080: Other Duties As Assigned

22 June, 2022

Transcript

Spot an error? Send a pull request on GitHub.

[00:00:00] Tim: he would have me every day, print out the current state of the code onto like the dot matrix, you know,the big, really wide green and white sheets.

[00:00:11] Adam: When you say the current state of the code, you mean just print out the application itself,

[00:00:15] Tim: the entire application. I would print it out every morning. Because he would go through it like a teacher and he would like redline different things. Yeah. He would read. And I'm like, what are you doing?

[00:00:46] Adam: okay. Here we go. It is show number 80 and on today's show, we're going to talk about other duties as assigned that's with a UT I E S not O O D I E S. but as usual, we're gonna start with our triumphs and fails, and we got the full crew back here tonight.

[00:01:00] Adam: So we're gonna start with Tim and Carol. Tim, why don't you go first?

[00:01:04] Tim's Triumph

[00:01:04] Tim: Yeah. So I heard you guys miss me bumping my microphone. So just for old time sake, here we go. There we go. Matt, leave. Leave that in yeah. So,

[00:01:12] Adam: So good to have you back.

[00:01:14] Tim: Thank you. Thank you. I missed you guys, but, yeah. Had a good time in Barcelona. We'll talk about in the after show. Talk about all the fun stuff we had in Barcelona, but I I was literally gone for two weeks.

[00:01:24] Tim: and my goal was to not have to do any work. I was working, I was there for work the first week as leadership, meeting that we had in Barcelona. And then a week after, the next week was just personal. The family came over and we had some personal time, but everything kept running.

[00:01:39] Tim: So I guess you're correct, Adam, I'm completely replaceable. everything,

[00:01:44] Tim: nothing.

[00:01:44] Adam: We should all strive to be.

[00:01:45] Tim: got no messages.I even like, at some point I like sent a text message, like, Hey, how's everything going? Like, yeah, we're good. We're good.

[00:01:53] Tim: You know, there was, some people had to drive the struggle bus a couple times, but they were determined not to contact me and they figured it out.

[00:01:59] Tim: So, I mean, that just means that the team runs well. if I get hit by the proverbial bus, they will survive, which is, every leader should make themselves expendable at some point. I was happy with that.

[00:02:11] Carol: you know, you're doing good. When the people around you can do the work without you like to me, that's how you know you've been successful. And what you are trying to accomplish is that the ship keeps floating, even when you're not on it.

[00:02:22] Tim: Yeah, I will admit, early in my career, there's a bit of narcissist in me that

[00:02:25] Carol: Sure.

[00:02:25] Tim: I wanted stuff to just fall. I wanted to burn to the ground when I wasn't there. Cuz I felt like, if I didn't do that, like what was my. How was I contributing, but yeah, as I get older and wiser and more experienced, like, you know what, if you are leading people and they can't function without you,

[00:02:45] Ben: I feel like I've only just started

[00:02:49] Carol: I think having kids kind of pushed me past that before, like early on, because having the kids need me for everything and then seeing them grow and seeing them mature into where now they make their own food and now they have their own jobs and they, one of them even pays his own bills that helped me get through it a lot quicker.

[00:03:07] Carol: I

[00:03:08] Adam: Hm.

[00:03:08] Tim: I'm probably gonna misattribute my paraphrasing of this quote, but so I apologize in advance to whoever actually said it, but I'm pretty sure it was Warren buffet that said, that the goal for the CEO or whatever is to set the company up so that it could be run by an idiot because eventually it will be

[00:03:22] Tim: yep. It was exactly Warren buffet. Yeah.

[00:03:25] Adam: okay.

[00:03:26] Tim: Yep. That some idiot's nephew can run the company. Yeah. Cuz everyone has an idiot now. yeah. Wise words. So that's me, glad to be back. How about you Carol?

[00:03:38] Carol's Triumph

[00:03:38] Carol: Oh, I'm going with a giant triumph. So last week, I took the day off work. It was last Thursday, had a great day with, the fiance for birthday celebrations. And we laid down on the couch at four 30 and fell asleep and woke up at eight 30. two messages from you guys, you know?Hey, everything. Okay. Cause usually, we let each other know if we're not gonna make it.

[00:04:01] Carol: So my triumph is I did not sleep through the podcast this week.

[00:04:05] Ben: Nice. Nice.

[00:04:07] Carol: I'm winning

[00:04:08] Adam: Well done.

[00:04:09] Ben: you said you laid down with

[00:04:13] Carol: Yep. And I mean, I could wish, but yeah. Fiance. Yeah. Beyonce. Yeah. Now I'm just daydreaming of Beyonce.

[00:04:21] Tim: you're projecting there. Whoa.

[00:04:23] Carol: Yeah. What about you, Ben? What you got?

[00:04:28] Ben's Huge Triumph

[00:04:28] Ben: I'm going with a huge triumph today, which is yeah. Yeah. Brace yourselves. I know I've talked many times now in recent episodes about how I deploy stuff at work, and nobody seems to notice or care or comment or anything. And, I was reflecting on that over, my vacation. Last week. And I was like, you know what, there's something that I've wanted to deploy for a long time, but I actually got a hard, no on deploying it two years ago when I ran it by one of the product managers.

[00:04:59] Ben: And, but that was like two years ago. There's definitely a statute of limitations on how long and no lasts, I think. And now that I have no managers, I'm like, nobody cares what I'm doing. Your no is two years old. I feel like it's time to just deploy it and see what happens. And,just like a full Yolo moment.

[00:05:17] Ben: And,

[00:05:17] Tim: rebel Dotty.

[00:05:18] Ben: yeah, so I, spent Monday and Tuesday getting my mind wrapped around the code. Cause the code's literally been sitting in the application behind a feature flag for two years and cleaning it up a little bit and like adding a little bit of Polish and then Tuesday morning I just turned that feature flag on and had some analytics behind it.

[00:05:34] Ben: And I'm watching to see what's happened. I could see people opening this Mo window and click and drop downs and dragging stuff around. I always have analytics on it, so that's like fun, but it's not internal feedback. and then someone said that they were just talking to one of our huge clients and they just happened to notice that I had turned that feature on the client and the client was super excited about it.

[00:05:56] Ben: And I'm like F yeah. Heck yeah. So I. It's just,it's just super exciting. It's like it doesn't, it takes so little, it takes so little to get me all jazzed up about the stuff that I'm working on. So,

[00:06:11] Tim: So it makes me question. Why was it offered? what was the reason for not turning it on for two years

[00:06:15] Ben: I wanna say fear, uncertainty and doubt. yeah, I think people just panic a little bit about, I don't know. I don't know what goes through their head and, and they just don't want to turn stuff on in case, in case something happens or in case someone doesn't like it or in case it's not the best thing that we could have built, but you know, now there's been two years of people not having any value add, and I'm hoping it's not too late to add a little bit of value.

[00:06:39] Ben: So I'm just super excited about that

[00:06:41] Ben: so anyway, that's what I got going on. Adam, how about you? What do you got.

[00:06:45] Adam's Fail

[00:06:45] Adam: Well, so sorry to, to derail the train here, the triumph train, but, it, that's gonna be a fail for me this week. So.

[00:06:53] Adam: and it's funny, cuz I have a couple of things that went really well this week that I could call as triumphs. But this one was the overriding, like this is the thing that happened to me this week.

[00:07:01] Adam: so, I mean, I guess one of the positive things is like I deployed the big thing I've been working on that, that like message queuing and background job processing thing. That's in production now behind a feature flag and it's for the people that are using it, it's on, it's been going really great.

[00:07:14] Adam: but it. Is the precursor to my fail, which is,this new feature uses a new database permission that we had to grant to the. Database user for each customer anyway. So, it's like, it's MySQL. And if you're familiar with the load data in file, it's like a way to grab a big CSV file and import it into a table.

[00:07:35] Adam: there's a way when you're using MySQL on AWS, there's a way to load that file directly from S. It's instead of load data in file, you do load data or load from S three, I think is what it's called. but you have to have a whole bunch of permission stuff. I am stuff,the bucket policy has to be set up, right?

[00:07:52] Adam: So you have to get a whole bunch of ducks in a row for this to work. one of which is you have to grant a custom MySQL permission to that user account and in the process of. Trying to figure out why it wasn't working for one customer. we discovered that. That customer had multiple user accounts with the same name for MySQL.

[00:08:13] Adam: They just had different like hosting. So if you're familiar with ho my user accounts, it's not just the user account. It's like user at host name is sort of the whole piece of a, my user account. So not, I would say most people probably use like, it's percent instead of SARS. So instead of like user.

[00:08:32] Adam: Star is user at percent. And that's just means no matter what host name they're connecting from, that's the user account to use? Well, we discovered that they had two accounts of the same name, one of which was like an IP address. And the other was the percent and the percent one had no password on it.

[00:08:53] Ben: Amazing.

[00:08:54] Adam: is kind of a no-no now I think we're okay because like the database is part of our VPC, which is private. and there's like literally no way to connect to this thing. If you're not attached to our VPC, which you have a 10 dot whatever IP address and the. the user, had the one that had a password was the at 10 dot whatever.

[00:09:14] Adam: and so I don't think anybody actually could have connected to it using that account, but it was just like this, oh, God moment that I had when I saw that there was a user account there and it had no, no password on it, just like a I'm gonna need to change pants type of

[00:09:30] Tim: Yeah,

[00:09:31] Ben: Redis doesn't have any user management. As far as I know, there might be like a recent addition, but Redis historically has had no user management. So it's one of those things that you have to be behind some sort of, cloud VPN or firewall or something, but it is a little nerve-wracking every.

[00:09:49] Adam: Yeah,

[00:09:49] Ben: I just wanna side tangent for one second. I find I am permissions terrifying. Like you talked about having to have

[00:09:55] Ben: special. I am permissions for S3 and I have talked about that. I have mentioned my anxiety to DevOps platforming type people. And they're like, oh, it's really not that complicated.

[00:10:07] Ben: Like once you get used to it, it's really, it's all pretty straightforward. And I'm like, all right, maybe it's just that I don't know what I'm doing. but since those conversations we've had like no less than four incidents at work from platform, people applying the wrong permission. So I feel very validated that it is actually quite complicated.

[00:10:27] Ben: and when you don't think it's complicated, you're wrong.

[00:10:30] Adam: What is that? the,the it's like Dunning Kruger of permissions, right? Like it, they get to this point where they think they know it all and

[00:10:37] Tim: Yeah,

[00:10:38] Adam: well enough to mess it up.

[00:10:39] Tim: I'm with you that, yeah, those permissions, like, I think this would work. I'm pretty sure everyone can't get to this, but then I can't get to it. I'm like, oh, let's just open it up.

[00:10:51] Adam: All right. So,

[00:10:52] Adam: I guess that's good enough for me. So as we get into our topic here, I guess I'll just mention that right at the end of our triumphs and fails, we kinda lost Carol her internet connection pooped out. And even though she's trying to get back in, she's having some trouble, so maybe she'll be back. Maybe we'll have a Carol light episode this week.

[00:11:10] Adam: We'll see. Good luck. Hope you get on Carol. But, I guess as we move into our topic of the day, It's gonna be other duties as assigned, which if you signed a, an employment contractor or two, you might have seen this phrase, basically it means that we're hiring you to do a job, but you work for us. So if we tell you to do something, you pretty much have to do it.

[00:11:30] Adam: I know personally I've seen that on all of my employment contracts and I have had some other interesting duties assigned. So I thought it'd be a good thing for us to discuss. So who wants to go first?

[00:11:42] Tim: Well, you came up with it. So obviously you got something to

[00:11:44] Nipple Cream Story

[00:11:44] Adam: I will let me throw this out there. I remember one from, if I'm not mistaken from our, origin stories of Bens that I want to throw out, and maybe we can use this as a springboard. you had to, if I'm not mistaken, for your boss, you had to go buy nipple cream.

[00:11:59] Ben: Yeah. Yeah, she was, she was pregnant and I guess this is a thing that happens. And, I was an intern, so not only was it, my first job, I was still quite young and immature. And the idea of walking into, first of all, walking into a maternity store in general was very awkward

[00:12:15] Tim: stores.

[00:12:17] Ben: Oh yeah.

[00:12:18] Ben: New York. They do at least.

[00:12:19] Tim: Oh, okay. All right.

[00:12:22] Ben: man.

[00:12:23] Tim:

[00:12:23] Adam: not just Costco or Publix, whatever you guys have.

[00:12:25] Tim: Dollar general.

[00:12:27] Ben: well, yeah, the, I had to go buy nipple cream and that was just, as a 19 year old kid, that was.

[00:12:36] Adam: Hey, you know what? There's probably a lot of 19 year old dudes who have had to buy nipple cream, a for running, but B also for, for their, partner who was, pregnant

[00:12:48] Ben: Partner. I could

[00:12:49] Tim: but not Ben. Ben was

[00:12:51] Ben: I was more, I'm very happy that I have now blossomed into a wonderful young man, and this would not be a problem

[00:12:58] Adam: Beautiful

[00:12:59] Tim: mortified. yes. He'd be like, yeah, I'm a avid jogger. I need some

[00:13:07] Adam: flower. I've tried. 'em all.

[00:13:08] Ben: when I was a very young kid. So my brothers are they're 10 years older than me. And when I was quite young, I went to visit one of them in, Philadelphia. He was going to a university of Pennsylvania and he took me to condom world in Philadelphia, which was immediately mortifying in and of itself.

[00:13:27] Ben: but then after we went to condom world, we then

[00:13:29] Tim: You guys really do have stores for everything up

[00:13:37] Ben: After we did that, we went to, it was like tower records. I think there was some big record store also kind of in that main drag. And so I'm this young, like I think I was like 10 or something. I'm just really young. And I'm walking around with this semi-transparent bag that has boxes of condoms in it. We have to, we go into. And my brother walked in ahead of me and then I'm walking and the security guards, like, sorry, you can't go in. You have to check your bag. And I'm mortified at the idea to go for this bag of condoms to this adult. So I had to yelled at my brother to come, basically save me and I ran outta the store and he had to come and take the bag and check it for me.

[00:14:18] Ben: But,

[00:14:18] Adam: That's

[00:14:18] Adam: hilarious.

[00:14:19] Ben: lots and

[00:14:19] Ben: lots of more

[00:14:20] Tim: I feel like we wandered an after show territory, but I gotta ask. I mean, were they for you or were you just buying them

[00:14:27] Ben: no. He got them

[00:14:27] Ben: for me as a joke, as a

[00:14:29] Tim: Oh, as a joke, right? Sure. A joke. Okay.

[00:14:32] Looking For Hoops

[00:14:32] Adam: So, I have not entirely similar, but also a mistaken or whatever, an at place condom story. So I. Got my left ear pierced when I was, I don't know, like maybe 13 or something like that. 13, 14. and, so my parents were with me. They had to be there for me to get it done.

[00:14:49] Adam: And afterwards we went to, I think Spencer gifs or something, and they had, know, a bunch of earrings up on the wall or something. And, I went up to the counter and I told the dude, can I see some of those hoops? And he hands me like a box of condoms. Because I maybe at the time that was like slang for condoms or something.

[00:15:08] Adam: I,

[00:15:09] Tim: Okay.

[00:15:10] Adam: I, to me, I was just pointing at like hoop earrings and I don't know why I would've had an interest in hoop earrings, and I regret getting my ear Pierce now, but still like, and like, this is in front of my parents and I, honestly, I don't think I knew what they were at the time. Like I was just oblivious.

[00:15:25] Tim: These balloons taste terrible. alright, so back to the other duties as a side here, I think we wandered off the path here, guys.

[00:15:35] Adam: Little bit, little bit.

[00:15:37] Tim: Carol leaves, and we just completely lose the plot.

[00:15:39] Adam: Oh, I'll go. I'll do one. my very first job, I worked at T C Y, which is if you didn't know, stands for the country's best yogurt, it's a, it's like a ice cream shop sort of deal. They had a drive

[00:15:50] Tim: for this. Can't be yogurt.

[00:15:52] Tim: It's the country's best yogurt. Trust me. I worked there We had one down here, back in the same time. Okay. maybe that was, they had the same acronym, but it was like a different,

[00:16:01] Adam: maybe, yeah, I don't know. and, it was an okay job for a teenage kid. That's fine. The thing that I didn't like about it was, one of the things that they made me do frequently was to go out and like just scour the parking lot for cigarette butts and sweep those.

[00:16:16] Tim: Yeah.

[00:16:17] Adam: Not a

[00:16:18] Tim: Yeah.

[00:16:18] Ben: that's gross.

[00:16:20] Tim's Grocery Store Job

[00:16:20] Tim: Yeah. So my first job was a family job, so it's, I mean, when you're in a family business, my, my mom and dad, we manufactured car cleaning products and, cleaning products in general. ostensibly, I was the it guy at like 15, 16, but it's like, Basically you do everything your parents tell you.

[00:16:36] Tim: And there's no boundaries there whatsoever, which yeah. Got really annoying to the point where I got in a big argument at like 16 with my parents, and just left. I'm like, I'm gonna go work at a grocery store. So I was at, so I go to the grocery store and the guy hires me and he sees I had really good grades and I had good grades in math, but I'm terrible at math.

[00:16:56] Tim: Basic arithmetic is I can do, calculus fine. Don't ask me to do multiplication. I just, I don't I can't. So he had this theory that boys were better at math than girls. And he put me as a cashier. And my, my, this was before, like when you could scan stuff, everything was like, you look at the number, the price was on the lemon.

[00:17:17] Tim: You put the price in, you type it in and there's like, it calculates it up. My tray was off every single day. So eventually my other duties as a sign, I was like, a bag boy stock boy. And that lasted for like two months. I'm like, yeah, I don't really enjoy this anymore. I went back to work for my dad.

[00:17:37] Tim: So that was my first job.

[00:17:39] Cleaning Bathrooms

[00:17:39] Ben: I also had to, I worked at a tennis club for years, several summers in a row. And I was the maintenance guy. So definitely I had to do all the maintenance stuff and the garbage stuff. and so this was technically part of my job, but I only bring it up because, I had to clean the bathrooms, both the men's and the women's bathrooms.

[00:17:55] Ben: And, people are just disgusting. They're just filthy

[00:17:58] Ben: disgusting. And both genders are just equally disgusting and I was just shocked. The

[00:18:05] Adam: Excuse me. Did you say both genders,

[00:18:08] Ben: all of the genders, all of the genders, all of the genders are disgusting. And I was just, I'd be blown away at the, just the filth that people would leave in bathrooms.

[00:18:20] Ben: And, I mean, so I happily cleaned it up, but it just, it was,

[00:18:23] Tim: Did

[00:18:23] Tim: you happily, did you really happily?

[00:18:25] Ben: in a way it was kind of exciting to see behind the curtains.

[00:18:30] Adam: I haven't been in the women's room since I was, my mom took me in there, put me on the couch.

[00:18:35] Ben: Yeah. it's just, it was like, you get to see on the other side of the fence a little bit. And, so there was so insight to that, but just people are just gross.

[00:18:41] "Infrastructure"

[00:18:41] Tim: Yeah. So when I got my first it job, my real it job, the company didn't really know what it was like doing. This is during the. Late eighties, early nineties.com bubble. Right. And basically it was just do anything. Internet just doesn't matter what it is. And so we were doing that company. I came on, I started as an intern, was doing anything and everything.

[00:19:03] Tim: Internet related real estate, just, I mean, Odo band. So they were a customer of ours. Like, I don't know if Odo band do you have that? It's like a, it kills smells. It's I guess it's a regional thing. Their website. Yeah, just all just anything and everything. But, so I was hired as like the, my, I did a lot of, networking and so early, like, running cables and.

[00:19:25] Tim: Ethernet and doing that stuff. So I was in charge of the server room infrastructure, but I didn't realize that in my boss's mind, infrastructure also meant like building and grounds. So. Taking out trash, like dealing with issues like the ceiling, like, floods. And now's like my job to find out how to fix it.

[00:19:44] Tim: Like I'm not a construction guy. I don't know nothing about construction. And you want me to like, deal with Sheetrock and yeah. And our server room ours, we didn't really have a server. We had like, like these like, metal wire. Shelves. And we had just like these CPUs, like they weren't rack mounted or anything.

[00:20:01] Tim: These were just individual PCs. We were just continually stacked. And to the point where they had like build a door, had to build like Jerry rig this door, like was just pretty much all fans, because it was so hot in there. Cause once you get like 15, 20 computers, like a 10 by 15 room, it gets really hot.

[00:20:20] Tim: And so CPU start failing and like memory problems. So yeah, that. Not what I expected I would be doing. I thought I was like gonna be, pulling wire and, dealing with servers. No, it was, trash, Sheetrock, cleaning, emptying trash cans. Yeah. I got really, I just found out that I was really bad at doing anything handy and I made sure that everyone knew I was really bad at it.

[00:20:42] Tim: So no longer became my job.

[00:20:45] Ben's Hotline

[00:20:45] Ben: At one of my first jobs they had at one point said, oh, by the way, if you hear the phones ringing and the receptionist isn't getting to it, would you guys

[00:20:55] Ben: mind just picking up the phone? And, I somehow turned that in my mind into this like phone answering sport. And I got really addicted to answer the phone and it's like, I wouldn't barely even let a single ring go by.

[00:21:09] Ben: and I was like practicing my phone voice. And,

[00:21:13] Tim: Let's hear it. come on. Let's hear

[00:21:14] Ben: I was trying to be very sultry.

[00:21:16] Tim: Bring, bring, bring, bring, bring.

[00:21:18] Ben: good afternoon, go interactive. How am I help? And

[00:21:25] Adam: or.

[00:21:27] Ben: and I was just like trying to get like, very sexy about it. And at one point I remember one day this, one of the account reps in our company, this, this woman called in and I answered the phone and she goes, Oh, I'm not sure how I feel about that.

[00:21:43] Tim: Hi, this

[00:21:45] Adam: What are you wearing?

[00:21:47] Ben: so at some point I, they, they asked me to not answer the phones as much

[00:21:52] Tim: is Ben

[00:21:53] Ben: for a while. It was dunno for a while. It was just a lot of fun. oh,

[00:21:57] Adam: Oh,

[00:21:58] Paper Stacking

[00:21:58] Adam: so Tim brought up his first it job and that made me think of my first it job. so I mean, it was a programming job. I was working on an intranet application for doing alpha paging and, I don't even remember whatever stuff is probably mostly like document management stuff, but, It was kind of a part-time job.

[00:22:13] Adam: And it was like, okay, well, when you run out of the programming tasks we've assigned, you let us know and we'll find other stuff for you to do. And it turned out that this it department was basically responsible for everything that plugged into the wall.

[00:22:24] Adam: so that meant like refilling copier paper, throughout the entire building.

[00:22:30] Adam: and when all the copiers were full on paper, one of the things that I had to do occasionally was, consolidate pallets of copier paper. So you take two or three pallets that are running low and you stack them all onto one. And now you've got two empty pallets. You can clear up that space.

[00:22:43] Adam: I mean, it wasn't all awful. Some of it was kind of. This was way back. I guess so 22 years ago, around the year 2000, the, I was working at a,

[00:22:53] Computer Resetter

[00:22:53] Adam: I think I've talked about it in the past, so I'll just go ahead and name it. I was working at a franchise of Pepsi, and, there, the. Delivery drivers, the guy, guys that drive the trucks, specifically the ones that had the trucks with the trailer had like a garage doors all along the side, not the big tractor trailers with just one garage door in the back, but like, you know,20 bays on the truck, and their, they had a computer that they took with them, but it was like, The Zach Morris cell phone from saved by the bell on steroids.

[00:23:18] Adam: Right? It was like twice as big, no antenna on it. Oh yeah, no antenna on it. They had to like, it didn't have it like downloaded everything at the beginning of the day and it was just, it would entirely work offline. And then at the end of the day, they would like resin it. And so like, they'd get to their stop and it would print out the list of what you're supposed to pull off the truck and take in like the order and all that.

[00:23:37] Adam: and a couple, like, I think it could like print out directions from one stop to the next or something anyway. so they had dozens of these computers and, they were, they weren't like what people thought of as computers at the time. Right? This is year 2000 people think of a box on the desk.

[00:23:51] Adam: Right. and these are handheld. And so people were just like terrified of messing with them cuz they didn't wanna mess up the computers. And so sometimes my job would be like, okay, need you to drive an hour north and reset all of the computer, the driver computers, which is like, take the battery outta the back.

[00:24:08] Adam: Right. Take the little panel off, take the battery out, let it reset. And then resin it for 20 computers that they have there. And then we need you to, to. Turnaround pass us while you're driving to an hour south of where you started. So two hours south from there and do the same thing down there and then come back to the original.

[00:24:26] Adam: So that was like an entire day, just like drive north, go reset. Some computers, drive south, go reset some computers and then come home. but it was kind of cool. Cause like the, they were, it was, I don't even know how to describe it. it was like purpose. These days it's really popular to have like Arduino stuff, like purpose built, like micro controller stuff.

[00:24:41] Adam: And this was like somewhere in the middle there. Right. It was a reusable computer. It was programmable. We had like custom software for it. but the, I don't know. I don't know. I don't even know where I was going with that. It's just, it was a really cool thing to, to be exposed to.

[00:24:56] Tim: I just wanna put out. So like, so early on, kind of when we guys were getting started, a lot of what we did was like dealing with the fact that most people had zero. I. Zero tech experience at all. Right? I mean, and now people, maybe they don't think they are, but they're so much more tech savvy. The fact that my, my parents can, use zoom and iPads and iPhones and tech.

[00:25:20] Tim: I mean, back then, it's like we were hand holding. An entire generation of people that were just scared to death of doing anything wrong with a computer. Right. And that was really a lot of our jobs was like dealing with the fact that people just literally knew nothing. And we knew just a tiny bit more.

[00:25:38] Tim: we weren't anything special. We

[00:25:39] Adam: We were just not scared to, to mess

[00:25:41] Adam: it.

[00:25:42] Tim: We didn't mind turning it off and on again. Right. And they did. And yeah, I just, it was a weird time.

[00:25:48] Font Organizer

[00:25:48] Ben: One of the things that I had to do at work was, this is way before Google fonts, where the designer at the company really wanted to have all of the font faces printed into binders so that he could flip through them when he was choosing fonts. So.

[00:26:03] Ben: he say, he showed me on the, like the network drive, where they kept all their font files and I had to print them out and then using my best judgment, I think I had to put them either into a San Sarah folder, a Sarah folder, like a designing, like, wombats or wing, dings like that.

[00:26:21] Ben: Yeah. Like that kind of folder. And then like handwritten there, it was just like four or five folders. And it, I must have had to print out like, It was some, it was like over 2000 fonts

[00:26:31] Adam: we want you to sort these by line letting

[00:26:33] Ben: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It was basically like that. I mean, it took me, I think, several days to do it.

[00:26:38] Ben: It's just super tedious.

[00:26:40] Printing Code

[00:26:40] Tim: That's so you just kicked off a memory that was deeply buried. I mean, this is, I guess this is kind of trauma for me. so we had, so my first real tech job, we had a co-founder who didn't last very long, but so one of my jobs for him was I would have to print out. So he was like from the mainframe era, right?

[00:27:01] Tim: So he, like, everything goes, he would have me every day, print out the current state of the code of the source code onto like the dot matrix, you know,the big, really wide green and white sheets.

[00:27:16] Tim: You know what I'm talking about? perforated sides.

[00:27:18] Adam: When you say the current state of the code, you mean just print out the application itself,

[00:27:22] Tim: the entire application. I would print it out every morning. Because he would go through it like a teacher and like, like he would like redline different things. Yeah. He would read. And I'm like, what are you doing? He's like, I'm just going, I'm reviewing the code. I'm like going through the code.

[00:27:39] Tim: I'm like, why don't you just pull up on your monitor? He goes, this is just how I do it.

[00:27:44] Tim: Like,

[00:27:45] Ben: my

[00:27:45] Adam: I mean, I mean, to be fair when I was in high school and I took a computer science class, that's how we, we started out on paper debugging our code that way. Like, if you got stuck, it was like, okay, we'll print the whole thing out. So you can see it all at once and you can kind of draw lines on it and things, and, I guess it gave, you had the blank space off to the right where your lines didn't reach over there or whatever.

[00:28:05] Adam: And you could like, okay, this variable is now this value and that sort of thing.

[00:28:10] Hair Styles

[00:28:10] Tim: yeah, he'd go through all the co. Particularly like, so one day like Oprah, the Oprah show back in the early nineties, like featured to, we had a website that, like I said, we didn't know what we were doing. So we had a website that was called hairstyles.com and it was like a site where you could go look at a bunch of basically it was uploaded photos of people's hairstyles.

[00:28:30] Tim: it was pretty stupid. And then all of a sudden Oprah featured it and our, like our internet just went crazy. it just went nuts. And he decided that this is our, this is how we're gonna make our billions, we, it didn't happen. But

[00:28:44] Tim: anyway,

[00:28:45] Adam: hairstyles.com now forwards you to instagram.com/josh snow.

[00:28:51] Tim: yeah. I don't know. Yeah. it, it totally died after like two or three years, but yeah.

[00:28:56] Tape Backups

[00:28:56] Ben: was our offsite tape backup guy for a while at the, at one job.

[00:29:03] Adam: Like to just take 'em home or.

[00:29:04] Ben: Yeah, so they were running tape backups every night. and every morning I had to bring in the, it was like the tape backup from the previous day, put it into the machine, then take the other tape backup that had run that night, put it into my backpack and make sure that when I left at the end of the day, I would have it with me.

[00:29:23] Adam: And I guess the idea was that there was always just an offsite copy of everything that we had. wait a minute. if you. Brought yesterday's in with you today, then there's none at your house, right? Like if something were happen to you while

[00:29:37] Ben: yeah. yeah. But I guess, I guess it's just like, it was overnight, but it always just seemed like why? I don't know. I always felt like that responsibility should be higher up in the organization. I was just like, Joe developer didn't seem, it felt weird that I was the one doing that. and.

[00:29:51] Tim: I don't. I think that job kind of gets yeah, pushed down a little bit. So I got a funny story as that goes. So we do, we did, we don't do it anymore, but, so we had like a huge tape bank array, right? So everything was being backed up and every day we'd swap them out. We'd take it to the bank.

[00:30:07] Tim: So we,we had a safety deposit box. We take you to the bank, take the old tapes out, bring 'em back and then take the new tapes. Put 'em. And, so it's like, this is shortly after nine 11. And so the guy that we asked to do that was Sri Lanka kind of, and he shows up with like, he's wearing like somewhat camo jacket with a big camo bag

[00:30:31] Adam: Oh,

[00:30:32] Tim: and just, and he is like in a hurry cuz and he just like busted the doors of a local bank and immediately they all the tellers pressed the emergency

[00:30:40] Adam: Oh, no.

[00:30:42] Tim: They just see, they just see a brown guy with a duffle walking in really fast and thought they were getting robbed and so, yeah, it took a, they had to call me and like, I'll get this message. Hey, so is this, you know? Yeah. He works for us and, yeah, we're just using our safety deposit box, which is putting these tapes in like, okay,

[00:31:01] Adam: Like we do every day.

[00:31:03] Tim: As we do every day, but there were like new people there. I don't know why that day it triggered it, but yeah, everyone stood. So we always made sure that there was like two people that came with them and there was a diverse profile of people that were there.

[00:31:19] Adam: oh,

[00:31:20] Ben: Oh, so wait, so you stored the offsite backups in a safety deposit box. That's pretty player. That's like very official.

[00:31:28] Tim: Been right. I mean, that's how we

[00:31:30] Adam: this was the.com bubble. They had money to spend.

[00:31:34] Ben: Safety deposit boxes for everybody.

[00:31:36] Travel And Hardware

[00:31:36] Adam: I mean, I got one from my current job. so we've talked about this, some length already on the show with me, traveling around to universities and doing these. Events technically, I mean, I guess you could say it's sort of like adjacent or related to my job, but you know, I do software, right. I don't travel and, do hardware and that sort of thing, which is a little weird, cuz like, all my software runs on hardware.

[00:32:00] Adam: So like where do you draw the line? Right? Is it, does it, is it too hardware to write an app that is intended to be used on a, like a cell phone or an iPod that goes like offline. Right. And they use it offline and bring it back and stuff. And I don't know, it's just. It's one of those parts of my job that I am eager for the company to grow so that we can push that off on somebody else.

[00:32:20] Ben: totally.

[00:32:20] Adam: and yeah, and it's funny, cuz it's such a double edged sword, right? Like I, I personally, I just enjoy traveling. I like to get to like see different parts of the country. I'm hoping that eventually it'll will expand to outside the country and I'll get to like use it as an excuse to travel the world and.

[00:32:36] Adam: Yeah. And,like it's an opportunity in some cases for me to bring along my skydiving gear and like get jumps, in different areas. Like I have this, half-hearted goal to jump in every United States state. I'm not putting any money or anything behind it, but like, you know, if I could make it happen, that'd be cool. so like that's a nice little bonus there, but it's often hot sweaty backbreaking work or extremely boring. so, it's just like, eh, I'd rather not. and it's not what you think of when you think of like a software job.

[00:33:07] Sales

[00:33:07] Tim: Yeah. I mean, I say one thing over my career of 20 something years is I feel like I get pushed more into sales side of stuff. Then, right. and honestly, at one point I actually did run the sales and marketing department, which was a complete mistake. but I still like constantly, like, even today, it's like, Just because my personality, I'm a bit of a showman.

[00:33:31] Tim: And, and so like our marketing people are like, so you need to like, join these calls. And like, and we, I did that. It actually worked well, but it's like, this really, wasn't what I signed up for. I didn't sign up to be a sales guy. Right. I'm not a salesperson, but I don't mind like doing the song and dance cuz I do believe in our products.

[00:33:48] Tim: I do believe in what we're selling, but it's like at the end of the day, I'm like, I'm not a salesperson, but I do really envy their commissions. really envy their commissions.

[00:33:58] Adam: Yeah, that's another one of those things. Like we're a really small company and I can see a future where we get big enough that we hire like dedicated sales people.

[00:34:05] Adam: like everybody hate. I think, I feel like everybody has those,stories of salespeople selling something that doesn't exist or misrepresenting what your product does.

[00:34:14] Adam: And then that kind of puts you in a bind. And there's that like, I don't know. I guess it's a stereotype or a, a trope of the sales and it relationship.

[00:34:23] Tim: It's true because it's true.

[00:34:24] Adam: Yeah. Yeah. but like, it makes me think about like, what am, if, and when we hire dedicated sales people, what's the right way to prevent that.

[00:34:32] Adam: Right. And I, the only thing I can think of is like embed them on the customer service side, put them in working the events and put them in the support. whatever tool, but not tool chain, but like, the conversation make them a part of, seeing how the application works and helping people use the application so that they understand what it is they're selling,

[00:34:49] Adam: But

[00:34:50] Tim: But at the same time though, like I having been on these calls, like you so wanna impress the client, right. The prospect it's like, I've sit there, start spouting stuff. Like, oh, can you do this? Like, oh, sure. Yeah, we could do that. Yeah. I knowing what's. It's saying it's within the realm of possibility, cuz I know it is at the same time.

[00:35:10] Adam: I'm like, we totally don't do that. Yeah.

[00:35:14] Tim: yeah, we can do that. That's a great idea. But we don't do that now. So I'm telling you the promise and which, I mean, that's kind of what sales does. So I mean, I get it.

[00:35:24] Adam: And then, everybody has that, everybody's expecting that. So they always just like, they assume that the salesman is blowing smoke up their behind.

[00:35:32] Adam: Right.

[00:35:33] Management

[00:35:33] Ben: At work right now, as I've mentioned before in the. I don't have any managers. So I've been doing all of the interfacing with the customer facing team. That's the support team, that's the sales team, and I've been doing my best to balance interrupt, driven work from other teams that have dependencies on me plus new feature development.

[00:35:53] Ben: And, I'm just kinda, really loving it. I,I don't ever want to be a manager. That's just not, I don't think what my fabric is made. But I'm really enjoying wearing the engineer and the manager hat for myself. I really do like the independence and the kind of ability to shift priorities at the drop of a hat using my hopefully best judgment.

[00:36:16] Ben: so that was never part of my job title, but I'm just really liking where I am right now. So pretty happy about that.

[00:36:23] Adam: Carol's back.

[00:36:30] Carol: So I feel like I struggle different from that. Like I have to pick the manager things now over the fun things I wanna do.

[00:36:39] Tim: I feel, I, feel.

[00:36:40] Carol: I just had this conversation with one of my coworkers who I'm pro, who I'm paired up on this project with, and it I'd started this effort before I got promoted or right when I got promoted.

[00:36:50] Carol: So I didn't quite know what. Time consumption was gonna be with the new role. And I told him this past week, I'm like, yeah, I'm not gonna pick up any more big projects. I'm just gonna work support and from the backlog, because those don't have big deadlines on them. Right. So I don't constantly feel like I'm holding anyone back. So

[00:37:14] Ben: well, it's all a

[00:37:14] Tim: I feel

[00:37:16] Carol: it's a balance.

[00:37:17] Declining Duties

[00:37:17] Ben: one thing that I've struggled with historically is when someone asked me to do something that's so clearly outside my job description and it's not just that I don't wanna do. It's that I'm just literally the wrong person.

[00:37:32] Ben: Like you will not get good results from me and you should go and find the person whose job it is to do this much better than I do. And I never quite know how to phrase that. Like I just wanna say, like, that's just not my job

[00:37:46] Adam: Yeah,

[00:37:46] Ben: I don't wanna say I'm not good at that. Like, I won't be able to do that for you, cuz I think that I just get like a little embarrassed by that even though that's again, not my job.

[00:37:55] Ben: so I. I tend to I'll like start it to show them how terrible I'll be at it.

[00:38:04] Tim: Hey, man, the truth will set you free. So

[00:38:07] Tim: like couple years, couple years ago, they came to me and like, move me to another position. And I said, listen, I know what this job is. I've seen other people fail at it. And the main, my biggest thing is I suck at spreadsheets. I really suck at spreadsheets.

[00:38:22] Tim: And some of the things, the duties I had to do involved, really kind of the analysis of that. Mike, listen. I just told 'em straight up, like, you're asking me to do this, but I'm gonna tell you right now, I cannot do spreadsheets. I hate spreadsheets. I hate Excel with a passion. And they're like, all right, that's fine.

[00:38:41] Tim: We'll just assign someone who will handle that for you. I'm like, cool. So sometimes just being very clear about this is not the thing I can do. It's not the, and it's like, it's not even that I can't do it. I don't want to do it. I honestly do not want to do spreadsheets ever.

[00:38:57] Ben: I know, but

[00:38:58] Carol: me in there. I'll write formulas all day long for you. I love spreadsheets.

[00:39:02] Tim: Yeah. come on, come work for me.

[00:39:05] Ben: I never wanna say that I don't wanna do something. I feel like there's. I don't know if this is just like this weird stigma I have in my head, or if this is a generally held perception, but I feel like when people tell me they don't wanna do something, it feels like, like you're given up. You're just like, you just don't even, you're not even interested in trying.

[00:39:26] Carol:

[00:39:26] Ben: and

[00:39:26] Tim: short to do stuff.

[00:39:29] Ben: yeah, I totally agree. I just, I wish I was more, confident in my ownership of that perspective at work

[00:39:37] Adam: I

[00:39:38] Adam: think I've gotten pretty good. Now it's a slightly different thing. So, spend up a bunch of time, especially during the summers at these different university campuses, in a position, in a physical geography where people come up and ask me questions a lot about campus. Like they're back on campus after 40 years or something.

[00:39:55] Adam: And they're like, where's this building? And I'm like, dude, I don't know. I don't work here.

[00:40:00] Tim: here.

[00:40:00] Adam: Yeah. And, so like I sometimes it's, it's a similar, right. Can you carry this over there or something? And it's like, well, technically I'm working at this event, but you are looking for somebody who works for the same company as you, not me.

[00:40:16] Adam: and,

[00:40:17] Ben: for.

[00:40:17] Adam: yeah, so it's relatable. I think probably everybody has some way that they can relate to that situation.

[00:40:24] Social Duties

[00:40:24] Tim: I would say, so this is kind of a bit of a meta conversation here, but I think one of the biggest jobs, so we, when you go to like, like a, we just came back from this leadership summit and it was a whole lot of networking. And what you find is when you like start. Relating with different peers and different people in your company, you somewhat become a bit of a therapist for people. And trust me, I'm the least person that you want to be your therapist, but I will listen to your story and I will commiserate with you, but it's like, this was not the job description, but it's like, it's a work event. But it's really not work. Right? You're not at your jobs. It's like, you're at,a conference or you're at some team building thing and you're trying to like build each other up.

[00:41:13] Tim: It's like, I get why it's important because you want the, I mean, we're all humans. We want the human connection with each other, but the same time, it's like, I don't really find I'm qualified. To like be your buddy right now. Cuz I'm going through stuff too, but I'll do my best. I'll do my best. I'll show you.

[00:41:32] Tim: I'll show you what a failure I am as a human and hopefully that'll make you feel better about yourself. that's the, that is the lowest bar I can set right there.

[00:41:39] Carol: So it's funny, you said that because we just had our leadership thing and I went, that's why I was out a couple weeks ago. And one of the exercises we did and like this whole thing for us was about building trust. And it was about building trust, like with the leadership team and how to trust each other.

[00:41:54] Carol: And they gave us this handout and you had to take your. You're the person beside you who you may not know. I just got promoted. Like, I don't know these people yet. Right. And it's like, what? Like, are you the middle sibling? Are you the youngest sibling? Oldest sibling. Uh, where did you grow up at? Like where have you traveled to, what is your biggest failure in life?

[00:42:15] Carol: What is your biggest success in life? And I was like, I don't wanna tell them my failures

[00:42:19] Tim: Right.

[00:42:20] Carol: and they're like, look, it's all.

[00:42:22] Tim: how honest am I gonna be on this

[00:42:23] Carol: It's all about like building trust, right? It's about being able to be open with someone because you can't handle conflict correctly with people until you trust them. Like, you can't really have healthy conflict unless you're having conflict with someone that you trust, because then, the conflict's gonna be resolved.

[00:42:39] Carol: And I was like, Oh, I'm outside my comfort zone. I'm outside my comfort zone. Number one, all these people are in person. I have not been around people in a very long time, and I was like, I have to be truthful too.

[00:42:52] Tim: oh yeah.

[00:42:56] Ben: I was, I was at an orientation meeting one time. This was at school, not at a work setting. And like the very first thing that the guy running the orientation did was passed around a whole bunch of rolls of toilet paper. And he was telling everyone to take off as much toilet paper as they usually need when they're on the toilet.

[00:43:12] Ben: And I was like, I don't like this. This is not fun.

[00:43:17] Carol: I would be looking around going, what did everyone else take?

[00:43:21] Tim: So those who heard the after show about the SEP tank story know that we use a lot of toilet paper over here.

[00:43:26] Carol: I know I'm

[00:43:28] Tim: yeah, 50, 60 yards

[00:43:31] Adam: it's not a fair question, cuz it's a certain number of squares per try. Right. And you just try until you don't need anymore. We.

[00:43:42] Tim: yeah. So this whole being each other's like. Bull work and like psychological helper. Yeah. I, that duties did not assign, like, this was not the job description, but fortunately it's kind of unofficial, but at the same time, it's like, I leave these things going, man. I left way too much blood on the dance floor there. I hope no one remembers all the stuff I said.

[00:44:06] Adam: I, I think we found the perfect spot to end the show because we brought it full circle to duty

[00:44:12] Tim: There we go. There we go. Duty

[00:44:14] Carol: Oh, good job. Good job.

[00:44:16] Adam: all right.

[00:44:16] Patreon

[00:44:16] Adam: So this episode of Working Code was brought to you by all the waffle cones that were not good enough to sell that I made when I was working at C Y. So I just went ahead and ate them for you so that you didn't have to eat a crabby waffle cone and listeners like.

[00:44:30] Tim: have two now.

[00:44:30] Adam: If you're enjoying the show, you should consider supporting us on Patreon.

[00:44:33] Adam: It's the best way to help keep this show running Patreon donations, cover the costs of our editing and recording. And we couldn't do this every week without those things. So we appreciate all the support that we can get special. Thanks to our top patrons, Monte and Gavin. and Oh yeah, you weren't here.

[00:44:51] Adam: You weren't here.

[00:44:54] Tim: you, Gavin.

[00:44:55] Carol: love Gavin.

[00:44:57] Adam: So, okay. Look, I, we keep talking about how the number of shows has really creeped up on us. Gavin made a reference in our Discord the other day. it might have been today or yesterday. I have no perception of time, but, he made a reference to like the last episode, even it's not even released yet.

[00:45:12] Adam: Right. He's on the early access, for patron. He made a reference to that. And so I replied, oh, it sounds like you've caught up. Right. Cuz he started a little bit after we were already into it and he was like, oh, listening in mass or binging them. Right. And as I said, it sounds like you caught up and he's like, actually, no, I've listened to the first like 30 something in the last 30 something.

[00:45:31] Adam: And I got like 60 episodes in the middle. I'm like

[00:45:34] Carol: We have how many

[00:45:35] Adam: Yeah. I mean obviously with this one it's

[00:45:38] Tim: we're in 80.

[00:45:39] Carol: oh, wows.

[00:45:40] Adam: So that's not quite 16, the middle, whatever. I don't know, but

[00:45:43] Carol: Math's hard.

[00:45:45] Adam: So it's just, it kind of blew my mind at one point anyway, so yes.

[00:45:50] Carol: that's cool.

[00:45:51] Adam: So if you wanna be like Monte and Gavin and all of our other patrons, and get early access to an ad-free version of new episode, wait, we don't have ads in our episodes.

[00:46:00] Adam: So. we don't have ads anymore. So you get early access to new episodes and our after show, where like this week on the after show, we're gonna talk about Barcelona and, somebody says that they spatial indexes are burning them and their DBAs. So we're gonna talk about that, I guess.

[00:46:16] Tim: like a bin question.

[00:46:17] Adam: Nope. Must be Carol. It's not me. yeah, Carol's hand went up anyway. Thank you to our patrons. If you wanna join them, you can go to patreon.com/WorkingCodePod.

[00:46:26] Thanks For Listening!

[00:46:26] Adam: your homework this week, I'm gonna start giving out homework. Your homework this week is to look for our tweet. It's on Twitter in case you didn't know, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:46:36] Adam: At the, and when I say our tweet, I mean, it's coming, it's, it'll be tweeted by Ben and, retweeted by working code pod. and it's a, it's like a quick teaser of the episode and it just helps get the word out there. And we want you to retweet that that would really helps out. Thank you. That's right. So, Another thing that we'd really appreciate all the time, that when we get them is, your topics or your questions.

[00:46:59] Adam: so if you have one of those and you wanna send that to us, you can obviously send it to us on Twitter because that's where our tweets are. @WorkingCodePod, you can go to workingcode.dev/discord. We have a Discord and you can join there. It's totally free and open to the public. great place to hang.

[00:47:13] Adam: Ask questions, all that sort of thing. you can send an email to WorkingCodePod@gmail.com, or if you're feeling saucy, you can record a voice memo on your phone or whatever other du Hickey you've got and email that voice memo to WorkingCodePod@gmail.com. You'll hear your voice on the pod, I guess.

[00:47:30] Adam: That's it for us this week. We'll catch you next week. And until then,

[00:47:33] Tim: Hey, your heart matters. And particularly Scott STRs starting your new job. tomorrow's your last day at work? Your heart matters, bro. You're moving into new space. changing jobs is it is a big deal, man. So congratulations. Best luck to you and to everyone who's like moving on to bigger and better things.

[00:47:52] Tim: Your heart matters.

next episode: 081: Total Randos

prev episode: 079: Potluck #5