148: The Day The Code Stood Still
In this episode, the crew speculate on what would happen if every coder just stopped coding.
With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.
Transcript
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[00:00:00] Highlight
[00:00:00] Tim: just everyone who codes just says, you know what, we're not coding anymore until this happens. five months.
[00:00:05] Tim: No code being pushed.
[00:00:07] Carol: I go back to my original statement and everything would work perfectly because no one would break anything.
[00:00:12] Ben: I think people would realize how often stuff breaks for random reasons. Like how many servers in two weeks will be full because log file directories aren't getting rotated.
[00:00:23] Ben: Suddenly you stop doing that stuff and servers just start dying.
[00:00:47] Intro
[00:00:47] Adam: Okay, here we go, it is show number 148 and on today's show we're gonna talk about the day the code stood still. Or might in the future? I don't know. but first, as usual, we'll start with our triumphs and fails. once again, we have the whole crew here.
[00:01:01] Adam: Uh,so Tim, why don't we start with you?
[00:01:04] Tim's Triumph
[00:01:04] Tim: So I'm going to call this a triumph. This could be, you know, if you've, if you've ever seen the peanuts cartoon, you know, where Lucy, you know, holds the ball from Charlie Brown and they're like, let's move it away before he kicked it and he'd fall on his butt. I really, really, as a kid, I hated that. I just hated that so bad.
[00:01:22] Adam: In this triumph situation, are you Lucy or are you Charlie Brown?
[00:01:25] Tim: No, I'm Charlie Brown. I feel like I could be Charlie Brown, you know, sometimes you're the football and sometimes you're the kicker. And I don't really know, cause I've been, this has been years. Many years in the making, I've been working a deal where I'm trying to create a partnership. It's going to be a huge, huge, huge thing for our company, but it's like legal.
[00:01:48] Tim: Our internal legal has been blocking us at every turn just because they're not comfortable with it. So finally. Like two months ago, I got approval to bring some outside legal in, who was more experienced with this kind of deal. I mean, spent a really good, big chunk of money that I had to basically put my neck out, you know, to say, yes, we have to do this and it's like outside legals had this same thing that our internal legals had, but they have more experience with these kinds of arrangements.
[00:02:21] Tim: And it seems like they swooped in for a win cause I think we might have a workable, legal agreement that we can finally live with,
[00:02:29] Carol: Oh, wow.
[00:02:30] Tim: but this is, I've been at this point so many times, it's like, I feel like Charlie Brown trying to kick the dang ball. Oh, and just knowing that I'm going to land on my butt again.
[00:02:40] Tim: So this is a triumph with an asterisk. I'm hoping, I'm hoping, I'm hoping so bad.
[00:02:49] Adam: We'll need to follow up.
[00:02:50] Carol: Yeah. So do we get a follow up if it does go through?
[00:02:52] Tim: will. I mean, I've been talking about this on the show. I've
[00:02:55] Carol: A long time.
[00:02:56] Tim: Yeah, it was a long time. So definitely whenever it's actually signed, I will tell you guys, but it's like. It's been driving me insane for years because there's so much potential.
[00:03:06] Tim: And so I, it's all I really can say about that. I don't want to give too much out
[00:03:12] Adam: Go on
[00:03:12] Tim: because you are a public, we are a publicly traded company. So, yeah, so I'm just hoping I'm not going to get, take a swing and a miss and then land on my butt like Charlie Brown.
[00:03:21] Ben: I know you can't go into details here, but I think this is an actually very interesting context in terms of grit. And how do you know not to give up? I mean, there, you know, you look at people on Shark Tank and some of them have great ideas and then some of them are like, Oh yeah, I've been working on this for 15 years and I'm watching the show and I'm like, well, that's a terrible idea.
[00:03:42] Ben: How have you been working on this for 15 years? You know, how did you, how did you not give up? Were you just, you just could see the value?
[00:03:53] Tim: one, I saw a competitor of ours who kind of took our idea and ran with it. And they got a whole lot of angel investing money and they, they, they, they did it. Right. And now they're like a big mover and shaker in the industry. They're like the name. That should have been us,
[00:04:10] Carol: Ugh,
[00:04:10] Tim: that should have been us, right?
[00:04:13] Tim: So there's that. And then two, I, I, I don't remember where I saw this. It was probably about nine to 10 months back. I read an article that talked about people give up when, when the point where people give up is usually like just a few months before they succeed. I don't know how they come up with this.
[00:04:31] Tim: They did some scientific study, but it's like they measured people who are like trying to achieve the same thing. And that people that gave up usually did so right before they were about to succeed. With the other people who did a similar thing, who were reaching the same goal. They just. You know, gutted it out a few months more and they succeeded.
[00:04:51] Tim: And I'm like, I don't want to be that guy that I've put years of my life into this project. I've put years of my life of trying to actuate this into reality. And then just be like, you know what? I give up because trust me, there's been times that I just said to my heart, I can't fight this fight anymore. No, one's getting it. People are not on my side. It is just too hard to wake up every day and just feel like I'm not going to get it. And I just should just give up. But I've just said, no, I do not want to be the person that stops. A month before you're about to succeed. That would just be so, and maybe it's a sunk cost fallacy kind of thing, but it's like, I can't, I'm too dang stubborn.
[00:05:36] Ben: That's the hard thing about all this stuff, is that, you know, in, in retrospect, it's always easy to identify the people who continued when they shouldn't have, but in the moment, it always feels so murky. You kind of just have to go with your gut and, and as best evidence as you can find. And then I don't know, it's really tough.
[00:06:01] Tim: Although I don't feel my organization has given me a huge amount of like, I wouldn't say it's not support. They have, they haven't not supported me, but they haven't pushed against it. Right. No one's ever said, you know what, Tim, you really need to think about this. Your viewpoint of this is wrong. It's not as big a deal as you think it is.
[00:06:19] Tim: And I never got any pushback. I just got a bit of apathy and a bit of, well, we can't really help you right now. To the point where I just basically laid out and said, listen, here's all the money you're losing. Here's what we're losing right now. We're talking millions and millions of dollars that we're losing right now.
[00:06:37] Tim: So if you're fine with that, okay. I will just, I'll just show up to work and take my paycheck. But if you want to get in on some of this, I'm going to need some help. And that's when they brought some out, you know, very expensive outside legal in. And so I was happy for that. And I, I saw some positive signs from that.
[00:06:57] Tim: We'll see. I will celebrate when there is ink on paper.
[00:07:01] Ben: Yeah, way to bring in the internal pressure though. I mean, I know you didn't close the overall deal, but you definitely closed an internal deal, so to speak, to get people on board finally.
[00:07:11] Tim: Yeah. I just said, listen, here's, here's what we're losing. Here's what our competitors are winning or our one competitor is winning. That could have been us. That could have been us because they've gotten some really huge names in the insurance industry. Huge. It's like, I could have won that deal years ago
[00:07:29] Carol: Ugh,
[00:07:30] Tim: had we got that.
[00:07:31] Tim: And now that's gone, that's, that's gone. We, you know, it's going to be forever to try and win that back. So if you're fine with that, if you're fine with the status quo, don't get mad at me for not making my numbers. So anyway, sorry, I'm getting, anyway, that's me. That's my tribe. How about you, Adam?
[00:07:47] Adam's Triumph
[00:07:47] Adam: Oh, let's see. I'm gonna go with a triumph. long time coming. And that is that, so we're, as we're recording, this is October 2nd. Yesterday, which would have been Sunday was the first day of our official SOC 2 review period. So we, you know, we spent the last too many months, doing readiness and like, you know, understanding the requirements and making sure that we are compliant with the requirements.
[00:08:13] Adam: and now we are officially. Being reviewed and, and, you know, we need to stay compliant for the purposes of the, the, exercise. And, it feels good. It feels good to be able to get back to real work and,
[00:08:29] Tim: Oh, come on. You've been doing real work.
[00:08:32] Adam: oh, yeah, yeah. Like we talked about last week, you know, my, my brain just doesn't believe that it's real work, right?
[00:08:39] Adam: It's, it's tough to, you know, accept that I'm being paid for some of this stuff.
[00:08:46] Tim: Well, congratulations. I
[00:08:48] Adam: Thank you. Yeah, I mean, we haven't, we're not there yet. end of the calendar year is when the period ends, and then it's probably like a month or two before, it, we officially get the, the results. so. You know,
[00:09:00] Adam: it's a, it's a long process, but yeah, we're, we're pretty much there.
[00:09:04] Ben: Wait, but then even after you get the results, don't you then have to remediate anything that they find or, or push back against any of the findings?
[00:09:11] Carol: This is Adam. There'll be no
[00:09:13] Adam: Yeah, potentially if they were to find anything particularly bad, then, then yes, we would have to remediate them. And that might end up as like footnotes on our certification or anything like that. we've tried to work with them, work with the auditors through the readiness period to, to make sure that we understand what they're going to be looking for and are prepared, give them the answers that they want to see, so.
[00:09:36] Ben: Do they have access to your code or this is just based on things that they can see publicly?
[00:09:42] Adam: They do not have access to our code, but we do give them some reports on things. So like, one of the things is you have to like show that all of your changes go through some official change control policy. Like nobody can just commit to main and deploy. So for us, that looks like, you know, everything, all changes have to go through a pull request, and then we've got certain requirements on for pull requests, like, commits have to be signed.
[00:10:06] Tim: And we require at least one reviewer and, you know, if there's tests available, then the tests have to pass that sort of thing. a test, they're okay with it.
[00:10:16] Adam: yeah.
[00:10:17] Tim: You're good. You're good, Ben.
[00:10:20] Adam: You can be SOC 2 compliant.
[00:10:22] Adam: so again, you know, this whole exercise is about understanding your own position on things, right? It's not so much like a black and white. Here's what you have to do to get the certification. It's more of like a, this is what you need to think about. And you need to decide for your company, what the policy is going to be, right?
[00:10:40] Adam: Is it. for, for testing like that, you know, you can, you can lay it down in black and white that in a policy that, every, all code changes have to have tests. You could, you could require that you always have 100 percent code coverage. That would be a fool's errand, but you could do it. you know, it's kind of like a framework that allows you to decide what the rules are going to be that you're going to play by, and then you're held to those rules. So, you know, short and sweet, hopefully for me this week. So, that's it for me. How about you, Ben?
[00:11:13] Ben's Failure
[00:11:13] Ben: I'm going to go with a failure mostly, which is just that I've been feeling pretty exhausted lately. we've talked about, I've been under some work stress, but I also got my flu shot and my COVID vaccine booster last week. I don't even remember what day. And I think maybe I didn't feel anything negative from either of those, but I think maybe I've, that's part of why I'm tired.
[00:11:37] Ben: and then also, you know, I've been writing and writing is just hard. I, um, I was listening, I was listening to an interview not so long ago with, Simon Sinek, he's, kind of a business minded guy and writes books, does podcasts, gives presentations, that kind of stuff, really good stuff. And he was talking about how it took him three years, I think, to write one of his book.
[00:11:57] Ben: And he said that he just hated it the entire time, that when he was done, it was tremendously rewarding and he was really happy with the final product and people really loved his book. But the act of writing it, he just didn't enjoy any of it. It was hard and challenging and an uphill battle the entire time.
[00:12:16] Ben: And I, I mean, I'm not going to even come close to comparing myself to him. That's crazy. He's incredibly successful, well respected person. And I'm just... Like a guy who loves Coldfusion, whatever. but writing is just really hard and I. I enjoy it, but like, I don't actually enjoy it. And the farther I get into this book, the more it feels like there is left to do because the speed at which I'm moving makes the rest of the remaining outline feel so much larger than I thought it was going to be originally.
[00:12:49] Ben: So anyway, that's just been mentally challenging.
[00:12:52] Adam: Have you been trying to employ the techniques we talked
[00:12:55] Ben: No, I have not, because I just can't, I just can't, I don't know. It seems so hard to not think it's hard to not approach writing in the way that my brain wants to approach it. And, and I'm having a lot of trouble freeing myself up to think about it in an alternative means. But I don't, I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole of feeling blah.
[00:13:21] Ben: And I, and I do want in on a positive note, which is that,I've recently used Jsoup. I don't know if anyone's used Jsoup. It's basically an HTML parser and,
[00:13:30] Adam: library that you can kind of, like, treat an HTML document or it lets you sort of query it, like jQuery, right?
[00:13:37] Ben: yeah, basically you give it an HTML string and it parses it more or less like the browser would parse it. And then it gives you a DOM structure very much like the browser DOM. And you can do things like selecting based on CSS. Navigating, you know, first child element, parent element, that kind of stuff.
[00:13:55] Ben: And, it's just awesome. It's one of those tools that I think it's been around for like 15 years and I've only recently leaned into it in the last year or two.
[00:14:06] Adam: used it in the past,
[00:14:07] Ben: Yeah. And every time I use it, I just think Jsoup is awesome. It just makes things so easy. It's, it's, it's, it feels to me when you first use jQuery and you're like, Oh, I can just access stuff on the DOM and change attributes and move elements around.
[00:14:22] Ben: That's what Jsoup gives you, except for a server side DOM. And it's, it's just pretty awesome. So can't I, I want to use it more and I want to recommend it to people. So that's me. Yeah. So that's me. A little mixture there. Carol, what about you?
[00:14:39] Carol's Triumph
[00:14:39] Carol: I'm going to bring us home with a triumph. I, just wrapped up my first week back working and I don't hate it. That's a good thing, right? I will say the, one of my favorite things is I get to work what's called an alternate alternative work schedule. So, I don't think I mentioned this last week on the show, but, Monday through Thursday, I work nine hours.
[00:14:59] Carol: The first Friday of the pay period, which is a two week pay period, I work eight hours, and the following Friday, I'm off work. So, I only work every other Friday. So, every other weekend is a three day weekend, unless you're rolling it in with a holiday, like I get to this weekend, where then it's a four day weekend for me.
[00:15:17] Carol: So, not a bad little gig.
[00:15:20] Ben: What holiday is this weekend?
[00:15:21] Carol: Columbus Day!
[00:15:23] Ben: Oh,
[00:15:24] Carol: yeah, coming up on... The 6th, was it 7th, 8th, 8th, Monday's a holiday.
[00:15:29] Ben: That's pretty cool though.
[00:15:31] Carol: 9th. I just lied, it's the 9th. Apparently I don't calendar very well.
[00:15:36] Adam: This holiday obviously means a whole lot to you, Carol.
[00:15:38] Carol: I just get four days off. Ruby gets her second rattlesnake vaccine, so she'll be covered once she gets that injection. So it's a good weekend for us.
[00:15:46] Ben: Very cool.
[00:15:48] Tim: Sorry. Hold on. So I was going to just jump in. I was muted. So I was going to point out that we're now a multi time zone podcast.
[00:15:55] Adam: We are.
[00:15:56] Ben: right.
[00:15:56] Carol: And Adam, pointed this out, then Adam pointed this out, now you're kind of behind. I'm just
[00:16:03] Tim: Yeah, I am. I, I, yeah. Because I'm in a totally different time zone.
[00:16:08] Carol: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
[00:16:10] Tim: So in your schedule, I mean, do you work nine to five, eight to five? No. What, what, what's your,
[00:16:16] Carol: yeah. I work, I work 6. 30 to 3. 30 or 4, depending on lunch and stuff. So I get up, I get up, you know, 5. 30 in the morning this week. this week I'm going to start back working out. So that means I have to get up even earlier, but I am trying to work closer to Eastern time because that's where my family is.
[00:16:34] Carol: That's where most of the people working are.
[00:16:37] Tim: It's the only time zone that really matters in the world.
[00:16:39] Carol: I don't know. I mean, what I hear is West Coast is Best Coast, but it's kind
[00:16:43] Tim: yeah. But they, but they have to get up early because we're, we're, we're a business gets done, so
[00:16:49] Ben: Yo,
[00:16:49] Adam: coast.
[00:16:51] Ben: I get up pretty early. I get up at five. I mean, that's early for a lot of people and my wife will usually get up around 637, but every now and then I'll go into the bathroom at five. And when I come out after having showered, she's awake and reading the news in bed. And it's just too early for me. I can't deal with people. I will not even acknowledge the fact that
[00:17:13] Carol: Oh no!
[00:17:14] Ben: I will wait. That's not, that's not untouchable. I will walk by and I will gently squeeze her foot to let her know that she's alive. And I understand that. And then I just continue walking. Cause I just, I can't, I can be creative at five 30 in the morning, but I can't people at five
[00:17:30] Ben: 30 in the
[00:17:30] Tim: people. Yeah.
[00:17:31] Carol: You and Steve, he's just like that. Yep.
[00:17:35] Unions
[00:17:35] Tim: So, are we going on strike now? Is that what's happening here?
[00:17:39] Tim: yeah, so let's go strike. I mean, so I mentioned earlier before we started the recording that, you know, this has been like hot strike summer, right?
[00:17:48] Adam: It kind of has, yeah.
[00:17:49] Tim: I mean, the, the. First, the writers union went on strike, then the actors union went on strike, then the autoworkers went on strike. Now the video game people are going on strike.
[00:17:59] Tim: They just narrowly avoided the, was it UPS strike? I mean, they, they were going to strike, but they, they, they came to. So I was thinking, I'm like, what would, let's just put our hypothetical hats on and ask ourselves, what would it look like if every coder in the United States We went on strike, or let's say the world, let's say even bigger, the day the code stood still, every code in the world said, you know what, we're not happy with our, our working environments.
[00:18:30] Tim: We want more pay, we want more time off, we want more autonomy. We don't have to deal with Agile anymore because it's just a made up thing. It doesn't really work.
[00:18:38] Adam: taking our gerbs.
[00:18:39] Tim: We don't, yeah, don't want the AI taking our jerbs. What would, what would the world look like if, if just all the coders stopped working?
[00:18:46] Adam: I feel like we should take a moment up front here and do a quick poll of the four of us. Have any of us actually worked at a job where you, like, were required to be a union member? Or are we also privileged that we have not? Yeah, I'm not.
[00:18:59] Tim: Yeah, I have not. Georgia's a right to work state, it's a very un unionized kind of place, so I've never,
[00:19:07] Ben: isn't the right to unionize? I thought that was like a constitutional right.
[00:19:13] Tim: I mean, they vote for it, but it's like, there's certain states that are very non union.
[00:19:19] Carol: Yeah. My son was telling me, he works for Chili's in Georgia, and he was telling me that in his, like, Assignment, like contracts and stuff in the beginning, he had to sign away his like ability to unionize because Georgia doesn't do unions. Like they're basically not even a thing.
[00:19:38] Adam: Yeah, it's, it's like union busting at the state level, I
[00:19:40] Carol: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:19:43] Tim: They're trying to be business friendly at the expense of the workers.
[00:19:47] Ben: I mean, I, I just don't quite understand how that even works from a mechanical standpoint, cause
[00:19:55] Carol: How unions work.
[00:19:56] Ben: no, no, no, that not being allowed to be a union, cause you know, as Tim was joking before the podcast, I think he's like, Oh, I would get sick that day. You're like, yeah, everyone could get sick and maybe it's not a union, but you're on strike.
[00:20:12] Tim: A sick out. Yeah.
[00:20:14] Ben: I just seems strange, but,
[00:20:15] Tim: But if you, but if you're all getting sick and there's no one to represent you, it's not really a union. The union, they're going to collect dues. They're going to like have money for you. So when you do go and strike, they try to support you, that sort of thing. So
[00:20:29] Adam: Yeah, so, I mean, it sounds like you know a few things. I know, so you, you touched on a few of them there, right? So, the union has representation to, to collectively represent the members. you, not, probably not all unions have this, but if the good ones maybe have, like, some sort of insurance, so that if you do have to go on strike, you can...
[00:20:47] Adam: you know, take some minimum pay in order to help feed your family while you're striking or whatever. What else? Ha ha ha, this is the Mafia.
[00:20:57] Tim: They buried Jimmy Hoffa somewhere. I don't know. That's all I know. Everything I know about unions, like comes from like popular TV, like the A team. I remember they had an episode where they're like supporting the union. I, that, I don't know a lot, but I do know like, like people strike and they try to get better, right now they're getting better, you know.
[00:21:15] Tim: Better wages and, yeah. And in America, for, for people in like non American, it's like, there's sort of this like almost guilt that I feel like having been raised in the South of the United States about unions, like organizing labor to try and get more wages, I sort of feel like slightly communist, I don't know why that is.
[00:21:38] Ben: I
[00:21:39] Tim: But I do, this is sort of like this is around in Georgia. It's like, like, like that's a unionizing is a dirty word. That's like. That's not a, you're not American, but it's like, well, why should rich people not pay Americans? That, that seems very American to like give Americans good jobs. So
[00:21:57] Adam: Because it It takes away that person, that rich person's ability to get richer. And they all want to imagine that they could be that person. Right, it's maintaining the American Dream of I could become Elon Musk with
[00:22:10] Adam: untold
[00:22:10] Tim: Who, who's South American?
[00:22:13] Adam: South
[00:22:13] Tim: African, South African. Yeah.
[00:22:15] Carol: well, I thought the way that I had kind of understood the right to work meant that if you joined a job, you couldn't be fired for not joining the union. And if a union did picket or strike that you couldn't be terminated, like, they had no say on it. Like, that was kind of the whole thing in Georgia. Like, you get to keep working, even if someone above you says things are terrible and we need to fix it.
[00:22:39] Carol: We're all going to stop working. You get to keep working without repercussion.
[00:22:42] Tim: Yeah. There may be some of that. I do know like, anti competitive laws are very hard here. You can't, you can go work for another competitor without. Worry about getting sued. I know that's a part of it as
[00:22:55] Adam: Yeah, I mean, I just did a quick Google. That is effectively what right to work means, right, like it's that, employers are allowed to source workers from non unions, non union workers, even if they would otherwise have to deal with unions. But it, so it doesn't mean that you can't unionize, it just means that the companies don't have to, hire union workers.
[00:23:16] What Would Happen If All Coders Stopped Working?
[00:23:16] Tim: So we're talking about a whole lot about unions. My, my, my thought experiment was, was what would happen though in, let's say all that's level playing field. Just everyone who codes just says, you know what, we're not coding anymore until this happens. And like no one codes for how long the writer strike was like five months, five months.
[00:23:37] Tim: No code being pushed.
[00:23:39] Carol: I go back to my original statement and everything would work perfectly because no one would break anything.
[00:23:45] Ben: I think people would realize.
[00:23:47] Carol: real.
[00:23:48] Ben: I think people would realize how often stuff breaks for random reasons. Like how many servers in two weeks will be full because log file directories aren't getting rotated. Or, you know, like how many things don't break because you happen to deploy every so often and therefore memory, yeah, memory is not an issue.
[00:24:09] Ben: Disk space is an issue. Suddenly you stop doing that stuff and servers just start dying. Hard disks just start dying and there's no one there to... You know, turn it off and turn it back
[00:24:20] Adam: almost like, if you can imagine, like, you know, a tech workers. View on the, like, episode one of The Walking Dead, right? So like, the zombie apocalypse happened, and so nobody's working on that stuff anymore, but for a little while, you know, the internet's still gonna be up. Like, until electricity starts to shut down, until infrastructure starts to get in the way.
[00:24:45] Carol: I think it would become apparent how many manual processes there are on the back end that real people have no idea about.
[00:24:52] Adam: Yeah. Real people. Are we not real people, Carol?
[00:24:55] Carol: I mean, like, you know, not, yeah, okay. We're not really, you know, we're kind of fictional, but like, you know, emails going out, something as simple as, you know, I keep seeing this help desk ticket that's like, Oh, the emails didn't go out again.
[00:25:07] Carol: And an engineer's like, Oh, well, let me clear the queue and let me get that back reset. They reset it and all of a sudden emails go out again. I'm like, you probably should fix the problem, but that's down the road, I guess.
[00:25:20] Adam: I feel like, so when that sort of thing happens, and it's like, you know, when it's obvious to us that we've got a manual process or a manual cleanup task that we need to do, I always feel really, like, sensitive and sort of embarrassed about that, right? Like, I'm like, trying to deal with the ticket and be as transparent as I should be, but also, like, hold something back and, and...
[00:25:41] Adam: Not say, oh yeah, that's a thing that we have to fix every time that it breaks and we just haven't done it yet. You know, it feels embarrassing, but at the same time, like you're saying, you know, I think the other person on the other end of that ticket probably has no clue, right? They couldn't tell
[00:25:56] Carol: Mm hmm. All they know is now all their emails went out, so they're happy.
[00:26:01] Tim: Yeah. I think there's a huge amount of processes, like you were saying, Carol, that's like, there's a thing that doesn't happen that often, but when it does, like some person has a script that they just run manually that, you know, that just goes and fixes it. And it's like, now they're on strike. And it's like, well, I'm sorry.
[00:26:19] Tim: none of you can get paid today because, They have to run a script and they're on strike. And so no payrolls going out, until the strike's over. And so a whole company can't get paid because someone says it has to run some manual script.
[00:26:33] Carol: And I mean, you might, you said something there that made me think of like another point for this. Tech people are usually pretty well paid. I mean, as far as like the market and comparison to other Americans. So if there was a strike, I think it would be a huge hit on our economy as well, because of the, the money loss on people, because they're not getting paid and not putting money back into the economy.
[00:26:56] Adam: You know, I don't think employers really need to worry too much about, tech workers striking because probably what would happen is that we would, like, try to put our heads together and, like, build a CICD pipeline around it and, you know, try to, like, document what we're going to do and get some tests going and it'll, it'll peter out before we ever actually get to, day one of being unionized.
[00:27:19] Carol: We quit two months before we were done.
[00:27:21] Adam: Yeah.
[00:27:22] Tim: Hmm. So, so it go into like a waterfall sprint. Is that what you're saying? And that we would never, never reach strike, strike velocity.
[00:27:30] Adam: Yeah. Strike velocity. Yeah. Mm
[00:27:35] Tim: no, I mean, seriously. So, I mean, just think how much of our modern life though is run on software.
[00:27:41] Adam: hmm. I
[00:27:43] Tim: Everything.
[00:27:43] Tim: So your, your Gmail doesn't work properly, possibly.
[00:27:48] Adam: UPS, Amazon Prime,
[00:27:49] Carol: Yeah. All your deliveries.
[00:27:51] Tim: All your deliveries. I mean,
[00:27:53] Adam: grocery stores are going to shut down.
[00:27:55] Carol: They have to. Yep. I mean, I, I go to grocery stores now and they don't accept cash.
[00:28:00] Tim: yeah.
[00:28:01] Carol: ones I go to, they're like card only, card only. Like we still can't touch money. It's COVID, right? I'm like, well, how do I pay if credit cards are down?
[00:28:09] Tim: card processing. Cause I'm, that's something I'm very familiar with. Like the whole stack, like doesn't, I mean, yeah, I was meeting, I was meeting today with one of the biggest, credit card processors, United States, TSYS. And it's like, yeah, TSYS system doesn't work. It's not, matching out correctly.
[00:28:25] Tim: People are, you know, getting charged or their charges just don't appear. Everybody's screwed.
[00:28:31] Carol: I feel like it would be one of the areas that you would see a huge government, like, what is it called? A buyout. What do they do when they handle the strikes? A bailout. There you go. I'm like, I don't know the word, but I mean, I think it's one of the, one of the ones that very quickly you would see a bailout for whatever's going on because the impact would be quickly seen.
[00:28:51] Tim: A bailout or I think, so I don't remember pretty early in my life as a, probably teenager, there was a air traffic controller strike. I don't remember when this was eighties, nineties, maybe. And the basis of the government stepped in and says, no, you guys are going to work while you're striking, you have to, you can strike, that's fine.
[00:29:14] Tim: We'll negotiate, but you have to go to work.
[00:29:17] Tim: And
[00:29:17] Carol: shut down the country.
[00:29:19] Tim: You can't shut down the country. And I honestly think that's exactly what would happen in this situation where they just, all the coders got together and said, no, we're striking and the government would be like, no, you're going to work. You can negotiate, but you're going to go to work.
[00:29:33] Tim: Otherwise we're going to put all of you in jail. And like, and then you can work from jail. So
[00:29:38] Ben: I was listening to an interview, maybe like a year ago, and they were talking about the, bailout's not necessarily the right word, but during the pandemic, when essentially travel shut down, all of the airlines, at least the American airlines, continued to get paid. And I believe all of their employees continued to get paid.
[00:29:57] Ben: And the guy talking about it, And the interview, his rationale was, the moment travel opens up, we have to be ready. Like you can't, you can't fire everyone and then have the latency of hiring staff and retraining them and retraining your air traffic controller and retraining your pilots and your stewardesses and your stewards.
[00:30:18] Ben: Like you have to be ready to go.
[00:30:20] Adam: but that's exactly where we are right now anyway. Like, yes, they were still being paid, but the airlines allowed a lot of people to retire earlier or whatever. And so now there's a huge pilot shortage.
[00:30:33] Tim: Same thing with healthcare.
[00:30:35] Ben: Yeah.
[00:30:36] Tim: A lot of people got out of it. It was just too much
[00:30:39] Adam: I think just working in general kind of sucks.
[00:30:41] Carol: It does.
[00:30:44] Ben: I mean, that's why I've always felt so lucky because I do get so much joy out of
[00:30:49] Adam: Let me guess, cold fusion?
[00:30:50] Ben: Well, that too, that's, that's just the icing on the cake, but programming in general, I find
[00:30:55] Adam: Yeah. No, I feel
[00:30:56] Ben: so rewarding.
[00:30:57] Adam: lucky to be able to do this. I've had, I've had some manual labor jobs in my past, none that were unionized, as we discussed, but, I, I much prefer to sit at my desk rather than to sweat through my clothes in order to earn two or three times the pay, if that, like, that was, two or three times the pay was the starting salary 20 years ago, so,
[00:31:18] Ben: Right.
[00:31:19] Tim: And that's, I mean, this is a bit of a digression, but that's one of the reasons. So my son, so he needed like a few hundred dollars for his, his scholarship didn't cover a hundred percent of his schooling and he's like, and he ran out of money, he got a lot of gifts and some scholarship money and he had a pretty good bank account, but then it ran out.
[00:31:41] Tim: And then, so he's like, I'm like, so what are you going to do? And he's like, well, I don't know, I guess I'll trickle in. Now I give him like a small allowance, like every couple of weeks, I'm like, no, no, you're not doing it. So he's been working at Publix as a bag boy and, like doing carts and like doing the floors and, cause I wanted him to see like, just, I mean, he's been working there since August.
[00:32:03] Tim: It's now October. I think he's maybe just now eked out a thousand dollars. Right. And so I just wanted to see, right, that's what a lot of people's lives are. And he's only working three days a week. He's only working out three days a week. He's not working a full schedule, but he's working three days a week, working till midnight many nights.
[00:32:23] Tim: It's hard. It's hard work. And he's not getting a whole lot of money. And I just want him to see that's what most people's lives are. You're going to school right now. You're getting a computer engineering degree. You're going to be making six figures probably in the next. Three to four years. So, but I want you to see, here's what life is like for most people so that you don't forget how privileged you are to be able to do what you do and you're only privileged that way because you've been pushed in that direction and you've had a family that's been able to support you in that.
[00:32:56] Tim: And if you don't get paid well, strike. And then the COVID stands still and then we're back where we are. We can get more money.
[00:33:02] The Demands
[00:33:02] Adam: So, actually, let's, let's, circle back on that for a second, because we've kind of brought it up a couple times, and, and... I think it might be interesting to theorize or hy hy hypotheticalize, whatever, hypo I don't know, words,
[00:33:17] Carol: Ben, help him out,
[00:33:18] Adam: hy hypothesize,
[00:33:19] Ben: Yeah, that sounds right.
[00:33:21] Adam: to, to hypothesize on, you know, what maybe besides money we would want to, bargain on, right, the whole idea of unions is collective bargaining.
[00:33:31] Adam: So, If we are saying that our work is what keeps this world running, and we believe we deserve more than we're getting,
[00:33:39] Adam: obviously money.
[00:33:41] Adam: Well, but I think, you know, is certainly something that would have to be discussed, but I think that that's too obvious, right? Like, yes, everybody needs a living wage and equal pay and all that,
[00:33:52] Carol: Sure. If we had a checklist of things that we are demands, right? Money's on there. Checked. All right. So what's the, what's the next item?
[00:33:59] Adam: Exactly, yes.
[00:34:01] Tim: Things that should have been an email will not be a meeting. Number one,
[00:34:06] Adam: Oh, I
[00:34:06] Tim: four day work week,
[00:34:08] Adam: yeah, I, I heard, somebody say that, meetings are a bug, not a feature. I really like
[00:34:12] Tim: Exactly. A hundred percent.
[00:34:15] Ben: What about, constraints around on call rotations? You know, like you could, it's illegal, for example, to be. On call for more than six days in a row and then have some period in between that where you're no longer on call,
[00:34:29] Carol: or do the firefighter thing, right? Where you're a 24 hour shift, but then you're forced to be off work for two days, right? Like if you're awake for two hours work or for 24 hours working, you shouldn't be expected to maintain 8 a. m. the next morning,
[00:34:42] Tim: Yeah. I feel bad, particularly for like our, we called our ops team, other people call it infrastructure, like sometimes they work, like there's a big issue. They work all weekend. And then they go back to work on Monday and there's never, they always say, Oh, you'll get some time off later, but there's never any guarantee of
[00:34:57] Carol: Right. Yeah. I
[00:34:58] Tim: their salary. So it's like, you know what? No, if you worked eight, you know, seven days consecutive, you're going to get four days off the next week as compensation for the fact. And that's just, you can't be forced to, Oh no, can you just come in? Cause that's what happens. They're like, well, yeah, yeah, we know is, but you know, is a one off.
[00:35:15] Tim: So can you just come back in to work the rest of the week? Cause we need you. No, if you work seven days straight, because of some issue that you're trying to fix because it was critical, you definitely need to get, you know, guaranteed time off the next week.
[00:35:29] Carol: Mm hmm. Or paid, you choose.
[00:35:32] Ben: Well, in kind of a.
[00:35:33] Tim: don't even, I think time off is more important than being paid. I mean, I know some people would like that, but it's like, I think it's healthier.
[00:35:40] Carol: Yeah, mentally, it's good.
[00:35:43] Ben: I think the amount of time that you are allowed to be in an incident remediation, having that to be a constraint, because I've definitely seen issues where you're going on like hour 12 of trying to figure out why something's going wrong and nobody wants to step up and be like, we need sleep. So if someone could say, well, That's it.
[00:36:05] Ben: 12 hours. See you guys tomorrow.
[00:36:07] Tim: Yeah.
[00:36:08] Ben: sucks that no bank accounts are working, but you know, them's the rules.
[00:36:13] Tim: yeah. Having been a person who's been up to like three, four in the morning and then have to get back up at seven, eight in the morning to pick it. Yeah, for sure.
[00:36:21] Carol: But you, Adam, got one.
[00:36:24] Adam: Yeah, I was just trying to, trying to come, like, everything I was thinking of, you guys were saying, I'll, I'll, I'm gonna keep noodling on it.
[00:36:29] Ben: Your chair was basically falling apart for a long time. What about something around, uh, office equipment?
[00:36:35] Adam: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's a, you know, reasonable office supplies, right? Like, so, everybody, if our job is to sit in a chair, everybody should have a good quality chair and a good quality keyboard and mouse. And if we're expected to be on. Video chat. Now that a good percentage of us, a significant percentage of us are working remotely, we should all have high quality video, like webcams and microphones and headphones, right?
[00:36:59] Adam: Like these are, these should be table stakes for being in this job for, for, at least for being a remote tech worker.
[00:37:06] Carol: So, one thing that I got at my last job that I didn't even think was a thing prior was since they had kind of sent everyone home to work was you got a communication stipend added to your check and it was to help. Like with the cost of providing better internet at home or, you know, help cover your phone bill or whatever.
[00:37:24] Carol: So I think some of those things should be considered too. You can't write solid software and have these great calls and have things upload like they're supposed to, or download if you have terrible internet.
[00:37:35] Tim: And you're having to pay a hundred percent for
[00:37:37] Carol: Oh yeah. Yeah. That's something the government could do because they subsidize it for, rural farmers, so it's already working in other areas.
[00:37:45] Adam: it needs to be a commodity anyway.
[00:37:48] Tim: A hundred percent.
[00:37:49] Adam: a separate discussion.
[00:37:50] Carol: Yeah, agree.
[00:37:52] Tim: Another one. Carol was talking. I mean, if we're making our demands, right. We gotta, we gotta be, we gotta be strategic
[00:37:59] Carol: What are you putting on your picket sign?
[00:38:02] Tim: Yeah. Right. What do we want?
[00:38:05] Carol: More
[00:38:06] Adam: Race conditions.
[00:38:07] Carol: we can use.
[00:38:10] Adam: Vacation's an interesting one because like. you know, again, I feel very grateful and, and, privileged that, you know, I, I mean, I guess what you would officially call a unlimited vacation scenario, but, you know, it ends up being somewhere between two to four weeks a year, right? Like, you know, I just kind of, and I don't keep track of it either, but it, you know, I just, it's like, okay, well, I'm taking a long weekend here, or I'm taking the week off between Christmas and New Year's is kind of like my usual thing.
[00:38:38] Adam: I think that the American industrialization two weeks a year, I think that's kind of where that settled in, given everybody two weeks off. And I think that that needs to be modernized, right? I think that like four weeks a year it should be the standard and then like we need to see paternity leave and better maternity leave and better sick leave, right?
[00:39:00] Adam: Like two sick days a year or per quarter or whatever is... Not realistic anymore,
[00:39:06] Tim: Hmm.
[00:39:07] Carol: has COVID.
[00:39:09] Investing In People
[00:39:09] Tim: I remember what it was. So, I mean, you're in a job where your brain is really the commodity, right? Your, your brain's a commodity and you're learning and the things, you know, I mean, most companies say they like invest in their people. But how many actually really do, like, give them training that makes them, that may give them training that, you know, makes them more useful to them, but how much do they give the training that makes them employable?
[00:39:37] Tim: And I think about this a lot as I'm getting older, it's like, you know, I'm, I'm in my fifties, you know, I'm in my early fifties now. It's like, I'm at the point where it's like, if I lost my job, I would not be an extremely attractive hire for most companies because it's like, well, you know, you're maybe going to work 10 years.
[00:39:54] Tim: Maybe 12 years at most. Um, so why are we going to invest in you? And so I think a lot of companies need to invest in like, just training their people so that they are, if they left today, they'd be hireable. And I don't think any company really does that. They, they train them so that they're useful to them, but, not necessarily for making their workers more attractive if they go on the open market.
[00:40:18] Tim: And I get that. There's no motivation for them to do that. That's why you negotiate that kind of thing.
[00:40:23] Adam: Yeah, I mean, there's the, the, the old trope of, you know, like the CFO asks the CEO, what happens if we invest in our people? And then they leave us and the CEO says, well, what happens if we don't? And they stay.
[00:40:33] Ben: Right.
[00:40:34] Tim: Right? Yeah.
[00:40:36] Adam: So, yeah, I mean, again, you know, just, I feel privileged because I just, had the opportunity to write a policy on training budgets. And, you know, I, I, I took my shot, right? I was like, okay, this is, this is my opportunity to, to get something good. And I wrote what I thought was asking for a little bit too much.
[00:40:55] Adam: And then I submitted it for review and I expected to be like, okay, well, let's reign that in a little bit. Let's, let's lower those dollar amounts or something. Right. And he just was like, nope, stamp good enough. And I was like,
[00:41:05] Carol: Oh, wow.
[00:41:06] Adam: asked for more.
[00:41:06] Carol: Yeah. Agree.
[00:41:07] Tim: exactly. Now, you know, you negotiated too low.
[00:41:11] Adam: Yeah, but I mean, I, I did, like I said, I, I was overshooting, you know, it's like, you know, one to two conferences a year and, and, you know, X dollars on books and training materials and
[00:41:21] Ben: Well, I think probably what the, the hedged bet there is, is that most people won't take advantage of stuff like that. And, and I think that's the difference between making education a first class citizen of the company culture, as opposed to making learning resources available. That most people are just not going to opt in.
[00:41:46] Ben: So you have to find a way to make it a thing we all do so that there's almost a social pressure to better yourself.
[00:41:54] Adam: What do you guys think
[00:41:54] Tim: we tried it. We tried to do a book club and we offered the book club and no one showed up.
[00:41:59] Ben: Yeah, exactly.
[00:42:01] Adam: what do you guys think about like company retreats that are 99 percent social, you know, entertainment, not so much like let's get together and have an all hands all day sort of thing, but like, you know, like just spend quality time with your teammates.
[00:42:16] Carol: Yeah, it's harder, it's harder with everyone being remote though, right? So you have to do like lunch together at the same time where you all have a drink and a sandwich and talk on webcam, or you all get together and go out and do something. Like I
[00:42:30] Adam: Yeah. So
[00:42:31] Carol: lunchings where you go like rock wall climbing and four hours in the afternoon, just getting to spend time with the executives at a personal level, not talking about work, just being appreciated.
[00:42:41] Adam: sure. No, I was actually specifically saying like retreat, right? Like let's all go to Barbados or whatever, you know, like,
[00:42:47] Tim: No. Well, I mean, the company I'm part of, we, we do that. I mean, that's a thing we do every year, a hundred percent every single
[00:42:53] Ben: And then
[00:42:53] Adam: And, and so
[00:42:54] Ben: flu.
[00:42:55] Adam: for,
[00:42:55] Tim: exactly. Everyone gets the
[00:42:56] Adam: for, I mean, if we're trying to, to suss out, you know, like what is valuable and how do you bargain for that? Like, what is the company's, perspective on that, Tim, if you have any insight into that? Like, why do they
[00:43:09] Tim: Well, I mean, I, I, I, yeah. So, I mean, Constellation Software, which is. That's basically their parent company. They're very, very big into that. And that's, I mean, part of that is, is like internal propaganda to, you know, to help you buy into their whole, the mindset. But a lot of that is just basically the same thing.
[00:43:27] Tim: It was like. Making those social bonds with people across companies and within your own company. And so, yeah, I think, yeah, if you wanted to have that as part of a, a bargaining chip to say, you know, so much, so much budget needs to be spent on, you know, those sort of deals where your top, you know, 10 percent of, you know, up and comers and leaders are, you know, go to these things once a year,
[00:43:55] Tim: that, that would definitely be a,
[00:43:57] Tim: uh, a point.
[00:43:58] Adam: one of my previous jobs, we did, you know, everybody, it was a big, organization. And when you started, you know, there was. I probably started at the same, on the same day as like, I don't know, 15 other people. And we all had, like, had to go to this orientation. I think it was our, like, entire first week or three or four days, something like that.
[00:44:20] Adam: And, you know, there was some, like, you know, relationship building, get to know you sort of thing, icebreakers, improv, whatever. But then there was also, like, we filled out surveys to do, personality tests. Like, I think Myers Briggs was, like, among them, but it was more than that too. And it was just like sort of getting to understand yourself and so that you can use that to help inform how you interact with your coworkers and, you know, let people know how they should interact with you, if that matters to you sort of thing.
[00:44:50] Adam: And I was just, is that, is that worth investing in? Or is that just like... A waste of time.
[00:44:57] Tim: I think it's a judgment call.
[00:44:59] Carol: Yeah, in the moment. With the team.
[00:45:02] AI
[00:45:02] Tim: Yeah. So, so one thing that the Writer's Guild was all worried about was the use of AI, right? So you could like feed a bunch of scripts into AI and say, make me a sequel. I mean, you think about it, Hollywood movies aren't really that smart. Like, you know, you don't, you don't need a genius to come up with a sequel to some dumb movie that just managed to squeak out, you know, 200 million.
[00:45:24] Tim: So, and I think honestly, coding is, is, I mean, it could be that way where we're, you know, how do we protect ourselves from being replaced by, you know, just. People with very little experience just writing prompts and writing software. Would that be on the bargaining table? Should it be?
[00:45:42] Ben: mean,
[00:45:43] Adam: for sure.
[00:45:43] Ben: yeah, I feel so behind on the AI stuff that said,
[00:45:47] Tim: Well, I mean, CodePilot, think about it.
[00:45:49] Ben: The thing that, one thing that gives me some comfort is, is that it, it appears that so much of the value that people can extract out of AI is based on their ability to communicate well into AI in the first place. And so many people are honestly just straight up awful at communication.
[00:46:13] Ben: So, you know, I'm hoping that, that that means that there's still a lot of opportunity for. For people to have
[00:46:22] Tim: I, I, no, I agree. I was kind of whining, whining people up there. I mean, the, the, the, one of the memes I saw was like, so for AI to be effective, the customer needs to tell us exactly what they want. Our jobs are safe guys.
[00:46:36] Carol: heh heh. Heh heh heh. I
[00:46:37] Tim: if they can't tell, if they can't tell me an actual thinking human being who has like a bit of empathy and insight, like what is it you want?
[00:46:46] Tim: I've been talking to you for an hour. I don't understand the problem you're trying to solve. They're not going to put that into chat GPT prompt and come out with a working app. They're just not. It's not going to happen. They're still going to need someone like us. Even if we're not like writing code, if we're just explaining to the interface, you know, you know, Skynet, if we're explaining to Skynet what we want, then it's good.
[00:47:11] Tim: We're gonna have to be the intermediators. As we are now, but just, it's a different job, but we should get paid this more for it, not less.
[00:47:20] Carol: Heh heh heh.
[00:47:21] Tim: I guess I'm advocating me to be the union boss here.
[00:47:24] Adam: Yeah. You're hired.
[00:47:25] Tim: Yeah. I'm okay. Cool. Fight for our rights. Me, me and Corey doctor out.
[00:47:29] Adam: Alright, well, we are coming up on our union mandated break so we're going to stop here and Do the the show outro and then we'll take our break and we'll come back and we'll do our after show
[00:47:41] Patreon
[00:47:41] Adam: So, this is the part of the show where I let you know that this episode of Working Code was
[00:47:44] Adam: brought to you by the state of Georgia, who reminds you, you don't need to be in a union. And listeners like you. If you're enjoying the show and you want to make sure that we can keep putting more of whatever this is out into the universe, then you should consider supporting us on Patreon.
[00:47:57] Adam: Our patrons cover our recording and editing costs and transcripts too, and we couldn't do this every week without them. Special thanks to our top patrons, Monte, and Giancarlo. We actually have a new patron this week. I want to say welcome and thank you to Ben Winters. Welcome aboard.
[00:48:11] Carol: welcome! Heh
[00:48:11] Tim: Hey Ben,
[00:48:12] Adam: and I want to point out, we've had a couple of patrons leave over the years.
[00:48:17] Adam: and you know, Patreon has like a little exit interview and so you can like tell us why you're leaving. And, you know, every now and then somebody will even, they'll say, you know, like my financial situation has changed and I think that that is, I want to be on record of saying, like, absolutely, you know, we don't, we don't want to be a burden on anybody.
[00:48:32] Adam: We appreciate the support that we can get, but you have to take care of yourself before you can help take care of your favorite podcast. So
[00:48:38] Tim: your checkbook matters.
[00:48:40] Adam: no, no hard feelings. So if you want to help us out, if you want to be one of those lovely people, you can go to patreon.com/workingcodepod.
[00:48:50] Thanks For Listening!
[00:48:50] Adam: one of the benefits that our patrons get is, as I mentioned earlier, we're going to record our after show, which is after the outro plays, we just keep talking about whatever's on our minds.
[00:48:57] Adam: I am going to go on a rant about, Microsoft Windows and how much I hate it. I'm gonna try to see if we can get anything interesting out of Tim about, DragonCon. Because he has gone and returned and, hasn't mentioned much of anything yet. So there's gotta be some good stories there. and actually, I'm gonna bring back homework.
[00:49:13] Adam: I'm gonna give you homework this week. Come join our Discord. It's a lovely place to be. Tons of people in there hanging out. Spending our days together, and we'd love to have you. So you can do that by going to workingcode.dev/discord. That's it for us this week. We'll catch you next week. And until then,
[00:49:28] Tim: Remember your heart matters, but don't get a big head because it's required by union standards.
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