Chris Jenkins joined The Symphony Agency in 2015. In his 3 year tenure as Chief Digital Officer, he accomplished bringing an outsourced tech department back in-house, and received an award for 2017 CIO of the Year from the Tampa Bay Business Journal, private-small category.

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On The Symphony Agency

Matt Vaughn: I read through the ImTheirWebGuy.com blog on the transition from your agency into merging up with The Symphony Agency. What lead to that and got you here?

Chris Jenkins: Basically, I maxed out. I was going to have to start building an agency of my own and move into a pure business leadership role, as opposed to technology leadership. Honestly, I didn’t want to be responsible for all that. I’m not a CFO. I want to build technology products. So, we did contract work for a while, and they desperately needed in-house technology. They managed multiple contracted outsourced resources. It wasn’t ideal. We just started slow dancing. I think it was a 9 month conversation from start to finish. They said, “This is what our thing is,” and I told them, “This is what my thing is.” It ended up being a good match.

You just hit that point when you’re operating as an independent free agent and you achieve a certain amount of success, you’re going to run into issues with scalability. Even if you’re charging $1000 per hour, you’re still required to work hours towards money. Then, you have to deal with all the administrative stuff, which isn’t making you money. I was ready to hand that stuff off to someone else.

Roxanne Williams: Did The Symphony Agency find you, or did you find them?

Chris: I was there when Symphony was founded, and helped them come up with their first slogan. Lauren and I have known each other for a number of years now – maybe 7 or 8. I host a group in St. Petersburg called the Entrepreneur Social Club, and she came with Daniel (her husband, who also works at Symphony). They had just founded Symphony as a tiny company at that point, maybe 4 or 5 people, operating out of her kitchen. We’ve grown along the way together. They focused on the marketing stuff, and I hate marketing, so I did all the development. We ended up having a lot of crossover. We’d done multiple projects together. Whenever they needed someone to come in and fix something development-oriented, they’d call me. I guess we found each other.

Roxanne: ImTheirWebGuy.com, is that more of an archive at this point? Is there no hope of blogging there in the future?

Chris: I wouldn’t say there’s no hope. I had a lot more time to focus on custom solutions and writing white papers and doing opinion pieces then. Management demands are more time-intensive lately. I really haven’t written much anywhere aside from social media type stuff. So I wouldn’t say there’s no hope, I would just suggest that it’s a hiatus based on time availability.

On strong female leadership

Roxanne: You mentioned Lauren earlier, and I actually have a question about her. Lauren Davenport seems like an amazing person to work for, having received awards (finalist for Business Woman of the Year awarded by the Tampa Bay Business Journal and a winner of The Business Observer’s 40 Under 40 Award). Have you enjoyed working for a strong female CEO?

Chris: It’s awesome. I hear a lot about some of the issues that women face in tech and I guess I’ve been fortunate, in that I’ve not had to experience that kind of dynamic in the workplace. I’ve had a technology career where having strong women bosses was a thing. I understand that may be statistically uncommon, but to me it fits right in. Lauren knows where I’m strong and she gives me the leeway and leverage to make these kinds of decisions, and she has the rest covered.

In the few instances where we have some sort of conflict, she’s coming from a business case position and I’m coming from a technology case position, so we work it out based on which is most important. Again, we’ve been friends for many years, so we don’t really butt heads on anything critical. She’s very polished and I’m rough-around-the-edges, so it’s kind of an Odd Couple kind of thing.

The tech team at The Symphony Agency

Roxanne: You received recognition as TBBJ’s 2017 CIO of the Year, private-small category. That award is given to leaders who provide significant contributions to the Tampa Bay IT community. In your words, what did you implement at The Symphony Agency that earned you that award?

Chris: We decided to make Symphony a tech-forward organization. That was a significant transition: from a purely marketing-based organization, where technology was secondary. In doing so, we did some really great work with high-end clients that had heavy needs. We started figuring things out along the way that consistently created problems, like OAuth management for agencies, client credentialing, all sorts of problems that people run into all the time in this space. So we started working to solve those problems internally for us as an organization, and then began to productize these solutions.

I think that ended up being a situation where we started hiring more technology-focused people like developers, and app-savvy designers. It changed the public perception of Symphony quickly. People started thinking of us from that perspective, and we started being asked to do other kinds of consulting. That’s the whole thing: you took an organization where technology was an outsourced dev team somewhere and now it became a locally-hiring technology-forward company, making some pretty awesome products.

Matt: How many is the tech team up to now?

Chris: 2 full-time, and I’ve got a handful of folks that I have consulting who aren’t full-time but that help with architecture and product strategy. That’s what The Symphony Agency’s hiring strategy is: find people who are noisy in their space, and acquire them. Matt Ashwood has done really awesome stuff in the organization. I think he’s really found himself from a social videography perspective. He’s gotten heavily into the A/V stuff.

Roxanne: This actually leads into my next question. We talked about how the company outsourced tech. What exactly did you have outsourced?

Chris: Everything. All the marketing services were in-house, but they outsourced all development.

Roxanne: How drastic is the difference between outsourced remote workers and in-office staff?

Chris: I’ve never had a great experience with outsourced workers. In all of technology, working with 12 hour time differences, and a bunch more holidays than in the US, etc – there’s not a sense of vested ownership when it’s outsourced. They are looking to deliver a product and be done with it. Whereas, if you’re an in-house developer, that’s your baby. You’re gonna be the one who has to pay the technical debt. And, you’re the one that has to support it if it’s broken. You tend to get a better product from developers who have a vested ownership in it.

Matt: And even if an outsourced developer has an idea to make the product better, they’re not gonna do it or even share it with you, because that’s not what they’re paid to do.

Chris: You’re not gonna get innovation from an outsourced developer.

Talent in Tampa

Roxanne: Being that Tampa Bay is more and more recognized as a tech hub, have you noticed a positive shift in terms of qualified tech talent in the area?

Chris: I’ll give a conditional yes. Part of why I do what I do (I mentor startups in the area, things of the like) is because I am passionate about helping technology grow in this area. I love new startups popping up all the time. Every time I see some new headline like, “Vinik gives $100 million to this new company for this technology,” it’s like wooo, that happened here, baby! That being said, there are a lot of big companies here that suck up talent as soon as it hits the street. And, the actual training that’s available here doesn’t really focus on commercially-viable technologies.

There’s still a lot of hipster training out there, like, “Hey, you can build your first Ruby app on your Macbook!” Well, good luck finding a job, buddy. What happens is those people that get all those niche skills then have to go off and try to make something with them. People aren’t really hiring for those things. So, you end up with all these little splintered startups.

There’s more talent, but it’s not talent with the skills we need. The single most common platform that runs websites is WordPress. Yet, the bootcamps in the area still don’t offer PHP, or even a rudimentary WordPress class.

Matt: Angular/React are the hottest things of the day, but PHP gives us the most consistent open roles in the area.

Chris: If you search PHP jobs and you search Ruby jobs, there are 200 times more PHP jobs. People just don’t like PHP. It’s frustrating from a talent cultivation perspective, because the only resource that we have in the area doesn’t teach the skills that we need. I’m working with SPEDC (The St. Petersburg Economic Development Corporation), and their mission is, of course, to bring more business here and attract more talent to the area. We provided some feedback to them and the chamber, like “Here are the kinds of things we’re looking for.” So to circle back, yes there is more talent in the area, but it’s a conditional yes because it’s not having any net effect on my hiring. It’s not the kind of talent I need.

Matt: I’m curious, do you have any involvement with local colleges to champion growing that talent here? Jeremy Rasmussen is someone I point to as dedicated to similar efforts in the security space. He’s an adjunct professor at USF for 18 years, before they had a cybersecurity track, and now it’s grown to a specialty at the college. He also founded the Whitehatters Computer Security Club (WCSC).

Chris: I sat on the Curriculum Advisory board for IADT (now Sanford Brown), but they don’t really get into heavy tech. It’s mostly light stuff. They touch on interactive design, but they don’t get into the guts of app development. AIGA and a couple other folks reached out to me to start that conversation, but it hasn’t really happened yet.

Neither of my first two developers or myself have a college degree. For us, traditional academia isn’t something we spend a lot of time in. If you want to work at Google, then by all means get a postdoc degree in math probability and learn to write fast algorithms. But for a lot of stuff that we do, it doesn’t get taught there, and I don’t think it’d be good to get it taught there. It changes so quickly, whereas number theory doesn’t change. So it depends on what your focus is, I guess. If you want to be a computer scientist proper, then yeah you need to go do a PhD track. But if a college offered a web development major right now, what would they be teaching, given that the curriculum would probably have been developed 6 years ago?

Roxanne: It blows my mind that there are so many companies that still require a degree. Everything can easily be self-taught. There are so many good resources online for free. We see this all the time, as a staffing agency. You can present a candidate that hits every single skill the client asked for, but they don’t have a degree so they get rejected.

Matt: What are some suggestions you have for people to get that knowledge if they have no PHP-focused bootcamps in the area? What are some resources you can recommend?

Chris: The meetups aren’t bad – they’re a good place to start. PHP and JavaScript both came out literally in an 18-month timespan. There are just as many resources for PHP – if not more – than there are for JavaScript. We attend lots of meetups, we do forum stuff, lots and lots and lots of reddit. Stackoverflow is another big thing, and surprisingly enough, there are lots of really robust conversations that happen on Github around public repositories, so go find somebody else’s framework and post an issue.

Roxanne: What do you hope to see in the next few years in Tampa Bay when it comes to technology?

Chris: Ugh, that’s such a deep question. If I had to boil it down to one thing: capital. I’m obviously not a youngster, I’ve been in this space for a while now, and I had ideas in the late 1990s and early 2000s that other people executed, but I couldn’t. The money around here is real estate and hospitality, maybe healthcare as a third. There are very few people who have a good enough sense of technology with the pockets to match it, so that makes it hard to do. We have Vinik, Florida Funders, Citizinvestors. How many companies have we seen that left here, went somewhere else and became the Big Thing there because of capital? I remember seeing the Wikipedia office here on Central Ave. We’ve had major, major technology come from this area and leave.

Matt: Full Stack Talent has 2 friends here that are part of the Tampa Bay Wave – I don’t know if you know Robert Blacklidge, who’s trying to figure out what skills are not being served by colleges with CourseAlign, and Jonathan Truong, doing the VR physical therapy with Verapy. Both of them are being courted by investment groups/incubators elsewhere in Florida, like West Palm, and around the country. Because of this, they might leave the bay area.

Chris: Ryan Holmes – he’s popping all over the West Coast now doing their whole robotic hands with VR thing – and these are all guys that we know. Little junior startup entrepreneur guys, and now they’re all doing those things out there. That sucks.

Matt: It’s obviously a problem that will take a lot of people and time to figure out, but what are your thoughts on how we can change it to not just be Vinik and a small handful of others? There’s a lot of money here, so what do the cities need to do in order to highlight investment opportunities?

Chris: If you look at it from a municipal perspective, nobody is really actually aggressively putting their money where their mouth is when it comes to tech. There’s a lot of lip service when it comes to talking about it, and they especially love to take credit for it, but when did the City of St. Petersburg last host a hackathon themselves? It’s not that difficult to do those kinds of things, and you can bring in talent from other areas, and this stuff doesn’t even cost that much.

There really needs to be some actual investment in helping those things grow. Our infrastructure here would be perfect for wireless. You’ve got a fairly limited landmass for coverage, with most of the population in the middle. Basically, 4 towers and you’re good. And, it totally fits with that St. Pete “We’re young and hip” thing. Why aren’t we pushing in that direction? There are a lot of things we could be doing to help support that kind of niche.

Roxanne: Is there anything you’d like to say to anyone thinking of going into tech? Any words of wisdom from your years in the industry?

Chris: It’s not what you think, but that’s ok. It’s gonna be hard. It’s gonna be a strange trip. You’re going to question your commitment constantly along the way, if you’re any good at it. But, make things. Don’t get locked into rote thinking. Make things, create, innovate. Learn. Constantly learn. As soon as you stop, it gets harder. Touch new things, and touch new technologies while your mind is still young. These days, picking up a new framework is like “ugh – is it me? Why isn’t it working?”

If you’re gonna be in development space, get a Github. I don’t care about your degree, but I do care about what’s in your repo. Show me the code that you write. Every time you create a solution, document it. Write a white paper. Publish it. Put it out there. Developers don’t make more money by getting raises in their organization. They make more money by building themselves up in the industry and moving to different organizations. That’s the reality of what it is to be a developer, so constantly grow yourself as a developer. And lastly, you owe your employer nothing.

Roxanne: I wrote an article a while ago that pretty much echoes that. It’s sad, but to get a significant raise nowadays, you have to jump ship. And company loyalty? That should be a thing of the past, because no one is loyal to you.

Chris: Exactly. If we had some sort of pension in 20 years, ok cool. But that doesn’t exist so… I cultivate my developers, and when it comes time for them to move on, I thank them for their service and provide a nice reference on the way out. Who knows, I may see them again in 5 years on another project. And my developers, watching their growth, it helps me drive our entire product forward. If I’m not cultivating them to be smarter than me, why am I paying them? I want them to outgrow me.

Roxanne: This is completely unrelated to Tampa, tech or talent… I see that you’ve got a homebrewing club going on – what’s your favorite kind of beer?

Chris: Oof… there are so many. I mean if I’m locked in a room and I only get one forever, probably a Belgian tripel or quad. Trappist style. Big boozy beers for a big boozy guy, I guess!

Roxanne: Any final thoughts you’d like to share with us?

Chris: This city has felt like it’s on the cusp of a breakthrough for years now, and it just doesn’t seem to push through. I think there are a number of people – gosh, even in my own network – that are trying to push these things forward. Old is hard to break. There are deeply-established systems in place in this area that kind of make things a bit more difficult, and I really hope that emerging leadership – especially political leadership – in the area can drive forward some of that vision. I like the fact that guys like Topher Morrison, in Tampa, for instance is running for mayor as a small business entrepreneur guy, complete underdog, but just the fact that this message is out there – that’s the kind of thing I want to see more of.

Roxanne: I feel like Tampa’s trying so hard as a city. We have so many tech events now. Startup Week, Synapse, BarCamp, Ignite!, Startup Weekend, so many!

Chris: Actually, BlockSpaces is another thing going on in Tampa. BlockSpaces is essentially what used to be the Tampa bitcoin years meetup, and they actually opened a development center that allows blockchain-based startups to work out of there as a shared cowork space.

Roxanne: Is that Michael O’Rourke?

Chris: Michael O’Rourke is one of my partners, yep!

Matt: We did a test run of something we’re hoping to bring back – it’s an Emerging Tech meetup – not tied to a specific technology, but finding people doing new stuff that want to talk about it. Michael spoke at the first one we ran.

Chris: Super, super smart guy.

Matt: My final question, half out of interest and half out of selfishness – who is a person and an organization that you think is doing something right and innovative in the area, outside of The Symphony Agency?

Chris: I probably would point back to Michael O’Rourke. What he’s doing is probably the most groundbreaking thing I’ve seen in a while. That team is building a pretty amazing product. I’m not sure if anybody else I can think of right now is far along enough to have something to talk about. It doesn’t feel like there are a lot of folks like me in this space right now, purely from an age experience, technology-niche perspective.

Matt: Most people who have been in tech as long as you have have moved on elsewhere or moved into management and no longer care about tech from a hands-on standpoint.

Chris: Right.

Matt: Michael O’Rourke’s not a cop-out answer. We’re big fans of him.

Chris: Thinking about exciting, new, innovative products, Pocket is the first thing that comes to mind. They just released their BANANO Quest app, which is the world’s first databaseless mobile app. Wildly impressive. Completely blockchain-driven, and proves that you can use blockchain as a distributed data system.

Roxanne: Are you a blockchain evangelist?

Chris: I totally am. I talk about blockchain a lot. I’m not interested in blockchain so much from the decentralized cash aspect – that’s all a pipe dream to me. The fact that institutional money and SEC-regulatable systems are coming into play with cryptocurrency I think is super interesting and is actually what’s gonna be necessary for that to actually be a technology that hangs around. Sorry it’s not your libertarian dark money, but… at least it’s gonna be around and work, so – tradeoffs! The actual underlying technology, stuff like HashGraph, where you’ve got transaction times that are so fast you can stream video conferencing through a blockchain application. 250,000 transactions per second. Actual voice is only 56,000 per second, and that’s with a hard phone line. So doing it as a blockchain application with a distributed data network is mindblowing to me. I love that stuff.

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About The Symphony Agency:

The Symphony Agency specializes in building comprehensive marketing campaigns and technology products for medium to large organizations which need a team of experts to function as an extension of their company. Learn more here.

With a strong focus on advanced tracking and transparent reporting, Symphony solutions are designed to make growing a business faster and easier.

To connect with Chris Jenkins, find him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/digitalprecipice/

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Roxanne Williams is the Marketing Director at Full Stack Talent, a technology staffing agency in Tampa, FL. Find her LinkedIn here.

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