Understanding, Confidence, and Humility in Web development - JSJ 655

cover that topic as well. So anyway, welcome back. I am a j o'nial, I am your host, and this yo yo yo coming at you live from the shed that stinks because of the flycatcher thing, my bob and uh Kyle, go ahead, and for for the for the audience that is going to be listening to this probably a week or two apart from the the last episode we just cut. Who are you? What do you do? Why are you famous? Why do you?

around now for most of the web. I've been doing this engineering thing for like twenty five years or more, so long time, and I'm most well known for the you Don't Know JS books and those were published in the last decade or so, two editions six books each, or six books in the first edition and then kind of like up in the air, how many books for the second edition. But anyway, the you Don't Know JS

books are how most people know me. That's spun awful whole series of courses that I've done on front end masters, corporate trainings and conferences, so that's all a lot of people out there will probably know me.

I'm just gonna say this plainly. I'm not gonna sugarcoat it because I think I think that between you and I and the people watching, I think that's gonna be right. I have noticed over probably the last six months your your tweets have gone from being things that were felt more positive, more energetic, to a lot of tweets coming through that have a really bitter tone to them. And I am curious as to what's going on. I was saying before, I think that some of it's resonating with

an industry problem. It's not just like you're having a personal thing in your life and it's making you better, although I think that there might be something there, but there's some sort of industry problem that's going on that's reflected in this. So do you agree that, especially in the last six months, you have had become a little bit bitter and why.

been unemployed for a full year. And it's not for lack of trying. I've done a lot of applying and some interviewing and a whole lot of effort. I have been able to find a place. And you know, there's going to be a lot of different reasons why that's the case. I'm not going to try to come on

here and shift the blame onto everybody else. I own a lot of that with particular I with with particular respect to the tone I've had some i'll call it love hate relationship with social media for quite a while,

going back at least several years. And part of the reason for that is because because of the success that I had in building a bit of a long tail following around my takes on JavaScript and trying to encourage people to learn it, and I am regularly seen as someone who kind of challenges the status quo and pushes back and asks more challenging questions, and I think that's resonated with quite a few folks. I hope that people have felt empowered to own why they feel a certain way.

That's certainly always been my mission. But I didn't make a lot of friends along the way, is the point I'm trying to make. I've made a name for myself by being willing to be disagreeable and what I hope

has still been productive ways. But I made a name for that by being a bit more divisive or churning, you know, stirring the pot, whatever kind of metaphor you want to use, and that I did not recognize and probably should have, but I did not recognize the cost of building my brand that way, and I didn't even think of it as building a brand at the time.

But over the last fifteen or whatever years of my public persona, I built a brand around this guy who comes up with these hot takes on JavaScript and is, you know, challenging the status quo and is a little bit maybe cantankerous at times, and gray beard and old school and any of those other terms. And I also, because of that large following, because I'm a human and I have an ego, I enjoyed the fact that I had you know, eighty whatever thousand followers, and that when

I had something to say, people listened. They didn't always agree, in fact, probably mostly didn't agree, but at least they listened. I had a megaphone that I could speak through, as opposed to if I just had a little personal Twitter account somewhere with you know, seven followers, and half of them were my family. That's not much of a megaphone to make, you know, a difference if I have a thought.

So over the last several years, I increasingly started sharing thoughts at times that didn't have anything to do with my technological perspective, whether they were about politics or religion or their social issues. As a person, I was willing to kind of share my personal views on things, and I was doing so through this megaphone that had been built around the brand of JavaScript. You know, questioner, I'll

call it. I didn't realize that that was going to be taken so poorly, and I pushed back a lot on people who would try to tone you know, they try to police what I'd say, and they'd say things like, you know, stick to the JavaScript. We don't want to hear what you have to say. About you know, politics or whatever, and I pushed back on that. I still feel like it should have been my right to be whoever I wanted to be with my own online persona.

But what I didn't appreciate at the time is how many people had come along for the ride only because of what they liked about what I had to say with JavaScript and technology, and so I kind of I sort of broken unspoken contract in doing that by trying to become something more than the JavaScript guy and talk about other things. It really created some strong frustration in folks, and I didn't appreciate just how tangible that would be.

So there were a couple of different instances over the last several years where I ended up creating a pretty significant storm of frustration and controversy over one of my over something that wouldn't necessarily have been about JavaScript. One of them was on my views on healthcare and health insurance. I have some very personal and real experiences with that

that are difficult. And another one was on probably the most recent a year or two back, was on what I thought we should do to change how we onboard engineers into being new engineers on teams and into the industry. I had thoughts about that, and in both of those cases, I believe that I was significantly misunderstood in what I said. But I'm not here to defend myself because the damage has already been done. But there was a lot of

people that got really mad at what I said. They took it in ways that were very much not what

I intended, and went with it. The most recent round involved a significant push to boycott my courses and books, to try to tell people that I should never be employed in the industry again, and literal personal threats of harm and direct messages that other people have experienced I experienced it to And because of those periods of time and other smaller periods in between where I get really frustrated, I'll kind of like take a break from social media,

hoping that I can kind of clear my head, and then I come back in a week or a month or sometimes much longer, and I try to pick up where I left off and maybe have a better reflection on how I've been. But one thing in this most recent in a most recent kind of kerfuffle, was somebody said to me on one of it was a LinkedIn post.

Somebody said to me, you know, you're very logical, and you're defending your points well, and you're making your points well here, but what you're missing is that you're just not kind. And I took quite a bit of time to reflect upon that assertion, and I think that person is absolutely right. I don't think I'm very a very kind person. And I actually dug into this with my therapist. I see a therapist, and I like normalizing those things.

I think it's helpful for people. I see a therapist, and I went to my therapist and I talked with them about this, and what I can say is that because of some quirks of the way my personality works, kindness is not actually a priority of mine, which is why I'm not kind. There are things that I think

are much more important. In one of those is the authenticity of being the same person in every situation in conversation, every person I interact with, I want for them to come away thinking that's the same guy as he was over here, and he was over here, and he was in his book and he was in this conference. I want to be that. That's one of my core psychological drivers. But it's really messy how this plays out in social media.

So when you see my frustration around my lack of employment, see my frustration around decisions that I made along the way that I didn't realize We're going to box me in later, when you see my frustration around how I'm so regularly mistaken, how there can be people that really believe in what I'm trying to do, And then there are other people out there, probably not listening to this episode, but there are other people out there who are really

really strong Getify haters, they're really strong detractors. And I get web notifications or people will tell me about threads that just randomly spin up on somewhere on a Reddit, or there's dozens of them that I get screenshots of private discord chats, and people just really like to talk a lot of crap about me, and I've upset a lot of people. I never One thing I would like to say in my defense is to say that I

do not insult people. I do not make my points by way of trying to attack the person and demean the person and condescend the person. I have some very strong opinions of what I feel, and I'm trying to avidly portray what I feel when I'm in these conversations and social media or whatever. I take up the case strongly and passionately, but most people that I engage with

in these negative fashions don't have that same line. They very quickly turn to attacking me as a person attacking, you know, calling a troll, telling me that I'm you know, a bad influence. I've been told many times you should be unemployed. You don't deserve to have a job.

the way that I've feeled a lot of that. So I guess this was a very long winded way of saying the increasingly negative tone you're hearing from me and a lot of social media, especially Twitter, but even it's crept int LinkedIn and people have said it there too. Now that negativity is coming because I'm not really in a great place, if I'm being honest, I'm pretty frustrated about where the industry is, where it's headed. I'm frustrated

personally about how it left me. I don't have a place really, or I don't feel like I have a place, and how I felt like I really spent my career trying to keep us from getting here, and we still got here, and then you mix in all the other stuff, Like I'm just it's difficult for me. I consider being logical and rational to be the most respectful thing that I could ever do with somebody I engage with. That's

the way, That's part of how I'm wired. But I think most people experience that as meanness, as rudeness, as being too curt and too dismissive. And so I know that there's a lot of people, and maybe a few of them are listening. I know there's a lot of people out there that feel like I've ruffled feathers over the years on that, and I just want to say it was never ever my intention to personally demean or attack a person. I've always tried to stick to the topic.

of authenticity. And the way that you were speaking, I was interpreting as people want you to be nice, but I think that it is in fact kind to confront and I feel very comfortab when like this is this is a frustration I have. I will get into arguments with someone, a heated argument, and walk away thinking, you know, I don't like them as a person, but I respect them for their knowledge, and when I have that problem, I want them on my team. And I wish that

more people were that way. I have had frenemies become friends because we were arguing about something and we could call each other d bags or whatever. You know, we could do a little bit of name calling, and but we could walk away having learned like, Okay, this person's actually really smarter at this, and they've got some opinions.

I don't agree with but but yeah, I want them on my team if I'm doing X, because I can tell they know X. And there's there's I mean, it's not like hundreds of people, but there's a handful of people that, over the course of my career that I have gone back to, and you know, the friendship. Like first it was the fighting or the argument, like the you know, like the two cats that just like something about you I don't like, Like I don't even have

a reason to, I just don't like it. And then that turning into a that that turning into but I respect you, and that turning into Okay, well let's actually work together on this project where you're obviously better, and that turning into friendship. And I wish that that was the norm. I think that was the whole idea behind.

You know, if you can't beat them, join them when when somebody's bested you, when they've defeated your arguments, when they've when they've made you look bad because you were wrong, to be able to go back and say, but dang, do I want to have you on my team for this project? So I don't know is that does that resonate with any of what you were saying or feeling.

to come across? And so I believe that there's a lot of people that have been turned off to what otherwise could have been, you know, useful disagreement and collaboration because they've been really unhappy with the disagreeable way of me doing things, whether that's being too you know, me being too quick to respond to something I experience on a regular basis, feeling like the rest of the world

is going in slow motion compared to me. I don't know if anybody else feels that way, but in any sort of conversations or debates, I feel very much like because I spend so much time in my own head thinking about things, I already know exactly why I feel the way that I do right or wong. I have lots of deep reasons behind it, and the rest of the world is just so slow motion compared to that and can't understand. And I can't even get them to listen to me long enough for me to articulate why

I feel that way. But I hear when you know that that old adage of like strong opinions loosely held or whatever. I've never understood or been able to agree with that, partly because if an opinion is loosely held to me, that means that one statement to the contrary might you might throw up the whole opinion right, just

like one new fact, and you might completely flop. And I'm not going to share an opinion on something until I have a mountain of reasons for why I feel that way, because I've already spent hours or days or weeks in my head about it. I don't even share opinions on things unless I've already spent that time. I do appreciate when somebody comes along with a mountain of counter evidence. I really enjoy that, and I have actually changed opinions. I know there's people out there that are like, no,

he's never changed an opinion I have. But it's rare, Believe, it's rare. I rarely find people willing to defend their reasoning to the same level of rigor as I've got driving what I feel about something, and so that creates a real imbalance, and I think that is where a lot of the static comes. Is this imbalance that I'm coming to the fight already prepared with a bunch of stuff. This person feels that way, and I'm not invalidating that

they that they feel the way they do. That's you're You're entitled to your own opinion, but if you're going to try to convince me, you've got to bring the same amount of counter evidence. That's how I've always taken it. So I've probably missed out on a lot of what you've you know, what you were saying about, the opportunities that you've had to kind of in retrospect go back and rebuild a bridge and all of that. I've missed out on a lot of that.

not know who he was. Uh, we had We've switched meeting booking systems a few times on JavaScript jabber, and we had done that recently within the last month or two, and it was still a problem where like the emails wouldn't get sent, and so it's like, Okay, I don't know what I'm doing this week, Chuck was out sick or something, I mean, and and so we were having this conversation and I was I thought I didn't. I

also didn't really understand British culture. It's much more high context compared to American culture, meaning that like you have to there's rules that you have to know that are beyond what the words that are said that come out of the mouth, and that that relationship. I don't I don't think I'll ever be able to salvage and and I still respect him hugely for the work that he does. Like I've used some of his stuff, I read his blog articles, I'll retweet him. You know. We still every

once in a while get into a little something. I didn't even leave because I'll go on a thread that's like six years old for some web standard and just post and you know, and admittedly inflammatory comment because I want to get the conversation started again. It's like, okay,

like this, this has been six years now. And then there's other people you knew, you could see, like you know, eight months ago or fifteen months ago, you know, somebody did the same thing, and uh, and I didn't even he responded to something because apparently he's part of some web standards body or whatever that I commented on, and I even I mean, look, I but like, you know, so that's that's my one big experience with somebody online where like I respect him, I respect that he has

knowledge that I don't have. I wish that it were the other way around as well. I think that my senses that what he came away with was that that I have no idea what I'm talking about whatsoever, and that my my opinions were completely invalid. That's that's the way it came around to me because I was I was like, you know, I was being aggressive in questioning and pushing back on what he was saying, because you know, there's a lot of stuff people say and it's like

it's dogma. They say it because they say it. It's not because that they know that the truth behind it, or they're looking at it from one particular perspective, you know. But a lot of the stuff with the Web Standers committees in particular, I get so frustrated because these people are web developers, a lot of them. You know, they spend their time in system programming languages, and they're making decisions on JavaScript, which you know, huge props being smarter

than the average JavaScript dev. But you need to walk in our shoes for a little bit before you ratify that standard because like we have to live with those decisions, you know.

don't want to spend my time focusing on him. The experience that you just described with standards has largely largely tracked with my experience going back to the early two thousands when I was first starting to get my head around JavaScript and trying to carve out a space where

that was not an accepted thing. There were not jobs for JavaScript experts at the time, and I was trying to do so, and I naturally gravitated to trying to participate in TC thirty nine discussion emails, you know, email threads, and I was shot down so harshly, so many times that part of the reason I actually ended up writing the you Don't Know JS books, And part of the reason for that title it's, you know, it's a big complex layer of meaning behind that book and that that title.

But part of it is because I was told so many times in both literal terms, and you know, implicitly figuratively, you don't know enough JavaScript to be here, You don't know enough of our terms. You don't know if enough of our You're not up to the bar that we need. And I desperately wanted to be good enough to ask questions, to propose ideas, And to this day I desperately wish that I was good enough to be taken seriously by anyone in TC thirty nine for that matter.

message thread and it's couched. It's couched. So so like due to the great respect that we have for so and so and owing to his experience, we have carefully considered and decided to pursue other avenues for the time being with you know, and it's like, no cut the BS. Tell the dude, look like I don't care that you're one hundred years old. I don't care that you're one of the best D plus plus developers has ever lived. You're wrong, like you're wrong, like everybody knows it everybody

knows we need rejex dot escape. There's somebody that people want to please standing in the way, and nobody has the courage. Everybody needs to be respectful. Nobody has the courage to say, look, this is a technical decision. Your emotions are getting in the way. It's five against six or five against one, and we're we're putting this through. But the other thing with that is I've been on another standard's body, very short lived. I only went to two sessions. I couldn't stomach it. It was an IoT

standards body. And uh, I mean the guy who was leading the thing, he took me aside and he's like, look, because you're new here, I'm going to school you on some things. This is so and so. He works for Cisco. His objective is that Cisco wants a patent on this. They're not going to do anything unless their patent is represented in this standard. This is so and so, and it may not have been Cisco, so don't don't. I'm just throwing some names out there, like you know, this

is so and so. He's from the Google team, and his objective is that he doesn't want Cisco to have you know, any advancement whatsoever. He's going to try to block the patent being used whatsoever. And like here's so and so, and he kind of gave me the lay

of land. Like we had this, you know, this this back room conversation where he gave me the lay of the land and basically explained why no progress was going to be made and that if any decisions were made, they weren't going to be the ones that benefited the people that the standard went to. Now, he didn't say like that because he was optimistic, because he had done this for years. He was good at politicking. He knew that the incremental gains, like just getting one good part

of a standard through was worth the politicking. I can't stomach it. So sorry, sorry, sorry, not sorry for cutting off there, but like I just I can't give these TC thirty nine people any excuse because because I don't have that in my heart, I don't understand the politicking.

It's not something I'm good at. And when there's something that is so obviously the right thing to do, and somebody says, well, the Rejack escape function won't escape strings that haven't been escaped, so we can't have a Regick escape function, Instead, we're going to continue to have people download it from NPM or copy it from stack overflow. Like I just I can't do it. I don't have it in me. I'm not that good of a person.

one body with one view, it's hundreds of people. And I do believe there's quite a few people on TC thirty nine that really do have the best interests of JavaScript and really don't like and don't want to devolve into all the politicking and pr battle. I think there's quite a few people there. Unfortunately, the body doesn't work according to that tone from my experience, because there are others who have been there a long time and who have a lot of influence in other ways. But we

should be very careful. I think not to paint TC thirty nine as a whole, because there's hundreds of different people and they are on a spectrum of what they are bringing to the table and what their biases are and their backgrounds and all of that. I just personally wish that I had ever been seen as a peer among that group. Not that I was like literally like had a seed on TC thirty nine. I just wish that I had ever earned the right to be respected

among that group. And the vast majority of my interactions have always treated me like I'm an outsider that's bringing an unwelcome amount of noise to what they would prefer to just be their own process. And I'm you know, I wish, But TC thirty nine is not the only standards body that I've had that kind of experience with. It just I've had more of that experience because I've cared about JavaScript for so long.

But well you aren't. You may be not seeing them.

they really want it. They operate on GitHub as if they want it, but I think they would really prefer to kind of do their thing themselves. So I've largely tried to step out of any discussion around TC thirty nine and around JavaScript, and I've stopped making my complaints

about the language. And I mean even I even went so far as instead of I need to evolve to your point, instead of trying to change to change JavaScript, and instead of just complaining about JavaScript, I actually designed a whole programming language that has some of my ideas about what I wish, a programming language where, whether people like it or not, I just I wanted to be I wanted to do something productive instead of simply saying

I don't like what JavaScript's doing. So I hope that you know, maybe somebody's listening and maybe they can find others that they can be more welcoming to. But my experience over fifteen or twenty years has not been very welcoming unfortunately.

talking about earlier. But it seems like he came out on top like he had some books dropped from his publisher and and you know, Chuck had something similar happened, which I mean the Chuck situation. Chuck was an innocent bystander. He literally was just saying, Hey, I'll host the pod cast and let you to talk about it. And that got him like lost bunches of sponsors, bunches of people that were going to come on the show, and all the I mean, he did nothing in my view, and

I tried to see because I'll be fair. If I think he did something wrong, I'll say it. But he had like the most generous take in the world of hey, I don't know what's going on. I would love to have both of you on a podcast to talk about it. And that got him banned from conferences, dropped advertisers. It was insane. That was the first time that that was before cancel culture was even the buzzword that it is today.

It was it was still something where it's like, now that's not real or you know it's but yeah, it seems like when that happened, I I'm not sure why Amy didn't come back on the show. I know that some of it is because she's busy, but I have to wonder if some of it was not due to online harassment, because there was some that went on that was uncomfortable.

there's some pretty strong flaws with them. I personally experienced the negative side of that code of conduct enforcement at a conference that I was supposed to be a speaker at and I had a talk that had that I had given it other conferences successfully, and I was scheduled to give that talk at that conference. One of the marketers for that conference wrote an ad that made an inappropriate joke about the title of my talk. That they made an inappropriate pun from the title of my talk.

That was an outside marketer or advertiser or something. Nobody cleared it with me. I didn't know what was happening, but happened that ad offended a bunch of people, and those people got turned their attention to me in my talk title, and they made a claim that my talk title was a violation of the code of conduct because of what that market or advertiser did. The conference organizer and I had some long drawn out conversations about it.

He was begging me to Chane change the talk title, and on principle, I really felt like I wasn't going to change it because I felt like that was not at all the intent of the talk title, and I didn't feel like it was fair to compromise on that. In the end, that conference I organizer basically dropped me as a speaker. He said, well, if you won't change the title, then we can't have you speak because one of our sponsor companies, a big sponsor company, is going

to back out if you speak. So they dropped me from the program. And one of the things that frustrates me about that scenario, it's not like, oh man, I got deplatformed. I mean it was one conference. I've given hundreds of conference talks. But what frustrated me about that situation was literally hundred part I've literally given like over two hundred conference talks. Yeah, wow, had I did not realize I've done. I've been speaking forever. I've had plenty

of opportunities on the stage, is my point. I'm not trying to brag or something, but I've had plenty of opportunities. It's not like I don't somehow like canceled or dy platforms. But the Code of Conduct is supposed to protect everybody equally, but in its implementation it ends up unequally protecting some

folks at the disadvantage of other folks. That's unfortunate. I should have been just as protected from an unfair claim against me as the people who had every legitimate right to feel their complaint about my talk title and feeling offended by my top title. We both should have been equally protected. But in that case, basically the sponsor dollars one that organizer said, I got to take the sponsor dollars and I got to kick you out.

people get over it. And it's you know, I guess it's like if you don't know how to act like an adult and you don't know your audience, you're going to find out that the idea that there was a formal process to pick apart something you've said or done, to hold a kangaroo court, that's that's all. That's all I see it as i've I'm I think I heard it one instance where somebody made an inappropriate joke and they they coced him and it was like a warning.

But most of what I hear and but that you would do anyway, Like you don't need a COC to say, hey man, that joke was a little inappropriate, especially for this audience and the professionalism that we're trying to have. We will not invite you back if you you know, like have that sure, but to co see somebody and then make an announcement, Okay, there was an inappropriate joke in track three at twelve pm by someone, and we have this part of our COC that those kinds of

inappropriate jokes are not okay. So we just want everybody to feel safe. The person has been dealt with. So there's there's I'll.

lot of it goes wrong. Is we really wish that people were just you know, better at understanding how their intentional or unintentional actions were, you know, making somebody feel unwelcome or unsafe. We really wish people just had that perspective and that we could just kind of like have a quick little conversation with them and they would totally get it and say, you're right, I'm sorry, I shouldn't

have done it. But a lot of people don't a lot of people don't feel that way, and so we've got to litigate the empathy into the situation.

But everybody really should be acting I think with that empathy that at the instant that somebody points out, hey, that thing that you just said or did was like it was over the line, or it bothered me, or it made me feel uncomfortable, that the instant reaction should have been like, that wasn't my intent. I'm sorry, I'll fix that joke, I won't do that in the field. That wasn't my intent, and I'm really sorry. We could resolve so many problems if people really genuinely cared to

be empathetic like that. And there there will be people who have malicious intent who don't who who are going to say things and they're not going to feel contrite. Those people definitely do need the litigious part of a code of Kunda, but it's sort of this one size fits all paintbrush that all interactions need that same performative

aspect and they don't. It's really hard to know in advance whether a person is going to be like really receptive and understanding or whether they're going to make a big stink about no, no, no. I have the right to say whatever kind of joke I want to say. So I think it's really hard for me to imagine us being more successful without them. But I don't think that we've figured out the right way to position these yet.

And this was PHP five or so. But if you do, here's how to overcome that pitfall. Never run a PHP server standalone, but if you do, here's how to overcome that pitfall with a reverse proxy instead. Never use WordPress because your server is going to get hacked. But if you do, here's how to install the security plug or you know. So it was very much. A you know, I don't like PHP, and I hope that you don't

use it. But if you choose to use PHP anyway, here's some things that I've encountered that mitigate the problems. But it was, you know, it was in bad faith in the sense that I was, you know, I was trolling for my own personal ego, and the conference organizer pulled me aside and you know, just gave me a disappointed look and he said, that's not cool. Man, I'm going to need you to apologize. You know, what you did was wrong, you know it that shouldn't have gone

that way. And I'm embarrassed that that, you know, you did that to our community. And so you know, I made a public apology and I came back the next year and I spoke and I didn't do something stupid like that. But you know, and I think that that is that's the right way to handle it, is to pull people aside a deal that man and man or woman a woman or what you know, man, whatever it is. But you know, in the idiom man the man and and to you know, to take that personal responsibility in

both respects. And if I had said no, he probably would have said you are welcome to leave, you know, and that would have been the right thing to do. And so I I agree that we should have standards, you know, and I agree with a lot of what you're saying. I just yeah, I'll leave it at that. I agree with a lot of what you're saying. I think that we actually have a lot in common. I think we have more in common on this point than

we than we disagree on. But there's some some definitely some details we disagree on.

And I eventually decided that what I wanted to do, which I knew would ruffle feathers, but what I wanted to do in an attempt to be productive, is to give a talk that points out all of the frustrations that I have as somebody trying to come in to react from the outside and learn and do something and specifically the frustrations I have because I can't do what I need with only React. Why is React so deficient in the following ways that the only solutions are all

these external vibras and frameworks. Shouldn't this be something that is prioritized by reacts? So the talk was effectively from that frame of reference. Here's what I was trying to do, here's my bad code.

but the outsiders don't understand it. Whatever. But I think the majority of people were like, man, screw that guy. And I didn't get invited back. I doubt I'll get invited back. I doubt i'll be ever I'll ever be invited to speak at a React conference again. So I've got the same I've got a similar experience. I get it.

was the wrong format. If I had inverted that to saying, you know, there's a lot of things I like about X, Y, and Z, and I think that if you use these there's a lot of pitfalls you avoid, and so i'd actually encourage you to investigate those as you're on your journey. But talking about PHPD, I could have done it in

a way that was much more productive. So I'll take a list of that talk and i'll i'll I'll message you and and and give you my my take if, if, if you would be interested in that, I put myself up on a you know, a high horse or anything. All right, Okay, so this is this has been interesting. It definitely started off and has continued in a direction that I didn't expect, and I want to I want

to circle back around. Actually, is there anything else that's on your mind right now that you wanna that you want to dig into.

and all of that offshoot from that. Not to say again that I don't own any of the responsibility for why some players might want to hire me, but I do think there are some macro level things that I believe to be true about our industry now that have changed and changed rather rapidly, and I want to call them out because I think they're a bad direction that we've gone. And I don't know if there's any dialing it back, but I just want to call this out.

So when I joined as an engineer, when I started as an engineer back in the mid to late nineties, that's kind of when I got my feet wet with software engineering. And when I was joining, the industry was full of a number of extremely highly regarded founding fathers

and mothers of the industry. There were people that had been already in the industry by for thirty or forty years at that point, and they were still active and involved in various parts of technology and internet, web and all of that, and they were in these highly regarded positions at the big companies, whether they're the Googles or whatever, like they you know, they held these like distinguished physicians

in these companies. And I joined as this brand new engineer, and of course I immediately, like I so looked up to them, right like I want to be like them. I want to I want to do something important and impactful for the world, and I want to be like them, and that's not going to happen overnight. So I literally have

intentionally spent a lot of my effort. I've it's something that I've regularly gone back to in my career over the last twenty five years to try to pay my dues and to try to pay it for it, and to try to give back more to this industry than I've taken because I wanted to follow in those footsteps and I wanted to be that type of engineer for this industry. What I think has happened over the last and I don't think it's been long. I think it's

been maybe two or three years at most. It's not been But I think what's happened is we've the industry is basically decided that having people like that as part of the conversation is not important anymore, and in fact, not only is it not really all that important, it's actually more of a liability. I think what we've decided.

The way I would describe this is, I think what used to be the variance of the engineering ladder going from you know you just started to you've got ten or twelve or more years right above twelve fifteen years, et cetera. Like that was the the variance of the engineering ladder, and there were companies that would always believe it was important to hire people near the top of that ladder. Now I think we've shrunked that ladder so much.

Where from the beginning of your engineering career to when you're like a season staffer principal engineer, where that used to be twelve fifteen, twenty years, it's now like four to six years. I literally see a job in my mind. I saw job posting just the other day for a staff level engineer and they said five years JavaScript experience for a staff level position, and that was unheard of. That would have been unheard of back in the day. But that's that's the new reality. I'm not saying it's

not a reality, which just need to embrace that. It is the reality. And so because things are changing so quickly, and because companies are not really valuing those those longer, longer lived, and more experienced voices in the conversation, I think we've seen a lot of these factors kind of reducing both the pay that is available in the industry and really it's become where we don't hire people anymore.

We hire roles. We don't hire people and Taylor what we have them do based upon what their experience and their skill level is. We just hire into roles and if you fit in the role, grain and if you don't fit in the role, we just don't hire you. Right, that's a big change where we now have more supply than demand. And I've looked at a whole bunch of jobs that and applied to many of them that are well below my level of experience at twenty five years

and pay well below what I was making before. And I've tried to apply to those jobs and I don't even get callbacks. I don't even get like interview and part of you.

So we're not going to hire him into this lower role because he won't be happy and we won't be happy. And so it's not simply that, in my opinion, it's not simply that you know that there's a quote unquote more qualified candidate at this point. What I'm seeing, and I'm not the only one, what I'm seeing is that the more senior you are, the harder it is to find any jobs out there because they're kind of just being sunseted. They're not firing super top level you know,

year experienced people, but they're not hiring them anymore. They're just not and they don't want to. And I feel this is really troublesome.

I think the advent of AI has been significantly improved the position of those entering because they are not coming into this with any prior experience about or conceptions about what engineering should be, and they're excited to use whatever tools they can, and they're excited that they get a lot of visible bang for the buck if you will quickly.

Those people are way easier for companies to imagine employing right now than people who have been doing engineering the quote unquote old school way for so long and are more willing to call out the flaws.

any result than a more traditional engineering approach would. And I had interesting you know, there was a very recent experience where I had gone through a very prolonged job interviewing process, really thought I was going to get it.

I was down at the end final interviews, and then got told that we've decided not to move forward, and the feedback they gave me was literally, we think you're too rigorous of an engineer, you're too concerned with solving the problem in the most complete way, and you're not interested in just shipping something quickly, and that you won't fit here because of that. I sat that that's just

a reality. That's that's the way our industries change. And I'm not going to say that there's no benefit to it, because there are reasons why our industries changed that way. But I don't think we've really come to terms with the cost of that quite yet. I think I have a lot of costs down the road.

first thing that comes to mind. You don't. Well, maybe you personally, Kyle Simpson, you may do this from the way you're speaking, but the average person doesn't doesn't recognize what's wrong. They don't know why they're angry or why they're upset. They're upset, they know they're upset. You ask them, oh, you seem like something's bugging you, what's bothering you? And they're just gonna spit off the first thing that comes to mind, which is typically the most recent thing that happened.

Like they were upset, they're having a bad day. They stub their toe, So you say, why are you upset? Ugh, I stubbed my toe, you know. But no, that's not the reason you were upset. That's just the most recent thing that happened that put an impression negatively on your emotions. And I think that that's kind of what's happening in the industry in regards to this AI thing. Interest rates

are the problem. Money is drying up. AI is an excuse, which paradoxically then causes more of the economic issue because then people believe that AI is the solution, Like people are not firing their employees because AI is picking up the slack. That's somebody come at me with the data that shows that that's what's happening. But I think that everyone who's done marketing for an AI company has had

their article refuted on that basis. People are losing employees and tightening the belt because the interest rates have gone up. When the interest rates go up, that means that for the investors to take out the money in the first place, they actually have to have a plan to pay back the money, because when the interest rates are low, then you don't really have to pay back the money every month.

You could just float on it. Like imagine that. You know, if you could get a one percent interest rate on, like you had a big project you wanted to do and you were not being really conservative with your money, interest rates were one percent, you could take out fifty thousand dollars and then you could sit on that fifty thousand dollars for the next ten years and use the money to pay back the loan and only use ten

thousand of it to do whatever you wanted to do. So, if interest rates are sufficiently low and you're financially savvy, you're going to take out way more money than you need and you're going to use the extra money as a buffer. And I say financially savvy, I don't not necessarily from a moral perspective, I'm not saying that's the right thing to do, but I'm saying it's a trick you can use. You take out more money than you need, you use, you use the money as a buffer to

pay off the interest rate. That's what the whole I mean. And a lot of people I think are truly evil. They get people to do this with their home equity loans to you know, take some blockchain course or some real estate course or I've got I've got a friend, Like my heart just hurts for him because he's gotten suckered in, and I'm telling him, I'm like, dude, you are getting suckered like, please stop. This is going to be so bad for your family, This is going to

be so bad for you. Just please please just hear me out like you are the sucker. Like, but nobody wants to hear that, you know. Anyway, Sorry, that's a tangent, but I.

think it's coming back in my lifetime. I don't think it's coming back.

to extinguish competition. But that's effectively what the zero interest rates did because the profitable, the profitable businesses went out of business because they had to pay their costs that month. The businesses that had the zero interest rate loans funneled through investors, they did not have to pay their costs that month. Yeah, And so the businesses that were profitable went out of business, and the businesses that were unprofitable

had an unfair advantage. And this is I mean, this goes into a whole ball of wax, but I mean, like that's the fed. It funnels into tech. Why do these tech companies from the last twenty years, why do they all parent the same message? Why is there not a single publicly traded company that has a different opinion. Why is it only privately owned companies like thirty seven Signals that have a different opinion. When the money flows that way, it is the ideology, the philosophy, the ethics,

everything about it. Where the money comes from is tainted. When you've got a profitable, profitable business, your relationship is to your customer. When you have a growth opportunity, your relationship is literally to the US government. You were getting your money from the FED. That is where you know, that's where it all goes back to. You may have a different opinion on that or whatever, and I don't. I don't want to push that any.

But I do think that this is a conversation that I hope maybe you'll have with even other people on this podcast. Bring people on and ask them their perspectives on these things. Is it might be different than mine?

and that makes it a good pairing. That is a very bad pairing when I get on with a high context communicator because I'm not intuitive and I take things that's face value. I don't read signals, you know, so so this anyway, Yeah, I don't, I don't wanna. I don't wanna monopolize your Actually, no time, I absolutely do.

change and shift and culture and all that kind of culminating. Yeah, so thanks for coming on. I guess we'll go ahead and move on to picks then, and I'll go first. So I know so many people right now, This is this is what's blowing my mind. It makes me really worried because you know, I myself am at risk. I work independently. I work for a few different companies, but it would be as the economic situation changes, I'm at risk and I could be in an unfavorable position myself.

And I know so many people that are highly qualified people that if I were hiring, I would hire them. I met this guy to meet up. He is, you know, there's probably like the ten smartest people I've ever met. And this guy is so weird now because now there's nobody except the Internet that I'm talking to. It's totally different vibe. But there's he's probably one of the ten smartest people I've ever met, just in terms of like

the way that he can reason about things. I mean not just his knowledge, but like his ability to intuit patterns and connect the dots right. And he works at an Amazon warehouse and he also works on a compiler, and he is struggling to get a job for some of the same reasons that Kyle was mentioning, where he's overqualified and yet has no industry experience, like the things that he can the things that he can work on.

He's overqualified for the positions that he's applying for and under under experience in terms of what could be shown on a resume. So it's just like this weird limbo and he's not the only one. And I'm going to share some of his his work for fun. For fun, Walmart had released a paper about their search algorithm and he noticed some technical issues with it, and he created one of the most masterful presentations I've ever seen showing

how applying different techniques would yield significant benefits. And this is actually significant because it's Walmart and it's search for their autocomplete, so it's not it's not like a I mean, it's a significant problem, you know, it's Anyway, he just one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. And I'm going to post some links to that. His handle is valid Ark. But this is a guy that if I were, if I were hiring, I would totally want

him on my team. I wouldn't be able to use him to his full capacity, but totally want them on on the team. And I've I've done a little bit of work with him on a on a side project and is very satisfied. Anyway, And I know other people like this. I know several other people that do not have jobs right now that are top tier engineers. They are on the top shelf. They are the people that I would want to hire, and they cannot find work. And this is the strangest thing in the world to me.

So anyway, I was the pick. There was more than anything else is that the Walmart paper and then oh, whoops, I actually didn't link to the correct the Let me let me see I can link to this correctly, the link to this. Okay, there we are, that's the correct link for the other piece there. And then also, uh uh, you know, since we're since we're all alone now and it's just me and no one else can be blamed. My my other pick is going to be I don't like I kind of want to couch this. I kind

of want to don't. I don't know, but I I don't. I don't know if this is going to come out before the election. I think it will. I don't think our lead times on the episodes are that long right now, I have to go back and check. But I would encourage everybody to reconsider what you think you know. I like, No, I don't even want you to reconsider what you think you know. What I want, what I want for people

to do. What would what would make me so incredibly happy is if you know, just one person goes out there and looks up actual source videos. Take the person that your hate is targeted towards, go look up the source videos, and see what that person actually says. For the whole sentence, because I've seen some I don't know if it's AI generated or what, but I've seen some

content that it's not parody content, that's actual content. It's being put out there that is removing words like not from the video and and and then being you know, recycled into I think a lot of people have some very wrong misconceptions about particular events and particular things that have been said in particular like a lot of the

particulars are very very skewed. So whatever your greatest bias is against or four your candidate, go just watch the video and watch like the whole sixty second clip, the thirty seconds before, the thirty seconds after of what they're actually saying, and see if it lines up with what you believe that you have been taught that they are saying. Because I guarantee you, for many of you, if you do the at no matter which side you're on, you are going to have your eyes opened, and it might

open up enough to cause some reconsideration. I do think that this election is very strange. I think there's a lot of anomalies that have led up to it. I think that something is wrong in the US system right now. I think it's dangerously wrong. And you know, and if you want to make a quick buck, Elon has announced a program on Twitter where you can make money by registering people to vote. And as far as I know, I don't think that there's a stipulation on that they

have to be for a particular candidacy. The position is a freedom of speech position, but I don't believe that you have to subscribe to a particular candidate in order to take advantage of that offer. So basically, forty seven million dollars is up for grabs. That's forty seven dollars per registration is up for grabs for anybody who goes through whatever online tool they have inviting it becomes the

referral for the registration something like that. I don't know all the details, but I think it's anyway, So I put that out there. So with that all said, thanks for tuning in. I hope that this was a good episode. I hope that that this has a positive impact overall. I know I did a little bit of ranting there and whatnot, but I hope this is a positive impact overall. And y'all have a good one. I'll catch you later. Audios