216: Ben's New Job
In this week's episode, the team discusses Ben's new job in a radically different domain, the common difficulties when joining a new team with a new 'language', and the unique challenges of working at a manufacturing focused business as opposed to a start-up style tech business.
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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.
Transcript
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[00:00:00] Highlight
[00:00:00] Ben: he'll say something about like, oh yeah, you know, once we have some tests in place and we'll be able to figure out how we can make changes in our project, I'm just like, you know, like grabbing my collar, like, oh, this has hot in here.
[00:00:11] Ben: What's going on?
[00:00:13] Intro
[00:00:33] Adam: With one eye tied behind my back. It is show number 216. And on today's show we're going to do, be talking about Ben's new job. Ben, you got a new job?
[00:00:42] Ben: I did, sir.
[00:00:45] Adam: well we should talk about that.
[00:00:46] Ben: Let's do it.
[00:00:46] Adam: and I'm sure that you know, as usual we'll go off on a million little tangents, but that's the topic for the day. But before we do that, as usual, we'll start with our triumphs and fails. And Tim, it is your turn to go first. My friend
[00:00:56] Tim: oh, okay.
[00:00:57] Tim's Triumph: Handling Customer Changes
[00:00:57] Tim: so I'm going with a triumph, as you know, I mentioned last week how I'm, you know, taking on more responsibility, but at the same time, still working with my same company and another company as well. But one thing we're doing is we, we are changing up how we're handling our payment stuff, and it's requiring basically new contracts with every single one of our customers.
[00:01:17] Adam: using Stripe now.
[00:01:18] Tim: No, absolutely not. A hundred percent, not, a hundred percent not. So we've, I mean, today, I swear to God, I think I had eight calls with different calls. It usually takes a half hour. So, but sometimes, normally only 15 minutes. But yeah, seven, eight calls today with customers and they've shockingly, in my opinion, gone all really well.
[00:01:40] Tim: So it's a triumph for me.I, I, you know, it's like, I, I don't know, I don't know why I'm scared to sometimes just talk about to my customers about changes, but it's like, you know, the changes we're doing are good. It's, it's to make us future, you know, more forward looking, add a whole lot of features, not increasing prices.
[00:01:57] Tim: So, I mean, it's all good, but we have one partner who we have probably 20 customers with and so as I mentioned the show, so we're part of a big conglomeration of software companies. They see. They are a competitor of one of our sister companies. And so they, when they found that out several years ago, they originally, we were like their preferred payment vendor.
[00:02:23] Tim: And then when they found out kind of how the whole structure works, I, I actually think our company tried to buy them at some point. And so when they found that out, they saw us as a threat. They're like, oh, this payment company, they're really just kind of like the, the thin edge of the wedge to get in the company and steal our customers.
[00:02:42] Tim: Which to be fair was true. I mean, I'm not gonna that, that, that was certain people's plans. It is never happened in the past 10 years that we've been doing it. But they have like people in leadership, at least one person I know of who like absolutely hates us, right?
[00:03:00] Carol: Uhoh.
[00:03:01] Tim: So when we came to them and said, Hey, we're kind of making this change, and I tried to pitch it to them.
[00:03:04] Tim: I'm like, look, this is good for you because, you know, you know, we. What we're doing, you know, it was kind of shift the role a little bit so we won't be directly competing anymore.they didn't buy that. so they, they sent an email to all their customers. Unbeknownst to me, I was on a call with one of their customers.
[00:03:21] Tim: Like, oh, this is how you presented is nothing how they told us that it was gonna be. They're like, you guys are going out of business and it's gonna be really difficult. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, no, none of that. None. A hundred percent, none of that.and so I, I said, here's the conversation we had with our shared partner and, you know, this is what we're doing and here's why we're doing it so we can offer you more features.
[00:03:43] Tim: I mean, it's a, it's, it's gonna be a very small change from your point of view. And so if we said that we could, and several of them actually just flat out said, well, you know, we are happy with you guys. We don't wanna make any change whatsoever. we're not very happy with I. Your other partner, but we're stuck with them.
[00:04:00] Tim: But yeah, we're not gonna let them. I'm like, yeah, 'cause I don't know why they're trying to push you towards Stripe. They're like, yeah, we don't either. And it, it'd be a complete hassle to change right now. So yeah, we're just gonna ride with you. And I had like five calls today with people like that.
[00:04:12] Tim: They're like, yeah. So we, we were kind of worried 'cause we got this email from our shared partner and they were kind of like, poo-pooing you guys. And,
[00:04:20] Carol: Uh oh.
[00:04:21] Tim: and then, and, but now that we talk to you, we feel a lot better. And I'm like, and so we're gonna tell them we're staying with you guys and they can just do whatever.
[00:04:29] Tim: So I mean that was, that was an, it was an unexpected, surprise. 'cause you know, I always know the, where the bodies are buried only think about the bad things that we do. I don't think about the fact they're like, yeah, you guys, you're really great. Your customer service is fantastic. you know, we never have any issues with you.
[00:04:43] Tim: We have issues with them, but not with you guys. So I. So I was super, super happy about that. So I guess when you speak to all your customers a short time, you kind of sometimes have to realign your, your own self image and go, you know what, we're, we're, we're doing good. We're doing the Lord's work. So, so I was pretty happy about that. And
[00:05:03] Adam: I mean, that's, that's cool. it, it's gotta suck when you're, when you find out through the grapevine that one of your, it's not a, they're not customer of yours, they're just like a partner, like a referral sort
[00:05:11] Tim: Right, so they're, they are like the, the insurance policy administration system, and so they have multiple payment providers. We used to be their preferred vendor, and then we noticed that we stopped getting referrals from them anymore, and we found out why. Like, they're like, oh, we understand you're part of this company and as part of that you, 'cause we have multiple competitors inside our portfolio, but it's like.
[00:05:36] Tim: They don't benefit from our, from what we do, right? So it's not like they're giving money to their competitors, they're just giving money to the big behemoth parent company that buys everybody up. so yeah, that, that does kind of suck though, that they didn't, they weren't honest with us about, 'cause we had a conversation with them and they said, yeah, we, we'll let the, our customers know that, you know, this is coming up.
[00:05:57] Tim: But the email that they sent, I had a customer, one of our shared customers kind of give me the gist of it. I'm like, yeah, that is not at all what they said that
[00:06:06] Carol: Oh,
[00:06:06] Carol: geez.
[00:06:07] Tim: Yeah,
[00:06:08] Adam: I wonder if you could like take them to a take, take that to them and be like, so we have this email that you sent to all of our customers.
[00:06:15] Tim: yeah,
[00:06:15] Adam: you get nothing.
[00:06:16] Tim: yeah, yeah. We, we kind of, we kind of need them to still work with us. So,
[00:06:21] Carol: yeah. So it's not like even legal action. It'd be
[00:06:24] Tim: no, there's no,
[00:06:24] Carol: had, like convinced all their
[00:06:27] Tim: yeah.
[00:06:27] Carol: sub people to leave. Right. That'd be different
[00:06:30] Carol: But at the end of the, at the end of the day, like if, you know, our shared customers go, no, we're, we're happy where we're at. We don't wanna move. So you're good?
[00:06:37] Tim: just switch the credentials to the, to the new thing. So we'll see how it goes. So, but it, it did feel good to hear them say, you know, yeah, we we're kinda worried we got this email, but yeah, we wanna stay with you guys.
[00:06:49] Tim: I'm like, cool.
[00:06:50] Carol: Yeah. It's always good to hear that you're providing a solid platform and a useful to your customers. Like
[00:06:56] Tim: Yep.
[00:06:57] Carol: that's good.
[00:06:57] Tim: And especially when they heard like, why we're doing that. We're not making this change to make your life difficult. We're doing it 'cause we want to give you more features. Right. So,
[00:07:04] Adam: Yeah.
[00:07:05] Tim: yeah. But anyway, that's me. How about you Adam? What you got?
[00:07:08] Adam: I
[00:07:08] Adam's Fail Uveitis
[00:07:11] Adam: got one eye, as I alluded to it in the, the opening there. I have one eye tied behind my back right now. I have, a, a condition, I guess I'll call it, called uveitis, which is inflammation of the iris and the, I think it's called the uve, whatever part of my eye.
[00:07:23] Tim: Boys have those
[00:07:26] Adam: as far as I know. and basically it's inflammation of like some of the different parts of my eye.
[00:07:33] Adam: and it is a pretty significant thing. Like if, if you don't treat it, you can go blind.
[00:07:38] Carol: moly.
[00:07:39] Adam: yeah. and this is the second time I've had it. The first time was in 2006 and that was right before I got diagnosed with my autoimmune disorder. And it was, it, so it's, it's an inflammation. Condition and my autoimmune is inflammatory, right?
[00:07:52] Adam: It causes inflammation. So this is just like a particularly bad flare up of, of inflammation. The first one I had was in 2006, so it's been quite a long time. And to me, this is kind of an indicator that, you know, it was not a one time thing. This is something I can probably expect to have at least one or two more times in my life.
[00:08:09] Adam: so that's fun.
[00:08:11] Carol: Was it in the same eye?
[00:08:12] Adam: the first time it was both eyes. Um, you know what? Now that you mention it, I do think it was both eyes, but more in the right eye. So I have a, a weird memory. I was driving approximately an hour to get to work at the time. there was, it was like right after we moved up to Pennsylvania.
[00:08:28] Adam: I was freshly married, and like everything is new in my life. We got married, we moved, got a new job, all this stuff at once, and then like two months later I got this. uveitis and I was on the couch for like a week. I, like all the curtains drawn, everything just like as black as I could make the room and like, wouldn't, didn't even have the TV on or anything, just like slept all day and all night.
[00:08:51] Adam: because like I was just so photo sensitive, any bit of light would make me go, I don't know, get, be, be in a lot of pain. and so when I finally got like, I was on the mend, but still not quite there, I just got so sick of like doing nothing. I drove to work and I had like sunglasses. you know, back in the day, Oakley sunglasses used to come with a, like a almost silk black bag.what I did was I like wrapped that bag around the right lens and then put my glasses on so that it was like cover. It was like wearing an eye patch while I'm driving, right? So that I could, so I could drive and it wouldn't, you know, I would be able to see because the right eye was, to, to messed up to be able to drive.
[00:09:30] Adam: So, yeah. now that you mentioned it, it is the right eye Only this time. I, I do think it was a little inflamed at first on the left eye, but that has like, fully cleared up, so I'm, I'm okay there. But yeah, I mean, this is kicking my butt. I've taken several days from work where it's like, I, I do as much work as I can in the morning and then it's, you know, at some point my eyes just get too tired from staring into the screen.
[00:09:52] Adam: and so I'm doing what I can.
[00:09:55] Tim: taking drops or something
[00:09:56] Adam: Yeah, so they've got me on the max, dosage that they can give you of steroids. It's this lovely little eye drop and then they're, I forget what the other one, is called. But it's, I don't, I don't, I don't know necessarily what exactly it's trying to do other than I do know that it dilates that eye, which is part of why, like, so with just the, before I got the second eye drops that dilate my eye.
[00:10:17] Adam: It was painful, but I didn't really have any vision problems. Right. Then the second, they gave me a second set of drops, and she's like, take these twice a day, and it'll, it dilates my eye, which is causing the blurry vision and all that now. so if I cover up this eye, like I have no blurry vision, I, I feel not feel fine, but I can see fine, right?
[00:10:38] Adam: I still have my 2020 vision on that side. and, but it's, you know, this is kind of messing up my life now, right? I can't, this is what's causing me to not be able to work and, and it's a pain in the butt to drive and, and all kinds of fun stuff. So it sucks. I do not recommend zero stars.
[00:10:53] Carol: Do you have an iPad you can wear?
[00:10:55] Adam: No. I did ask about that and they were like, yeah, it's not a good idea because you really need to be aware of what's going on with the eye.
[00:11:02] Adam: Like if you have a patch on, you know, stuff could change throughout the day and you would've no idea. So,
[00:11:06] Carol: oh wow.
[00:11:07] Adam: and plus I have to put in eyedrops every hour, and with, that's the steroids. And then, twice a day for the, the other one. So that's no fun.
[00:11:15] Ben: so during the call, if any of us yells out, Adam stopped touching it. We're talking about his eye.
[00:11:22] Tim: He has been rubbing it a lot. I'm like, because when you say eye problems, I'm thinking like conjunctivitis pink eye. I am like, stop touching it. But I imagine it doesn't really matter. I imagine it doesn't really matter.
[00:11:32] Adam: So I'm gonna, I'm gonna put this on the, the list of topics for the after show, but, they, they like started telling me options and there's one that, that has me really worried about, like the treatment plan sort of things. I'll, I'll, I'll save that for the after show, but,
[00:11:46] Carol: Ugh.
[00:11:47] Ben: Oh.
[00:11:47] Carol: so, uh,Like gonna take your eyeball out and wash it.
[00:11:52] Adam: it wasn't quite that far, but it's not too far off from
[00:11:55] Carol: Oh, gross.
[00:11:56] Adam: all right. So what do you got going on, Ben?
[00:11:58] Ben: I'
[00:11:58] Ben's Fails: Learning Reflections
[00:12:00] Ben: m gonna go with some light failures here, which is, I had gotten into a really good pattern of keeping a column on my Trello board that was just random junk that entered my head that I might wanna bring up on the show. And I've just, I've sort of fell out of tune with doing that, and I keep having these thoughts throughout the week.
[00:12:18] Ben: I'm like, oh, that'll be so much fun to bring up on the show. Or like, oh, I gotta remember to mention this to the, to the team. And then I forget to write it down in my Trello board. And now, it's totally gone. And I
[00:12:29] Tim: And, and the show has suffered for it. I can tell you that. It
[00:12:32] Adam: you have problems, it's Ben's fault.
[00:12:34] Carol: blame Ben.
[00:12:35] Tim: Yeah.
[00:12:35] Ben: could have gone on many more tangents than, than we have so far.
[00:12:39] Ben: I also, I feel like sometimes I get the sense that I'm terrible at learning stuff. I.
[00:12:45] Tim: What.
[00:12:46] Ben: and I, so, okay. I like learning a lot and obviously I put a lot of time into trying to hone my craft in, in various ways. but I don't have a lot of skills. Like I don't go, jumping out of planes or woodworking or cooking or, you know, all the kinds of stuff that y'all do.
[00:13:06] Ben: I, I just have very little skill and, I keep hearing on all these podcasts, these people who are kind of wildly successful and then they talk about all the other hobbies they do, and on top of that, they're raising kids. And I'm just like, am I, am I not nearly as good at learning as maybe I thought I was?
[00:13:24] Ben: Because here are all these people who are doing so much more in terms of breadth and they seem to be able to learn a lot of the stuff that I learned. So,I don't know. That just makes me feel like, um,
[00:13:34] Tim: Yeah, compare, comparing yourself to others. Does neither side of this, a service.
[00:13:39] Ben: Right. it's, it's,
[00:13:40] Tim: neither side of service.
[00:13:41] Ben: just a bad, it's just a bad journey to go on.
[00:13:44] Tim: It is,
[00:13:45] Ben: But
[00:13:45] Tim: I think you're a great learner. I, I, I admire how you learn in public and you share. I mean, I, I think I, I try to learn things too, but I never like said, I gotta write an article about this.
[00:13:58] Tim: I, you know, there's short period of my life where I did, I was trying to be, been to Dell for a little bit. you were my hero. I wanted, I wanted to have a blog, and I, I, I, I wrote a few articles and, you know, they, they served me well, but it's like, yeah, I'm just, I don't, I can't do that. So I admire you for that.
[00:14:13] Tim: I, I, I think, I think you're selling yourself short.
[00:14:16] Ben: appreciate that. I
[00:14:17] Adam: definitely very thirsty and I, I mean that it, you know, thirst for knowledge,
[00:14:21] Ben: I, I,
[00:14:21] Tim: Not, not just,
[00:14:22] Ben: like, I, like, I love listening to podcasts and I love just trying to hold a lot of stuff in my head. but I also, I need a lot of downtime and I watch not a lot of television, like, I don't wanna underscore italicize a lot, but like I watch a good amount of television. And the more I hear about people who don't watch television, it just blows my mind.
[00:14:43] Ben: And I think we've talked about this on the show before, but like I was listening to, the Lenny Podcast this morning, and it's an interview with the guy who I think founded the, I don't know the name of the company, but they create Devon, the automated code assistant thing. And one of the things that Lenny always asks at the end of the episode is, you know, what's a TV show or movie that you could recommend?
[00:15:04] Ben: And the guy was like, oh, I can't think of a single thing that I've watched in the last month. I just don't watch a lot of television. I'm just like, another, like, just like yet another person who doesn't watch television blows my mind and then it makes me feel guilty
[00:15:15] Tim: But you know, they have some other time suck. I mean, my, my, my wife barely watches tv, but she's always on her phone playing silly games, like little moving stuff around and checking her farm and I'm like, I mean, everyone wastes time in some way.
[00:15:29] Carol: Yeah. I will tell you the show watching thing, right? You guys know I don't watch a ton, so I just finished the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
[00:15:40] Adam: Nice.
[00:15:41] Tim: Welcome, welcome, welcome to the two
[00:15:43] Ben: years ago?
[00:15:43] Tim: Welcome to two thousands.
[00:15:47] Carol: 20 years ago. It's crazy.
[00:15:49] Tim: More than 20 years. More than 25.
[00:15:51] Carol: oh, yeah, I am. I'm way back there with you guys, so I don't watch tv.
[00:15:57] Tim: Okay. Captain
[00:15:57] Ben: on a positive note, I continue to have big old lady energy
[00:16:03] Ben: and, and by that I mean old ladies just like to talk to me and I am here for it.
[00:16:10] Carol: It's, it's your face, man. I just had the urge to like strike up a conversation with you. When I see you smile, I'm like, this guy wants to talk to me.
[00:16:19] Ben: Old ladies are my number one demographic. That's great. I'm out with the dog.
[00:16:23] Adam: how we cornered that, the edge of the podcast market.
[00:16:26] Tim: There you go.
[00:16:27] Ben: So I'll, I'll end on that. It's a positive note.
[00:16:30] Adam: I do think, I want to go back to, you know, you're saying more, more and more people you're noticing are not watching tv. I'm starting to think that it's an age thing, right? I, and not that, not that there's anything bad about any of that. I just think that when we were younger, our interests were different.
[00:16:47] Adam: Right. I, I don't, I can't speak for you, but me personally, I used to spend a lot more of my free time writing code. And these days I still write code in my free time, but I have other interests as well. And so I find myself kind of spreading out more,
[00:17:03] Ben: Yeah, I think that's, that's totally fair. I mean, I, I, I don't have the energy to write code the way that I used to. I mean, I used to, it would be like those people who talk about, you know, I put my kids to bed and then I go write code for another couple of hours in the evening. Like I. I just can't do that anymore.
[00:17:19] Ben: My brain doesn't last that long. My, my body physically doesn't last that long anymore. That's why I need my TVs to recharge. Anyway, that's me. Carol, take us home. What do you got?
[00:17:31] Carol's Triumph: Control Key Victory
[00:17:31] Carol: So I'm gonna let us end on the 50 50 here, you guys. So I'm gonna go with a triumph.if you oh one, I still have my job. So that's the
[00:17:39] Tim: Yeah. Yay.
[00:17:40] Ben: triumph.
[00:17:41] Carol: I don't talk about work often with what's going on, just because it's easier to, to not get myself in trouble if I don't talk about the specifics of work.
[00:17:49] Carol: So not a ton of work conversations happening on the show these days, but I will tell you my control key functions again. So that is a giant win, just, and I didn't even request a new keyboard yet because I didn't wanna deal with it. So I've trained myself this past week to use the right control button.
[00:18:10] Carol: Today I had an update install and it took like 30 minutes to get my laptop back on. 'cause it was updating bios, it was doing a whole bunch of stuff. And when I logged back in, I just automatically hit control C for something and I did it with my left hand and it worked. So I'm not questioning, I'm not gonna say they did it to drive me crazy, but they might've did it to drive me crazy.
[00:18:33] Carol: So.
[00:18:34] Tim: Hmm.
[00:18:34] Ben: That's how they
[00:18:35] Adam: was one of their like al alternative, firing techniques or whatever, like make you, make you hate your job and.
[00:18:41] Carol: Yeah. If, if you won't leave, we'll just disable your left control button.
[00:18:46] Tim: Tell us five things you did this week with your left control button
[00:18:49] Carol: Yeah.
[00:18:51] Tim: else you're fired.
[00:18:51] Carol: Yeah. So, yeah. Woo wins you guys.
[00:18:58] Ben: No.
[00:18:59] Adam: Right.
[00:19:00] Ben's New Job at PAI Industries
[00:19:00] Adam: Well, with that outta the way, let's get into, the topic for the day. Ben, you got a job. Congratulations.
[00:19:06] Ben: Yeah, thank you. I, I've been working for Peter Amir, who is heading up technology at a company called PAI Industries. They're actually, headquartered down in Georgia, Suwanee, Georgia, I
[00:19:20] Tim: Oh, okay. That's, that's where the falcons are headquartered. That's where the training camp
[00:19:24] Ben: Noyce toy.and it is a truck parts manufacturing company. I think it's, I think it's like technically a secondary market for truck parts relating to truck engines.
[00:19:37] Ben: I know nothing about cars. I certainly know less about trucks and, and manufacturing. Basically everything I know about manufacturing, I learned from. Office, which is very, very little about manufacturing. so
[00:19:51] Adam: It's all, it's all pranks, right? You just prank each other.
[00:19:55] Ben: so I've, I, I've been there since the beginning of February. And, for those who are listening later, that is now the beginning of May. So I've actually been there a couple of months and I've been a little hesitant to talk about it because going into December of last year, as Envision was winding down and I was starting to think about my future, I, I like really spiraled into a dark place.
[00:20:18] Ben: And I was, I started getting very depressive and I started having some panic attacks, panic attacks. And, I, I didn't wanna talk about this job 'cause frankly, I didn't know if I could, like, I didn't know if I would last. Like, I, I don't know. I just, I didn't know if I had an inmate to be working again. And, you know, so far so good.
[00:20:37] Ben: I've been feeling a lot more positive. I've been feeling a lot more. Focused and motivated, and I've got back into, to my writing, decently enough. I still have yet to start promoting the show again. That's my bad, but I'm getting there. Yeah. Yeah. I'll get there. I haven't made a headliner, little blurby video thing in quite a while, but I'll get back.
[00:20:58] Ben: You know, it's baby steps, baby steps. But, one of the things that's really fascinating to me about this job is that I'm still doing web stuff. That, that hasn't changed, but the subject matter is radically different than anything that I've worked on before. Here to, for everything that I have dealt with has been mostly imaginary.
[00:21:20] Ben: It's all just records in a database. There's no real world corresponding. Value that has to be tracked or measured, you know, user clicks and analytics like that kind of stuff. But for the most part, everything else has been made up. if a data record gets corrupted, like you can just programmatically fix it and, and continue on.
[00:21:40] Tim: It's like crypto.
[00:21:41] Ben: It's exactly, in, in
[00:21:45] Adam: So it's like you're working on NFTs, but in the real world.
[00:21:50] Ben: it's like a 3D printed save icon.in this world it's manufacturing, so there's actual machines, and those machines produce actual goods, and those actual goods have to be stored on shelves and they have to be stored in shelves in particular areas, and they have to be shipped out to different warehouses.
[00:22:09] Ben: And it's, it's just very physical. And what's so exciting to me about this, and it's not like I'm gonna go start manufacturing stuff with my hands, but it's such a, it's such a messy world. Meaning, let's say you have to, they have to manufacture a hundred parts. And those a hundred parts need some amount of raw materials.
[00:22:31] Ben: Like literally as the guys are bringing the raw materials from the inventory shelves over to the machines, things can break or they can drop something and it can bend and, and get dented. And then suddenly they don't have the things that they thought they had in inventory and they have to go manufacture some new stuff as precursors to other parts.
[00:22:49] Ben: And it's, there's just all of this messiness. Things can break, things can get lost in the mail, and now you have to have a system that is resilient to the messiness of life. It's not just race conditions, between machines talking or like what happens if a network blips and I have to retry a task, which is also, you know, messy and full of headache.
[00:23:10] Ben: But this is like all of that headache and then layered on top of the messiness and the headache of the real world. And so I just think that there's gonna be a.
[00:23:18] Tim: dumb humans.
[00:23:19] Ben: Yeah, yeah. Su super dumb humans. Obviously none of the ones that work at the company, but like, you know, peripherally.
[00:23:27] Adam: Just the
[00:23:28] Ben: Yeah. So
[00:23:30] Carol: drivers.
[00:23:32] Ben: I'm just, I'm just kind of excited to come up against those real world challenges and have to come up with ways that it's like you, you have to almost not over architect things in certain ways to make them a little bit more flexible and not like in a resilience flexibility, but in like a, like if I put my database hat on, I think to myself, oh, if someone enters a, a value into this field, it has to correspond as a foreign key constraint to this other table.
[00:24:00] Ben: And then you talk to people on the manufacturing floor and they're like, oh no, sometimes we just have to put random annotations in this field based on, on, like something that happened on the floor. And you'll never know about that until it happens. And you're like, well, that's it. Like, life's messy. I'm just gonna have to let you do that.
[00:24:14] Ben: That's fine. So I, I don't know. It's just, I think it's, it's gonna be very frustrating. It's also been very emotionally challenging for me because I've been working, I was working in vision for like 15 years, or coming up on 15 years. I was very much a subject matter expert in the topic of the company. I knew almost everything about the software itself.
[00:24:39] Ben: I had written a lot of it. I knew everything about the framework that was used to build it, both the front end and the back end. And now I'm learning a variety of new technologies. I mean, it's still, Lucy, CFML right now. And, and, and SQL stuff, Microsoft sql, not Postgres apologies,
[00:24:58] Tim: Stop it.
[00:24:59] Ben: but,
[00:25:00] Adam: Get out.
[00:25:00] Ben: but it's like, I, it it's been very challenging to go from knowing, let's say roughly everything as a rounding error to knowing roughly nothing as a rounding error.
[00:25:10] Ben: And, It's just a very, very different place to be and I, I'm, I'm just trying to keep faith that I will learn it.
[00:25:18] Adam: it's emotional for
[00:25:19] Ben: very emotional.
[00:25:21] Carol: and then not to, not to, I don't know. Not appreciate what you're saying. Just imagine if you had to learn the new industry and the new language on top of
[00:25:31] Ben: Yeah.
[00:25:32] Carol: so at
[00:25:32] Ben: I'm very
[00:25:33] Carol: in and you're able to read the code and you can understand by reading it like what's trying to like what it's trying to accomplish.
[00:25:40] Carol: It's not, oh, I don't even know what this syntax does here. Why does this language have double curly brackets at the end of something like this? Makes no sense to me and. Then like figuring it all out. So at least you've got one foot in where you're like, okay, I can breathe here and learn the rest.
[00:26:00] Ben: Yeah. And I'll tell you, so we're using a, a, a web framework that I've never used before called CF Wheels.
[00:26:06] Ben: It's, It's, based on. It's a cold fusion framework, but it's based on Ruby on Rails. I think it's kind of a port of a lot of those philosophies.
[00:26:15] Carol: know that.
[00:26:15] Tim: Yeah, we know that. So I didn't The Isn't the guy who hired you, isn't he the maintainer of
[00:26:20] Ben: Yes. So Peter Mi, my boss is the, the current maintainer, the lead maintainer on wheels. so it, I I I will say that having a deep understanding of cold fusion has at least literally every time I run up to something and I'm like, how does this work? And I've already filed like five tickets with the Wheels framework repository saying Stuff doesn't work, or it would be great to have it this way.
[00:26:42] Ben: I can, I literally just go into the source code and I'm putting in dump statements of call stacks and trying to figure out what's calling what. And like, I, I feel confident enough at the language level to be able to go in and do that and, and trace argument passing down through a whole bunch of different methods to figure out, oh, okay, I see once you go seven method calls down, here's where the misunderstanding was between how I thought it worked and how the framework handles it.
[00:27:06] Ben: so yeah, it's, that is very much a saving grace, but, I, I don't know. It's just, it's wild.
[00:27:13] No Designers
[00:27:14] Ben: And also it's, we don't have any designers
[00:27:16] Carol: Ooh.
[00:27:16] Ben: and, and, and like Envision was all about design. That
[00:27:19] Tim: Yeah, it was a design company.
[00:27:21] Ben: Yeah. So going from that where we have a lot of designers that had very, very strong opinions about what interfaces should look like to now, it's just like a figure it out and, you know, like, oh, if you don't know,
[00:27:36] Tim: please tell me you're not doing the design.
[00:27:38] Ben: well, so I'm looking, we're using a CSS bootstrap as our, as our kind of foundational thing.
[00:27:43] Ben: And then we have a, a, a theme that, that has been chosen before I got there on, on what the bootstrap theme should be. So there's a, that, that theme site has a whole bunch of examples. So it's, it's like a. It's like going down a buffet and you're like, I have a little of this, and a little of that. And like, then you jam 'em all together on your plate and you're like, well, that was a terrible idea.
[00:28:05] Ben: Let me put some of that back.
[00:28:08] Tim: That doesn't look appetizing.
[00:28:10] Ben: that's gonna make you sick. so it, it's just been fascinating and it's also been very, emotional is not the right word, but I'm trying to integrate myself into a new team, and that is, everybody has different personalities. I don't understand the team dynamic yet.
[00:28:30] Ben: And I don't mean that in a, in a negative way. It's more like, I'm just trying to understand what the expectation is from an interaction standpoint. I'm, I'm coming very much from a, let's call a startup world, even though the company was like 15 years old, where we're like, everybody lived on Slack and people were trading memes and you could just do slash giy and search for, for, for funny things to post.
[00:28:54] Ben: Like I tried to do slash GFI at work and that is not installed, and that like blew my mind. Like, how are y'all trading gifts? I don't get it.
[00:29:02] Carol: Like how do you tell someone Yes, without some type of gif? Like I, I don't know.
[00:29:07] Ben: Now I have to have the shut up and take my money gif saved on my computer.so, you know, it's just trying to understand the new culture and that's, and that's definitely, it's very different. You going from startup to this is very much rooted in the manufacturing world and, and you can imagine that's just a different mindset.
[00:29:25] Tim: Yeah.
[00:29:26] Carol: users of your software are internal, so it's something that the people in the company are using mostly.
[00:29:32] Ben: The, the project that I am working on, yes, it's gonna be used primarily by the manufacturing team to set up and plan all of their manufacturing processes, but there, there are parts of the web. Landscape at the company that are used by customers, which, and, and customers in this case I think are like other parts distributors.
[00:29:58] Ben: So we're like a distributor to other distributors.
[00:30:01] Adam: I can't, like, the more we talk about this, the more I'm envisioning, parts Unlimited. The company from
[00:30:07] Carol: the book?
[00:30:08] Adam: Yeah, like just you, you're talking about distributors and parts and I'm just like, don't, don't say it. Don't.
[00:30:16] Ben: No, it's really, it's actually cool. I, I, when I first started talking to Peter, I, I went and I looked at the website and they have YouTube videos of the factory floor and
[00:30:26] Carol: Ooh.
[00:30:27] Ben: it's so cool. I mean, it's all like robotic arms and high tech things and drills and I mean, it, it's like real,
[00:30:35] Carol: it on site.
[00:30:36] Ben: I, I will, I, yeah, I will go down to Georgia at some point and
[00:30:40] Tim: Ooh,
[00:30:40] Ben: and meet the team, preferably at the height of.
[00:30:44] Tim: Yeah, genius
[00:30:45] Carol: wouldn't do that
[00:30:47] Tim: Come Labor Day weekend, I'll take you to Dragoncon
[00:30:49] Ben: Is Labor Day? Is that the before summer or
[00:30:52] Tim: First, first, Monday of September.
[00:30:54] Ben: Ah, nice. All right. ISN in fall,
[00:30:57] Ben: so,
[00:30:58] Tim: not in
[00:30:58] Ben: yeah.
[00:30:59] Carol: Mm.
[00:31:00] Tim: not in Georgia.
[00:31:02] Adam: Well, so I have two questions for you, Ben. you had mentioned your team. How many people are on your team?
[00:31:07] Ben: it's very small. So I think in total, the IT group, which is, which is like all of the computer programmer people and the kind of machine programmer people, I think that's only like 12 or 15 people in total. as far as the web team,
[00:31:29] Adam: Mm-hmm.
[00:31:29] Ben: I think there's like six or seven, but that's not even, that's not one team that's like.
[00:31:36] Adam: Right.
[00:31:37] Ben: two, two and a half teams actually. So the, the people that are, yeah, the people that are actually working on my project, it's, it's really like four people.
[00:31:49] Tim: Gotcha.
[00:31:51] Adam: So it sounds like you have the biggest of the, the web teams.
[00:31:53] Ben: It, it's like, it's like split. It's like split down the middle. But, so the other fascinating thing is, so the company PAI has been around for 50 years and in the seventies they started, they they used this system called Auto Power. And Auto Power is like a flat file database where What's that?
[00:32:16] Adam: controlled it with a Nintendo Power
[00:32:17] Adam: glove.
[00:32:19] Ben: And, and it's, and it's still what they use today for a lot of their data persistence. And it's, and it's totally fascinating. And, they, they have released A-J-D-B-C driver, so you can sort of talk to it as if it were a SQL database. But the thing is, is like you can't really do that if you want to call.
[00:32:38] Ben: It's all, it's all based on stored procedures. So you have to basically say, Hey, I want to access this quote unquote stored procedure, and this is the inputs that I'm giving you, and these are the outputs that I expect. But then behind the scenes, these auto power developers who, some of them have been working on this database technology for like the last 35 years,
[00:32:59] Carol: What.
[00:33:00] Ben: they have to go in and they actually make a file on their end that is the prob, like the procedural calls that actually power that stored procedure behind the scenes. And it's, I don't know, it's just fascinating. And it runs like 90% of their entire business.
[00:33:18] Tim: Wow.
[00:33:18] Carol: Oh wow.
[00:33:19] Ben: Yeah.
[00:33:20] Adam: So my other question, I ha Hey, I said I had two questions.
[00:33:24] Tim: fine.
[00:33:24] Carol: One at a time, Adam.
[00:33:27] Carol: I did, I did one. Now I'm gonna do my other one.you, you had mentioned, so you said Lucy, and, and Microsoft SQL Hiss Boo. wrong with Microsoft Sequel.
[00:33:39] Frontend
[00:33:39] Adam: But what else is there in the stack? Like do you guys have a front end framework or, or anything else? Interesting
[00:33:44] Tim: Yeah. Bootstrap.
[00:33:46] Ben: the, the, so yeah, bootstrap, but then, they have used HTMX, which I've, which I've talked a little bit about in previous episodes. Episodes. They have used that on other properties in their web ecosystem. And I actually just installed that into our project, like yesterday. and I did my first little type ahead, a little search input.
[00:34:07] Ben: So it was pretty exciting. Yeah. So I mean, I'm excited to learn that just 'cause it's like a, a little bit of a new shiny thing that is also kind of an old shiny thing.
[00:34:16] Adam: Mm-hmm.
[00:34:16] Ben: but other than that it's, it's, it's weird. It's, and I, and I don't mean this in a dismissive way, but it's a very strange mix of a lot of really high tech stuff and also very low
[00:34:32] Tim: Yeah.
[00:34:32] Ben: stuff.
[00:34:33] Ben: So it's, it's, it's, I mean, I don't, I don't think I'm saying anything that I shouldn't say, but basically they, they have their own data center internally to the manufacturing plant, and they have their own servers and they have all of this hypervisor stuff and they can spin machines up and spin machines down machines.
[00:34:50] Ben: In this case, I mean, like servers not, not like manufacturing
[00:34:53] Tim: on prem.
[00:34:54] Ben: Yeah. Like everything's on-prem and, you know, very high tech firewalls and all kinds of just, I like, like interesting networking stuff.
[00:35:05] Tim: Yep.
[00:35:06] Ben: And, and all you like Jenkins, pipelines and things are being pushed to machines automatically, but then at the same time, there's like no build process for the actual app itself.
[00:35:19] Ben: Like there's, there's like all the peripheral stuff, magic, but then like, if I wanted to say add some new JavaScript library, I'm literally just adding a new script tag to the layout that renders this application, which is, you know, so different than anything that I've done in the last 15 years where it's, you know, you do like an NPM install and it gets added to a package JSON and then it gets bundled into magic and split into modules and tree shuck and shaken and, and, and all that magic kind of stuff.
[00:35:48] Ben: So it's, I don't know, it's just this like bizarre mixture of kind of old, old, not older, like just less complicated web built on top of a actually very complicated deployment pipeline.
[00:36:04] Adam: Is the HDMX stuff, like kind of as, as complex as the front end gets, or is there more like, I know you were doing angular apps before.
[00:36:14] Ben: I, I think HTMX is like as complicated as they've gotten in terms of a, of a build process. I think.
[00:36:23] Adam: Okay,
[00:36:23] Ben: not as, of, not, sorry. Build process isn't the right, but like as complicated as a front end framework, I think. I think there's like a, you know, some jQuery UI stuff and, and,
[00:36:32] Tim: Ancient.
[00:36:34] Ben: yeah. Yeah. So it's, but it's like, it's, it's kind of magical in that they're so focused on the business and they're like, if this doesn't have an impact on the bottom line, I think there's very much a, like, it's a distraction,
[00:36:51] Adam: right. Yeah. When your customers are internal, you don't need
[00:36:54] Tim: Mm-hmm.
[00:36:55] Adam: the, the new shiny doesn't, doesn't matter. Matter much.
[00:36:58] Tim: so I have a couple questions.
[00:37:00] Ben: Hit it.
[00:37:01] Adam: You get one?
[00:37:03] Carol: At a time.
[00:37:06] Humility
[00:37:06] Tim: So, so one, how many unit tests are they making you? Right.
[00:37:09] Ben: Well. Okay. So I was, I was thinking about actually bringing this up because I have not yet written a single task, but, but
[00:37:17] Adam: I was gonna say, in your whole life.
[00:37:19] Ben: so I, I said that we're, we're working on Wheels, CF Wheels is our, is our web frame, our backend web framework. And Peter has, we've been maintaining this project. I don't, you know, he's been doing, maintain it for a really long time, and he was telling me the whole test processing that they do on the wheel side, and it seems incredibly robust.
[00:37:40] Ben: They have this huge automatic pipeline that tests the wheels framework for aggression tests, unlike. Seven different versions of Adobe called Fusion and Lucy going back different versions and like on different platforms. And I think they have hundreds and hundreds of unit tests. And, every now and then I'll be in a conversation with him and he'll say something about like, oh yeah, you know, once we have some tests in place and we'll be able to figure out how we can make changes in our project, I'm just like, you know, like grabbing my collar, like, oh, this has hot in here.
[00:38:14] Ben: What's going on? So, I, it does, it does sound like eventually testing will be part of this project, but it has not yet happened.
[00:38:25] Tim: he's gonna
[00:38:25] Adam: that your answer for, for the interview question? You know, what's your biggest weakness?
[00:38:29] Tim: my biggest weakness is my code is so good. It doesn't need tests. Is what was what he said. Yeah.
[00:38:36] Ben: My tests run faster than anyone else's tests,
[00:38:38] Tim: Exactly.
[00:38:40] Carol: That's true.
[00:38:41] Tim: And I forgot my second question.
[00:38:43] Adam: You're welcome.
[00:38:45] Ben: It's, I don't know. It's just, it's, it's like I've been on the other side of new people coming into a team and I've been on the other side of someone coming in and being like, oh, all of your stuff is stupid. Let me just rewrite everything and do it my way.
[00:39:01] Tim: Let me poo on everything.
[00:39:02] Ben: Yeah. So it's like every time I see something, not that it, not, not that I see anything that is bad, but it's just not how I have done things traditionally.
[00:39:12] Ben: I'm, I really have to practice a lot of constraint and, and not just like randomly do stuff I keep talking about at work, trying to do things, quote unquote the wheels way, and this whole concept of cutting with the grain or cutting against the grain, that's a woodworking terminology. I believe
[00:39:29] Adam: never heard that before. Yeah.
[00:39:32] Ben: So, you know, it's like, I don't wanna. I wanna be able to learn the technology to a point where I have a better instinct on whether or not I want to do something different, because it's just what I'm more familiar with or if I wanna do something different, because literally I feel like doing it the way that they've been doing it is actually counterproductive or could be just improved upon.
[00:39:53] Ben: And, but I wanna come to that conversation with real reasoning and, yeah. Yeah. Like, and not just, you know, when I do it this way, it's better.
[00:40:03] Tim: I been to de how I would do it,
[00:40:07] Ben: I invented the piano. What is, see a, I invented the piano neck kitty. No. Ah, I can't remember the, it's a Zoolander reference.
[00:40:16] Adam: Oh, is that from the
[00:40:17] Tim: the P,
[00:40:18] Adam: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The, oh, that's from,
[00:40:20] Ben: Zoolander. Yeah. He goes, I, I invented the, what was it? Piano. Piano. Ah.
[00:40:25] Adam: Neck tie,
[00:40:26] Ben: Neck tie. My words are, it's like a tug twister. Anyway,So it, it's just interesting. It's all been very interesting, but I'm at a point now where I feel like I, I'm not just drinking from the fire hose. You know, I, I felt like I was drinking from like three fire hoses when I got there.
[00:40:40] Ben: Just, it's like all new domain terminology. They're saying all these new words and I don't know what they're referring to, and. You know, or like I'll have a notion of what that word means, and then they talk about what it means that it's totally not the thing that I thought it was. So I'm like, I'm learning all the new words.
[00:40:56] Ben: I'm learning what the departments mean. Like when they say accounts receivable, I've never worked at a company where we talked about accounts receivable, so I don't have a instinct for what those things mean and accounts payable. And, and, and it, to me, I didn't even know that those were two different things.
[00:41:11] Ben: Accounts receivable and accounts payable or like, that those would be different departments. That doesn't even make
[00:41:15] Tim: I envision went out of business. You don't, you don't have accounts receivable. You're screwed.
[00:41:22] Ben: And you know, I'm, I've just, I'm, I'm getting to a point now where I feel like I can be successful as a productive member of the team. I still have a million questions and I'm by far the most talkative person on every single call that I get on. 'cause I'm just constantly like, what does that mean? How does this work?
[00:41:41] Ben: What are these edge cases? And I have to caveat everything. I, you know, I'm trying to be extremely humble with all of the things that I do because I'm, I'm trying to get the work done and I'm just making a lot of executive decisions as I do it. It's not like we have this real robust reporting structure where I can go and talk to people that are in the know all the time.
[00:42:01] Ben: So I'll say, Hey, look, this is the thing that I did. It's not based on anything in particular. It was just a choice that I made. If anybody has an issue with it, you know, please let me know, because nothing I'm saying is the truth. It's just the thing that I chose to do, and if there's a reason I should do it differently, it's not personal, just let me know.
[00:42:21] Ben: And I feel like I have to say that on every call because I'm just trying to get my work done. And I, and I, and I always, I've, over the last 10 years, I've really developed the muscle of airing on the side of action. So if I get to something and I'm not exactly what I'm supposed, sure. What direction I should go, I'll just pick a direction that feels right and then I assume I can fix it later if it's not the right direction.
[00:42:44] Ben: But, you know, I wanna make sure that everyone knows that that's the plan, and that's not me just being a jerk as, as clearly I have big jerk energy.
[00:42:53] Carol: I
[00:42:54] Tim: An old lady
[00:42:55] Ben: Yeah.
[00:42:56] Tim: you got. How about you, Carol? Got questions?
[00:42:59] Carol: well, no. I was just gonna make a comment.
[00:43:00] The Acronym Struggle
[00:43:00] Carol: One of the hardest things I have, like transitioning jobs, 'cause you know you guys, I do it like every few years, right? It's the acronyms, it's people have acronyms for everything they do. So much. So today my boss asked me, or he made a statement, he goes, I guess we're gonna have to get familiar, real familiar with GHA.
[00:43:18] Carol: I was like G-H-A-G-H-A-I was like, government, housing authority. what could GHA stand for? So finally I just say GHA question mark, and he says, GitHub actions. I was like, thank God. It's finally something I actually know about and have been putting a lot of energy into. I'm like, check Mark got that one right.
[00:43:37] Carol: But I'm like, these acronyms, they kill me. They kill me.
[00:43:40] Ben: Yeah, they kept talking about pos and I kept thinking, so I kept thinking it was purchase orders and it turned out that there's actually two different pos of the company. There's purchase orders and then there's production orders, and it's like different steps in a, in a processing pipeline. But I even after they told me that I couldn't keep them straight in my head, so they would, they kept talking about pos and I'd have to like, it must be, this is how I always imagine when English is not your first language and you're talking to people in English, and I just imagine you're having two conversations, like you're having the conversation outside your head and then inside your head you're having the translated from English back into your native language conversation.
[00:44:21] Ben: I don't know if that's actually how it works. I only speak one language, unfortunately, but exactly. Please. But that's, that's what it's like for me. It's like I'm constantly trying to translate what they're saying into this very rudimentary mental model that I have in my head, and then form English thoughts and then spew them back out in a way that says, is this what you just said to me?
[00:44:44] Ben: And, sometimes I'm right and I'm every day I'm a little bit more Right. Which is exciting.
[00:44:48] Humility in Leadership
[00:44:48] Tim: I'll, I'll say Ben. I'm, I'm impressed with what you said about how you're coming into this, like, into leading with humility, right? Because it's, it's hard to come into a group. They're already established. You're the new guy. But I mean, chances are they're all working. If they're working in CFML, they know who you are, right? You're
[00:45:06] Ben: I, I, I think like one of them does.
[00:45:09] Tim: Okay, well, okay, but I'm pretty sure like your boss is like, Hey, we're bringing in this new guy. You know, full disclosure, I tried to hire Ben as well, and, and it just didn't work out. But, you know, people were super excited. I was like, Hey, we get Ben Nadel. And everybody's like, oh man, that'd be awesome.
[00:45:27] Tim: And, but anyway, when you come into a group, like you don't want to throw off the dynamic at the same time you wanna learn. And it's like, but imagine like, so in my new role, I'm coming in as their boss,
[00:45:38] Ben: yeah, that's, that's even bigger pressure.
[00:45:41] Tim: That's even bigger. So I'm doing the same thing. I'm just quiet meetings. I just listen. I. Because I'm trying to figure out who, who are the players here?
[00:45:48] Tim: What's their, I mean, everyone seems to have their own thing, right? Like, there's some people like security, security, security, and they're banging a drum and others like, oh, we, we can't ever measure anything and we, we will never know the time, you know, we'll do, or like, you know, quality, you know, just trying to figure out who the players are.
[00:46:05] Tim: 'cause I've been away from that side of the company for so long that I don't know who's who. And so I don't wanna step on any landmines like I used to in my, in my younger days, I would just come in with hand grenades, just boom, boom, boom. Here's what we're doing.
[00:46:18] Carol: Clean up the mess after.
[00:46:20] Tim: Yeah. Clean up the mess after everybody's like, you're such an arrogant jerk.
[00:46:23] Tim: And so now with, with, with wisdom and gray hairs, I'll just come in and go. Yeah. Okay. So I'll just see what you guys got going on here. You know, what's, you know, I haven't shaken any trees yet. I will, I'm, I'm going to
[00:46:35] Tim: go to grenades or I don't lead to grenades, but grenades are in my pocket.
[00:46:40] Tim: But, but I do appreciate that you said that, 'cause that that is true. You, you wanna, 'cause a lot of times you, you can, can, step on a trap that you, you should have seen. So it's good you're doing that Ben.
[00:46:51] Ben: yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm trying and I'm, I, I push back where I feel like I can be test the waters a little bit.you know, like, it's like, oh, so, so one thing that this framework does, the WHEELS framework, which I think a number of frameworks do, is they, they sometimes like to separate out the endpoints for rendering a form and then processing the form is a different endpoint.
[00:47:19] Ben: So you might have a route that is rendering the new, like the new entity form, but then when it posts back, it posts to a creation endpoint. And then if that. Validation fails, it will just re-render the new form, but kind of at a different route. and like we even envisioned, we had used that pattern with framework one a a couple of times, and, I had always just found it very frustrating to have two different places that sort of handled the same cohesive workflow.
[00:47:47] Adam: Mm-hmm.
[00:47:48] Ben: And, I'm like, I, what I really want is to just not do that anymore. And I, and I, and I wanna just merge these ideas back together and, but like, I feel like I'm not at a place where I can push back against that with, with any real strength yet. But, I, I've been slowly testing the waters
[00:48:05] Adam: I'm taking notes
[00:48:06] Ben: they'll, they'll bend to my will eventually. So, but anyway, it's, it's been a journey.
[00:48:12] Dealing with Dark Moments
[00:48:12] Tim: I'm, I, I still have dark moments, you know, I, I talked about in December, I kind of spiraled into a dark place. I. I still have dark moments where I'm like, not yet out of this. I think it's kind of almost like a midlife crisis. How long do you think you're gonna live?
[00:48:29] Ben: now times two, I guess.
[00:48:33] Tim: I know you sure.
[00:48:35] Tim: And, I, I, I still have mornings where I wake up and I have this nondescript sense of dread. Like, I just don't know what I'm gonna do with my day. And like, I have work to do. It's not like I don't have work to do, but it's just this, this nondescript like sense of angst and darkness. America in 2025 right now.
[00:48:59] Ben: I, I mean, honestly, that is a, that is like a big part of it for me.
[00:49:03] Ben: I, I, like, I've, I've, over the last few years, I've just become more anxious, period.and then with the company ending, I think, I think like a bunch of things triggered and started to spiral together. And then like, so I was, that was just terrible. But, I'm just feeling better. I'm not a hundred percent, but I'm feeling better and I'm happy to be working and paying my mortgages also.
[00:49:25] Ben: You know, that's double
[00:49:26] Carol: It's a win, right?
[00:49:28] Tim: Being, being busy is not necessarily the best coping mechanism in the world, but it is a good one.
[00:49:34] Ben: yeah,
[00:49:34] Carol: In routine, like you're a, you're a creature of habit, so getting into a routine will definitely
[00:49:40] Ben: I'm so much
[00:49:41] Carol: your
[00:49:41] Ben: of habit so much, and I'm starting to feel more creative again. I, I think when I was feeling very depressive, I, I just felt like my brain was empty. I would literally sit at the dinner table with the misses and we'd be having dinner and I would just apologize. So like, I'm sorry, I just have nothing to talk about.
[00:49:59] Ben: Like, I literally have nothing in my head. I just feel empty and drained. And I'm just gonna sit here quietly 'cause I have nothing to say and like, like it's a really crappy feeling to have that feeling, but it's like, you know, it comes and it goes and I've, and I'm past that now. I have, you know, stuff to say.
[00:50:17] Tim: I, I hate to put you on the spot here, Carol, but as our, you know, female. Counterpart here on the show. When a, when a man tells you that he absolutely is not thinking about anything, do you ever really believe him
[00:50:29] Carol: Yeah. Yeah, so, well, you can't ask me as a woman because I think like a man in
[00:50:34] Carol: most situations. So like
[00:50:36] Adam: I thought you were gonna say it was like a HIPAA violation or something.
[00:50:39] Carol: No. No, but I mean, I did the exact same thing. Like I will sit there, I'll just be like, I have nothing to say. Like I don't wanna look at my phone, I don't wanna do anything. If the dog cries like I react to it, like, okay, she needs to go out.
[00:50:52] Carol: That's a thought. But I can sit there with nothing and it's bad like now because we've had so much going on, right? Like with family and work and Army and all these things, right? So there've been multiple nights. We've done the same thing, Ben, where we sit there and go. Sorry, I am just going to eat and not say much.
[00:51:10] Carol: It's just nice to be able to like look at you.
[00:51:13] Ben: Yeah.
[00:51:14] Adam: Sometimes just being able to sit next to somebody is, is good comfort and there's nothing wrong with that.
[00:51:18] Ben: Yeah, a hundred percent.
[00:51:19] Tim: Tell that to my, my girls.
[00:51:22] Carol: that they're like, you have to be thinking,
[00:51:25] Tim: Nope, I'm not.
[00:51:29] Ben: Oh man.
[00:51:30] Carol: I'm thinking that you're annoying me now.
[00:51:32] Tim: Yeah, exactly.
[00:51:33] Carol: that's me.
[00:51:36] Tim: Oh,
[00:51:37] Remote Work Dynamics
[00:51:37] Adam: Ben, how much of this new team that you're on is, is remote? Because I know you said it's a manufacturing company, so I imagine, you know, most of the people that work at the company that are not it are gotta be onsite, right?
[00:51:49] Ben: yeah. I mean, I think, I think the company has like four or 500 employees, and the vast, vast majority of them are on site in various warehouses and, distribution plants and stuff. I mean, I think there's one main manufacturing plant, but then they have, I think, warehouses around the globe that they have to ship things to and then distribute from.
[00:52:10] Ben: so most people are on site. I think even the, I think what I've heard is that even pre covid, most of the technology people were also on site.so the, the somewhat distributed nature of this relatively small team, I think is also a new thing. But, it's, it's, it's interesting. It's interesting.
[00:52:36] Tim: So I remember the second question I was gonna ask because Carol told me to, I did it out of sequence. Thank you. so. Since Sounds like the con, mostly the consumers of the software you're working on are internal to the company, so I would imagine you probably don't, is it not public facing? I mean, is it just like kind of inside the factory so you don't necessarily have to worry too much about security.
[00:52:59] Ben: it's, you, I think you'll, the people who use this thing will actually have to both be behind the firewall and have to go through a, two factor authentication, single workflow. So it's, it's,
[00:53:15] Tim: not like you're hardening it against the world. You're, you're hardening against your employees.
[00:53:20] Ben: I wanna say yes, but it's, even the things that I'm writing have only ever gone to a staging server. It hasn't even gone to what. Even internally, what would be considered production yet. But I, you know, I think that's, that, that those are questions that I'll be able to answer better at a later time.
[00:53:36] Tim: Gotcha. Well, cool.
[00:53:38] Ben: Yeah, it, it, it's fun. It's very new. It's, it's very challenging in different ways, you know, being new, learning new domains, learning new technologies in some respects. So it's a lot, but it's fun and it's, it's keeping my brain busy and sharp,
[00:53:58] Adam: On, on that, pretty sour note. I dunno, just, it's not even a negative con connotation, but the, just the, the pitch direction and everything just seems like we're, we're kind of downhill here. It sounds kind of depressing. But wait, you know, it's just a normal
[00:54:13] Tim: Wait till the after show. We'll, we'll punch it up. We'll punch it up.
[00:54:16] Adam: anyway, why don't we, why don't we call it a show there?
[00:54:19] Patreon
[00:54:19] Adam: So this episode of Working Code is brought to you by Old Lady Energy, uh,
[00:54:23] Carol: And not mine.
[00:54:27] Adam: and listeners like you. If you're enjoying the show and you wanna make sure that we can keep putting more of whatever this is out into the universe, then you should consider supporting us on Patreon. Our patrons cover our recording, editing, and transcription costs, and we couldn't do this every week without them.
[00:54:39] Adam: Special thanks of course to our top patrons, Monte and Giancarlo. You guys rock.
[00:54:44] Thanks For Listening!
[00:54:44] Adam: we are going to go record the after show, which is our little bonus for our patrons. we are gonna roll the outro and then we just keep talking for however long we like. Sometimes it's on topic, sometimes it's off topic.
[00:54:54] Adam: A couple of things that we're gonna talk about today. Apparently, max, wrote some, Tim's son, max, I should say, wrote some, some unit tests. So that's a good thing. we're gonna dig into that a little bit. I got a
[00:55:05] Ben: does
[00:55:05] Adam: patron RSS, like podcast feed update for you guys. and as I promised, I will, I'll get into my interesting and maybe slightly like twitchy.
[00:55:16] Adam: Some people might not wanna hear it, kind of gross, option for my eye. so yeah, and we got a couple other things we'll get into.
[00:55:22] Tim: Does it, does it involve those like ball washers at the golf course where they, because I really wanna hear about that.
[00:55:30] Adam: just have to become a page for the show so you can find out Tim.
[00:55:33] Adam: alright, well then, let's see. I'm gonna give you some homework. Come join our Discord. We, we've had several people join Discord this week. and it's been.
[00:55:40] Tim: Germany.
[00:55:41] Adam: Yeah, it's been cool to have some, some fresh blood in there. It's a good opportunity to use my welcome to the Party Pal gif.
[00:55:47] Adam: Um,so if you'd like to do that, you can go to workingcode.dev/Discord. It's totally free and open it public and we'd love to have you.that's gonna do it for us this week. We'll catch you again next week. Until then,
[00:56:00] Tim: Remember, you passed all our unit tests and your heart matters.
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