Open Source Summit NA 2025 | Clyde Seepersad, The Linux Foundation

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Clyde Seepersad

Senior Vice President & General Manager, Education

The Linux Foundation

Code, community and the future: 13 takeaways from Open Source Summit NA

Beyond uniting developers under shared ideologies, goals and pain points, Open Source Summit North America ignited conversations at the intersection of code, community and change.TheCUBE goes live with insights at Open Source Summit NA

play_circle_outline Empowering Internal Talent: Overcoming Challenges in Accelerating Application Release Cycles Through Up-Skilling Instead of Hiring

play_circle_outline Bridging the Divide: Addressing Skill and Capability Gaps in Application Development and AI within Organizations

play_circle_outline The value of people, processes, and technology in organizational success.

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Clyde Seepersad, The Linux Foundation

Clyde Seepersad

Senior Vice President & General Manager, Education The Linux Foundation

In this exclusive segment from Open Source Summit North America 2025, Clyde Seepersad, SVP and GM of Training & Certification at The Linux Foundation, joins theCUBE Research’s Paul Nashawaty for a wide-ranging conversation on the evolving intersection of open source, talent development and AI.

Seepersad unpacks how rapid shifts in AI tooling and cloud-native technologies are accelerating demand for upskilling while simultaneously challenging traditional career development models. He addresses common misconceptions around AI-driven job displacement and ... Read more

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What are the impacts of up-skilling, productivity, and the challenges organizations face in application development and deployment? add

What are the distinct components of the talent situation related to cloud-native technologies and AI? add

What is the breakdown of elements that contribute to the success of technology adoption according to the Boston Consulting Group report? add

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Clyde Seepersad, The Linux Foundation

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Paul Nashawaty

>> Welcome back to Open Source Summit North America 2025. My name is Paul Nashawaty and I'm covering the AppDev space and all things open source. Today I'm joined by Clyde from The Linux Foundation. Clyde, welcome

Clyde Seepersad

>> Paul, glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Great to have you. Why don't you tell the audience who you are and what you do?

Clyde Seepersad

>> Yeah. My name is Clyde Seepersad. I am the head of education at The Linux Foundation. And so we don't just do great technology and collaborations and bringing people to develop. We also try to figure out how do we get people to figure out what is this? Why should I care? And if I do care, how do I learn it? And so the people side of the equation.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Absolutely. Well, I'll tell you, when I talk to organizations about their challenges, a skill gap, and just basically the building of these applications, it's a big challenge for a lot of organizations. We see that 94% of organizations are looking to use AI. I have to bring in AI because it's part of the conversation.

Clyde Seepersad

>> Right.

Paul Nashawaty

>> It's in every conversation. But AI is really kind of put in place to help drive some of those skill gap issues. So as we dive right into it, there's a lot of fears that organizations and people have that AI is going to take over their job. And despite those fears, AI is actually really not taking over those jobs. It's actually enhancing productivity, but also driving new IT jobs. Would you agree?

Clyde Seepersad

>> I would agree. I think whenever there are periods of disruptive change, people obviously get uncomfortable, and that is perfectly natural. It's particularly true that for those of us in the tech sector, the who is affected has always been someone else.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Right.

Clyde Seepersad

>> And this time it feels pretty close to home, and so there's definitely a psychology there. What I like to remind people of is that in the 60 years post-World War II, productivity growth was 2.5%. Since 2000, it's been more like 1.4. So maybe the internet made us less productive. But having more productivity is a good thing. Figuring out how to use AI to do that is a good thing. Figuring out how to do that in the context of our talent strategy is an important thing and one that I think not enough people are talking about.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Oh, I agree. When we talk about this, I think we have to look at the good side of this too, right? The good side of this is like you were talking about the productivity and the growth. It hasn't been growing as fast as it probably could. But the good news is up-skilling is working. We see that 97% are prioritizing internal challenge for development. We see that as a 38% faster than hiring. So that's kind of an interesting perspective when you think about it. Organizations are seeing strong gains in retention and also readiness, so they're responding faster. In fact, what I see, as I said, I cover the AppDev practice and I cover the release cycle of applications, our research shows that organizations are trying to push code out the door very rapidly. 24% of respondents in a recent survey say they want to ship code on an hourly basis, yet only 8% are able to do so. That's a challenge for a lot of organizations. So what are your thoughts? This is this productivity. We see that 94% of organizations believe that AI will deliver operational value. Do you believe that true?

Clyde Seepersad

>> I think that's true. I think any of us who has even toyed with these tools, it is astonishing the power of it. I was playing around and asked it to do some code in Python, and it was faster than I could read it. It is mindblowing just this pace at which this stuff can do basic things. Getting from basic things to something that you would put in front of your customer is I think where the rub ready comes in is the speed to get the basic things done, to do the things that are simple to do. Great, let's do that. But let's not lose sight of the fact that the context of your business, of what you're trying to get your customers to do, how are you trying to get delighted customers? A lot of that is soft knowledge and intuition and experience, and it lives in the people within your organization.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. Well, I think you're right, but I guess I'll ask a question specifically around AI and in the talent. Is it closing the talent gap or do you see it as maybe widening it and making it bigger? And is it outpacing current skill and development in those areas? What do you think?

Clyde Seepersad

>> Yeah, the way I think about it is there are two different distinct components to the talent situation. There is a ongoing talent gap in cloud-native and modern deployment, which way predates the AI-

Paul Nashawaty

>> It does....

Clyde Seepersad

>> revolution. It's been sort of this quiet crisis where everybody's attitude has been, I'll go to LinkedIn and I will grab somebody who has experience, because of course everybody wants experience. That has not gone away. In this latest report, it's over 50% saying they don't have , they don't have cloud, they don't have enough of all these sort of fundamental, maybe not so sexy skills. So there's that piece, which is an ongoing crisis we need to address. And then for AI, there is a gap. I wouldn't necessarily call it a skills gap because the tools have been evolving so fast. It's not like you could say, "Hey, I want your three years of agentic AI experience before I would hire you." So it's a capability gap, like a speed of innovation has been such that how do we keep up? How do we figure out... It was LLMs and then it was agents, and then it was MCPs so agents could talk to agents. That world is a very different world where it's all about the nimbleness of your organization to figure out which pieces of this rapidly moving tech stack are going to be relevant to your business. How do you bring that in? How do you get the people in your org, whether they're technical or non-technical, business side, to embrace that, use it, deploy it. And don't deploy it three weeks from now, like you were saying in the opening. Deploy it today. Deploy it in the next 10 minutes. That is a operational gap. That is a technical gap. That is a business model gap.

Paul Nashawaty

>> That's right, that's right.

Clyde Seepersad

>> And AI opens the door to that. AI doesn't provide the solution, it really just opens the door. We've got to walk through it and figure out how to get... We see the promise and 97% of people believe there's a promise. How do we get there?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, I agree. I just recently did an AppDev Done Right Summit, which we covered off on a lot of these technologies and a lot of the data that kind of aligns to what we're talking about here. Since it covers day zero, day one, day two in the CI/CD pipeline across the SDLC, in that research we highlighted there's a compounding effect across application life cycle due to AI. And that compounding effect really intersects the skills between existing shortages with cloud and cybersecurity and platform engineering. I make a joke of walk the floor here, and I'll give you a shiny quarter if you can find me somebody that calls themselves a storage admin, because they don't. They're platform engineering now. But the reality of it is developers... I guess I'll ask you the question, are developers being stretched too thin as they are asked to do more? Everything shift left and they're sitting with the catcher's mitt, are they being stretched too thin?

Clyde Seepersad

>> Well, it's an interesting question. Because the flip side of the AI coin is why do we even need developers? And so it's interesting how these different ideas can be floating around simultaneously when they're apparently in conflict. I cannot name a time where developers weren't stretched thin. There's always been this insatiable appetite for do more, do it faster, extend the reach. So to some extent, I think that's always been true. When you look at some of the productivity gains you can get from the models in terms of software development, the expectations rise, and so the demands rise. So I think the bar has always been rising if you're a software developer. There's a little bit of a step function in sort of how quickly it's risen. I think the big open question is we used to have a pretty good playbook on, over the course of a career, what does that look like? We bring people in at the lower rungs, and now there's this sort of obsession with the middle rungs. It's like, well, what if I don't need the junior people because the experienced people... But when your experienced people becomes your senior people, who's your new experienced people?

Paul Nashawaty

>> I'm glad you said that. Yeah.

Clyde Seepersad

>> This myopia around, well, I want today. And so today, I can expedite and I can leverage the people with context and history. You eat your seed corn, and so we've got to not lose the lens of we're all going to still be here 5 years from now and 10 years from now.

Paul Nashawaty

>> No, you're spot on. This is something I've been talking about with the introduction of AI and development and job shortages and such. A lot of organizations are using this kind of, I'll call it misinformation, that they can use AI to replace junior-level developers. And the problem is this, in my mind. When you and I were coming up, we had a rite a passage. We went to some school, we started our first job, we earned the stripes. We went through the ranks and we did our thing. But we learned along the way, there was that rite of passage of going up the ranks. The problem is if you're not, as an organization, hiring the junior-level people who's training those junior-level people to give them that rite of passage or that rite of way? So in five years when you're looking for a senior-level person to do the up-skilling of the role, where's the skill? Is that a fair assessment?

Clyde Seepersad

>> I think that's fair. And I think it does come back, in my view, to this idea of we've had a playbook we were pretty comfortable with. The playbook got incinerated in the heat and light of the AI entry media.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Sure did. Yeah.

Clyde Seepersad

>> And now we're trying to figure out, well, what does it look like? And I think a great example to look at and think about a different way to doing how you think about talent, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, for the longest while, has had this phenomenal program of bringing new talent into the organization and putting them into what is essentially a prolonged internship period where they learn the business. After they learn the business, they then start slotting people into the specialty functions, but they've now got the shared understanding of the business of the customers. What do we actually do? I suspect that we're going to need to do more of that. So instead of thinking, "Well, I'm bringing Clyde in as an entry-level software developer," maybe we need a wider aperture of, okay, I'm bringing this person in to learn the business maybe in a particular area. And then over time, I'm going to make sure they get trained and exposed to whichever lane. Because the other thing that's happening with these AI models is it's accelerating the collapse of the walls between the business side and the user side and the dev side. We already had that collapse on DevOps between the engineering and the operations. When you see end users being able to play with models and build models, even though they have no technical expertise, that tells you that that wall is breaking down. So I suspect there's going to just have to be a different playbook in terms of what does entry-level look like? And maybe not the old playbook, which was you come in as a software dev. Because the truth is the type of work that you would have done in the past as an entry-level software dev, probably true that a lot of that type of work can be done at pace by some of the models, but there's other things, business contacts, making sure there are guardrails. So I imagine that's probably what it's going to be, is re-imagining of what does entry-level look like for our organization?

Paul Nashawaty

>> I love that response. And the reason I do is because I kind of equate that to why we're here today, Open Source Summit, right? We're talking about open source. We're talking about how there's innovation. But innovation also plays into with retention. I think that that has a lot to be said about strategic tooling around this new model that you're talking about, this new way of developing, a new way of looking at your human capital and going, how do we use this human capital to do these rotations within the organization so they get to learn every aspect of the business and not just get this model with a kind of, this is what you do every day and this is what you turn the crank and kind of get come to work. And I think honestly, that helps with satisfaction. What are your thoughts?

Clyde Seepersad

>> Yeah. I remember over two decades ago, I was in consulting and I was talking to a client, and they were talking about growing their business and they had all these ambitions. And then one day we were chatting about how we're going to organize the business and the people and structure. And he said, "Well, the way I think about it is cost walks on two legs." And I remember being taken aback at this idea that in this person's mind, his people were just a cost item.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, yeah.

Clyde Seepersad

>> And I think we're learning more and more that that's not true.

Paul Nashawaty

>> No, that's the talent .

Clyde Seepersad

>> People drive the business.

Paul Nashawaty

>> That's right.

Clyde Seepersad

>> And so how do we bridge our way to this future? How do we bridge our way to this new playbook with a clear focus on the fact that people matter? Look, it's great to come to these events and go to all the talks about all the hot new technologies and how they're coming out and how they're being developed, in many cases as collaborative open source projects. Great. And I recently read a report from the Boston Consulting Group talking about the promise of AI, and they're talking about the rule of 10, 20, 70. 10% about the tech, 20% about the processes-

Paul Nashawaty

>> Processes....

Clyde Seepersad

>> 70% about the people, right?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, absolutely.

Clyde Seepersad

>> It's true. I've been in education for 20 plus years, and so of course I'm going to want to talk about the people, but I think the reality is that people are important, even though it's not the sexiest thing that people leap out of bed every morning.

Paul Nashawaty

>> But it's not just academia, right? I mean, it's a real thing. I think we have to re-evaluate as an industry, the term people, processes, and technology and understand what that really means. I like that what you said about that Boston Consulting Group study. It really is tech is tech, right? But the people do bring the value. So Clyde, last words for the audience, what would you recommend them do?

Clyde Seepersad

>> I talk to my kids, who are teenagers, all the time, and I say the thing that's going to be different is my generation had the luxury of setting a course and saying, "We want to be an X," and build up mastery and then ride that wave for 20 or 30 years. I think in the new world, by the time you get to mastery, that skill's obsolete. And so every day, that learning mindset of just keep learning, just keep trying, just keep experimenting, having the tolerance for some ambiguity. We're going to all have to get there. Very different way of being, especially from a career perspective.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Oh, I love it. I love it. Be creative, curious, keep building, right? I use that as a tagline in my podcast every week, so I love it.

Clyde Seepersad

>> I agree.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. Well, thank you for your insights, Clyde. This has been great. And thank you for watching our segment. And I'm Paul Nashawaty, coming to you live from the show floor at Open Source Summit North America 2025. Thank you for watching theCUBE, the leading source of tech news.