Ask the Programmer
Ask The Programmer Episode 254 - Dan Ferrisi Asks What to Know About Hiring & Retaining Programmers
22 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
From the world of AV programming and control with James King, I'm Steve Greenblatt, and this is Ask the Programmer. Hey, James, how are you? I'm looking forward to today's conversation, and we have a special guest with us again.
I'm doing great, Steve. I love when we have our guests, especially this one. Always a great conversation when he's on.
So without further ado, we get to welcome back Dan Farisi, group editor, commercial and security with Emerald. And he is in charge of commercial integrator and security and sales integration publications. Welcome back, Dan.
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.
Well, thanks so much. We appreciate you being here. And if you aren't familiar with Dan, you're not really listening to our podcast because Dan is on quite often and we enjoy having him. And he really gives us a good chance to change the perspective where James and I get to answer some of the questions that he's posing.
If you want to hear more of Dan, you can listen to last week's episode, as well as some others, uh, episodes 236 and 237, and then many more before that. So Dan, I'll turn it over to you.
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.
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Chapter 2: What should integrators know about hiring internal programmers?
They want to change things around. So we can't sit here and be like, well, I'm going to fence you in here because they're going to go quicker. Our job is I kind of treat it as, you know, a parent. You want your kids to do better than you. You want your employees to do better than you.
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? Then we're going to be stuck with someone who is not skilled to their potential because we're so afraid that if we give them skills, they're going to leave.
I think that's a great point. And what you said, Steve, the personality type familiarity that you have, talking about exactly what they're looking for. They want a career path. They want respect for the work that they do. But they have a certain humility about they themselves. They don't need to be in the spotlight as individuals. They don't need to be carved onto Mount Rushmore.
But the work that they do should be respected. Their skills should be respected. And they should have a career path if they want it within your organization. It shouldn't just be a clock in, clock out job. If they want to invest in you for five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, there should be some kind of a cognizable path where they can do that. And it's not just a clock in, clock out.
Is that like a decent summary? Because I want to make sure that all of our listeners are kind of understanding the many nuances of all the knowledge you've shared.
It's quite good. Thank you. One thing that I would add, too, is if you want to take a little bit of a different look on it is from the employee or the programmer's perspective, what are the things that they should do to also find themselves in a better place and be desirable? And I think that there's a few tips that we might be able to provide there as well.
I'd love to hear them.
For me, I think that one thing is understanding that they're part of a business and what they do is very important and the technology is really what we sell, but it has to be done in a way that makes the business run.
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Chapter 3: How does a programmer's personality affect hiring decisions?
I completely agree. James?
A hundred percent. I'm actually going through interview processing right now for a position on my team.
And one thing I really love about where I work, you know, what we're doing with all the people on the IT team when they go through interview process is we make sure that it's clear to them that not only are we interviewing them to make sure they're a good fit for us, they need to be interviewing us. And are we a good fit for them?
And we tell them, when I talk to them, you know you should be interviewing us to make sure we're the right fit for you. And we're providing every information we can that will help you make an educated decision. And that just shows you that people, you have power. Yeah, you may be looking for a job, so you might feel like you don't have power, but you have power. And you've got to use it.
Especially as a programmer, like Steve said, we're very... A lot of programmers are, you know, invert. They put their head down, get the job done. And they may feel like they can't ask for things or they can't. Well, I just got to get the job. I just got to do this. Now, you got power. Use it.
Make sure that, you know, they're good because people don't like I always say people don't wake up and go, I'm going to be bad at my job today. Everyone goes out and they want to do a good job. Sometimes the environment is not right for them. And there's not anything wrong with the environment itself. And it's not anything wrong with the person.
And that's where Steve is great with the personality is some people just don't know. I also like to sum it up. And I talked to another coach about this as a soccer saying is I like to summarize some things as people are like popcorn. You apply heat to popcorn, it pops, but not every kernel pops at the same time. Some pop early, some pop mid, some pop late, some don't pop at all.
It doesn't mean the heat's wrong. It just means it's not the right environment for them.
Yeah. I think that is a great point. I really do. And it's interesting when you mentioned the idea that you should be interviewing not just the candidate, but the candidate should be interviewing you. I would kind of analogize it to a conversation I've had with a lot of integrators who That not every yes is necessarily a good yes for that job. Is that job good for you?
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