You're listening to Tech Talks, a podcast by the Technology Education Collaborative.
Tech is an Arizona nonprofit that empowers people with useful information
about the technology they use every day.
Today on our podcast, we have Jordan Anderson coming in from Australia.
Is that right?
Yeah, yeah.
Awesome.
Thanks so much for coming on to our show today.
So today we are going to go through our usual format where we ask Jordan a
series of questions like we normally do on Tech Talks, and then after that,
we're going to have an interesting conversation about different mindsets we
can use when we are writing software.
And I am very excited about that conversation because just a few minutes
ago, Jordan and I were having a little casual chitchat and we already
found a lot of common ground.
Without further ado, I'm going to give Jordan a chance to talk about
himself here for a few minutes.
I'll give him these questions and we will learn more about him.
But first off, thank you, Jordan, for coming onto the show today.
Yeah, thanks so much, Chuck.
I definitely share your excitement.
Really looking forward to this chat.
Awesome.
Yes.
The first question that we got here for you is what is your title or position?
I'm a director at Hermit Technology and Hermit Tech is a tech consultancy
firm and our MO is that everything we do is with radical ethics.
Uh, and so what that means, um, is that, you know, we won't bull anyone
that we chat with or honest, and we could get more into kind of what
that looks like and examples, but yeah, I'm on a team, there are six of us.
We have expertise ranging from data engineering, right through
the data science and analytics.
That's kind of my role.
And my game is to go and help people who need, you know, data and database
solutions to all their fun stuff.
Thanks for explaining that.
I really love that ideology, that mindset, just keeping it very true.
And to the point, no nonsense, right?
A little bit more on to our second question here.
What do you do on a daily basis?
Just like any consultancy, you know, we go out and look for leads, uh, so
that, so that we can find our clients and do some work, really what that
looks like is just meeting people, talk to them and finding out what
they're paying points are.
And it's, it's funny.
We've, uh, we've talked a lot about, uh, how we're going to run the company.
Uh, we have a completely flat structure.
All six of us are directors.
So we trust one another with decisions and, you know, you don't have to check
with anyone because we all believe that we're going to act with each other's
best interests and the company's best interests within our ethos.
So, yeah, it isn't like we go around cold calling with all of that, you know, on,
on a daily basis, I, uh, I focus on writing about my experiences.
Chuck and I got connected through, uh, one of my co-directors, uh, Nick
Suresh, uh, one of his blogs recently went viral and was all over Hacker News.
Uh, and that's just kind of the stuff that we do is that, you know, we write
about our experiences and share our, our honest opinions and just don't, you know,
fluff around and don't hide, uh, you know, how we feel and criticisms.
Um, but really kind of that's, that's the way that we get the message out.
Uh, I guess you can call it marketing, uh, about what we do.
Um, so that's kind of a big chunk we're doing today.
I'm currently contracting for a government agency.
And so, you know, my nine to five right now is actually filled up with providing
kind of solutions architecture services.
They've kind of scaled out of, uh, requirements, not out of choice with
their data and some of their products they're offering to, uh, different local
governments and so, uh, my role there right now, most of my day is, uh, setting
up cloud pipelines and cleaning up some of their, uh, data science projects
that they have a few of their models.
And I'm doing a bunch of, uh, data modeling to, uh, to move them out of
kind of a, I guess, individual data mart type approach with their database
to, uh, to a dim fact model.
So yeah, very technical in the kind of, uh, what I do with during the day.
Um, and it's, you know, it's all part and parcel with keeping my skills sharp.
Uh, but also, you know, those are kind of the services that, that Hermitech offers.
Our next question, what is your favorite thing about your job?
Yeah, the, this sounds cheesy, but like, like helping people.
Uh, and so going in and, uh, you know, the most exciting thing that I've
had in the tech industry is going in and understanding an organization's
challenges, problems, pain points, and then just like the massive amount of
dopamine that I get of, of helping them with that and solving it, you know,
through, through being a nerd and sitting down, writing code for a black screen.
Yeah, it just, I get, I get such a drive out of making things better so that an
organization can, can do the thing, you know what I mean?
Uh, so, you know, I come from, uh, recently I worked in healthcare in,
in the data team, they're developing different products, uh, mostly on a
database, my big role was making data more available to emergency department
teams so that they could get a better understanding of what they're doing
and how they're doing it.
And so I had a great opportunity to work directly with emergency department
nurses, doctors, and data teams.
And it was, it was just such a cool role that I, that I sat in for that period
of time, because like, I just, you know, I stood on the floor when things go
crazy in the middle of the day in the emergency department and, uh, just so I
can understand, you know, what they're, what they're actually dealing with and
why they need the data and what those, those, you know, visualizations really
need to look like so that it helps them do their job.
Uh, so yeah, that, you know, again, in a very cheesy way, I just love helping
people with the super technical side of things that we do in tech.
I'm kind of the same vein, you know, I write software because I love it.
And because I just, I get a dopamine rush from solving problems that make my life
better in turn, you know what I mean?
And if I can do that for other people too, that's a win.
Totally.
And I think that's a big thing about, you know, what we do in, in software
engineering, data engineering, the whole bit, right?
Like, like we get that big rush of dopamine and serotonin and, you know,
in a way that it's funny that that's the selfish side of the work that we do.
Right.
And, but yeah, no, it's, um, it's really cool when you can do that.
And you're not just another monkey, you know, fixing a bug that someone created
because it was, you know, just poorly designed, it's, uh, yeah, really pushing
things forward is, is such a fun way to get paid, right?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And you know, the job isn't always fun, right?
It's not always the dopamine rushes.
And in fact, there there's, there's days where probably things are rough and
that's kind of a good segue into the next question, which is what is your
least favorite thing about your job?
If you, if you have any least favorite thing, or if you don't really have any
complaints, what are things you think could be better?
Oh, Jack, don't worry.
I got some complaints and I touched on it, you know, it's, um, one of the, I
mean, just like any other developer, it sucks to have to debug someone else's
code that's, you know, either was poorly designed, rushed to put together, you
know, whatever the reasons were, but, you know, going through somebody's
uncommented, just elephant graveyard of, of lines and lines and stuff like that.
I think, you know, all of us share that disdain.
I'd actually probably have to point to the thing that I dislike the most is
kind of why we started Hermit Tech.
And it's just the systematic waste of time, money, and other resources, and
that other resources, the most precious ones, you know, just the souls of people
in tech shops, right, I'm sure that, you know, all of us have had that experience
where you work somewhere where a manager is breathing down their neck or going on
and on about burn velocity and sprints and, you know, how many story points we're
getting through, and, you know, that becomes a focus instead of doing good
technical work with high fidelity and strong data integrity, right, when, when
the ladder takes a backseat, because we just got to get it out in the next two
weeks sprint, that type of philosophy and pressure, right, and the frustration that
comes along with it.
Like I said, that that's really where Hermit Tech, I guess was the impetus to
actually get us all together and doing the thing that we do is that we've
experienced all that. And again, a bunch of us have experienced the great sides of
being a developer. But it's just the frustration of watching these
organizations getting sold on the worst ideas ever, you know, one of the big
companies would come in working with KPMG Deloitte or any of the other big
firms is that there's this excitement of a project and strategy. And then when the
rubber hits the road, you get, you know, a bunch of kids who are 18 months out of
graduating college, that you know, your organization is forking over thousands of
dollars a day for this thing that just doesn't have any governance or control.
And, and so then as in-house talent, you're stuck with this just absolute
heaped pile of something, right? And so that that's absolutely the most
frustrating part, because then, you know, again, the in-house talent is, is
demanded that they make this thing fixed, fitting a, you know, a square piece into a
round hole. It's just that type of this interaction and transaction throughout the
tech industry, and not just tech industry, like across industries, but with tech and
digital assets. That's, you know, really why we came together to be a bit of a
positive beacon to stop that. So I mentioned that, you know, we're, our
ethos is that, you know, we're radically ethical. And, you know, a big thing that we
do is that, you know, often we advise clients that they shouldn't do the thing,
you know, they contact us like, Oh, you know, we have this idea, this project, for
example, you know, the Red Hot thing, the past three years ago, we want to do a cloud
migration, we got to get to the cloud, we got to get up there, right? We got to, we
got to be serverless. And, you know, the first question we always ask is like, Well,
do you really need to, would it be more effective for your organization, if you
just, you know, reorganize your data, did it in Postgres, posted it locally, because
you kind of already have the infrastructure sitting in a basement somewhere? Like, would
that not just be a better solution to do the thing that your organization wants to do?
And so, yeah, that's, to tie back to your question. Yeah, that's the most frustrating
thing. And, and the six of us, we want to do things better, you know, and do better
by people who use technology, and data to really achieve why they started this
business that they do, be it in healthcare, or transportation, or, or, you know,
agriculture. So yeah, that's the long winded answer of what makes me frustrated.
I definitely hear a lot of sentiments that I share in your response to that. One
exercise I always take people through is what I call right sizing, where I say to
them, Hey, let's start with the most bare bones, cheapest single entity possible,
right? A single server, a computer, right? Maybe even a Raspberry Pi, if you wanted
to get really crazy with this. Let's start with a really small thing that's cheap
and easy and answer the question, why won't this thing solve our, our business
needs? Right? What constraints are we going to run into first, such that we
actually need to go to the cloud, or, you know, you know what I mean, when I say
cloud, something more nebulous than just simply one server in the cloud, something
like an AWS distributed architecture or whatever is what I'm kind of getting at
when I say the cloud here. But you kind of get the gist, right? So if when we do
a right sizing exercise, we identify the areas in which we maybe won't have
enough enough disk space, maybe won't have enough RAM, maybe we won't have
enough uptime or high availability. But because we're thinking about this from
the things one server can no longer do for us, we're actually able to get down
and figure out what the customer really, really needs. Instead of them just
assuming they have to go to the cloud, they have to spend $5,000 a month on a
single Redis cluster, they have to do all these other crazy things that just
really aren't necessary to get the job done. Because they're not operating at
the scale that they think that they are going to need to operate at.
Yeah, totally. I mean, the thing that you mentioned there is that, you know,
that that right sizing is a wedge, right to get in, so that you can really get
into that. Well, what is this company doing? What do you guys actually want to
do? Why did you reach out to us? And I think, you know, having that philosophy
is so much more effective, because we can all just say like, Oh, you want to go
to the cloud? No problem. I'm going to set up your, you know, DBT will stop it.
No, we'll use Matillion. And then we'll get you up in AWS and use DBT. Oh, you
definitely need Snowflake, right? And you just just terminology bomb them with all
of the fads of today with with products. But no, you're totally right, Chuck, like
that, that that thing of like, hey, what will actually help your organization? And
why are you bringing us in as consultants as an external group, right? Like, what
are we actually trying to do here, team? And, and let's work together towards that.
And it's such a more fulfilling thing to do. And, you know, I've got a big
philosophy that it that it helps the tech industry as a whole to do things
better, right? Because like, I think we're getting, you know, talking
different C suite people, you know, we're moving more towards a distrust in tech in
general, not just consultants, but like, ah, you know, those software engineers are
taking so long. And, you know, that's been a bit of the rhetoric, always, but I
think it's, it's starting to slide and get a bit worse in, you know, the mid to
big size corporations, particularly you find in Australia, the government,
right? Like, there's a lot of skepticism. And so, you know, we have to not not sell
harder, but like, you know, there's a lot more conversation and you got to say the
right words to gain trust. And it's just been a weird shift over the past, you
know, bit of time.
So the next question that we've got queued up here for you is what is one
practical thing you'd want someone who is considering pursuing your job or your
industry, whatever it is you do, what would you want them to know? And I know
that we've kind of touched on this and maybe a little bit of a ways like kind
of what feeds into your philosophies and your mindset and all that stuff to
someone who is hearing this, what would you tell them if they wanted to get
started? Let's say that there may be a college graduate or maybe just still in
college, maybe even in high school. What would you say to them such that they
could be more prepared for getting into this career path?
Learn to use Git, version control, that's that like, and I start there,
because it's, it's technical, therefore, you know, us nerds, we can, I could do
that, I can go out and read Stack Overflow and read a book and like,
seriously, pick up Pro Git and just like, read the first five chapters and just
start a little project. Like, honestly, like, just just do that. Learn Git
version control properly. That's like the technical side of what people can do on
a more, I guess, broader principle approach. I'm borrowing this from, from
Nick, my co director, like, just take people out to coffee, like, talk to
people, just have a conversation and learn from other people. And, and, you
know, that type of approach, you just, you open up and unlock your ability to
learn so much more effectively, and not just about tech stuff, right, like,
about what challenges people have in the world. And I'm feeling, sounding
hippie-ish, but like, when you start with that, and you get used to learning
from people around you, in your industry and out of, like, you look down
the road, and it just sets you up, you know, in different roles that, you
know, all of a sudden, you're having a conversation with someone who does
hiring, or you get a referral, or, you know, when it starts to look like
that, you find your way in front of something, you know, a CEO, and then
you can have different conversations and have a bigger impact in the
industry. I mean, from a consulting point of view, like, you asked, you
know, what does my day to day looks like? Yeah, like, seriously, a lot of
it is, is asking interesting people, if I can buy them a coffee, you know,
from there, you start, if you want to look at a business and marketing
point of view, like, that's the way that you can, quote unquote, you
know, find leads, or, you know, start building your business, but it's
really just like, talking to people, what about their problems, you know,
what are you interested in? So and I say that, again, typically in the
tech industry, you know, we, we just want to sit and write in front of a
computer, right, we want to write code, we don't want to talk to people.
But you know, it's get out of that comfort zone. And you might, you might
find a passion in what someone else is doing. And then, like we spoke
about, find a way that you can help someone else. And you know, heaven
forbid, get paid for that. So yeah, those are kind of the two things,
learn version control, get really good at Git. And then just just talk to
people in and out of the industry about tech stuff, because it's
fascinating.
Regarding Git, I also agree that it's one of the most foundational things
to learn nowadays. It's a little weird at first, right. I mean, I also
was kind of confused with it over, you know, 1015 years ago, I don't
remember exactly when I started using Git, I think the thing that made it
click for me was remotes, and how a repository is basically just something
that can exist across different remotes. And once you learn that,
like, oh, there's GitHub, and then there's GitLab. And then there's,
you know, get tea and all these different source control hosts. But
underneath it all, it's just a Git thing that you're pointing your
repository to. And that's just the remote, something, I don't know, I
just made it made it click for me. And I really hope that other people
can can put in the time to, and most importantly, the patience to learn
it, because it's really not so bad once you get used to it. But I have
met quite a few people over the years who are still kind of struggling
with with the basics on it. And I do my best to try and explain it to
them, because I acknowledge it as a little unusual at first.
Yeah, totally. And like, look, just the I mentioned before, like, learning
a new thing, any new thing, just get a project, get a pet project that
you want to tinker around with, and, and do that. Or, you know, if, if
anyone's listening, and they're, you know, let's say, a few years into
the industry, and you're thinking like, I don't have time, you know, I
don't, I don't want to be from my computer at night or on weekends, I
just do it at work, right? Like, convince your IT department to allow
you to install Git and just whatever you're working on now, just start
version controlling it, right? That's just the best way to learn a new
skill. Because I totally agree with you that, you know, I've worked with
people who've been in the industry for 15 years. And, you know, in a
way, I empathize with them, you know, if you got kids or grandkids, and
you're looking at it like, I don't want to learn a new thing, I know
how to write SQL, and I get paid, so why would I do anything different?
And so, you know, there's, there's going to be a few barriers to that
toward the end. But yeah, like it, like, if you want to learn, just
start doing it.
Those are the main questions. The we've got one final question here
for you. What would you like to share with those who are listening
currently? What are you working on? What passion projects? What are you
involved in? Anything you want to share? I know, we've discussed a
little bit about your consultancy, your firm, and some of the ethos
behind that. But is there anything else you'd like to share?
In terms of the practical stuff? Chuck and I, we spoke before we
started recording about Hetzner and, you know, exploring different
platforms, different tools that are not, you know, the big three that
are not Azure, AWS, and GCP. And so we're playing around with a few
things there. We're looking to develop our own CRM that's, again,
hosted in a bit more of a financially feasible way, be
really light with it, and put together a product that we use
internally, you know, borrowing kind of from from base camp
approach, right, that, you know, we have pain points. And so we're
all in tech, we've got, you know, back end and front end
experience. So why don't we just make something that works for us
and see where that goes. So that's kind of on a product side.
And then we're also big on developing processes. And so, you
know, I hate the corporate term, you know, ways of working, but
really, like, you know, I'm up in in the Gold Coast area in, in
Australia, and the rest of the team is down in Melbourne. And
that's, I gotta check my geography, but like, 2000
kilometers, so but yeah, so you know, we're separated. And then
in Melbourne, all five of them, they're also living in different
areas. And so, you know, it's really like, how do we be
productive with the mostly async dev cycles, and every now and
again, we get together in pair program. And we found that, you
know, pair programming in two, maybe three, where you have an
observer being the third. But yeah, no more than that, if we
actually want to tackle tackle something technical and deep,
we've realized that we got to, you know, talk about it, break
it, break the task down into chunks, and then split off into
into teams and pairs and tackle it. So we were formalizing, you
know, how does Hermit Tech work? Because, you know, it works
really well for us that we've, you know, developed a few other
products and, and solved problems for clients being, you
know, super async. So, you know, can we put together some sort of
a cookbook that other people might benefit from? So yeah,
that's that. Those are kind of the three big things that, that
we talk about that we work on.
Awesome. Okay. Well, that wraps up this portion of our
discussion here. Thank you, Jordan, for going through our
questions. Jordan and I are going to have a second part of
this conversation where we dive a little bit into a little bit
more of the mindset and philosophies of good software
development principles, at least as we see it, based on an
article that went popular that we mentioned earlier called I
will drop kick you if you use that spreadsheet. It's a little
more aggressive than I made it sound, that's for sure. And it's
a great read. So now we'll go ahead and move on with the next
portion. I got to pull this article up. Do you have it up?
So it depends on which one you're talking about the I will
drop kick you if you use that spreadsheet or use spreadsheet
again, that was an older one that Nick wrote. But it's still
got very a lot of positive feedback. The most recent one
that dropped at the end of June was I will compile drive you if
you mention AI one more time or something along those lines.
Yeah, it's so good. And like, we laugh about it. But yeah, so
no, those are those are kind of the two. So a quick rundown,
like the spreadsheet one was more around like data
engineering, like, stop shoving everything into, you know, five
megabyte size Excel files and like do things properly. And,
and what does that look like? And a lot of like what we spoke
about in the first segment that like, stop adding to tech debt,
just because your stupid sprint burndown chart looks better,
right? Like, let's do things properly. So that's kind of that
one. And then the I will drive you if you mentioned AI, like
that was God, it was so good. It's just like the culmination
of conversations we've had over the last year of just CEOs
getting absolutely sold on bullshit, right? And just crap
products that, you know, just because you use AI, it doesn't
mean that you're doing anything useful other, you know, you're
just wasting money. So it's a big conversation on like, like,
yeah, more directed towards a C-suite, like, what are we
actually doing? Like, and when somebody says these types of
things around AI, like, when you do like a fucking pip install,
like chat, open AI, like deploy chat GPT as a Gen AI, like,
you're not doing anything, right? Like, it's just but like
a CEO can put that on their on their CV and then, and then, you
know, fade off into the distance and gather a bonus. And so it's
the criticism of that type of stuff. It's like, what are we
actually doing?
Yeah, I got to be honest, it's it's absolutely all over the
place. Everyone thinks they can just plug this thing in, and
suddenly their application can do anything. I even had this
this thought for a little while at first, I wanted to create
something that would summarize your Git commits, right. And so
I thought, well, hey, this thing's a large language model,
right? So I should be able to pass in a diff patch of all the
the commits I did on a certain, you know, basis, and it should
be able to understand this. And so I passed it through like
three or four different production, large language
models, like Claude, GPT, four, and I think a few variants of
Claude. And I got mixed results from all of them. I even tried
to be very specific, like only respond. Exactly. Like only
respond with like a rating of one to 10 on how productive this
commit was. And like, if I'm over here, someone who is kind
of in the industry and is writing software thinking this
stuff, it's no wonder everyone else is also thinking this
stuff, because it seems like and it's advertised as this thing
that can do anything and everything. Right. And why are
we buying into that? Well, because it's new, because it's
novel, because it's very cool to see something being able to
distill the sum of human knowledge into a little prompt
that you can interact with. It's, it's undoubtedly undoubtedly
cool. But at the same time, I think people think, or are
rather being told that it can solve all your problems. What
are your thoughts on that? Is that kind of your perspective
as well?
Oh, yeah, 100%. Right. Like, exactly. Like you just
described, like this, this gen AI thing, like, ah, we're
gonna get AI and it's gonna solve our problems. But no, no,
you're totally right, man. And I totally agree. Like, oh, God,
Nick and I, we were at a conference last year. And it was
a tech conference. And, you know, it was really cool
networking opportunities. And so during one of the events, it was
actually Nick, he got chatting with this group of women from an
e commerce company. And I like somebody somewhere had sold them
on the this idea. And they like carried it, right? Because they
were, they were great at what they do. We talked about
marketing, when we got when we sat down with them, we're
talking about their marketing, and they're just so good at
selling stuff online, and like, what they need to consider and
taking care of their customer, but they were so good at that
stuff. But you don't have to be a software data engineer data
science to do that, right. And so somebody had sold them on
this idea that, you know, AI is going to solve all of their
technical problems. So the first the first interaction, one of
these women had met, had met Nick, and Nick was like, yeah,
you know, data science by trade, and this is hermitag. And so we
do and, and she was like, Oh, great, like, we're, we are going
to get AI to set up and do our analytics, it is going to solve
our analytics problems. And we're just going to get AI to do
it, and it's going to be great. And like, you totally empathize
with this, this woman who's so good in, you know, kind of the
tech industry, because they are e commerce, but you empathize
with her so much be like, Oh, who lied to you? Who brought up
the smoke and mirrors? Right. And so it was, it was, yeah, it
was fun. That was on like, day one. And so like, he met, Nick
met, I guess, one of their like, high high level managers, maybe
she was in the C suite. And then like, eventually, like the two
of us got introduced to their team of three. And Nick was
like, look, like, we just need to sit down to lunch. And like,
we gotta have a chat. And so like, we, we right there very
easily could have just sold them on like, yeah, definitely, we
will set up a gen AI product package, you know, use some fancy
terms that, you know, they didn't know that all they needed
to do is import, you know, open AI. But so like, we, like, we
could have just done the snake oil and sold them on whatever.
And then we would have made money off that. Um, but like,
I've been saying, like, hermit tech, we're, we're radically
ethical, like, we just, we're not gonna lie. And so Nick and I
sat down to lunch with with this team. And we just had a
conversation, we're like, look, this is what kind of data is
generally what data science is, you know, like, this is what
supervised model training looks like you do this unsupervised
model training thing. And you know, that's, those are just
kind of two models. And, and so like, we're just describing
like, you need to know something about your thing, for
a data science model to be successful, like, otherwise,
you're just going to get stuff, right? Like, you can do all the
design, the architecture, you can push that into it, you're
going to get an output, but it's just going to be, you know, a
mound of dirt, right? Like, it's going to give you numbers, but
do they mean anything? And so we just kind of put a quick
tutorial and just talk them through. And, and, um, you know,
you and I spoke on our last conversation about really
understanding a company and organizations challenges the
pain points. And so we just asked him, like, what are you
actually doing? And like black and white, just like a lot of
other organizations, that they had analytics set up, they had
some dashboards data being pushed into, like a power bi or
tableau or whatever it was, but like, they just they weren't
confident that having all that set up is was advising them how
to do sales better, right? And like, and like that black and
white, that's what ecommerce is, right? Like, you know, you sell
more of your product, you become more profitable. And they just
they weren't confident that their current setup is doing
that. And so like, very quickly, like, it's not an AI solution
you need, right? Like, you don't need to go through all that,
like, what that is, is just better data engineering. And,
and, you know, they were, you know, small to medium sized
startup. And, and, uh, so, so they, I gathered, they didn't
have a big tech presence in their staff to push those
agendas. And that's fine, right? It's just the reality. And so
when they wanted to shift more into that, of course, like
everything that's on Twitter and all the other platforms and in
the news, like AI is going to solve everything. And so it was
just logical that they came to that conclusion. And, and, you
know, that was a moment of, of, as our, our tech firm that I
feel as though that was a success, right? We didn't make a
penny off that organization, but that wasn't the point that we
really felt like we helped those people. And then the kind of, I
guess, highest ranking manager, it sounds like she's in armed
forces, but no, like they're, they're, um, you know, they're
manager of the, of the three people we spoke to, she's great.
She's like, awesome, I'm going to go online. I'm going to learn
a little bit more about the analytical side, um, see what we
can do with what we already have in house. And it was just like a
really positive experience and interaction that, you know, we
kept in touch with them and ensure that she, you know, went
on to learn a little bit more about how to do analytics with
what they already have. And so like circling back that, geez,
like, yeah, you know, people get sold on this idea that AI is
going to solve all the world's problems and it's going to steal
our jobs. Like, you know, those of us who know any programming
language know that's just not true, but unfortunately the
people who hold the purse strings and who are in charge of
layoffs and who are in charge of hiring or make the decisions to
go out and get one of those really big firms that will come
in and promise the world, and then send you someone who's
fresh out of college to do their gen AI agenda and their
technical strategy. Like that, that's the big problem, right?
Those people that make those type of decisions in
organizations just, just aren't aware of, of the reality of it.
And I think that is a big power of, of that article that, that
my colleague Nick Suresh, um, put out the, you know, I will
pile drive you if you, if you mentioned AI one more time, is
that like, we just hope that that message, the reality of
things starts to reach the desks and ears and eyes of people who
are making decisions in our industry, because I think that's
where we're going to start, you know, getting a bit of a change
away from this red hot thing that is AI, um, into something
that's actually going to help an organization, you know, achieve
their mission statement and move towards their goals.
Awesome thoughts. And I I'm going to ask a question here
that is a little devil's advocate sort of, um, I want us
to put ourselves in the shoes of these folks that kind of have to
say these things in a certain regard. And to expand upon that
a little more, if you are a CEO of a company, at least in the
U S and you're publicly traded, you are legally responsible for
ensuring that money comes into the company at all costs, right?
You're responsible for the growth in accordance with the
shareholders needs. I personally struggle with this a
lot, so I'm not expecting any or any perfect answer rather. How
do we reconcile the legal demand for a CEO to, to bring in as
much money as possible with the simple reality that the stuff
isn't as magical as it is being made to sound. I mean, isn't,
isn't a CEO sort of obligated in a certain sense to lie basically
is, is kind of how the system is set up. I mean, shouldn't they
be trying to extract the money at just the right thin, fine
line, such that consumers are happy enough and everyone is
happy enough, even though they are indeed being lied to. I
mean, I, I don't like it, but that's kind of how it's built.
Would you agree with that?
Well, you bring up a really good point of line that you had in
there, you know, that like, isn't it the responsibility to
CEO to lie to everyone and like, at the surface it's, and not
just at the surface, you know, I've been in organizations that
like people who just bought into that, right? Like, like the
movie, don't look up, like it's a lot of just, don't talk about
the thing, right? We don't talk about Bruno here. He's kind of
thing. Um, I, I see it more, you know, people are compelled to
lie. Um, and to oversimplify it, you kind of, you know, how, how
these CEOs in two different camps, right? You have the ones
who are aware and they know, and, and again, you know, what I
agree with you, what you said is that I feel they are compelled
to, to, um, shape their message that maybe bends the truth or
maybe, you know, full of lie. And, and it's a hard place to
be in, you know, like I got a lot of empathy for CEOs of those
kind of publicly traded mid-sized companies, a lot of
pressure. And you're right. Like, right. Like if they don't
make money, like people's livelihood, it's not even just
within their own company, but people, you know, bought shares.
Um, there's a lot of, you know, paying the mortgage and putting
food on the table, uh, type things at risk for a lot of
people. And so like, I got a lot of empathy. Those are, those
things are hard. Um, so like we'll park that. Yeah. It's
really hard, right? Yeah. And so like we'll park that that's kind
of like, let's say one oversimplification of, of our, our
CEO. Um, but then the other one is just like the scorpion,
right? Like the, the snake oil selling, um, you know, uh,
smiling teeth type, take CEO that will gladly lie, you know,
and, and ride out there two to five years as CEO as company,
um, bring in the AI, make it happen, tell everyone, go and
press conferences and then, and then jump on their, on their
boat and sail into the sunset before the house of cards comes
tumbling down. Right. And, and like, I've seen it before I
joined Hermit Tech. And then definitely, you know, a big, a
big offering we have is, um, uh, to be PG about it. We unscrew
the, uh, migration, right? Like we, we, we go in and we fix the
mound of stuff, a mound of garbage that's been left by
previous C-suite and previous consultants. And, you know, we
go in and we're like, all right, well, like we can dismantle this
and, and fix it for your organization. So you don't go
under, but yeah, like there's, there's definitely that second
archetype of just like, great, do it, do the Gen I, Gen AI, you
know, import open AI, make the thing happen. We won't tell
anyone that it takes a competent engineer two weeks to set
everything up, including documentation, but we're going
to roll it out. We're going to bring up the red carpet. It's
going to look great. We're going to cut the ribbons. Um, I need
to take the bonus and, you know, um, take off it's, it's, you
know, that type of thing. Um, again, we spoke in our last
conversation about how Hermit Tech, we do, uh, radical things,
radically ethically, like we just not interested in working
with organizations that have that latter flavor. Right. Um,
and so to, to circle back to your devil's advocate question,
like, yeah, definitely it's hard, but I think that, you
know, you can, in those two situations, you can make money
for your stakeholders again, to oversimplify in one of two
ways. One, you can sell the snake oil and you can, you know,
get a big consultancy firm in that will send juniors to dump
whatever they can do and walk away or the former CEO who's
aware and does have to play the game. You know, you can,
hopefully that CEO has a better understanding of the needs of
their organization. And that's the person we like sitting down
with to really understand their pain points and, and get a full
appreciation of what the business is and how we can help
their bottom line by, you know, automating stuff to remove
manual work so that those same staff members, they don't get
laid off their time and brain powers freed up to do more
effective things. Like a client that we were talking to, they
they'd highlighted that they do so much manual transfer, like
copying rows and columns from this spreadsheet into that one
and then push it into that software. Then that software
churns and spit something out into another CSV and they go in
and select specific rows and then they move it into the next
one. And so like all of that, yeah, let's, we can automate
that, you know, Perpetek will go in and automate that so that
those people that do the, you know, control C control V,
instead of doing that, they can be refocused on their analytical
work and do the creative stuff so that that company can serve
their clients more effectively with what they actually do,
right? Like they don't like their mo isn't to copy and
paste. Their mo is to provide deep insights that are valuable
to their clients from the data that they receive. And so that,
again, going back to your question, like, well, how do you
make money? How are you responsible to stakeholders and
being publicly traded? Like, you can go that former route. It's
not easy. And there are definitely pressures that the C
suite and, you know, co founders go through that are
like enormous. And part of why I'm not interested in going that
leadership path, you know, but like, there is a way there. And
we've worked with awesome companies that see that and, and
have been successful of improving how things work inside
by doing it, you know, properly.
Love it. Yeah. So just to kind of summarize, right, that the
approach is controlled by scope, right? You make the
choice of whether you're going to choose to work with a company
that is acting in a manner that they're clearly intending to
deceive or not. And you seek out those who prefer to operate in
reality, right? And what I mean by that is the approach that you
and hermit tech take is that you're going to connect real
principles, what actually matters, what can be
accomplished with what the business is trying to do, right?
And you're trying to dissuade them from hearing all this other
nonsense. That is the snake oil peddler. That is the, the
corporate exec that is lying to them just to boost their
shareholder value, right? So you are grounded in reality, and
that is your approach. And one would really, really, truly hope
that a grounded in reality approach would scale in time, no
matter what company you're at, right? Because eventually the
rubber is going to meet the road. If you are, say, I don't
know, Tesla, and you're lying about how good your, your cars
are, eventually one would hope that that truth would catch up
to you. Do you know what I mean? So that's kind of the, the
thing that I'm hearing from, from you guys is that you want
to really keep the scope focused so that you're within the
bounds of reality. Does that kind of catch the essence of
how you guys look at things?
I think that, um, people can choose the reality. And so
truly getting like some people's reality is consciously rung
consciously is to peddle that snake oil. But I think I think
the big thing is, you know, having the opportunity to choose
reality and choose your direction requires a good,
thorough, deep understanding of what your organization, what
your company does. Right. And I think that, you know, that work
and, you know, you can say, like, oh, you got to stay in
touch, you got blah, blah, blah. Like, you really need to get an
understanding of where, you know, down to your core, down
to the core of the company, where does this shit want to
sail? Where should it sail? And then within that, what do your
crew members want out of this? You know, and I think like, you
know, a good, a good CEO is going to have a real good feel
on all of those levels. And I'm like, we're talking about mid
size organizations, like, that is impossible when you start
pushing over 1000 plus employees, right? Like that
becomes very hard for the leader to get in touch with everyone on
the floor. But yeah, that's probably more the thing, you
know, again, being in touch with what your organization wants to
do, then you can start choosing your, your reality.
Jordan, is there anything else that you wanted to add in? Like,
do you want to share any, any interesting conversations with
people that you've had, or perhaps Nick has had since these
articles went relatively popular here on the internet or anything
else you'd like to share with us before we close up this
conversation?
Yeah, definitely. Since Nick, one of my co directors, since his
writing has gone so far, especially most recent ones,
we've realized how many people are experiencing the same things
that is in Nick's writings and reflection of that things that
we talked about at Hermit Tech and, and our previous
experiences, like it's wild, how many people have reached out and
said, thank you for writing these things. Now, I can point
people to a blog, instead of me, you know, telling them how
things should be, right. And, and so it's just that referral
to, to gain support for doing things in the right way. It's
been wild how many people are in a similar position. And, and
that's where we feel that the way that we're doing things at
Hermit Tech can be successful as our own company, you know, for
the six of us to move forward and make a living out of this
thing, but also that through people out there that we can
help that, that we align with in those things. So, so it gets
like, you know, for people listening that, if you're
frustrated at work with, you know, those burned down charts
and getting things done by the next sprint, or, you know, if,
if you're the manager, and, you know, there is pressure to make
sure your burned down chart looks good and, and all those
things, but like the way that you're doing things, you feel
like there's too much, just spinning your wheels. There are
a lot of people out there in all different levels from the
C-suite down to, you know, your, your software engineers, never
in between, that, that share those frustrations. And, and,
you know, I think the best way forward is to connect with one
another. A great way is, is through reading blogs and making
comments and, and sharing your opinions on these things, or
writing your own blogs, putting your own thoughts out there,
because there's so many people that we're just, because of the
tech age, you know, all of us are sitting in our own home
office or in a cafe or sitting on our phone on the subway,
having these same thoughts, and we're so physically
disconnected, like we can connect with one another. And
this is how, you know, Chuckie and I are having this
conversation. So I guess, I guess like a parting message or
remarks is that like, get out there proverbially on the
internet, read stuff, write your own stuff, publish it, put it
on, even if you want to do it on LinkedIn, whatever, like, get
your thoughts out there. If you feel like they're gonna piss
someone off, that's okay. Because if it's frustrating to
you, there are enough people in this world, that somebody else
probably has a similar opinion. And you know, if you're moving
towards a better way of working in tech, that's less
frustrating and less soul sucking. Like, I think it's a
good thing to be mentioning or explaining how frustrated you
are about these different things, because I think there
become to an understanding. And then we can start making a plan
of doing things better in our tech industry.
Well said, did you guys get any hate mail for anything that you
guys have posted recently? Like the, the AI post, I'm guessing
had some interesting responses, I imagine?
Just like, go on Hacker News, have a look for the blog, I'm
trying to find the best way to find it. Anyway, like, check if
you linked to the blog, like have a look, the comment section
is just awesome on fire. And even at the top of his blog, he's
got posts of like reviews, and there's a link to all the
reviews, and he just grabs like a bunch of the hate mail and he
posts it and says, really, it's so good. It's amazing. So yes,
if you want to if you want to good chuckle, or if you hate all
of these ideas, and you want to be around people that have the
same deal as you like, don't worry, like Nick has posted a
link to them on his blog. So cool.
Well, thank you so much, Jordan, for your time. It's really been
a pleasure talking to you. It's really been awesome hearing
about hermit tech and how you guys do things really absolutely
I'm privileged to have been able to talk to you today. So thank
you so much for your time.
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