News & whitepapers

Hello and welcome to Ship It, the podcast all about what happens after you git push. I’m your host, Justin Garrison, and with me as always is Autumn Nash. How’s it going, Autumn?

Good. How are you?

Good. That was an unenthusiastic good. I think you’re doing good.

I know, I’m only halfway through my cup of coffee, okay? Stop judging me.

I haven’t even had that much sugar yet today, so we’re good.

I thought you were not eating candy anymore, Justin. What happened?

It’s freaking October. Yeah, right. It’s like Halloween season. Are you kidding me?

I mean, as much as I appreciate our friendship, I had zero hope in you making it more than like a month. I’ve never seen somebody stash candy in as many areas as you have candy stashed, okay?

You have kids. You’ve got to hide it.

I don’t eat candy though.

That’s your problem.

I drink it in my coffee, okay? I can only consume so much sugar, and I save it for baked goods and coffee.

Baked goods.

Baked goods are my favorite. A brownie…

Oh my gosh, I almost bought brownies the other day. I was like, I so wanted a brownie. But again, I want a warm brownie with some ice cream on top.

Yes!

It’s just like, oh my gosh…

Okay, there’s this bakery in my downtown area, for where I live, and they have the most delicious, perfect… It’s not too cakey, it’s not too gooey, it’s super dark… It’s the most – look, it’s a $6 brownie and at first I was like “Who has a $6 brownie?” It’s a big brownie. But at first I was judging it, you know?

As you drink your $8 Starbucks…

Yes… Be quiet!! Okay. And then I took a bite and I was like, “I’ll just take a couple bites.” And I was taking my kids home food… Look, I got home and there was this much brownie left. I was like, I’m going to eat it later, when my kids go to bed, and I’m going to put ice – no, the brownie did not make it. I’m pretty sure I didn’t even eat for the rest of the day. I just consumed the biggest brownie I’ve ever seen, and it was a life core memory moment. That’s how good that brownie was.

Nice. That’s good. Now I want a brownie. Now I’m going to get a brownie. I went to Panera, I ordered pickup at Panera the other day and someone stole my food, and so they made me – remade the order and gave me two cookies. And I’m like “Dang it, I didn’t need this… But now I want it.”

See, I’m not really a big cookie person. I like brownie and cake.

Yeah, I never was a big cookie person, and then I started making them myself, and I’m like “Oh…” They’re good when you make them.

You make cookies, too?

Yeah, of course I do. Who doesn’t make cookies? I don’t just buy – you can get the store-bought stuff, but making them from scratch… That’s good. That’s good stuff.

It’s so much better from scratch.

I know. Everything. So today’s a different episode, something that we were doing for a long time as we started. This is like episode 32, I think, something, that we’ve been doing together. It’s been great.

Can you believe that we’ve made it 32 episodes?

I know, it’s funny too. It’s all started this – it’s just been 32 weeks, not even a whole year. But we’ve changed a lot.

And there’s been a lot of – I love getting all the cool people we get to talk to, all the topics, everything… And we –

Hopefully we’ve made it better.

I hope so, too. And I know we had some feedback for too much intro, some people liked the outro, some people didn’t… And so the idea I kind of had around it was we love the interviews, and when we give more space for the interviews; we just get to talk to the cool people longer, which is awesome. But also, podcasts are great to have what’s going on, and just some general information, and not have a guest all the time… So we’re these episodes probably in maybe once a quarter or something, of let’s just talk about what Autumn and I are learning, what’s some cool news, some things we wanted to learn about, talk about… And then if you don’t like that, that’s fine. You can skip it. And that’s okay, too. It’s an easy trade-off of like we don’t have to put this in every episode; we can kind of collect some of the… Hopefully, bring back some of the games. I know some people like the games. I like the games. I don’t have one for today.

I like when you name them absolutely ridiculous things, but…

I love trying to come up with unique titles, but I was also trying really hard to do some of that…

So yeah, so this one is really just a couple of things that Autumn and I brought – more than a couple; either news, or topics, or things that we’ve found fairly recently, that we want to talk about… Nothing is, I think, timeboxed, to like “You have to know about it at this time.” I think this episode is going to go out - wait. One, two… Oh, it’s going to go out after the U.S. election. So nothing that’s, again, really critical. We can talk about these articles. We’ll put them all in the show notes. You can go read them if you want to read more about them, but it’s not like something that’s like “Oh, you need this information now.” It’s “I’ve found this interesting, Autumn found it interesting over the last month or two, and we want to share it.”

I’m kind of sad, with all the ridiculousness in tech that we didn’t do it when it was close to all the craziness happening, but maybe this way you’re not just hearing the same stuff over and over again.

I mean, also delaying it a little bit is like “Hey, maybe we can see after the hype cycle how things are different.”

That’s true.

Which actually – one of my first articles, again, it’s not news, but it is kind of in the hype cycle of it was posted in October… But in Australia, a lot of companies are going back to work. And I guess there was some problems with trains recently, and there was videos of just these insane lines for buses, for people to try to get into work. And I was just like, “Well, yeah, this is what happens when traffic happens, and everything else.” And the thing that made me want to share this was just the amount of privilege the leaders that had quotes in this article were… They literally say –

Oh, my God…

It’s an excuse… Again, this is a quote from a leader at the company saying you have to come back to the office.

This is not Justin’s opinion, this is a quote.

No. I fell out of my chair when I was like, “okay, really?” “It’s an excuse or a reason to push back. No matter where you are, there’s always going to be issues with traffic. It’s just life.” I’m like, “Well, actually, we didn’t have to deal with that.”

How did we get here? We went from remote work, and this great economy… I mean, I guess in a way we know how we got here, but… Did we just forget that you need people to work in your business? Where’s the disconnect to reality? Because one side has so much money, and so much privilege that they don’t know what regular people’s lives are like anymore. And the other side is just miserable. The people that – just everybody is miserable and hates their jobs right now.

This second quote is the one that I’m like, “Alright, this is ridiculous.” They say “If they feel like it’s not productive, live closer.” I’m like “That’s not people’s realities.”

I was told that at work one day. Somebody was like, “You should just live closer to the city.” And I was like “That city, that has gone up like quadruple the price in the last three years? I should magically…” I also think people don’t really remember that there is a difference between people who’ve been in tech for 5 to 10 years, and people who’ve been in tech for 20 years.

And people that have owned a house for 5 to 10 years, versus 20 years.

I was reading an article and it was saying that there is the upper middle class, and then there’s people that are below the poverty line. And then you’ve got this new, weird division of the middle class. They were dividing it and they were basically saying middle class people who bought a house 10 years ago, and that don’t have little kids in any form of daycare or afterschool program are living completely different lives than people that are paying for daycare… Because they were comparing the price of mortgages now, and the price of daycares, and you could live in the same neighborhood, be making the same amount of money and living two completely different lifestyles.

Yeah, depending on when you bought it.

Yes, but not just that… I have a friend, and we were talking about daycare bills, and I was saying “To put my kid in the daycare in my building would have cost $2,800.”

Ooph. A month?

Yes, for a four-year-old. For one kid. And I was like “Who can afford this?” And they were like, “That’s my mortgage.” And I’m like “I wish that was my mortgage…” You know what I mean? So it just shows you - same job, same state. You know what I mean? It’s just wild. The difference between – he can pay for daycare… It was the most expensive daycare. He could have paid for the daycare and his mortgage for the price of what I’m just paying for a mortgage, and I’m supposed to pay for the daycare on top of it. You know what I mean? That’s wild.

[12:14] It is. You’re not getting better service, you’re not getting anything that’s different from –

Nobody even likes going to daycare. Your kid’s going to scream the whole time, they’re going to get sick and not go half of the… You know what I mean? You’re doing –

Did I tell you I used to run a daycare?

No, you didn’t…

I ran a summer camp daycare for my school for two years. It was elementary school, and it was just like – yeah, I was the finance person, and I did all the marketing planning for it… It was a really interesting time.

Were you a camp leader?

It was at the school. It was just like we rented space from the school, and then we worked out the funding to like “Hey, how much do they need to pay us?”

You did [unintelligible 00:12:54.10] and then you did that?

No, this was like – I guess yeah. It was a summer job, because I did that after high school for two years in summer. And then I started doing construction in summer jobs.

How are you not a camp counselor? Because my kids are obsessed with you. I totally thought we were about to have like a daddy daycare… Like, total Justin, like, just doing ridiculous Justin things, with like a trail of little duckling children behind you.

I probably would have been like a proper camp counselor out in the woods. Like, I could see myself doing that.

Proper? I don’t know. Fun? Yes!

Like proper, like at a proper camp; like, not like renting some space at a school.

My kids are literally obsessed with you. Like, obsessed.

Because they see me on the screen all the time.

They think that you’re like their bestie, and I’m like, “He’s my friend, back off.”

Well, I bought them ice cream, so…

You did buy them ice cream. And you bought them cool badges… And then I feel like I was just the third wheel of you hanging out with my kids. I don’t even know… Like, I was like, “Am I allowed to be here?”

Oh, I can’t wait to see them again at Scale. It’s going to be fun.

Oh, my God. They’re going to be like “Okay, bye mom. Okay, bye!” Oh, we should talk about Scale CFPs, too.

Well, so by the time this episode goes out, the scale CFP is going to be closed.

Oh, okay.

So it doesn’t matter… If you want to submit one – I mean, you can check the website. Sometimes it gets extended. But I think we’re closing on November 1st. There are other conferences that you could submit to… But Scale is still open for registrations. Come. It’s in March next year in Pasadena.

It’s so much fun…!

Yeah. So it’s a great environment to be in, especially if you’re networking or you want to learn some really obscure, weird things… Pasadena is like a really cool overlap between like Hollywood and JPL and…

It is so weird.

Yeah. So that’s a lot of fun.

We saw America’s best dance, or whatever. What is that? America’s Most Talent, walking across –

Yeah, America’s Got Talent. What’s her name…?

…was walking across the street while we were like walking down the… I tried to get Justin to take a picture with the chicken with me, and he’s like “I’m from California. I see this all the time.”

This isn’t unique. Yeah. So anyway, I’ll actually share my first article that I wanted to at least talk a little bit about, which I thought was interesting…

Were there any other good quotes?

Oh, those are the two that I was just - I had to share it. So the links, again, will be in the show notes. You can read if you want. Again, I thought it was interesting that this was about Australia, and I didn’t know anything about Australia’s return to office policies, or how it’s affecting them… So it was nice to see something that like isn’t just California, or West Coast, or a United States problem. This is like - people hate it everywhere.

Do you wonder if the guy that made the WebMD video was like “See? They’re on my side.”

Oh, that video…

It was so bad. Like, you know he’s so happy somewhere, like, someone’s taking the heat off me.

I think everyone forgot about that. You’re the only one over here that remembered –

Oh no, forever. Like, I just, I watched it, and my mouth was on the ground. I was like, somebody came up with the idea. They scripted this, saw the end project and they still did it. Like, it wasn’t a small project.

[16:22] There were a lot of chances to say no.

There were so many chances to be like “This is a horrible idea. We should not do this.” And they still did it. Like, wow.

Yeah. So the other article, Pragmatic Engineer, if you follow him…

Oh, I love that guy.

Great newsletter. Has a lot of like in-depth articles. One of the things that I love is how in-depth it goes. One of the things I hate is how long the articles are, to get the information. I’m like “This is great reporting. I didn’t want to read a book every week.” But this article I’m actually quoted in, which was about “Why techies are leaving big tech.” You’ve been quoted in a lot of things lately, and I’ve been chuckling because as the mass Exodus happens, everybody keeps dropping your blog as it happens. We’re not going to mention your names, but like… As Exodus just keeps going. And I’m just like, I remember when you said you were going to write that blog, and I was like – I was scared for you. And then you did it, and now it’s being quoted everywhere… And you would have thought a year later, things would be getting better… And it is a wild.

Yeah. And for me this is one of the important things of when I feel something is important to write it down publicly on my blog, is like actually an important thing of my process… Because there’s so many things that I’ve referenced back that were like more than a year old. And this is one of those things that I wrote it December of last year, and I literally, someone from Bloomberg called me last week. It was like, “Hey, that article you wrote.” I’m like “Dude, this is like 10 months old.” They’re like, “Yeah, no, it’s still happening. We still have questions.”

But honestly though, a year ago if you had to ask any of us, or people that we know, “Would things still be this way?” Like, they’ve gotten progressively worse. They’re not even better, but they’re just not better, they’re worse. They’re so much worse. I’ve could have never have guessed. Would you have guessed? Like, if somebody said “Hey, they were going to be doing five-day RTO”, and all these things, do you think –

Oh yeah, that I saw coming. Like, that was like an obvious one. This is like a part-time RTO… Like, no, this is going – and they already had returned to team. Like, this is Amazon-specific. The article here from pragmatic engineer is actually – I liked it because it went into a lot of other big tech companies, where it’s like…

Well, I just meant in general, because it’s not just like Amazon. But in general, do you think you would have saw the market and like the way that employees are being treated, and just kind of like where tech is going - do you feel like a year ago you could have guessed we’d be here now?

No, not this dire. Partially because of like the hype cycle of AI stuff that’s like taking over the jobs, partially because overlap, at least in the United States, from like the election trauma and things that are happening… And then the other third thing of just like “Well, now you have to drive to an office”, and live closer sort of mentality of like “Yeah, it’s your fault.” All of those things combined - like, no way.

Okay, talk more about your article, but I do have follow-up questions about the election.

I mean, the article I thought was really good, that he laid out like seven main things that he found that people were leaving big tech for… And in many cases, he’s specifically calling out people that went to small companies or startups, or starting their own startups… I was one of those people that in January, I left Amazon. I went to a startup, this was my first startup I’ve ever been to. It’s really different. It’s like, I’ve only ever worked in really old companies or really large companies. And being at a startup is so different. And for me, not in a burnout, sort of like “I work too much” way, because I’ve always had those boundaries that I feel like I’m pretty good at… And the company has been good at supporting me in those things. Like, I’ve never been happier in my career than the past 10 months.

[19:55] It is good to say that you are coming from a place of privilege, because you have had such a successful career. But.

Yes, absolutely.

I mean, it is wild. Who would have thought that startups would be – like, everybody I know who’s left big tech has gone to a startup, and they are immensely happy. Like, last week we had Pete on, and Pete went from AWS and then to two startups. Like… So it’s just crazy. Like, big tech was known for stability, and you go there and like, that’s like the goal, you know? And now people are going to startups. Like, who would have thought?

Yeah. That’s literally like the first point in this article, is like big tech is not stable. Like, it’s just not. Not only are you just scared of the layoffs or giant reorgs that you have to do some new AI thing, or you have no agency over your work. And that’s just not something that people want to deal with. They’re like, “Actually, I’ll give up some of that stability for having more impact, or just enjoying the thing I’m doing a little bit more.”

I think when you get deeply technical people, they want to work on something they’re passionate about, and they do better work when they do that. So the fact that people are being forced to work on all these projects that they don’t necessarily believe in, or they feel are like yucky, I think the people that are going to leave are not going to be the people that are bad at their jobs or that have options. It’s always going to be the people that are good and they have options and they can go somewhere better.

Yeah. I didn’t want to – we won’t go too deep into the article. I will say that like, you know, I was quoting it from that blog post, but I think he did a good job in here just like identifying the top seven things of just like - this is why people have been leaving, and this is why it’s been difficult.

Is there anything that surprised you?

I think this one point of like steep compensation drops. Like, you go to big tech cause you get the big paycheck, and then it’s guaranteed forever. And that’s not the case, because people aren’t getting more stock options, or the stock isn’t doing as well as they were promised. And in both those cases, when your compensation is tied a lot to the stock price, then that impacts actually what you make. It’s different – like, when I was at Disney, I did get some stock options, but it wasn’t a lot. It wasn’t like half my pay, or anything. I want to say it was like $8,000 or something like that a year for stock options. Our bonuses came from the movies. So however the movie did at the box office, at least in animation, they would give us a bonus based on how it did. And it was so – that was like so out of my control that it felt like just like… It wasn’t even like a stock. I can’t influence the stock price any more than I can influence a box office. But the fact that it all came and we had no guarantees of any of it… Like, the stock I could at least hold onto for longer. I’m like “Oh, maybe this will turn around, and I’ll get something out of it later.” The box office bonuses were bizarre, because it was just like “Oh, you know what? Wreck-It Ralph 2 didn’t do so good, so you don’t get a big bonus.” I’m like, “Oh, that stinks.”

Were you taxed the same way?

It was still taxed as like a – it was regular compensation, but it’s like a big drop. But also, one year when I was there we didn’t have any movies come out, because they canceled a movie called Gigantic, that never came out, and a movie got pushed back… And so I had a whole year where I got no bonus. I’m like, “I get no guarantees.”

Do you get to see the ones that never come out?

They’re not – I mean, if they’re not finished, no. There are movies that weren’t released, or aren’t like easily available, that I could see internally.

In your opinion - you’ve been in tech for like 20 years, right?

Just call me old. That’s fine. Yeah.

I didn’t say that.

I like it. You can keep going.

Okay. So how does big tech continue to innovate and to get the best talent the way that they are treating their employees? Like, how long do you think that they can just lead with fear?

They buy it.

But they’re not buying it. Look at what you just said. The stock –

[23:53] No, they’re buying startups, right? A lot of the new innovation from any big tech that I’ve seen in, I don’t know, at least the last 10 years has been from acquisitions, acquihires, right? They’re like “Oh, this startup had a cool thing. We bought them. And now we own that thing.” And that’s literally the goal for most of the startups too, right? Because the startups are like “Great. I was a founder. You just bought me for a hundred million dollars. Cool. I can retire after I get this comp payout in four years.”

But we also don’t have 0% interest rates anymore though.

No, but I mean, if a company bought for say a hundred million dollars of 20 people, and the founders own most of that, that’s still like “Oh good, I’m going to sell.” If someone comes to me and they’re like “I’m going to give you enough money to retire.”

They don’t have as much money to throw around though. But I don’t know, they almost acquired Wiz for all that money, so who knows?

I mean, Apple has just like sacks of cash somewhere.

Apple does. I don’t know if they’re all that liquid, but… True.

Yeah. I mean, Apple probably has the most liquid. But yeah, a lot of them still have plenty of cash to buy a startup, of like “Oh, this will improve our business, or give us some innovation”, or whatever. Most of the ones I see are just infusion of new products from outside resources.

Do you think the big tech can continue to live off of the fear cycle, and still do well? Or do you think that you see this changing soon?

I think at least some of big tech is scared of being broken up, right? Like, Google lost a lawsuit recently, and literally, they were called the monopoly on the ruling. They’re like, “You have a monopoly in search. You shouldn’t have this. We will figure out what your punishment is later.” And that is like a constant fear for many.

There’s so many lawsuits right now, like smaller companies going after them, and a lot of big tech is losing some of these, as like we own so much of the stack that we shouldn’t – like, actually, the judges are saying you should have more competition. And so if things like AWS split from Amazon, or Azure split from Microsoft, or even, you know, GCP from Google… Those would be like “Oh, what’s going on here?” Maybe not in Google’s case, but in a lot of the cases that would actually be impactful for the business, because it makes a lot of money and it drives a lot of new business. And actually, how do we do this other thing now if we don’t have that cash cow coming in of free money because we own so much of the stack? So I think that is going to change, and I’m actually a little hopeful for competition in those regards, but I don’t think that’s quick.

If it’s not broken down by a monopoly, do you think that we just continue to trend this way, with fears of layoff constantly, and just them losing the talent that can leave?

No, I think they’ll start outsourcing. I think they’ll just say “Oh, actually, it’s just too expensive to get people here. We’re just gonna open a bunch of offices in India, where we can pay people half the price, and have them forced to come to an office.” It’s just fear in a different place, in a lot of ways. It’s just like “Actually, we’ll just outsource this somewhere else and we get the same, “quality”, right? The same output of something.

What does that mean for US tech workers, though? Or is this just like how it goes now?

I don’t know… If you can’t compete in small businesses with the big companies, then you just can’t get the money to pay people to come join you. And granted, there are plenty of – I’m having more fun than I’ve had for a long time, so it’s like, I really enjoy this, but I also have a family, and I also have a mortgage, and I also have things that I have to pay for… So it’s just like, how much can I give up to have fun?

Yeah.

That’s not something that is sustainable, and I think that there is always going to be like “This large company has all the money” sort of mindset.

That makes sense.

Share one of your articles. We’ve already been going for like almost 30 minutes and we’ve done an article and a half.

[27:47] All my articles kind of relate, because I’m getting ready for GitHub Universe, which will happen before this comes out… But I was just doing some research on different – just kind of trying to learn what we’re seeing from AI models so far. Liike, what is it looking at as far as bias, because my talk is about empowering women in data to try to combat AI bias, and basically trying to create a better future for AI, because of having more diversity.

Now, what do you mean by empowering women?

We’re in this very weird place where a lot of people are diversity is – DEI is Didn’t Earn It. And it’s this very negative connotations for diversity. And we’ve really got… For a few years during COVID, I think we were really pushing diversity, and it was seeming like tech was getting better for women and people of color. And now that there’s less money and hiring is harder, I think it’s harder for everybody, but I think it’s getting especially harder to get people from diverse backgrounds into tech.

But getting them into tech isn’t empowering them. It is life-changing for many of them…

But I think the way that you get people, like the way that you have an option and that you allow people to bring the qualities, that they have that may be not traditional tech, but you’re bringing that background… And then for instance, apprenticeships I feel are very much empowering women, because a lot of times you’re teaching a skill, but you’re also using the skills that they already have… And most apprenticeships were paid, right? I don’t know about how we’re going to go forward, but most – especially women, when we’re the majority caretakers for society, when you can pay them to do an apprenticeship to learn, it gives them childcare options, and it gives them options to be able to afford the gas, the lunch, or whatever; or even the computer, or whatever they need to reach that new level.

So I think a lot of programs, like, just giving people the possibilities. And not just that, but we’ve just done a terrible job at retaining people. So it is a lot of empowering, and having a safe, conducive environment to be able to grow in, and how we make those environments welcoming to everybody. And how are we making them where people can thrive if you’re not the same as everybody else? When you’re a mom, it’s very different when you say you have to go pick up your kids versus a dad. And the demands on the primary parent.

There is a Nobel prize economist who had said that the greatest indication of how we will close the wage gap is having a supportive partner, because women and primary caregivers who are – I mean, women are 95% of primary caregivers. They were constantly forced to take the less greedy job. So she determined that greedy jobs are the jobs that pay more, and take more time, and they take more resources, right?

And they might require you to move.

Yes.

They might require life changes.

Life changes. Basically, the job in your family that you put all of your life decisions on, those greedy jobs, because they pay more, right? But women are constantly having to take the less greedy jobs. So even if she has the same skill, the same years and all of that, she’s going to pick that less greedy job, because she needs the flexibility to be a caretaker. And they did a bunch of studies showing who’s doing the majority of the household work and everything, and it was still women, right? So that’s another reason why if you know you have to cook, clean and do all these things and then do pickup, you need the less greedy job, right?

So this just kind of goes to the fact of how are we empowering women and making sure that not only are they getting into tech, but they’re staying in tech, and that we’re making a conducive environment because what prices are we going to pay?

Break: [31:47]

There’s an article called “The urgent need for bias mitigation in large language models”, and it compares the different large language models. So it’s comparing Claude, Open AI, which is GPT, and just comparing each version of it, and then showing the bias, and kind of talking about what biases were found as far as health, race, gender, and religion. And just, it gets into a lot of the data, and if you put bad in, you get bad out, right? But because the models are also learning, and they’re making these connections based off the data, the bias will also grow, right? Because it’s making these connections –

If there’s one thing I learned from reading the LLaMA 3 paper is like training is all about bias.

Exactly.

That’s all training is, is adding the preferred bias for whoever’s doing the training.

Thank you. See, that’s what I was trying to get at and I couldn’t find the right words.

That was amazing. It’s just like “Oh, you’re just biasing the model.” That’s the whole point.

So because we’re humans, and we all have a certain level of bias. But the people that predominantly are in tech are usually male, and they usually have very certain backgrounds, right? So a lot of what we’re putting into is already biased. But to your statement, it’s almost taking bias and then multiplying it.

Well, bias is a good things for some things, right? Because I have a bias that the LLM should produce a coherent sentence, right? Because otherwise it could just be random words. Like, I want the bias to be like “I want to be able to understand what it’s saying.”

You have a bias for Dr. Pepper.

Oh, man… But yeah, bias exists and it’s there for a reason, but at some point you don’t realize the unintentional bias, the training that you put in by saying like hey, the order of the words in the sentence, the bias that you picked might influence if this was me as a white dude saying the sentence, versus someone with a different background, or a different gender, or a different nationality, trying to say the same thing. And that bias comes through in unintentional ways sometimes, but it’s very obvious when it’s like “This is foreign to me as an outsider of this world.” And if you’re not used to how the LLM speaks or what it gives you for data, you’re like, “Actually, this seems weird because I didn’t grow up this way. And the bias is not the same bias that I have.”

Not just that, but it can be culturally, right? Like, you could both be the same race, but it could be a different culture. I was in a presentation for our apprenticeships, and one of our coworkers was disciplined for saying “I’m going to throw it back to Laura.” And to me, I was like “Why?” Like, I had no idea what we were talking about. But apparently, one of the chairs on the committee or whatever thought that that was like a derogatory term in the UK maybe.

So it was just crazy, because we weren’t even aware of that being a negative thing, because we didn’t grow up in that culture. But then you get to tech, which is a global community, and you have to make sure that you’re not saying things that are like a negative connotation in like other cultures.

But my two other articles kind of go with that. There’s one about the Palo Alto police force, and they are using something called draft one, which is based off of GPT, and it is basically - they’re using their cameras and talk to text basically to come up with police reports, which seems to be a huge time saver. And because staffing is down, I do understand how – I mean, I think we’re all using ChatGPT as time savers, right? But when it’s somebody’s life and how these reports are used in court, and can –

Yeah, the impact is so much more than – I’m writing my Halloween decoration code with mostly… I’m like, how much of this could ChatGPT actually write for me? But the stakes for that are none, right? Like, this is just like an experiment.

Exactly. So it’s not that at all I am saying I’m against it, because I use ChatGPT every day. If it can make your life easier, do it. But when it comes –

To a degree.

Exactly.

Depending on that risk.

Yes. But when it comes to the fact that we are doing things that we know are disproportionately hurting certain groups of people… Like, people of color are already disproportionately affected by false acquisitions and not having the same socioeconomic background to be able to defend themselves in court… And the fact that police reports are so important to what happens in court, and like your sentencing, and the fact that this is now becoming so widely used, it’s really scary because of the biases we’re already finding… And these reports are going to be taken as, you know, as the source of truth. And then what? And then that kind of goes back also –

[40:16] Because people make assumptions about that as data. They’re like “This was data. This isn’t bias. It’s just data.” I’m like “No, no, no. That’s not how this works.”

That’s like the Wells Fargo algorithm. Were they trying to be harmful? No. But - what’s the saying with the causation? You can have data and it could be honest data, but why is the data that way? So it got to a point where it wasn’t lending money – the algorithm was not recommending people of color and women, and people of different backgrounds to be recommended for loans, for mortgages. And it was because people of color were at average making less when the data was trained. So they were making less and they had more credit issues or different things. But it was judging an entire group of people off of that data. Was that data taken in correctly? Maybe. But why is that bias there? Is it because more people of color were facing other socioeconomic issues?

The options on the table to just not do some of this stuff, too… All these rules we put in place, we put in there – my favorite example is last year, 2023, the state of California got rid of jaywalking laws. They’re like, “Actually, we’re not going to ticket anyone for jaywalking anymore.” And I grew up in California. Jaywalking has always been like “Don’t cross ever in these places.” And it was just like – it was a big thing. And last year, I’m like “Why did they get rid of it? Why is jaywalking not a thing anymore?” It’s like, isn’t it dangerous still? Don’t all the bad things still apply? And they’ve found that over 30% of jaywalking tickets were for black people, in an area that only 9% of the population was black.

That’s wild.

And they’re like, “This is disproportionately against certain people that are getting these tickets.” Does that mean that they’re the only ones jaywalking? Absolutely not. But they’re the ones that were being targeted for the tickets, and saying, “This is the law that affects you, so we’re just going to get rid of the law.” Actually, this doesn’t matter.

There was a press conference in Louisiana a few years back, and they were talking about the possibility of getting rid of fees for tickets and things. And they were like, “How do you feel about no longer–” They weren’t going to get rid of the fees, but they were going to get rid of the jail sentences, because they were saying so many people had these nonviolent crime, very nonviolent, like just tickets, stupid tickets, but they were compounding so much because people were so poor, they weren’t able to pay their tickets. So so many people were getting in prison because of their fees, but then they were losing their jobs because they were sent to prison. So you’ve created this cycle. And they asked, I think a warden of the prison, and he goes, “Well, who will wash our cars?” They were talking about people. Like, he was cool to basically enslave people because of a $20 parking fee, or just stupid fees, or stupid tickets, because he wanted them to wash their cars. I was like, “What?” It was just wild.

So I think that there’s a lot of cool things that we can do, but it’s very scary to see how we are going to societally impact and oppress the same people who have been going through this over and over and over again. Let’s go put it into things that are making our lives more efficient and easier, but let’s not trust it to do these things that we already as humans have a hard time doing.

What’s your next link?

I’m going to piggyback a little bit… I’m not going to talk about the link, because I haven’t read it yet, but Apple released a white paper about LLMs, that just the premise of it I’ve found fascinating… Because they’re saying that basically LLMs aren’t good. They aren’t good for very specific things.

The quote in here – again, I haven’t read this white paper yet, so I don’t really want to talk about it in depth… But the quote was “LLMs cannot perform genuine logical reasoning. They replicate reasoning steps from their training data.”

[44:09] This is the part that I’m still trying to learn about, which is really confusing to me, because they’re math, right? The majority of LLMs is a lot of math behind the scenes.

Well, it’s math for the fact that it tokenizes everything. It makes everything math, because computers only do math. It doesn’t know a word, it knows ASCII characters. So it turns everything into numbers, so that it can do math, because otherwise computers can’t do anything.

It was weird, I watched a video and it was saying to ask ChatGPT how to spell strawberries. And it can’t spell strawberries.

Or how many R’s are in strawberries.

Oh, how many R’s are in strawberries. But it can if you separate them, because of the way that it tokenizes. So it’s wild, because we haven’t found all the edge cases of how it doesn’t understand data. There’s so many things. What if it doesn’t understand what we’re asking for more serious questions?

Well, and this is why there’s so many jailbreaks. The jailbreaks are just so easy, because actually – if you add a space between every character, the LLM is like, “Well, yeah, I got the numbers. I know what the math adds up to”, but the thing you put into the model was completely incoherent to what a human would see. The model’s like “Oh, this is the math. Okay, here’s your output.” And - yeah, that stuff is just kind of rampant.

So I haven’t read the paper yet. I do want to talk about it later, whenever I finally – I might read it on my way to All Things Open. But a long-form thing that I did read recently was called Platform Strategy by Gregor Hohpe. I think it’s Hohpe. I don’t know. Fantastic book. If you’re a platform engineer, if you’re doing platform stuff, this book had some of the most complete business applications to what a platform actually does for a company, or doesn’t do for a company, that I’ve read so far.

It’s a lean pub book. You pay what you want, kind of thing. You go pay for it. I want to read his other books now, after reading this one, because I was like “This was fantastic.” And I wish I would have bought the pack. I think he has like a three-pack of cloud strategy, software engineer something, and platform strategy. But it took me a little while to read, because I was reading it in bits and pieces, and I think it’s like… I don’t know, it’s over 300 pages, which - I’m just a slow reader, so it took me a little while. But I had it all marked down, I was reading on my iPad, and marking it up… It was a really good book.

I love when No Scratch does that. No Scratch Press, when they do the bundles… I love that.

Yeah. Another white paper… Blue Sky is having a moment, and it’s been a lot of fun.

It is, and I’m so excited about it.

It’s been a lot of fun in the last week. We’re recording this on October 24th, so you’re all going to read this a little later, but… There’s been an influx of just people and information and stuff going on on Blue Sky recently, that has been fun, as someone - I’ve been there for a little over a year now. And it’s been quiet, but I’ve still been enjoying the architecture of it and how people are integrating the app protocol, that sort of stuff.

I wanted to reshare the white paper from that protocol on Blue Sky, because I did read this a while ago. It got updated in October. I haven’t read it yet, but they tripled the number of authors on it. One I have a copy of, and I was like, “Oh, it had three authors before. Now there’s nine. What’s going on?” So I haven’t reread it, but I think most of the content’s the same. I want a diff for white papers. That would be great.

I wonder if you could put it into Git and diff it.

Well, Google has the AI podcast thing, and I thought about “I’ve already read this paper. I wonder what the podcast version of it would be like”, but I haven’t. I want to read that one again. But I’m going to share it in the notes, because if you’re not on Blue Sky right now, it’s having a moment in social networks right now, where people finally got fed up with X enough after blocking, and AI training on art, and…

I hope this is the end, and we’ve all picked one place, and we can just go there, and I can delete my X account. I will be so excited. Because going back and forth between three different social medias is so – that’s too much work.

Yeah. Welcome to DevRel.

[48:02] But it makes me feel bad. So I had got another Twitter because we were going to do a startup thing at one point, and I had got another Twitter to just lock the name down. And the unhinged right wing stuff that this Twitter who doesn’t follow anything…

Oh, yeah.

It has no followers. I’ve never liked anything from it. And it gets the most – for one, it gets so many notifications for Elon… It’s wild.

Yeah.

It doesn’t follow him, but it’s constantly – I’m being fed these notifications. And I look at it and I’m like, “Why is this on my phone?” And then on top of that, it is the most unhinged, just…

Hatred drives engagement, right? Like, that’s the best.

It is just – it’s not even like the mainstream. It’s like, it’s being fed – you know what I mean?

All the corners right off the bat?

It’s just being fed the most from a dark hole under a rock stuff that you have ever seen. And I’m like, this isn’t even a popular tweet. It’s not feeding me what’s popular. It’s not feeding me the mainstream. It is feeding just straight unhinged right wing conspiracy theories. And I’m like, “What is the algorithm even looking for? Because I’ve given you no indication of this is what I want.”

The only reason I log into X right now is because I manage my work accounts. And again, it follows the employees from the company, who most of them are not active on X… But yeah, it’s the same kind of thing where I’m just like, “What is going on here?” Like, “Oh, I’m in the wrong account.”

But it’s weird, because my X account doesn’t see any of this stuff. No, I’ll take that back. [unintelligible 00:49:44.11] some weird stuff that I don’t follow… But it’s just – it’s so different. You know how when we hear that like “Oh, there’s like all this gross stuff”, and you’re like “Oh, where? I just see my friends.” And then every now and then you see some unhinged stuff, but you’re like, “It’s not great, and I don’t see as much as the stuff that I want to see before.” And now that I get those notifications, I’m just like, “Has this stuff – like, has it always been this bad?” Because it is so bad. And closer to the election it’s gotten just wild.

I think that’s TikTok is that also, to the extreme, right?

It is.

Because your For You page is your For You page; like, no one else – and there are some popular things that bubble up, but like it’s even more so. But I am really curious about the personalized moderation tools that Blue Sky has put in place… Because you can subscribe to block lists, you can have all these other controls where you don’t see stuff that someone else does on the same network.

And so like the Blue Sky moderation becomes very personal, even more so than like Mastodon, which is like on a server basis, right? Like, a server is going to block a bunch of other servers. We don’t want all the bad stuff from those other servers. But you’re still like in a community that’s server-based moderation. Blue Sky and algorithmic feeds like TikTok are very personal, and it’s only you that’s getting that exact feed in that way.

And even like – again, Blue Sky, everyone’s like “Oh, there’s so much art”, and there’s so much art they don’t want to see, there’s a lot of things that people are like, “I opened Blue Sky and all I saw was furries.” And I was just like, “Oh, like that’s the moderation that probably –” Like, I’ve been there for long enough now, and some of it might’ve been defaulted from when I came before, that I don’t see now… But there’s just controls in there that like, “Oh, I’ve never seen these controls on any social network”, where I’m just like, “Oh yeah, don’t show me any nudity. I don’t want to see it. It’s fine.”

There’s a beans filter, because Barry harassed him for so long that they made a Beans filter, y’all. You can filter baked beans.

Yeah. Custom feeds is another one, where it’s like, you can add labels to all this stuff. I have a labeler I subscribed to for pronouns. Fantastic. You don’t even have to say it in your profile or anything, but it adds a little, like, “What is this person’s pronouns” directly under their name, which is just part of the labeler. And I’m like, “Cool. I don’t have to do any of that work. They don’t have to tell me. They don’t have to put it–” So like, it just picks it up from their posts of what their pronouns are. I’m like, that’s really cool.

I love that I can have a different feed for each person in my personality. Like, I have books guy, then I have like a techs guy, then I have like for databases, DevOps. It’s just… Everybody’s compartmentalized into where I want it.

[52:19] Speaking of which, if people are getting started and want to join, I have a couple starter packs. I have one for cloud-native people, and I have one for All Things Open speakers, which I was like “Oh, how does this work for conferences?” Autumn, you started a couple, right?

I’ve got Linux and GitHub universe. And then there’s a database one named ran by someone named, I think, Josh. There’s a couple of cool ones.

Yeah. We’ll put those links in, too. Because again, if people are coming to Blue Sky, I think starter packs is a cool idea, because it’s not a starter pack that’s pushed on you from the network. Usually, if you join X today, it’s like “Well, do you want to follow Elon? Do you want to follow –” Like, these handful of really, really popular people… Versus “Do you want to follow people that talk about this topic, or are interested in this thing along with you?”

It’s like, you know when your friend always posts the best food pictures on Instagram, and then you ask them for a taco place recommendation, but you feel like you can trust them? It’s people in those communities making starter packs. So it’s not a corporation pushing it on you, or pushing the people that they hired to be in this community, but it’s like you’re – the other community member’s showcasing who they are interested in following, and I really like that aspect.

I think like Blue Sky is being very – the growth is from the community. It’s from people, and it’s getting back to the part that we really enjoyed about Twitter. Like, the people in the community that was there; that was the cool part of Twitter. It wasn’t Twitter, you know? So I think if we can get everybody in one place, this is what we’ve been looking for for so long.

It’s not perfect, right? There’s still fear that like, this is – I just saw announcements today they raised a round of funding, like $15 million. So it’s like, they still have profit, they still have things that they’re doing to try to make this sustainable… Which also I think is different from Mastodon, which is trying to go the completely like “Please just donate enough money that we can run this forever”, which I don’t think is sustainable long-term either.

But the balance of like, one of them we don’t know if it’ll have money to keep the lights on, the other one we are afraid that’s going to have too much money, or try to go after too much money to not make it a good place to be anymore… Or it gets bought by some other company. Some other billionaire could buy Blue Sky.

But there is still the fact that you’re using your own domain, and you have more power over taking your stuff somewhere else, you know?

The portable identity and portable data I think are the key parts of the app protocol.

Yeah. It makes me want more to invest it, because all the time I’ve put into like LinkedIn, and then it got weird, and now it has videos, and I’m just like “Uh, I don’t know.” And then, you know, I put so much time into Twitter, and then made some of my best friends there, and now I’m just like, “I put so much time into this and now it’s just gone.” So the fact that Blue Sky - it’s like, we know that we’re going into it, and we’re making that investment, but at least we know we can take some of that investment with us, if we have to leave one day.

And again, I still tell everyone, “Go buy a domain, put your own website there first.” Invest your time in your own domain, your own website, more than social media. Social media is convenient, and it makes sense to engage with people. But if you have.

It’s a different interaction on social media, but…

Yeah. Well, I don’t like having interactions on my blog. Like, I don’t have comments. I don’t have all that other stuff that used to be there when everyone was like “You can get likes on your blog posts.” I’m like, “I don’t want that.” I don’t want people to come to my blog posts and like it. I want to share it other places. And it’s a different way to do like a one to many; like, this is just me writing stuff over here, but when I engage with people and I share the link or I tell people about it, over there I want some interactions or I want to know what people think. But I don’t want to know that directly on my site.

I think that’s having different control over the way that you interact with the world, right? Because it keeps your blog where it gets to be your voice. And it’s not for engagement, it’s not for likes. It’s just a catalog.

Except for when news media calls me…

[56:09] You’re ridiculous. You knew what you were doing when you wrote that, okay? The whole time I was like, “Oh gosh, Justin…” I was having anxiety for you. Then I was like – but yeah, I think it’s good to have those separations, because it keeps your voice honest. And I think it keeps you being able to like be your true self in a blog. Like, all the blogs I’ve written are still on my computer, and one day I’ll release them…

That’s a lot of people, yeah.

But I’ll probably do it like on Medium, or like maybe on one of my sites, or like through Milspouse Coders or another org.

I think with a lot of people have this problem with, too. I’ve talked to plenty of people that are like “Hey, I want to start a website, but how will I know if it’s successful? How will I know? How will I measure it?” I’m like, “Don’t measure it. Please don’t measure it.”

I think I just want to do it for me.

Yeah, if you’re not doing it for you, then you’re going to feel like a failure, because you’re like “Oh, you know what? I didn’t get a thousand views this week, so it must’ve sucked.” Or “That blog post didn’t do well.” I’m like, yeah, no. You know how many of my articles did terrible and no one read them? Most of them.

That’s not my problem. My problem is fighting DNS all the time. Like, why is DNS like – I did all this work this weekend, and now I’m just like, I can’t even see anything, and I have to fix whatever went wrong…

I will say that GitHub’s DNS are different than – if you go to like Cloudflare or Netlify or one of the other ones, it’s… Yeah.

This was supposed to be easier, and I’m dying, and then I made it private, and then went back to public, and now it’s like, you broke it and I have to go figure out how… “Oh… What?”

Two more articles for me. One is Ghostty.

Ghosty?

Ghostty. G-H-O-S-T-T-Y. It’s a terminal from Mitchell Hashimoto; he wrote a blog post recently. I’ve been using it, I’ve been part of the private beta for a little while, because Mitchell’s really nice.

You’re part of every private beta.

I’m a professional beta tester. Yeah. I love beta-testing stuff. But I asked Mitchell because I was getting a little fed up with my terminals that I was using, and I knew he was writing this thing, and he kept sharing it, and I was like “Can I please? I joined his Discord.” I’m like, “Can I please get access?” You have to build it from scratch today if you’re using it.

Oh, my gosh. Their themes are so pretty.

The thing that I loved about this was his quote in his recent article about – he’s releasing a 1.0 in December for Ghostty. It’s been in private beta for I think over a year now. I’ve been using it as my main terminal for probably four or five months. But his goal says - he says, “The goal with expanding terminal application functionality is to make text-based applications more attractive for developers to build and for users to use. I believe that text-based applications have a valuable niche in the software ecosystem, and I want to help modernize the platform.” And I love that goal. I have been maintaining a GitHub repo called AwesomeTUIs for like six years, seven years, and it has like a thousand applications that are all terminal-based, they’re all terminal interfaces… I love TUIs. I think they’re great and more performant than a GUI in many ways. So I’ve been collecting them myself. And the fact that that’s Mitchell’s goal for making Ghostty, is just to make that ecosystem better and more vibrant - I am all here for it.

For one, I love the [unintelligible 00:59:25.04] Two, I love that it runs on Mac and Linux. And three, it’s like, why did we always assume that just for it to be like technical, or for it to be better it always has to be like ugly and unexciting? I love that this is command line, but you’re making it more accessible to newer people, and it’s not ugly.

And his goal here is it’s a native terminal, right? Because there’s a lot of them that are like, if we want to make it pretty, we have to do something exotic and new, and it looks foreign.

[59:56] And then it ends up biting you in the butt later, because it’s so different that when you’re following a tutorial something is now different for your terminal, so it doesn’t fit here. You know what I mean? This just won’t make it –

Yeah. And a lot of the integrations into the operating system don’t work.

Exactly.

You don’t get doc interactions, and all that other stuff. It’s like, no, this is an integrated, native terminal for Mac and Linux, and he wants it to be the best TUI experience for those applications. And it’s not maybe as fast as some other ones, but it has more escape characters than any of the other ones. There were so many things that as I started using it – I came from another one that was like a small terminal called BlackBox, which I really liked. And I don’t use tabs and things in my terminal. Like, I don’t need all the features of the terminal, because I use TMUX, and so I get everything that I usually want inside the terminal. And so it’s just like, I just wanted something that was compliant with so many different things and keyboard shortcuts.

There’s TMUX, and Emacs… Like, what is with all these…? Everybody has their special sauce.

I know. It’s just, you get used to it. Muscle memory is hard thing to untrain.

Yeah.

But we have been wanting – Mitchell was going to come on the show to talk about it… Also, if you don’t know Mitchell, he started HashiCorp. HashiCorp is going through some things, and so we were giving – he’s not part of HashiCorp anymore. He did leave and he was doing Ghosty as a personal project, which I completely respect him for like, “Yeah, I just want to go do this terminal thing for a little while”, which is awesome. So he’ll probably come on the show in the future. I want to talk to him after it gets released, but we are waiting for some other things on the business side to wrap up.

I’m looking forward to speaking with him.

I also want to talk about his planes, because he’s a pilot.

He has planes?

Yeah. He got his pilot’s license years ago, and if you follow him on Twitter – he’s one of the ones I want to come over to Blue Sky, because I love seeing his pictures of like “Oh–” He lives in LA too, so he’s like flying into LA again… He bought a jet. He’s like “Well, I’m going to buy a jet now and fly across the country instead of like short trips.” But he’s been a pilot for a while now.

That’s wild.

Yeah. Really cool. The last article that I wanted to talk about is one I’ve just read, and it’s from Inc.com, and it’s “The ultimate death of product management”, which I’ve found interesting because it’s all about how this AI overlap of like all these CEOs are like “I don’t need a product manager. I have ChatGPT and I can ask it questions, and I can get the insights I want…” Which is a real thing that is happening in companies where they’re like “I don’t need to talk to a person. I can go do this thing.”

The thing in the article that I thought was interesting was their definition for what a good product person is. And this is more for product management, not project management. Project management is more about the tasks of getting things shipped. How do we make this thing go from nothing to something, and get it out in the world? A product manager - and their quote was “She knows what the people want and how to bring it to them.” It’s someone that has a little more intuition about what their eventual customer would want and make them better productive. And I thought that was a better insight around what a product person does, especially as someone that like now I’m a product person, and it’s hard to define… Like, I don’t know what I do. But I’ve found the article interesting… I was just like, is AI killing off product management? And in many ways I think yes, at companies that had terrible product managers, it’s like – not saying the people were bad. It’s more around the practice of empowering product managers to have intuition and to experiment with things, and to figure out what customers are going to want to have, and how to bring it to them. A lot of companies don’t let people do that, even if people have the intuition for it.

So now they’re like “Well, we can just go off of historical trends”, which is LLM training, and say like, “Oh, we can just do the thing that this thing tells me to do.”

Can we just talk about your spicy takes? First it was cloud, then it was DevRel… Now you’re going to have product spicy takes.

I mean, I don’t know. It’s just, I like spicy food.

We’re going to have to put you in like a bubble to like protect you from like the companies.

I mean, in a lot of cases – like, I’ve been doing these roles, and I have more spicy takes the longer I do them.

We’ve noticed.

[01:04:04.00] I have more opinions after I get some more experience with it. I wanted to say too, you said you’ve been working on your GitHub universe talk, and figuring out how that affects. And that’s why I was asking you about like empowering women in AI. And I think your insights there align with what I’ve now discovered for myself about what cloud native is… Because I’ve rethought – I wrote the cloud native infrastructure book, I literally like went back and like read the definition while I’m working on this talk… I wrote the definition for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the CNCF. I wrote the original “What does cloud native mean?” And looking at all that - like, I was so wrong about all this. And I think the thing that actually is cloud native, if I look back at what people are actually doing, is paying your infrastructure people the same amount as your application developers, because you give them equal footing at saying “Infrastructure is as important as applications.” It needs a place to run, it needs to be scalable… And it aligns it gives, it empowers them to say no… Because historically, this is not the case. People are like “Infrastructure was just the thing we had to do.” It was just a thing that was like “Oh, well we got to ship the app, so we have to have someone to run the server”, right? And cloud native changed that. And it did it through all these practices and patterns, and I don’t think those are valuable necessarily. I think that the thing that makes a company cloud native is just putting those on equal footing and saying “Infrastructure is as important as this application.” And I think in some ways, what you’re saying about empowering women, it’s just like “Pay them equally.”

I don’t think it’s just payment. I think it’s investment, right? Because payment seems it’s just monetary, right?

But investment is part – like, you’ll invest in your application developer. You pay them $150,000, $200,000. You’re going to send them to training. You’re going to get them a book.

But I do think that it is more than paying them, right? Because you can pay somebody, and money is – like, the people that say money doesn’t matter, they’re liars, because they are poor. Right? That’s not true. But it is investing in how your company runs, what your culture is like, how people interact with each other, the training and meeting people where they’re at.

And like - okay, for instance, we both have children, right? Can you raise two of your children, and treat them exactly the same, and will they both be successful? There’s some things that some people are very good at. And there’s some things that another person might still be great in that role, but they might not be – have you ever read those articles about how they say women engineers are more the glue in a lot of teams, and they end up with more of gluey tasks?

Yeah, yeah.

And for a long time, people were like “You’re really good at processes and being technical, but we just want you to be technical.” And you don’t want to use somebody as like a note taker and your secretary, but also like, why aren’t you appreciating them for how they can bridge the gap between being technical and the process? You know what I mean? It’s a lot. It’s not just money. It’s about like finding what – I think good management in any role, any industry knows how to find people’s strong suits and bring that out and help empower them to do their job, right? You hit those qualifications for that job or you wouldn’t be there, but how do you empower them to bring their true self to that job, and to use what they’re good at to grow better?

And I think some of that is putting them on equal – again, equal footing of like if… When I was a sys admin and I went and talked to all the application developers, and we went to a room and they said “We need this” and I said “I can’t give that to you”, leadership would tell me “You have to figure it out, because they make more money than you, and the money comes from that thing.” And so like I couldn’t push back, and I couldn’t find the right role, because it was just like “Well, we think that applications are more important than infrastructure.”

And, and it didn’t matter if I was doing an infrastructure role, if I wanted to do a glue role. I feel like DevOps in a lot of ways raised the base pay for a lot of sys admins by teaching them Git.

It did. And SRE.

[01:08:04.20] It went in progression, right? Because you became a sys admin, you went to DevOps because you learned Git. And then you went to SRE because you learned how to monitor something. And it’s just like, your base pay went up because your value to the company went up. And now platform engineers are the application developers of infrastructure, and whether they’re treated that way or not, but they get the highest pay of a lot of these infrastructure people. And they’re like “Oh, actually, the platform engineers should be able to say no”, and they’re empowered in the application teams to be like “I can give you this feature on our platform, and you deliver the application this certain way.” And they have a pushback, because now the incentives are aligned, and they can say “Hey, you both can do those things that you’re good at.” And I think that in AI there’s a lot of this, like “We only want the highly, highly detailed nerd person that understands this very specific esoteric thing”, because they’re trying to learn it, and they’re trying to discover what this even means to the world, and they don’t know how that’s going to affect the next team over, or the product and the end goal… But they’re also – all the people that aren’t that highly specific technical person, they’re not paying them as much, because that person has a PhD, and so they’re going to demand more money, versus the other person who’s like, “Oh, well, I went to theater background, but I’m going to make you more money by improving the product before it gets to the customer.”

Also, I agree with you in a lot of ways. Don’t take this as disagreement, because guess what? Money levels the playing field. Women might be more caretakers, but the more money that you have to outsource the things that you are now put on your plate - like, if you can get a cleaning lady and you can pay more for daycare, you are leveling the playing field.

So don’t get me wrong, I wholeheartedly agree with you… But say the infrastructure team needs more money to run better infrastructure, to get better tools. That is an investment; the training’s an investment. So I agree with you, but I just think that you have to like kind of really – just the extras are important too, you know?

No, yeah. And I think that you’re right, because what a person is good at isn’t always the same, even on the same team, right? Everyone has a different focus, and…

It is not. You can be on two completely different – you know, engineering teams, and one team you can thrive in and one can be horrible. So it’s like, it just really depends.

Yeah. But I think having the company equally invest in you, no matter which thing you’re doing… And if everyone in the room makes a million dollars, who are you going to ask to take notes? Like, we’re all actually equal here because of that pay, because that’s like the time reward that you – like, that’s what a job is. It’s like, you’re trading your time for that money.

Also, sometimes it’s like toxically. We don’t want women taking notes. We don’t want women to do the less technical tasks, but sometimes we need to do – like, if ChatGPT is writing so much of code and supposedly it’s going to do so much of this, there is going to be more of a need for people that can people and process, and do technical. Because who is going to make sure that AI is doing the right things? Who’s going to make sure the stakeholders and AI – like, at some point telling AI what to do is going to be like high-level engineering, because you are still breaking it down into tasks, right? You’re still doing a process.

So if all of these wonderful notions of big tech are true, you now need people that can people process, and do technical, even more than just the people that did technical. So instead of being like “Oh, we won’t make them take notes”, when you find someone who can do all those three things, grow them. If they’re in a really technical part that doesn’t match their – like, where can you put them and grow them to be able to be the people that are the glue, but the very well-paid glue, who’s appreciated? You know what I mean?

Yeah. And making good engineers managers because they were good engineers kind of misses the point of like “Actually, they’re a bad communicator.”

[01:11:48.20] Thank you! Because communication is a very – like, engineering’s a team sport. Communication is really important. Being able to get everybody’s buy-in for something is important. But we down those skills because it’s not a typical technical skill. But somebody who can have the deep technical understanding and still do those things are an asset in a different way. But we don’t have that understanding for that. We only see engineering in one way. Instead of saying, “You don’t have to take notes”, say “Hey, we love that you can do all of these things”, and give them the people technical problems. You know what I mean?

Yeah. I do find it funny… I mean, not funny, but kind of tragic that so many of the AI voices default to a female voice.

Think about what you just said when you were reading that thing, when it said - what was it? The product management? “She is going to…” I was like, “What?”

[unintelligible 01:12:41.28]

We’re especially getting rid of the women now? It’s like…

No, in that article they’re calling it like “This was a person that was good at product, that is doing product”, and it was a woman. And it’s just like, people don’t necessarily default to that. Like, oh, the quote’s a she, but the fact that like all these like AI like bots are like taking the notes for us now, and they all default to a female voice… It’s just kind of like, “Oh, that’s not helping the stereotype of like…”

Wait. Also, the fact that the one 10X engineer AI was a dude named Devin, right?

The fake one, too.

Yes.

Completely BS-ed his way into that job.

And it’s so funny, because it’s like, we are almost hurting women more by being like “They have to only be technical, and not take the notes, and not do the other stuff.” But like, is that truly what makes a good engineer, is only coding? Because that’s not even most of the job. Like, you know what I mean?

They will lie to you all day before you’re an engineer, that all of the job is writing code.

That’s what I’m saying. So it’s like, we’ve used those things that were meant to be intentionally good, to be more toxic. Like, y’all, that’s not what we were trying to say. So…

Well, thank you everyone for listening to this episode. Please give us feedback on this one if you like us doing the news. I really enjoy just hanging out with Autumn and talking about stuff that we find interesting, and sharing some of this with all of you… So if you want us to keep doing this, please reach out. We are still in the Changelog Slack, but I know that there’s been a lot more activity in… What’s it called? Tulip. Is that what it’s called? Zulip.

Wait, there’s a Zulip? Nobody told me.

There’s a Zulip thing. It’s like a private – like, it’s interesting. I’m not sold on it yet, because it’s kind of hard for me to stay in touch with it, because it doesn’t have an app… And so it’s like a web portal on my phone, and the way it threads things is interesting… I like that I can keep a conversation going for a long time, but also, I forget contexts. I’m like, “Why did I get a reply to this thing from six months ago?” So I’m there, but – we will have shows that are in Zulip as well. But also, it’s in the Changelog Slack, so…

I’m in Slack. I’m not into Zulip.

Right. But we’re both on Blue Sky, so if you’re joining and you want to say hi to either of us, we’ll have the links there, too.

Yes, please, definitely write us on Blue Sky. Because I feel like we’ll see that, and we’ll see it quicker, you know, so we can respond and kind of like have better interactions with listeners.

Yeah. But again, thank you again for listening. If you have anyone that you want to have on the show, if you have topics that you’re interested in, go ahead and email us. I don’t think I’ve shared the email for a little while. It’s ShipIt [at] changelog.com. Autumn and I both get the emails. We reply to all of them, and it’s great hearing from you of what you like, and sometimes what you dislike, and just really what you want us to talk about. Because I’m learning a lot of new things from hearing from all of you, and it’s a lot of fun.

Some of those emails give me the warm and fuzzies. They’re so sweet. I love hearing about like just people, and the people that like listen. Also I had so much fun hanging out and just talking to you today. This was fun. It was like basically our phone calls, but like recorded.

Yeah. Thanks, everyone. I hope you have a great day.

Have a good day.