to get out of the show.

[29:55] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Like you showing up at a show and maybe you've been before, two to four, like the same people you've never been two to four, but you have certain goals.

[30:03] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Somebody else might come with you and they might have completely different goals than you.

[30:07] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): I have like, set low expectations, see what works, try to get different things out of it, and then at the end result, it's kind of just like you're kind of expected to grow as a person, build a network, build contacts,

[30:23] Brian Hein: And also be among fellow nerds.

[30:27] Brian Hein: I don't like labels, but I'm certainly on the ND spectrum.

[30:33] Brian Hein: Some were there.

[30:34] Brian Hein: Some of her best friends probably were teachers that just say recognize autism.

[30:41] Brian Hein: Now that's another play on the ND spectrum.

[30:43] Brian Hein: But I thought my communities of my people were like my awkwardness that I

[30:52] Brian Hein: and it's okay that people run around in furry tales.

[30:56] Brian Hein: It's just my people and I can say what I lived in in the early 2000s of Germany.

[31:02] Brian Hein: I was always afraid to go to a Congress because I didn't feel I was not so deep in the community where I just knew I belonged immediately.

[31:11] Brian Hein: And for me the barrier of entry was where you

[31:15] Brian Hein: of myself with an experience and there the tag-taking younger people along perhaps tremendously of just realizing they walk in here about this big event they're walking in just like oh they're normal people oh that's a speaker yeah that's what we do but we just have to expose people to it and get ready leaders who are just like yeah we'll enable it yeah we'll tell the key counters

[31:41] Brian Hein: then look at everything else.

[31:42] Brian Hein: She's like, yeah, no, it's totally okay to go to a hacker conference that only accepts payment and cash.

[31:50] Brian Hein: It is worth it.

[31:51] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

[31:53] SPEAKER_00: All right, thanks.

[31:55] SPEAKER_00: Oh, we're actually out of time.

[31:56] SPEAKER_00: But you're going to stick around.

[31:58] SPEAKER_00: So I guess, you know, we'll get your chance.

[32:01] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): I'll find us.

[32:02] Constantin Jacob (Tzeejay): Just please.

[32:03] SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much again.

[32:04] SPEAKER_00: I think a lot of us can relate.

[32:06] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

[32:08] SPEAKER_00: Thank you.