Adam Stacoviak: I think what’s interesting too, to go back to the earlier conversation around the vantage point you have on open source, and you mentioned how the community is getting driven, and how recently the Slack was formed and there’s community being formed, what do you see as community drivers for you in the Philippines? Do you feel like the United States or Europe, do you feel like they’re more advanced? Where do you see the Philippines in your local area in terms of developer community?

Mat Ryer: First of all, in the Philippines it wasn’t illegal to do this the first time it happened. So the person who did it didn’t actually get prosecuted. And then it was like a couple of months later they introduced new laws to stop this from happening again. But it was essentially Windows then had to patch it and say “Oh, we’re not gonna just run VB Script files like this. We can’t–” But it’s just like a kind of a time of innocence, where –

Shaquille Que: So I started in high school. I’m actually an international student; I think I forgot to mention that. I’m actually just here on an F-1 visa. I’m from the Philippines. Back in high school I started learning programming by myself, using an online curriculum from Stanford… And at the time, I really wanted to expand more in it, but I really couldn’t find anyone at my school who either enjoyed programming as much as I did – well, there were people in robotics, but it’s a little different, because they’re programming robots to move and do stuff, and I was more interested in using programming to solve problems.

Yeah, so we didn’t really have a good CS curriculum or program at my school, and it was my understanding that a lot of other schools as well didn’t have that, unless they’re top of the top schools… So I’d say the closest I have to a mentor is really the manager I had from last year, from my internship last year. We’re still in touch now; from time to time we check up on each other, just giving us updates on what’s happening in my life, what I’m learning, books he’s reading, and some suggestions for things to dive into. But yeah, a lot of it is really just me talking to my friends about cool tech, and then them sharing what they’ve found, and then we sort of dive into those together, or go into discussions about those together.

Kevin Ball: [12:07] Gergely. Okay. The guy who is behind the Pragmatic Engineer, which has kind of blown up recently… And it was sort of a quick mention that oh, Meta is now hiring engineering managers remote always, not just engineers. At least in the U.K. And I think it’s like a hint to a larger story, which is around the continued ripple effects of the move to remote work; how more and more companies, even these large companies, are having to say “You know what - this is not just a during the pandemic thing. The world has changed. We’re gonna hire folks all over, we’re gonna have an ongoing remote plan.” And I think there are some really interesting ripple effects in terms of how it levels salaries across the country and across the world.

I’ve heard from folks who are hiring contractors in Eastern Europe and the Philippines and things like that… Folks who have been in places where salaries were much lower to do software development - they’ve seen 50%, 70%, 100% increases in how much you can earn as a software developer… And I just think it’s fascinating. There’s so many different ripples. One, that’s a lot more money; it basically makes software development even more of an export industry; you can use that to bring money into wherever the heck you are. I think it potentially – like, they’re making this money going to U.S.-based mostly, and some European-based multinational companies, which then means local software development shops are gonna be starved for talent, or having trouble competing, which means - yes, there’s more money flowing in, but there’s also less development for local-facing things. So the world is changing in a way that I find absolutely fascinating, and I’d be curious to hear y’alls take on it.

Solana Larsen: Because it’s invisible, and it’s overlooked at all parts of the food chain, from the consumers at their computers, but also the people actually developing AI. The systems that you interact with in order to hire thousands of task workers to help you do things with your data - they’re designed to shield you from actually having any kind of human connection or sense that you’re dealing with the human. The whole thing is meant to feel like a machine. And unfortunately, I think it also shows the callousness of a lot of the industry, because thousands of people are saying that they’re traumatized, and are suffering, and can’t eat. And yet, these practices continue as just cost of doing business. And you’ve got millions of people in countries like Kenya, and the Philippines, and India, places that have a lot of Tech graduates who are doing this kind of work, which is thoughtful and requires reading long policy documents… And people take a high degree of responsibility for the outputs a lot of times on some of these projects, and yet they’re treated really terribly.

So it just seems like – does it have to be this way? No… It wouldn’t have to be this way. And it’s tied in with this – you know, we can do better. Again, it just seems like an area that like “We can do better on this.” The fourth episode that we look at, actually – I hope you weren’t expecting to go through them chronologically, but we actually –