Hey, folks, welcome to another episode of JavaScript Jabber. This week, on your panel, you have Steve.
Edwards Yo from a cold and rainy Oregon. How's it going.
I'm Charles Maxwood from Top End Devs. It's cold here too.
Oh man. Well, last week I was on a work trip down in two for one trip where I stay at my parents and then a bunch of people that I work with live in Tucson. I swear there and it was oh so nice. It was like mid eighties and sunny and clear, and of course you have to dress for inside the conference room because everything's over air conditioned, but oh so nice, sunny and clear. And then I came back at the cold and rainy.
And uh yeah, yeah. I mean I'm training for a marathon. I'm gonna go run the Phoenix Marathon in December.
Oh really yeah, and.
It's it's so coolie. I got some heated gloves finally, but I'm kind of curious to see what the weather will be like down there in December.
Oh it'll be nice, yeah, I know, it cold. This is one of the last fur times of the year.
Yeah. Yeah, I'm kind of counting on it being sixties. Be nice.
So you haven't actually run a marathon yet, right? Is this the first one you're gonna run?
I ran the Saint George Marathon in twenty nineteen.
So oh okay, so do you have there's reason I'm asking this. Do you have one of those twenty six point two stickers on your vehicle or anything?
You know that's on my truck? I do? Yeah.
Say the sticker that I have on my truck and on my water bottle says zero point zero. I don't run, so I'm sure the antithesis of the runner. I leave holes in the pavement when I run, So that's why not exactly what you call light footed?
Yeah, I go, I go run by the way, folks, we're just going to be catching up. We do have a few topics we're going to talk through the related to the JavaScript, but we're just catching up for a minute. Yeah, I go running to My father in law is always like, well is someone chasing you? Well?
What's the Bible verse? Was it the evil? The evil? Evil ones flea though nobody pursues, you know, So that's my excuse for not running.
Oh there you go, it's.
The person property.
Yeah, He's like, why why would you run because it feels good. Well, I've never feel good when I run.
Yeah, I mean neither, I mean neither.
But yeah. The other thing is is that my dad, he's he's been gone for what like eight years now, and he had all these health problems and I just don't want to go through what he went through. So, oh, just for my clack of exercise, you mean, well, he had some other stuff going on. He's gotten a car accident when I was twelve, and he developed fibromyalgia oof from that, and that was pretty rough on him. Really.
I always thought that was just a genetic condition. I didn't realize you could get it like that.
My understanding of his situation is that most people who have it, yeah, it's a geneticition, so they'll just develop it, you know, in their teens, and they'll just live with it for the rest of their lives. Sure, apparently there are a group of people that can develop it if your body goes through a certain type and a certain amount of trauma. Hm hmm.
Interesting.
Yeah, this lady t boned his car and they basically had to peel the car off him. And yeah, yeah, it was interesting. I know exactly what night it was because my mom was all dressed up. They were going to go out for Valentine's Day. That was twelve. Sorry'll tell you what day and what year. But because she looks at me and goes watch the kids. Right as soon as the hospital called, said he was in the hospital all right, Because I'm the oldest of ten kids
at the time, there weren't ten of us. But yeah, anyway, so I basically went and laid down in my parents' bed, and my mom woke me up when she got home and said to my bed in that way, if anyone came looking for mom, they'd find me. Anyway. But yeah, and then he had a hip surgery that went bad, and they the doctor, so they were replacing his hip, and when they were putting the ball or socket, which everyone goes on your leg bone back on, the way that they do that is they wedge it into your bone.
And when the doctor wedged it in, he split the bone. And so my dad had nerve nerve damage in his left leg, and so he basically would half drag his left leg and so he just wasn't active because it hurt. And it also hurt and so.
Anyway, yeah, yeah, I had a friend that had fiber mialgia from church, and the way she described it to us one time was, if you think about having a rubber band a sort of tied it on your finger, that pain is like that through your whole body and just never stops.
Yep, yeah, yeah it was. Yeah, he was in chronic pain. So anyway, it's much more common in women, apparently byber mil ja.
But okay, but I don't know.
Yeah, anyway, so yeah, so I just twenty nineteen, I just decided. I was like, I'm not I'm not going to go through that and then, you know, go through all the health issues and I kind of let things go for a while, but I realized that I was I was heading down that road. So I shaped up earlier this year and I've been running and eat and right I've lost about fifteen pounds feeling pretty darn good.
So yeah, anyway, yeah, I'm to the point now where if I don't work out, I feel like a slug.
Yeah.
I did my prossit probably what four or five times a week, and play basketball one day a week, and oh, there you go and do that stuff. I saw one of the funniest memes the other day on Instagram. It was some Crossfoait account. It shows this picture of us, just this big huge obe lady sitting there, and then the caption is what I feel like when I miss one day of workout.
Uh huh.
Here is like, oh my gosh, I missed today. I'm gonna gain. I'm gonna you know, no, it's okay.
Yeah. Yeah. The other thing I've been doing here, let me pull it up on my phone, because I've been doing a program called seventy five Hard. I've done it before, so you may have heard. Yeah, I remember you talking about it, and so you take a picture every day. I'll just hold my phone up to the camera and it scott anyway. That's why you see pictures of my belly. I'm here, but you can see where I'm at on this if it'll show.
The numbers seventy two.
Huh yeah, I'm on day seventy three. So I finish on Friday and then oh now my camera's out of focus. That's super fun. So yeah, so I've been doing that. And now when you work out twice a day and read a book every day and drink a gallon of water every day, and I've been feeling pretty good.
So that's what I need to do. Get better at a springle I drink a good amount of water, not a gallon a day.
Yeah.
I remember reading an article going down another rabbit hole. I think it was on Hacker News or somewhere where a lady talked about how she had started drinking a gallon of water per day and and how you know, it took a while to get used to but now so used to it. And she uses like, you know, flavorings and stuff in water, which to me can make a big difference. But she said, just the benefits that she noticed in terms of flexibility, in terms of her skin,
in terms of so many different things. It really made a big difference. And so yeah, I have my electrolyzed that make my water taste a little better.
Yeah, so seventy five hard you get quite a gallon. You can't add anything to the water. But yeah, so anyway, it's it's pretty good. Yeah, I've been losing weight. I've been feeling pretty good. My clothes fit different, so that's always a nice thing.
Is when your pants aren't so tight, right, you don't have to go buy new pants.
Well, my church pants, I basically I push I push all the loose fabric to the back and I have three belt loops that are all right next to each other on the back.
So anyway, so in front of looks great. On the back, Hey, you got some little loose waisted Yeah.
I needed to just go take them in, get it taken in because where I got my suit, because I just wear a suit for church, they do free alterations for life when you buy from them, so I just need to take it in and say, please don't fit anymore. Anyway, let's talk about JavaScript and market stuff here for a minute, and I don't know how far down the list we're going to get. I mean, one of the things that I wanted to talk through. And it sounds like you've
experienced some stuff with this, and I definitely have. I've also been talking to people out there in the market, and it seems like there are a lot of folks that are looking for work right now, and the job market's a little bit weird. I think AI is kind of put some uncertainty out there. I don't know, what are you see in and then I can kind of talk about some of the people.
I'm so I just started the job where I'm at in mid June, and I started where I'm at in March, so I had probably been looking for a year before I landed this one. And were you out of work before or no? No, no, no, no, I was never out of work. I was just wanting to get.
At you situation. Gotcha? Oh yeah.
I heard a statistic one time that said that something like sixty nine percent of people that change jobs do so because of their boss. And I followed that sixty nine percent. So anyway, I look for.
You laugh because I've been there.
I have.
I've so been there where it's like, okay, I can't take any more of this, and yeah, if it's not my boss, it's because he tolerates something from somebody else.
Yeah. Well I've been let go. I've been you know when I hear about, you know, people getting laid off for bedroom employe or whatever I'm taking. You know, I've had den camp three times because of financial issues, you know, whether it's rounds of layoffs and entire office getting let go. That was me last type of stuff. Yeah, I've had that happen more time. You know, you just get up and go find something else. But anyway, so my experiences this time around was.
It just sucks.
I don't know, you know, if it's just AI filtering things out. But I guess the thing that really bugged me was, you know, employers will talk about applicants who will you know, just not communicate that will go to you. And I had that case. There was probably twenty twenty one. I want to say twenty twenty one. I was trying to hire a couple of Larevelle and View developers where
I was at, and I give an example. We had this guy and this happened more than once, where we really liked him and we wanted to give him an offer, and we did continue upon references. And so this one particular guy we liked and he gave us some references, but they were it had been a few years since he had actually worked with these people and so and they were fine, you know, what they had to say
was fine. And we said, well, okay, do you have something like from your last job or something more recent?
Nothing.
He completely ghosted us. My boss, myself, nobody can go with me to drop off phase of the earth, which told me maybe there's something more recent. He wanted to hide, and we had other people that you know, would just drop away so all that to say, come around this time. I'm on the other side of the of the situation where I'm the one that's deploying. And I had companies
that would ghost me. Literally They would say, you know, so you always it seems like you always go through the screening interview with the HR type of person, right, and they're going to ask you some sort of general questions and then if you know that, if you answer their questions well enough, then you'll move on. They say, okay, y, that's great, Okay, We're going to schedule with tech person.
And sometimes that would happen, you know. I had one particular one, probably one of the better situations I had, was a particular company and they were looking for a Laravel PHP type developer, and I went through like the second round with their senior, their manager tech engineering manager.
I can't remember his exact position anyway, and we went through a lot of technical stuff and he was checking my knowledge on basic development principles and PHP and that kind of stuff, and iventually got the email says, I think we decided to move on. So I wrote him and I said, I said, hey, just had curiosity always looking for feedback. Was it, this and this, you know that wasn't able to answer, and he said he came back and says, hey, thanks for getting back to me.
I appreciate that. I says, yeah, we're looking for some of that as more and more sort of larger knowledge and engineering principles. And there was a specific book that he referenced, classic development books that I went and got and I'm already forgetting design Patterns by the Gang of Four. Yeah, yeah, And I went and boughted after that, you know, to familiar eyes with myself. At the next time.
He was great.
But I had other people where they would go through the first interview, Yeah, we're gonna you know, interview, and we wanted to go onto the second interview, and that was it. Never heard from them again. And I would look out where they had posted the job and they still had it open, and just for grans, I would just for grans, I would apply again and never heard from anybody. That happened two or three times where they say one thing, but then they don't even bother to communicate. Hey, sorry,
we decided to move on. We found a better applicant. Whatever, you know, that's fine, that happens. I've been on that side, I get it, but at least communicate, don't just ghost. Well, that happened to me. That happened to me more times than I wanted to count, where it's just they say one thing and then they just drop off and can't even have the courtesy to say, hey, yeah, we moved on.
Yeah.
And then the best though was I interviewed with the company that was based here in the Portland area and it was a La Belle PHP and I think some jobs for I forget the details, but so I went through and interviewed with a technical person and all the feedback was great, yeah, you know you got this and this next, we need to do some interview with that and nothing. So like two or three weeks later, you know, I'll wait and wait and then I'll follow hey, just
you know, checking up, see what's going on. You had indicated this, haven't heard anything. And he finally got back to me and was like, oh, yeah, we decided the jobs on hold. We're not going to hire for it money issues. So I don't remember what he said. I was like, oh, okay, yeah, I get that. That's fine. So then a month later, two or three weeks later,
I found a position. It was for a recruiter and you know head hunter type of guy recruiter, and he was hiring for this same position at the same company. And the listing was the way it was listening, didn't list the same company, but by reading it I could tell this sounded really familiar. So just for grins, I set up an appointment and I said, hey, see he
tells me about it. And I said, you know, I just interviewed for them, and they told me that they weren't hiring for the position, that they put it on hold. He goes, huh, okay, well you know I just placed somebody there, so I'll you know, yeah, I'll see what I can find out and let you know, never heard from him again either.
Oh wow.
So I'm like, hum, that's interesting. It's just it's just irritating as heck. And then the job that I got now was through connections, through personal connections, right, And I didn't get the job just because the connection. I had to run the whole gamut of values and a project to do it. But it happened to be somebody that mutual connection does My parents actually had know this guy, and he said, hey, it's under web developers. Looking, he goes, uh, well, yeah,
happen to send me his resume. So I did, and you know, I probably went through I calculated later like five different hours of interviews plus a demo, a small demo project, and I got it, you know, went through all the and I had to beat somebody else, and that's fine, but it was through somebody that I knew, just through getting through all the screening and and the you know, everything through the applications and then once I
got in. And so the space I'm in right now is is networking, you know, basically internet type of networking. And it's I'm still drinking from the fire hose when it comes to networking and terminology and the stuff. This is crazy how much.
We have to learn.
But I'm making tools for like network engineers, is what it is. So it's really cool. And so we had to hire. We wanted a back in this world, the back of his pythons, the language, the preferred language for all of the things that we do dealing with networking, and so we had to hire a back end person. And I haven't been part of the process, but my boss,
you know, he's obviously hiring for it. And he was telling me that when we would open up a position, he would just they had to turn it off after like a week and a half because they would just get drowned with applicants. But the issue was a lot of people just weren't qualified. He told me they had a couple of different interviews where it was a foreign national and he could barely speak English, and you know, it seemed like his Python, his coding skills were great,
but he couldn't hint. You know, my boss said, one of the basic requirements for me to be able to understand to hire him is that I have to be able to understand him right, you know, and I couldn't even understand it, which is sort of important for communication. Even you know, when you're using Slack, you know, there's still a lot of verbal communication that we do in person and you know, over zoom meetings and stuff like that. And so we finally just hired a guy who's going
to start next week. But it took months, and I had even had somebody I knew that had a lot of IT skills and you know, submitted him and they reviewed him, but you know, he didn't have that really hit a lot of the requisite background that we needed, but but yeah, I was, you just get flooded with so much stuff, but a lot of it you could tell his AI. You'll hear jokes about how you know, resumes that you submit you can tell that they've hit
all the AI keywords, and you know. Some of the best excuses I've heard, and I don't remember if it was one that we had. I heard Adam Argyle talking from who used to be with Google. Huh and now he's one of the hosts on a Whiskey and Web and whatnot podcast that I'd like to listen to, and he talks about, here's one of the most skilled guys out there with CSS. I've heard him on multiple different places,
and he knows his stuff. It took him months, and he was He talked a lot about this process and about how frustrating it was for him too, going through a lot of the same stuff, you know, five levels of interviews because the seniors can't trust their you know, managers to actually make a good decision. They have to
review it to you know type of stuff. But just dealing with all the AI stuff, and I think one of the things we heard was like examples I saw was, you know, I've been working with tailwind since twenty fourteen. Well Tailwind didn't exist in twenty fourteen, So it's sort of hard. How do you work with something that didn't exist at that one You know, that tells you, you know that somebody's you know, just reading a job description and is saying, okay, give me a cover let for this,
and it's saying as typical AI. If it doesn't have it, it makes it up. And so you get stuff like this saying you got skills for something that never existed in you know, at that particular point in time, or has any I've been working with so and so framework for ten years, Well it's only existed for five, yeah you know so. But yeah, it's it's just brutal. It's just brutal wading through and you know, getting people to communicate and and.
To be fair.
On the other side of things, they're getting flooded, you know, they've got so much stuff to wade through and trying to determine what's legit, yeah, versus what's not legit is tough. So it's it sucks on both sides, It really doesn't.
Yeah, that's that's tricky. It's interesting because on the other end, I just keep thinking of the situation. So back in like twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, I think it was a Rails comp. DHH got up and he said that he had gotten or went on I think it went on on Twitter and then people were talking about it Rails comp. But he got contacted because by a recruiter that said, you're the only person that we can find that has
ten years of experience with Rails. And the thing that was funny was that he was the only person in the world who had ten years of experience with Rails because it had been released nine years ago, right, so he you know, he'd been working on it privately at base camp.
Right they and they wanted ten years with l Yeah, maybe they need to look at their requirements.
Right, It was pretty funny. Yeah, I've seen all kinds of stuff, and I think more and more people are going to be looking for kind of the real genuine thing. And so what you're talking about, I think AI is helpful. Like if you hand at your resume and say, hey, help me polish this, make suggestions things like that. But I've done that with my resume when I was looking last year or I guess it was early this year,
and yeah, it would, it would. It would suggest you should put things like this on here, And I was like, yeah, but I haven't done any of those things, right, Like I have to. I have to be able to go into an interview and talk about when I did these things right, right, and and I would really prefer not to lie to people when I apply for jobs.
So anyway, yeah, especially if they come back later and find out you lie.
Right, I mean, there's just there's no there's no good scenario there. Your best case scenario is they never find out. But why run Well but the other thing is is that I I don't know, I would know and it would bother me. So anyway, Yeah, but I can also see, hey, you know, is there a better way to word this. I would like this to you know, have more action or active oriented stuff as opposed to you know, eliminate passive voice in my resume kind of thing. You know.
So all that stuff it definitely helped, you know, And some of the suggestions, there were a handful of them where I was like, oh, yeah, I did that, and that is something that helps, right. So anyway, Yeah, but one thing that I've been hearing from people because my well, let me back up. So you talked about kind of
the experience getting hired and hiring. They haven't been pulling me in on interviews lately at Price Picks, and mostly it's because they're interviewing front end folks and I just I don't have enough react native experience to really go deep with anybody. But yeah, you know, I applied for a job and then the person who had listed the job came back to me and said, I'm a recruiter and this is Price Picks. Is that okay? And I said yeah, And so then I went through the process.
So I applied for a company that I had never heard before, and it turned out it was a company I had heard of before. So it just kind of worked out that way. And yeah, I did the first interview and it was just kind of a with one of the directors of the company, h you know, director
of engineering level folks. They're a handful of them at Price Picks, and so yeah, made sure I wasn't a psychopath and somebody they liked to work with, and you know, then did the technical interview and they gave me a bunch of coding exercises on what what's that there's a website that has a bunch of them on there.
There's a few different ones. What's the I can't even think of the main ones and people are probably screaming at us, going, oh, this is so obvious. Yeah, I can't remember the one that we used to use. I try to block it out. Really, there's the one that there's one really popular. I think I think it was lead Code Lead Code. Yeah, that's it, and we can
literally they will, you can go practice for it. I mean that stuffs pretty much dead now well with AI because you can just get a question and run through AI and you know, yeah, I heard stories that I think my boss was telling me you said they him or something. I don't remember where I heard the story, but literally they had been in an interview where you could tell that the person was typing stuff into AI during the interview and getting answers out.
Wow.
Yeah, I was like, oh my gosh, that's that's pretty Yeah, got say it's fun, you know. I tried to get away with something like that. Yeah, So I had done.
I had applied to a contract because I was in a nightmare contract for the first three months of this year, and so I was looking at another contract, and they gave me a leak code to solve, and I solved it. I solved it with like I I had a half hour and I saw it twenty minutes. And anyway, it was funny because when I had to do the eleak code for Price Picks, they gave me like five of them to solve, and one of them was the one that I had done like a week before, and so
and I told him that too. I was like, look, I was like, this one's gonna look like I saw it in ten minutes. And the reason is is because I remember what I did on the other one, and so I just did it again and made it a little cleaner.
You know.
It's funny. When we were doing.
Gosh, I wish I could remember what platform we use. But it was cool because you could sort of pick and choose what questions you wanted to give. You know, there'sp there's JavaScript or sequel or you know whatever, a whole bunch of different categories. And one of the things that you could tell was how long it took him to do a question. And so we're looking at one the results from one test that this guy had done and one of them and my boss was really picky.
I hadn't noticed this so much, but he would look at time. He goes, Man, this guy got this one real quick. And so he goes through and looks and starts do some searching, and sure enough finds a GitHub repo with answers to these specific questions. So basically, this guy had found one out copy paste says that, Okay, I'm good, you know, instead of at least making an effort to you know, type it in and you know, make it look like you'd actually taken some time and doing it.
Yeah, but I had one.
I had one of the one of the positions that I interviewed for, I had to do a coding test and it was there was some JavaScript stuff and there was some sequel And I've lived in SQL for years, you know, doing quers and stuff like that, but it was in their UI and I had no, you know, nothing to play with. I had none of my usual tools that I can use to debug something and step through something or even just run some basic queries. You just basically had to generate a query on the fly
and get it right. And I totally bombed them on stuff that if I had my own tools and my own you know, ways of doing things I probably could have done pretty easily, you know, even in a browser. And that was really frustrating. And they never even got I submitted the test. I never even heard yeah you didn't pass the test. No communication, no nothing. That was
what was really frustrating about it. But for the job that I I'm at now, they had a little project, and what was cool about it was it wasn't just some sort of make work type of thing, you know, not a real situation. They said, here is you know, if you try to use this carbon library from IBM, which is absolutely atrocious, I would never use it, you know if you paid me money to use it as awful.
I ended up using Tailwind with it, and it was using a little library called Codemere, which we use on our current side it and uh, you know, like a Yama editor type of thing anyway, and you know, create a project that does this in this and generates file
in such such a format and saves it. And so it was pretty It turned out I was overthinking, was overthinking and trying to get the specific font colors and spend more time on that than the rest of the project, which I could have done in about you know, four hours. But that was what was cool about it is I did my project, you know, pushed it up to get they could all look at it. And then in my interview, I just stepped went through and explained this is what I did, and this is how I did it and
why I did it, and that great stuff. And it worked great to me.
That was great. You know.
It wasn't like, you know, a huge LNG project. It was a real project based on real life situation. And funny enough, I'm to the point now I'm actually working with that exact same thing that I did in my test project right now and what I'm working on.
Nice. Yeah, it's it's funny how those kind of come around. I like the idea of doing something that's more real world, oh absolutely, you know, absolutely and make work. You know.
Imaginary projects are like, you know, give me a class that generates what is something you pass it in. It's that you have to return a fruit. But your classes have to you know, you got to have a base class and then your different fruit types. Really where is this real world?
You know?
But you got an animal and needed I have this one needs to growl and this one needs to bark. And this one needs to not have a tail and okay, thank you.
Yeah, So anyway, kind of rolling back to back to my hiring process, Yeah, I did that, and then I went through the technical interview. The recruiter was involved the whole time, and so he had all my results from my coding exercises, which incidentally, he was like, they looked at your coding exercises and you scored higher on that than they've ever seen. But I've been doing Rube forever.
So yeah, so was your recruiter like a recruiter that worked for the company or like a third.
He was a third party recruiter that they had hired and he just shepherded people through. But yeah, it was it was pretty seamless process. After that, I want to spin a little bit toward where I'm talking to folks and I'm I'm talking to some senior folks who are having trouble finding work, like finding jobs, and then I'm running across like junior people. It sounds like it's just impossible to find a job.
Yeah, I've heard that too, and I think you and I and Dan might have talked about this a couple episodes ago when we were talking and I you know, I haven't talked to you know, people myself but who have been doing this. But what I'm what I read in multiple places is that people aren't hiring junior so much. You know, they use They figure the AI can can do a lot of that stuff, so they only want to senior people. So of course, what's the classic twenty
catch twenty two? How do you get seen people if they have in the first place, Right, It's like, yeah, automatically got to go to a boot camp and all of a sudden you're an expert and then you can get hired. It makes no sense. So you know, as an interview I read heard with the Coinbase CTO, one of the c suitet people, and they were talking about how they use AI for up to thirty to forty percent of their code and that includes like review processes
and deployments and stuff like that. So it's it's quite an interesting interview to listen to. But but yeah, I mean, that's that's huge. That's a lot of especially for something of that scale, that seems like a lot of code to be trusting your.
To AI. Yeah, it's I don't know, I kind of see it cut in both ways. I think it's short sighted to hand off so much stuff to AI. I think it's also short sighted not to be investing in people because you're going to need them. That said, so here here's the issue that I run into, and I'll probably piss some people off with my opinions on some
of this stuff. So I was at a conference a few weeks ago and there were a couple of talks on these topics, and one of the talks they were going talking about, you know, well we have immense privilege and blah blah blah blah blah. And my deal is is you you people who are talking about this have never run a freaking business, right, You have no idea what you're talking about, you know. It's It's one thing if you know I have some margin and I'm willing
to train people, right. It's another thing if I'm in a small, scrappy business and I'm just trying to eke out the next few thousand dollars a month so that I can figure out who to hire next, right, and then whoever I hire next, I need to get the biggest bang for my buck out of them. And so that may be a junior, right, if it's somebody in my position and I'm building a like a software as
a service or something like that. I could see hiring a junior developer, teaching them how to use the AI tools and saying, okay, you know, if you if you're not sure, ask me, right, and so this is this is how far I trust the AI. So this is about how far I expect you to do it, and then yeah, I'll mentor you through the rest of it. Right, And I can save myself some money and have a developer building features for me, or I may want to go just hire somebody that's as high up in the
game as I can afford and do that right. And I think I think the talking about privilege or you know this that or the other, any other kind of concern is just stupid at that point because you're small
and you're just trying to get crap done. That the bigger companies, I think they're insane if they're not investing in their pipeline to bring people up, because at the end of the day, what we're looking at is, yeah, if nobody's hiring juniors, then the only people who are going to have mid level people to hire are going to be the people who are training them as juniors.
And then the other thing is is that a lot of these companies have to change the way they think about this stuff because what happens is they hire them is juniors, and they pay them as juniors for a few years, and then they don't give them a raise and a promotion and a reason to stick around, and then they lose them, and then they complain that they lost them. And it's like, this isn't rocket science. If you give them a great place to work and you
pay them what they're worth, they'll stay. And so I think there's some adjustment that's going to have to be made there because the mindset on a lot of this stuff is insane. But I just I don't know that they're going to hire as many people because yeah, a lot of the stuff that I would hire a junior developer for, I can get the AI to do it. And if I'm if I'm solopreneuring my own software as the service and the marginal cost of my time and money leads me toward, Hey, I'm gonna have the AI
do a lot of this basic stuff. You know, I save myself a whole bunch of time and effort. Then I'm going to do it, and it's anyway, it's it's kind of an interesting spot. But the other thing is is a lot of the boot camps are shutting down. Like I've talked to a whole bunch of people that run boot camps, and.
Yeah, that was that seemed like a sort of a bubble, bubble that was waiting to pop, you know, because it used to be you know, there was a hey day. I'm sure you can remember this, and I've heard this multiple places, you know, was you know, boot camp, go to a boot can't come out and be expecting to make six figures right out of the gate, you know, because the man was there and it's over hiring, and well that bubble is obviously.
Popped and they've laid off a bunch.
You know, it's basic, right, it's basic economics, right, you know, the demand was there for a while and then you've got over some demand decreases. But yeah, right, so you know you need you need people that actually can do it, you know, can do the work. And so I mean just the number of tech jobs periods has dropped, so you don't have quite the demand for for getting as
many developers out there. And so yeah, I mean, it's so logical, Yeah, what you expect to happen, Yeah, based on the decrease in demand.
But the the thing is is that software isn't like a lot of other products in the sense that you know, like if I go buy a whole bunch. We were talking about like these energy drinks before the show, right, and you know, I've got like three cases of energy drinks because they were on sale, right, and so I was like, I'm buying a ton of Net of the Gods baby, right, Yeah, I got I've got these form energy drinks and I got plus water. I got them from seven to eleven right when they were a bucketpiece
during their one dollar promotion. Part of it I did also because I really like Andy Frizella, and he was saying, we're doing the one dollar deal. Go, you know, basically run them out of our product, right, show them that people really want this stuff. And you know, he's he's his podcast. I feel like I've learned a lot from and so it's like, oh, I can go spend thirty or forty bucks and you know, do him a solid. I get an energy drink I like, and so it
was a win win. But anyway, the difference is is that once I have so many energy drinks, I'm not going to need I'm not going to need more for a while, right, I can only consume it so fast. Software is different because there's always more stuff that I can do, right, whether it's making it faster, making it run better, making it cleaner, adding more features and so. On the one hand, yeah, right, there there was the demand was high, and a lot of it had to
do with the economy. Right. The economy was pretty good under Trump until COVID, and then it slowed down a whole bunch. I think that hurt him in the election and was part of the reason he didn't get elected. I'm not going to get into all the politics of it because that will piss people off for no reason.
But you know, the economy wasn't as good under Biden, and a lot of stuff slowed down, and so you know it's like, hey, look, I can keep going on what I have and not invest so much in the R and D side of development and still keep my doors open and my customer's happy, and wait for the economy to bump back up so that I can invest more into kind of the speculative stuff later and so I think that's part of the reason why the amendment down too. And then the other thing is is that
in the Trump tax cuts. Right here, I'm going to smack both sides. In the Trump tax cuts, there was a provision that changed in the tax law where before you could write off all of your R and D
costs in the year that you spent it. And so if I hired Steve Edwards and I said, Steve, I want you to develop these six new features for me, and we're going to add them to the application, then I could write that off as an R and D expense this year, right or next year when I filed my taxes right as an R and D expense, And they changed that, and they changed it so that you could only write off twenty percent per year, right, So
now I have to amortize it over five years. And so all of a sudden, the tax incentives for me to do this work aren't nearly as good, and I have to ration the tax break that I'm getting over five years, and so I'm not as keen to invest that money now into the R and D as I was before. And I don't know, I think that affects the bigger companies a lot more in the smaller companies. The smaller companies are just going to pay for what
they need period the end. But the bigger companies, you know, the fortune five hundred companies, the companies with you know, five hundred plus employees, where it's it's more than just a tiny line item. You know, eighty percent of that tax break went away. You know, yeah, I'll get twenty another twenty percent of it next year. But I think that affected things too. And then yeah, that the other thing is is that I think there were enough senior developers to cover a lot of the work, and so
hiring junior developers just got harder. And with the economy softening and salary softening, you could hire more developer for less money, right because if you're out of work and you're out of work for six months, you know what you're worth, but you may just take what you can get. So I think there are a lot of things that go into this outside of just supply and demand, because at the end of the day, more developers just means
more stuff getting done. So unless you just don't have stuff for people to do, right, well, even that's an ify statement. You know, there's the whole issue of how good your developers are.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, adding throwing developers at a project doesn't always make it go bettermental Yeah, that's a whole topic for a different complete episode.
But yeah, my point is is that there's economics that come into play. There is the supply and demand issue. I think that's part of it. There's the skill level of people. There's what people are willing to accept because job market isn't as good anyway. There's a lot there, I.
Mean, any any you know, my degree was economics in college, and I say this, you know, way back a while and spent a lot of times that I studied it. But I remember a lot of the basics. And if you think about you know, the dot com bust, you know, late nineties, early two thousand, uh, this is sort of the same thing where everybody jumps in. You got a whole bunch of supply, right, and a lot of stuff
just doesn't belong. Yeah, you know, shouldn't be there. You had how many thinking back to the dot com era, of how many different websites came up and they'd get a bunch of VC money or something like that. No business plans like.
Oh this is dot com.
Hey, yeah, it's a website. Let's do it, because that's the way to get round.
My point is is that it's not because we had too much internet or too much software. My My point is is that eventually people figured out that they weren't getting the ROI and they stopped or right. The other part of it was was that the economy would slow down, because it does that periodically, and then people start looking at Okay, well what do I actually need and then
they cut the rest. But I think it's driven more by what what I what I can pay for, as opposed to I have too much software development going on, or I have too many things here in my warehouse.
Right, so right, yeah, I mean, you know, going back to the boot camps, what I was saying, you know, there was too much there's you know, it's just you know, get him out the door, get him at the door. Whether or not they're really good for me is to be seen. And then you start to realize, okay, there's no room for all this, or we actually need qualified people, and so you know there's a slow down. All the fat gets trimmed and yep, you know that's how it works.
Yeah, And I think that was really I think that was more of a supply and demand issue just that not necessarily on the why people are or aren't hiring boot camp grads, but on the other end, that's why the boot camps is because there wasn't enough demand to soak up all the supply yep, And so people were graduating from boot camps. And then word kind of started to get around, Hey, you go through the boot camp, you spend twelve grand and you still don't have a job.
Yeah, so yeah, those those weren't cheap. I remember I looked years ago. I was looking into one. It was a boot camp that would have been I think it was on Microsoft Development stuff if I remember it. And I was seriously consider it because I was looking at, you know, just to educate myself, get something maybe more
formal and just self education. But I was like blown away by how much it would cost, how much time it would take, because like, yeah, I can't take time off from an actual job and do this full time and got to support a family.
You know. So yeah, when my oldest was in high school, I was looking at possibly because he was like, I want to be video game developer, blah blah blah, blah, And I was like, well, maybe I'll just put you through a programming boot camp, even if it's not game development, right, maybe it's React or something. Right, you can get enough programming experience to where then you can say, Okay, now I'm going to take the skills that I have in this area and I'm going to apply a lot of
them over here to game development. But I mean the costs and everything, we're just you know, yeah, a lot of money. But on the other end, I'm also and I've talked to a whole bunch of people that are now not convinced that college is necessarily the way to go either. And so I don't know for.
Web development, I mean web development or just development in general.
Well not just development, but a lot of other fields too.
Yeah, I mean the computer science stuff.
I've heard a lot of people who can't.
But well, even then, a lot of the stuff you studying there is an applicable, you know, to day to day web development. It's a lot of old schools stuff.
And you know, I know, so the environment I work in is is networking, you know, internet networking type of stuff, and we deal a lot with the university community and of a number of our employees have come from universities and they went through CIS degrees, but a lot of what they teach their is applicable to what they're doing in terms of networking hardware and software and stuff like that.
Right, And you know a lot of your performance OfTI and algorithms and that all plays in space.
Yeah, but a lot of that doesn't necessarily play in in you know, at least in the web dev world. And and so that's why you know it doesn't you know, it used to be you went to college just to say I got to college degree. But at the same time, you want your college to be somewhat you know, give you tools to actually get a job and performing, you know, in the industry.
That's why you're going.
So yeah, I mean there's there's a number of I mean, I can think off the top of my head, a number of you know, web developers for developers that never had any type of college to agree with that, But they're very good at what they did, and you know, like me, they're self taught. You know, they learned on their own just by doing and doing projects and working and being a junior for a while, right and working up to you got the experience to be a senior.
Well, I have a degree in computer engineering, and in a lot of ways, I still consider myself self taught. I mean, I graduated, I got a job working, and I wound up running the tech support team at the company I was working at the startup, and then I just kind of picked up some other stuff and was scrappy working on it in rails, and that's how I got started. And so you know, I kind of skunk works my way into into rails and into programming, even though I had learned a lot of programming stuff and
taking classes at the university. I don't think you really get a feel for what software development really looks and feels like until you get out there in the real world world, and then you're going, yep, oh, these are the things I care about, These are the things that matter, These are the things that are going to move the needle, and you know, and so then you wind up, Yeah, you wind up self teaching anyway to a certain level. Everybody does.
Yeah, for sure, there's I mean, and that's true with any industry or any topic. You know, you can learn about it and do test projects and stuff like that in school, but once you it's not until you get in the real world and realize that. You know, there's so many different things to work with with any type of software platform, whether you're an agency who's creating, you know, websites for customers, or if you're on the product side, where you have a product that you've built and you
maintain and customers pay you to use. There's so much stuff that, whether it's project management stuff, whether it's stay to day infrastructure stuff, that you're just not going to see in an educational environment unless you get somebody maybe who's been out in the real world and done this stuff and then comes back in and teaches and says, he this is what it's really like. Those are the best teachers.
Yeah, that's all right.
I take that back to some of the best.
I had a professor at I had a couple of professors at BYU that were they were those guys, right, And so one of them had written basically a variant of DOS called p DOS because his name was Paul. It was actually my neighbor growing up too. He was my bishop and my lds ward at church. P Dos
because his name was Paul. And then one of the other guys and he was the one that taught us about, you know, here's how development teams work and stuff like that, because he'd worked in the industry too, and so he had a class that was basically, hey, here's your reality check, right, here's here's how this stuff actually works. P dos.
It reminds me of Tanner Lindley and tan say, yeah, you know, we just talked to him a few weeks ago.
Yeah. Anyway, it's it's it's interesting stuff for sure. Yeah, I don't I know that you pick a lot of that up as you go. Anyway, it's been about an hour. It's funny because we were going to talk about a couple of topics and we just talked about this one. But I'm hoping that this kind of gives some people some ideas. I don't know if you have any actionable stuff you want to give people on this in terms in terms of following at finding a job or hiring or anything like that.
You know, the one thing I always hear, and this is probably a little more prevalent in the design world than it is the coding world, being able to show something you've actually done versus saying what you can do. You know, for a design person, front end, you know them er whatever term you want to use, the ones that make it look really good. I'm a portfolio, and a really good portfolio is probably something you want to have,
you know. Examples, when I was going through my development interviews, I had very specific projects that I could talk about, things that I had done, whether it was and some of them were ones where I could straight that the software I had generated had saved incredible amounts of time for the end users, you know, because that's what they end up They want to be more efficient. That's the whole point of having a lot of the tools that I have anyways to be able to do your job
more efficiently. And so I had projects where I could say, for instance, doing estimation for building certain types of industrial projects, I had taken what I had done had helped a company go from a three day estimation with crazy Excel spreadsheets to three hours right, or an application I used created with view and in nursery and Larravel helped a nonprofit organization go from literally multiple volunteers manual work in terms of managing membership to being almost completely automated and
saving just hundreds of hours of volunteer time. So the point of what I'm saying is just being able to demonstrate, yes, using these tools, this is what I have done, and this is how effective it's been in and that because what you want to convey to them, you know, and adders that I always use is that I want to make my job is to make my boss's job easier. Yeah,
you know, they don't have to worry about me. They know that I can jump in and do the job and get it done right, and so I want to demonstrate. And this is the same in the fire service as well. You know, you want to demonstrate that you can come in and fit in and jump in and do the job and you can rely on to do it. So that's probably the best advice you know that that I can I would give to somebody who's who's job hunting.
Yeah, I agree a lot of that. You know, you're talking about what you've actually done. If if you don't have that kind of work experience, then start a side project and go work on that. Yep, exactly, And I
highly highly recommend that. The other thing that I recommend is that you know, go out into the community, you know, local meetups, find a conference to attend something like that, and just you know, stay up breast of what people are working on learning putting out there so that you know the kinds of things that you maybe need to demonstrate, so that you are working on things that are relevant to what people are doing.
So, yeah, anybody can talk about what you could do being able to talk about this is what I did do. Is it's going to win every time?
Yeah, all right, well, let's go ahead and do picks and then wrap up. Do you want to go first?
Sure, So before I get to the high point of every episode, which is the dad jokes of the week, I'm going to do I'll do an unpicked sort of and you'll understand it in a minute. So I've been over the past few months. I've done a decent amount of flying, and so what I usually like to do, at least on Alaska is hook on my computer, the Wi Fi and they have a bunch of movies that you can watch, and so I've watched some pretty good
movies over the time time. You know, there's like One Life, which is what I talked about, the Anthony Hopkins ones about Nicholas Winton and the Accountant. I liked a lot with Ben Affleck, but the unpick I picked one is like, you know, I've heard about this movie and I'm gonna watch it, and it's an old one of I think it's one of Jackie Chan's first movies. And it's called Rumble in the bron Rumble in the Bronx because I've
seen some of the other ones. So if you think some of the more one once he's more well known for, like Rush Hour with Chris Tucker, and I can remember one of the first ones I saw of his in the theater was with Owen Wilson as Shanghai Knia had Lucy Lou. There's one scene in there that had me just rolling the eyes laughing so hard while we were in the theater and me and this other lady were just dying laughing at this one scene where he wakes up in this teepee. You got to see it to
understand it so funny. But I went back and watched this one. This had to be one of the worst movies I've ever seen it.
It was so bad. It had to be.
I don't I can't remember what year it is.
I have to look it up.
It's got to be early and there's a decent amount of martial arts center, but just the editing, the plot line, it's just so poorly done. And the thing that amazed me about it is the complete amount of destruction of property that happens in this movie, whether it's buildings, whether it's vehicles, whether it's boats. You know, in the end, there's this whole jet boat is the kind that have
the big use inflatable Rubbert. You know, they're driving around New York on the harbors for tours and stuff, and he's driving it on the beach and he's driving on those golf course and running over the bad guy at the very end, and I was like, I forced myself to watch. At the end, I was like, all right, I got this far, I might as well watch it to the end. But if you want to see, you know, something that's funny just because it's made so badly, then Rumble in the Bronx is the one to see. For sure.
I've heard of it.
I got, I watched the end, and I got back. After I was done, I thought, that's an hour and a half of my life. I'm never going to get back. But I was sitting stuck on a plane, so it wasn't like I was going to be doing a lot of other stuff anyway, Right.
So.
Dad jokes of the week. So recently, you know I like to use I've been using password managers, like one password is one we use. Now use it at work too, and it's really great. But before that changed all my passwords to be the word incorrect. So now when I type in the wrong password, the computer tells me that my password is incorrect. Right, So most people know that scuba right, like scuba diving is an acronym for self
contained underwater breathing apparatus. TUBA is also an acronym that stands for terrible underwater breathing apparatus.
Right.
And then, finally, speaking of startups, I recently opened a company selling trampolines that are disguised as prayer mats. Profits are going through the roof. That's pr pH et Anyway, those are the dad jokes of the week.
Awesome, all right, I've got some picks. I usually do a board game pick, but I'm just not my brain's not going there right now. I'm trying to think what I've played lately that I don't know. I guess I'll pick Hanabi. I've probably picked this before. It's been quite a long time, but this game has been around forever. I think hanabi means fireworks in Japanese. And anyway, you
play your cards. You play a hand of cards, and you have your cards facing away from you, and so then you can give clues to the other players because they can all see your cards. So when it's your turn, you can you can give a clue and you can say you have you know, two whites, and so then you tell them which ones are white, or you have two fours, and so you can tell them which ones
are fours. Right, And you're trying to get five stacks of cards that are all the same color, starting at one and going up to five, and I think there are three ones, two of each of two, three and four and then one five of each color. And you can you can on your room you can clue somebody else, and I believe you use little chips to indicate you know how close you are to blowing up, or you can get rid of a card out of your hand, and if you get rid of the five, you lose
because you can't. Right. So anyway, fun game. It's really simple, and so if you're looking for a fun game that you can play with folks. That's a little bit of a thinker because you have to keep track of what your cards are and I usually wind up turning them different ways or things like that, so I know which ones are which. It's a fun game. So Hanabi and then my wife and I went to the movies yesterday and we went and saw a movie called Truth and Treason is put out by Angel Studios.
Oh yeah, and they got some good stuff. Yeah.
So it's about a young man who his friend who's a Jew, gets picked up by the SS and you know, oh so it's World War it's disappeared, and it's interesting because like all the boys in it, they're all from a Latter Day Saint congregation, So, you know, a little bit of something that I identify with there. But it's not a major part of the story. So if you don't understand LDS culture, you'll still get it. Just find
what's going on in the the movie. But anyway, so he kind of gets radicalized, so to speak, against the Nazi government, and so he starts putting flyers out all over Hamburg talking about the evils of the Nazi regime. And so it's kind of his story of him doing this and trying not to get caught and what happens there. I won't spoil it. It's you could probably guess how it goes. But anyway, it's just interesting because the kind of major point was you have to stand up for truth, right,
even if it costs you your life. And so anyway, terrific message, fascinating story. And yeah, at the end of the movie, right, they have kind of the picture of the actor and then the picture of the actual person, and this person was blah blahlah, don't know, this is what happened to these people. And uh, it's interesting because the main character was the youngest person who was convicted
of trees and all this stuff against the Nazis. So anyway, yeah, and it turns out his friend in the captions at the end you find out his friend was actually taken to Auschwitz and died there.
So anyway, now, have you seen speaking of Angel Studios, have you seen The Last Road?
Yes? Pretty much?
Pretty I love Neil mcgonnough, Yeah, I love nearly really good. He's done some really good stuff.
Yeah, it's boy. That one is uh, how do I put it? Like? It is just an intense movie. It's I don't know, When I say that, I don't mean like, you know, because you think like the action flicks, right, and so you know somebody's always running into danger blah blah blah. It's not that kind of intense. I mean you're you're kind of scared for Neil McDonough's character because he's old and he's writing video. Right, It's like, it's like this guy's going to kill hold on.
Let's uh, let's define old here. He's if I read the movie description, he's fifty, so.
He's relatively old to be writing a relatively old thank you.
Let's clarify that.
Yeah, you right, he's he's older than I am, but you know he's old enough to where writing in a rodeo. You're just like, right, and the characters had like he broke his back and that's why he wasn't writing rodeo, right, and so it's like you're going to kill yourself doing this.
Yeah, well it was it his son or something grandson.
Of a brain tumor. And so he's he's writing in the rodeo to try and get the money he needs to pay for the prize money first for the true treatment. And yeah, it's a terrific movie. I really really liked it.
Yeah, Angel Studios they have some I saw an interview with one of those people on Mike Mike row interview on his podcast. And do you talk about some of the movies that they've done. Yeah, I think if I remember correctly, did they Were they the same people that didn't Napoleon Dynamite? Know? No, that was a different group.
Okay, If it was the same people Napoleon Dynamite was before Angel Studios? Was Angel there right right?
Right? But it's the same people not in that Angel Studio, I don't know. Yeah, them, and they also did maybe I'm thinking another group because that same group also did the Pooperie commercials, which to this day are some of the best, most playerousmmercials I've ever seen.
Yeah, the Harmon Brothers. Did I think the Poopoi commercials?
Okay, that might be who it was.
And I don't know. It's funny because both the Harmon Brothers and and Angel Studios or both they're both Utah companies. They're both here right right exactly.
Maybe that's why I'm getting mixed up.
And I don't know if they're closely connected or not. But anyway, yeah, I don't know for sure what if Napoleon Dynamite was produced by them or not, or if it was somebody else.
But anyway, all those Utah people they look like, Yeah, but that that was where John Header got his big start.
But and it has a lot of the Utah Idaho culture stuff in it, Like it's it's funny anyway, but if you've lived here for a long time, you're just like there's a lot of inside culture her stuff in it.
Oh yeah, my son, he's fourteen, and he just saw a Napoleon Dynamite like this past week and he hadn't seen it before. And I was like, I told him I remember a vote for Pedro, and apparently he wants He's fourteen, and my wife still wants to go out for Halloween, but he wants to go Napoleon's brother, the one that wants to be the pro wrestler. That's a Halloween costume. So I'm not sure I was going to pull that off, but looking forward to that.
Yeah, Wikipedia says that it was Jared Hess and John Header and they were both BYU.
Shams, Right I remember that much?
They yeah? So so alrighty anyway, so yeah, so those are my picks I, we'll go ahead and wrap it up until next time folks max out.