{"id":4362,"date":"2011-10-13T11:00:14","date_gmt":"2011-10-13T15:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/?p=4362"},"modified":"2011-10-13T11:00:14","modified_gmt":"2011-10-13T15:00:14","slug":"meet-donnie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/2011\/10\/13\/meet-donnie\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the New Monk: Donnie Berkholz"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;<em>If you give me someone who\u2019s nice and who\u2019s passionate, I can teach them everything else. I don\u2019t care what school you went to, I don\u2019t care where you worked before. If you give me someone with those two traits, they will nine out of 10 times be a great success in the company.<\/em>&#8221; &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/08\/28\/business\/a-boss-who-believes-nice-isnt-a-bad-word.html?_r=4\">Andy Lansing<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Even for companies that do it well, hiring is an inefficient process. And as a company that hires but rarely, RedMonk possesses no special expertise in the area. Our biggest advantage is that we&#8217;re able to think about the process creatively. We aren&#8217;t restricted to hiring an established analyst, for example; Cote was a developer of IT management products when he came to us.<\/p>\n<p>We hire those who we think will become good analysts, period. Which requires passion. And for our own sake, we look for people we get along with. Everything else is negotiable.<\/p>\n<p>That said, hiring someone who&#8217;s nice and passionate <em>and<\/em> has a Ph.d. in addition to deep expertise in your field doesn&#8217;t hurt. Enter Donnie Berkholz, the newest Monk.<\/p>\n<p>Monktoberfest attendees will know him as our closing speaker &#8211; a session that got <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/ZUrlocker\/status\/122047458397261824\">rave reviews<\/a>. We are hiring Donnie away from the Mayo Clinic, where he&#8217;s currently a Research Fellow. While he&#8217;s spent the bulk of his professional career as a scientist, he&#8217;s got long term exposure to technology, having been deeply involved in the Gentoo Linux project as a developer and council member since 2003. He&#8217;s also been a contributor to X.org since 2005, and has administered Google Summer of Code efforts for both.<\/p>\n<p>Donnie&#8217;s more than an open source expert, however. As anyone who&#8217;s followed his constructive criticism of our analyses is aware, he&#8217;s got deeper statistical training than I have and has legitimate programming skills. And if you follow him on <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/dberkholz\">Twitter<\/a> I think you&#8217;ll find his insight on everythng from cloud to mobile to big data more than up to the RedMonk standard.<\/p>\n<p>He can also write, and not just for academic journals.  His minor in journalism has been put to good use as a regular contributor to LWN.net, the highly regarded open source news source.<\/p>\n<p>With us, he&#8217;ll be covering the same broad spectrum of topics that we cover, and with his background as a researcher, we expect his transition to the world of analysis to be smooth. It&#8217;s certain to be less complicated than &#8220;\ufffcApplying structure-based drug design to the moonlighting enzyme dihydrolipoamide dehydrogenase to target detrimental oxidative stress,&#8221; anyway, the focus of one of his 2010 papers (<a href=\"https:\/\/aca.conference-services.net\/resources\/786\/2077\/pdf\/ACA2010_0465.pdf\">PDF link<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>As a former user of Gentoo, Donnie and I have a long history together, having met for the first time at OSCON in 2005. I&#8217;ve always had a <a href=\"http:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/2006\/03\/21\/thanks-donnie\/\">strong appreciation<\/a> for his work, and I&#8217;m thrilled that he&#8217;ll be working on our behalf as of December 1st.<\/p>\n<p>To our clients, we&#8217;re happy to schedule introductory calls for you as soon as he&#8217;s officially on board. In the meantime, please join me in welcoming Donnie, and if you&#8217;re curious, see our interview with him from the conference.<br \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;If you give me someone who\u2019s nice and who\u2019s passionate, I can teach them everything else. I don\u2019t care what school you went to, I don\u2019t care where you worked before. If you give me someone with those two traits, they will nine out of 10 times be a great success in the company.&#8221; &#8211;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[65,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-people","category-redmonk-miscellaneous"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4362\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}