Dan Ferrisi

Thank you, Steve.

Thank you, James.

Again, such a pleasure to be with both of you.

It's great to connect in person at industry events, but it's also, of course, great to connect with you on the pod and to share our audience's questions with you.

What a privilege to get an opportunity to share our audience's questions about or uncertainties about or wonderings about programming with those like you who know the whole category so well.

Thank you.

I will once again say that I'm kind of here as a conduit for the commercial integrator audience.

So if you do have questions for James, for Steve about programming, hopefully I'm invited on again in the future and I'll be able to ask them.

You can just reach me at dan.ferrisi at emeraldx.com with those programming-related questions.

But here's one I had in the queue from another of our readers.

What should integrators know about hiring and retaining internal programmers?

And I'll just note,

You know, we talk about hiring and retention a lot at Commercial Integrator.

We have a lot of hand-wringing in the industry broadly about hiring and retaining high-quality, qualified talent.

So I'm interested in how that applies to internal programmers and what integrators should know about them.

I think all of that is fascinating, and there's so many different takeaways.

We could go in a million different directions with this, but I'm just going to try to summarize it for my own benefit.

What you said, James, the idea that you certainly don't want to fence people in.

You don't want to make them feel like they're trapped with you, but you do want to give them the training and the room to be able to grow within your organization.

That anecdote you said, what if we don't train them and they stay?