The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Retirement is for suckers (Friends)

Episode Date: March 23, 2024

THE Cameron Seay joins us once again! This time we learn more about his life/history, hear all about the boot camps he runs, discuss recent advancements in AI / quantum computing and how they might affect the tech labor market & more!

Welcome to Changelog and Friends, a weekly talk show about teaching by doing. Big thanks to our partners at Fly, the home of changelog.com. Launch your app as close to your users as possible for peak performance. It's easy. Learn how at fly.io. Okay, let's talk. Yes, let's talk about Sentry's launch week. And I'm here with Rahul Chhabria from the product team at Sentry. So Rahul, can you tell me about the launch week this year for Sentry? We're making a huge investment into our product platform. We're trying to make it faster, better. In November, we shared a sneak peek about our new metrics offering.

So now developers are able to define custom metrics they care about and monitor how quickly their app is responding to the business measures they have to be accountable for plus also like the customer experiences that they've committed to and that's gonna be available in an alpha people can sign up to get access uh we'll turn it off for them like in a couple days once they write in and they can get going right away now on top of that it's like we are looking more at how do we make the product smarter now i know the world is talking about ai and ml and they're all solving like, we think like entertaining problems, but Sentry is taking a more thoughtful approach to it. We are trying to look at what is the developer trying to do? Like our goal is not to have you

sit in Sentry all day long. Our goal is not have us like be a tab that you need to keep open. Our goal is to have this be a tab you open when something is wrong, give you the information you need right away, tell you how impactful it is to your user base and if you should care. And if it is something you should care about, here's how to fix it. So we're taking a broader look at how developers use the product. Where's the noise they're seeing? Like, are they seeing repeat events? Are they seeing like things that are not critical rise to the top and have to automatically resolve them or ignore them? So we're going to make Sentry a little bit smarter with artificial intelligence to give you a more prioritized view of the issues that really matter so you can solve them quickly

and move on and not be distracted by random rage clicks that are just ghost issues. Okay. Sentry's launch week is happening as we speak. Check the show notes for a link to the launch week page. I'll be showing off new features, products. You can tune into their YouTube channel or Discord daily at 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time to hear the latest scoop. Or if you want to get swag along the way, enter your email address at the page. We'll link up to get swag all along the way.

Or join the Discord, whatever works for you. The next step is to go to sentry.io slash events slash launch dash week. Again, that link is in the show notes. We are joined by Cameron Say. Cameron, you were our most beloved interview of last year by our listeners. We haven't had so much feedback ever, I think. I'm glad to hear that. Thank you. Love it.

Very, very kind of everybody. I love what I do. I'm having a great time. I say I don't have a day job, but if I have a day job, this is it. And I love every bit of it. Right now, as we're speaking, I'm running a boot camp. I got a guy teaching co-ball. I had to check with him right before the class started at make sure the class going all right so love what i do

nice how long are you gonna do it i mean you've been in the biz a long time what are you gonna do till i can't till you can't anymore i can't do it till i can't that's the way to do it retirement's for suckers man that's right people don't know my wife often asks me she's like what are we gonna do for retirement i'm like i just can't imagine that kind of life you know i mean i want to retire like i think i'll always want to have purpose i think people conflate work you know in quotes work and the idea of retirement with not doing something of purpose right and i feel like as long as i have some version of purpose i'm gonna keep doing that until i like you just said until i can't why would you not because what would i do otherwise i mean just like sit there you know come on i i sat down and watched tv for like almost i didn't make it a week i'm like no i got to do something so

i could probably make a little longer than that though maybe like two weeks you know i it was a struggle for me yeah well i took a week off last off two weeks ago with my wife, and we planned on nothing pretty much. We went down to Phoenix, stayed at some nice places, ate good food. And our plan was like, let's sit by the pool and unplug. And I found that to be so difficult. I could do it, but I was ready to get back into doing stuff. I think I need more adventure in my vacations. But I couldn't imagine that just on into perpetuity or at the end of my days. For me,

it's got to be- How many times did you check in, Jared? Did you check in on anything at all? Oh yeah, of course. Well, my brain didn't leave. That's the hard part about sitting by a pool is you got to think about something. And so maybe more adventure would have distracted us a little bit better. Yeah, I think I'm a guy like you, Jared. Guys like us, and we have spouses, we have significant others, and we have families. Guys like us can only be away from this stuff so much. Yeah. And we go on a vacation, but we're going to check emails.

We're going to check texts. I'm sorry. It's just the way it is. I mean, we can't help it. We can't help it. And we're going to give our family the time, but we're going to keep our finger in it to some degree. Part of me wonders, though, however, if that is a reconfiguration of our brain OS, so to speak. Like habit slash dopamine. Like where do you get your dopamine?

Because then you gravitate towards the places you get that dopamine hit. And we do have brains that control us in more ways than we realize it controls us. And so I wonder myself, this is not just a question for you all, but just generally, this is what I ask myself. Adam, am I thinking about this while at the pool on this vacation or whatever it is because I love it, or is it because that's where my dopamine hit comes from? Let me give you the answer to that Adam you will never know I mean you can't tell you will never know I mean that's exactly why you had the invite back right there that answer right there you will never know you will never know and I mean how important is it I mean how I mean it may be of some importance at some level. I really don't care anymore, not care why somebody likes strawberry ice cream.

I mean, I don't care. I mean, I'm sure there's a reason for it. Maybe neurological, maybe psychological, but they like strawberry ice cream. Simple answer, they like strawberry ice cream. All right. Right. Keep it simple then. Okay.

I mean, the way I think about it is when my mind wanders, it wanders to things that I care about. And so I think about my kids. I think about my family. I think about my life. I think about the change log and what we're doing here. I want to check in and see how it's going because I care. And so some of it might be habitual wiring is what you're talking about, Adam. Like I habitually check my email. Is that good for me? I don't know. But when I do have time to just think, I do think about the things that I care about. And so this just happens to be one of those things. Let me interject this because I'm considerably older than both of you gentlemen. And I don't know if it's a function of age because some people learn this much younger than I am. But I have learned how to make myself happy, how to be happy, right? And it

comprises a series of processes and activities and habits and behaviors. And work is part of that. But there is this stasis that I've learned how to maintain. And I don't know when it happened. Work is a part of that, though. Work is a part of that. I'm working seven days a week, 24 hours. I'm never off the clock when I'm running a boot camp. But I don't feel under any stress. I don't feel everything is organized. Everything's happening the way it's supposed to happen. So this is just my stasis. And I don't go up or down. I pretty much stay the same. Pretty much stay the same. So I don't know if that's something for you to look forward to or you want to learn, but it makes me very comfortable. I don't spend a lot of time worrying, why am I doing this?

Because it works. My life is good. And I want to focus on doing more of the things that make my life good and less of the things that make my life not good. And that is what I'm contemplating 24-7, wherever I am. I love that. So how did you get there? How did you get here? Pain, hurting a lot of people, dead bodies along the way, suffering. I can't help but laugh. I was like yeah i love your responses i mean i was married to the one of if there is a ranking for the best most noble human beings who have ever lived i was married to one of them for 14 years

and didn't have a clue what that meant didn't have a clue what that meant. Didn't have a clue what that meant. Right? Because I was so in my own mess. It's all psychological. I'm sure my parents in there somewhere, I don't care. They're long dead. May they rest in peace. They did the best for us they could. I have no ill will toward my parents whatsoever.

I don't go back and try to psychoanalyze why I was as deficient as I was. I just acknowledge for whatever reason, I was deficient. And what it takes to live a good reason, I was deficient in what it takes to live a good life, to make good decisions. However it happened, whatever the cause, I was deficient until I wasn't. And the thing that made me not deficient was putting my hand on a burning stove and then not doing that again. And so that's the clearest answer I can give you.

Okay. Good old fashioned experience, I guess. Yeah. No substitute for it because now I'm able to make a decent living relatively effortlessly because I'm old. I've done the same thing so many times. What other people find complicated and complex, I find easy, not because I'm so much smarter than them. I've done it a thousand times more than they've done it. So I'm better at it than they are. I'm really curious about this being next to this person for 14 years and not knowing it situation.

Yeah. Is that, did she pass? Is she still around? No, she died at 56. And maybe a year ago. Wonderful woman. I met her purely by chance. And I was not, I met her when I, how was

I met? I was 36 when I met her. And I said, if I make it to 40, I'm not getting married. Cause I was totally against marriage. I was, I was anti everything Western civilization. I was, I was an anarchist. Okay. And I was an anarchist, nothing but anything. This woman treated me so good that I just, I said, dude, you know, you know, you're not right for this woman, but you know that she's right for you. So for whatever reason, I don't look back with regret. I don't have any bad feelings. We made up. We made up.

We died. When she died, we were on very good terms. But I just couldn't see it for whatever reason. For whatever reason. My family is the same way. My sister, the woman who lives, she's in the other room. I treated them horribly for decades. I't know why they didn't they certainly never did anything to me i can't look back and said the reason i did this these people because

what they did to me no it was it was just because what i wanted to do but that about the person yeah that's about her yeah there's two points i'm curious about is is uh is one how what changed i suppose in your relationship to help you understand that she's this most magnificent person ever of rankings, so to speak, as you had said? And then two, what began to change in your life to make you not be so mean to your family or to be horrible, as you said? What began to change for you? I think I can give you a lucid answer to both with her it was for immediate it was immediate when I met her I knew she it wasn't like love at first sight I just knew she was an exceptionally kind and compassionate person first meeting and that

feeling never changed that feeling never changed what changed was my inability to accept my inability to be the person that she needed me to be. That's what changed. I couldn't take it anymore. I could not take it anymore. So that's why we parted ways because this is not going to work for you. Whether that was the right decision or the wrong decision, I don't know. I can't say. I don't think that way. So I think that's the answer to both of your questions that i'm going to ask the second one when we broke up all my trouble i was a very unhappy person like a lot of people that doesn't make me unique but it was always somebody else's fault right i could blame it on something i could blame it on american society

racism and when i got married to her everything was was her fault. If she was a better person, I would be happy if she was different. Not true, right? So when we parted company and I was still without her and I still had the same issues, obviously she's not the problem. So then I started, you know, and having some internal conversations, some internal conversations, a lot of internal. And I should have gone to therapy i really i needed therapy my entire life but i didn't but that's what started my path back to my family my sister and i we didn't we didn't speak for like five years over something trivial but we've been thinking as thieves for the last 10 or 15 i mean well last five or 10 when i live at her house you know they take care of me so yeah long road back long road back i like that one of the things that you've done

thousands of times more than most people is you've been teaching, right? You are an educator. And like you said, you got bootcamps going all the time and you're willing to work 24 seven for the people who need your help. You have a contagious enthusiasm about this stuff. And in my limited exposure to you, you're a very good teacher. And so I wonder, how do you teach? What have you learned? Do you have experience teaching that many of us don't who are younger or haven't taught as long? Can you impart anything in terms of like what works, what doesn't work, how you're effective, why people who go under your teaching are so successful in their careers, et cetera?

Just like last time, you folks asked phenomenal questions. Your questions are almost bringing tears to my eyes. Don't laugh at them. Don't laugh. Don't laugh at me. Well, last time you couldn't help but compliment us the whole podcast. That's why I invited you back here. We like all these compliments.

I'm just giving a smile because that's your style. Yeah, it is. But first, I come from a long line of educators. Let's go back a little bit. So I want you all, you want this to be about me. Let me tell you about me. Let me tell you where I come from. My great, great grandfather, Eli Madison, was a slave on an Alabama plantation. Slave on Alabama. That's about as low in this life as you can get. Not too much lower you can go. So he escaped. He escaped, joined the Union Army, killed Confederate soldiers for his freedom, got his $1,000 pension, bought land, borrowed money against the land, sent his children to school. Wow. Now, when you hear the reparations talk in the US, are you guys a Canadian? You guys are Canadian? No, we're US. Yeah. So when you hear the the reparation talking to u.s i want you to think about this the trajectory of my life was changed for eternity with that thousand dollar pension that all the black soldiers were supposed to get most of them didn't get it most of them got cheated

out of it so he sent his kids to school they had these things called normal schools with these microwave programs to rapidly train the freed slaves to be teachers. So he and his wife, he married, they became teachers, right? He couldn't read and write as a slave. It was illegal. You'd be killed if you don't read and write. So they became teachers and they taught to other people. They sent their kids to school. His grandson, Arthur Madison, went to law school with Paul Robeson. You may have heard of Paul Robeson. They went to law school at Columbia University together. And so I come from a long line of teachers. My grandmother, my father's mother had a master's degree in math in the 1940s, right? Which is very unusual for a black woman,

you know? So teaching's in my blood. And I was in IT for a long time and I never considered teaching. I was in a PhD program because my family's serious about education. So, you know, if you're not going to go to medical school, you're not going to go to law school, the least you can do is just go get a PhD. That's the least you can do. So that's the minimum requirement for membership. And that's an overstatement, but that's why I did it. That's an overstatement. They're not that bad.

But anyway, I never planned on being a university teacher because they didn't make enough money. They don't make enough money. They don't make enough money. But while I was finishing, I decided to go ahead and finish my PhD because understand the PhD is not adding anything to my IT career, but it's taking time away from my IT career. So it really is a cost at the time. But I made up my mind to go ahead and finish it. So I'm skipping parts of this story for brevity's sake. But I came up to North Carolina to visit a black college to meet a woman that had written an article that I read. And I met a student there who was

graduating the next day on Saturday. And she asked me, she said, I'm getting a degree in CIS. Is this degree going to help me get a job? Mind you, she's graduating tomorrow. I said to myself, what kind of a question is that? I mean, why do you have this question? Why is this a question? So I decided to teach. I taught at North Carolina Central. I've taught at four black colleges. I love it. I love it. And the reason I'm good, teaching is more than anything else, intentional. It's intentional. You got to want to be a good teacher. You got to want to be a good teacher. And my doctorate is in education. It's not in tech, right? I was in a university

program trained by university professors to be a university professor. That's how they train, and they train me well. I identified a learning methodology, a formal learning methodology that works for me. It's called sociocultural learning theory. That's what I've used the last 20 years. The difference is it completely eliminates smart or dumb. It doesn't care who's smart, who's dumb. We've got these activities out here that need to be accomplished for mastering domain. I don't care how you have to do it, what it takes to get you to do it. If you complete these activities, you can participate in the domain. That's how I teach.

And guess what? It works. So that's where we are today. I love it. Well, I've never heard of sociocultural theory in the classroom. Yeah. Lev Vygotsky. Look him up.

V-Y-G-O-T-S-K-Y. Lev Vygotsky. Look him up. Russian guy. Interesting. Yeah. And you've been using this in your classes for the last 20 years. It works.

I like this assumption that your smarts don't matter. It's all about effort and applying yourself. And success is just at the other end of your applied effort. We have different abilities. And the value placed on those abilities is subjective, completely subjective. LeBron James, 100 years ago, he would have been in the field chopping cotton. I don't care how good a basketball player was. It didn't make any difference. Right? So it's all about opportunity and proper instruction. That's what it's about. And it's driving me crazy about women because I'm telling you, I've been teaching mainframe for 20 years and I posted this on LinkedIn several times.

I can say with complete lack of ambiguity that women learn mainframe better than men. I can say that with complete conviction, complete conviction, that women across the board in general, why? Because they listen and they pay attention. They pay attention. And I don't have a theory whether it's biological because they're mothers or it's society. And I don't care. It's just like strawberry ice cream. They're just better at it. You talk about diversity and inclusion. We're trying to include people in a field that they're actually better at the people that are trying to include them. That doesn't make any sense. We're asking men to include women in mainframe when women are better at mainframe than men are.

That makes no sense. It should be all the way around. Men should be asking to include if we're going by merit, if we're going by who can do the job. Men should be asking to be included. So if opportunity is such a big part of it, what do you do in your training, education, in terms of opportunity? Good question. Man, I think you found your niche. Yeah, you found your niche. Yeah. It is what he does for his day job among many things, but it is definitely one of the many things.

Jared, it is a ballet. It's a delicate ballet that you have to manage with some level of precision that everybody seems to be missing this ballet. And people don't, that's why there's this discontinuity between the students, their academic departments, and industry. You have to have interplay. When I first started doing this, the problem was the students were taking a class, but they weren't getting jobs, right? And I called IBM. I said, look here now, you guys told me to teach this stuff, and I taught it, and I taught it well. They can do what you say they need to do. This is an elective course. If students are not going to get jobs out of this, then I'm going to stop teaching because I got to teach where the students are going to get jobs.

And wouldn't you know, IBM made a couple of phone calls. We had six or eight students picked up by Bank of America the next semester, and we're off to the races. You have to continually try to identify the companies that need what you... First of all, I started with this. I want my students to get jobs, right? So I was a Linux guy coming in the door with strong Microsoft background. Linux was my preference. Mainframe was not on my agenda from an academic standpoint.

But what I'm doing, I was going to do with other technologies. But when I saw Mainframe, I'm like, man, this is easy. This is easy. Everybody needs this and nobody's teached it. Gee, I think, what should I teach? I think Mainframe. I think Mainframe. And so you have to identify, then you go to companies, Fidelity Investments, Lowe's, Wells Fargo, whatever you can do, keep HR out of your business. They add nothing to the equation in most cases, some HR departments better than others. But you need to talk to the hiring managers. Ask the hiring managers, for you to hire somebody, what do they need to be able to do? They'll tell you.

You teach that, and then students get jobs. There's no more to it than that. But you've got to manage that ballet, and people don't do it. Definitely have to have jobs on the side of education. You can't just like, it's like you're the person you went and met. Is this degree I'm getting going to be worth it? Yeah. It's the day before graduation.

Yeah. Well, there should be some sort of indication months, if not maybe at least a year in advance, to say that, okay, on the other side of this effort is the opportunities that have presented themselves. And I love the fact that you are willing to leave the education process of mainframe if you couldn't provide a path to employment for the students, right? Like what's the point of going through the class in this particular case? I mean, because sometimes you go and learn things just to learn things and that's okay but if you're going to dedicate yourself to a class like this and learn a very high level very thought-provoking task and skill set like mainframe is what's the point of doing it unless you have an opportunity on the side yeah and i mean and you know i'm

going to believe that there is a layer of logic in the universe floating around that we could all, if we drill down, we can hit to it. We can hit it. And that's what we hit here. The companies, they got it. And just like the boot camps. Now, companies, it's taken a while, though. Because I've been saying the same thing for 15 years. It's taken a while.

But it takes what it takes. But I think they understand now that this process, the process that I put together works for everybody. It works for the students. It works for for everybody. It works for the students. It works for the schools. It works for the companies. Can you lay that out for us, the process, the boot camp, and how it works? Be glad to. So now there is an established way to do this.

And the company, if anybody tells you they can't find mainframe people, they're just not looking. There's an established way to do this. What you do is you run them through apprenticeship program. There's several people having it. Franklin has one. You can look at these guys. I'm going to give you some names. You can look at Franklin Apprenticeships. So they do a pre-apprenticeship program. There, you're not really ready to get a job, but you are ready to get into an apprenticeship program, right? You go through the apprenticeship program and it's six to 12 months, depending on what the company is. And then you get a job job when you come in the door you make like 75

percent scale it varies because all this stuff is statutory by the federal government so there's a certain percentage that they can pay you less while you're an apprentice but once you complete that apprenticeship you go up to full salary so that's the process and our boot camp is like a supplement to the pre-apprenticeship. The pre-apprenticeship gives them some general knowledge. We drill them down in COBOL, DB2, MQ, whatever. We drill them down. And then they're ready to go.

They're actually ready to go to work, but the company is running through the apprenticeship anyway. They're ready to join production teams when they leave us because they know enough to join production teams. But the company still, they're going to save a buck. And the students don't mind. They got careers. They got careers. That's the process. Was that comprehensive enough for you, Jared? Or were there pieces left out? Yeah, tell me more about the boot camp.

How long is the boot camp? What's involved in it? Glad to. I'm sure my colleagues, my business partners would love me to talk about that. We have very flexible. First of all, I've been teaching boot camps long. This is probably my, I probably taught 10 or 15 boot camps. They have varied anywhere from two days to 12 weeks.

Okay. So there's all kinds of gradations of it. These are like corporate engagement. So a company comes to us and they say, in this case, there's iterations, but in this case, we want you to train X number of people for us. And we'll give you X number of dollars. And this is what we want them to learn. And we'll go through the process. In this case, they're learning Agile, a in this case they're learning agile a week of agile

before everybody has a week of agile then mainframe basics then something called v-sam which is a file thing there's something called kicks which is a you know credit think credit cards then cobalt and and then a little db2 little database in there too and so we have labs for them to do and like today right now the professor's lect but certain days, like the last time we had three hours lecture, three hours lab in the afternoon. Now we have two days of lab and a day and a half of lecture.

So this one wanted MQ. The last one wanted to focus on VSAM. MQ is like a messaging service between applications. You guys understand the concept of messaging, right? Think Tomcat, right? Just a messaging server, right?

So they wanted that we can do whatever you want i've got a worldwide network of guys that are credentialed to teach this stuff and they want to teach it so you know instructors no problem so you're customizing these boot camps based on the needs of the companies and the students and everything like that it's not like there's one magical solution that produces this whatever you need that's cool how about graduation rates and placement rates? And how successful is it? I mean, are you getting...

Well, I'll be candid. Well, I'm always satisfied with the placement rates, but I'll be candid. East Carolina is the first non-HBCU I've taught, and it's been a great experience. But the demographics are just different. So everywhere I was before it, all the HBCUs, mainframe was the point of the spear. There was nothing in the department we had that was more successful than mainframe at all for HBCUs because they weren't doing much in other areas, right? In some, they weren't doing anything. This is a very healthy program. It's in the College of

Engineering. My chair is Dr. T.J. Muhammad. He's got about 1500 kids in the pro they've got i'm one of about three or four or five excellent programs that they have that kids are getting jobs and so and i don't mind that i mean you know and my class is more so at the hbcu everybody there is looking for a job at east carolina about half my kids are they're not kids half my students already have full-time jobs so it's just a different demographic? And so I don't push as hard, but anybody that wants a mainframe apprenticeship, I mean, mainframe internship at East Carolina is able to get one. So that hasn't changed, but just the demand among the students is different. But my classes are always full though. My classes are always full. So what are the people doing that already have full-time jobs? Are they looking to

change positions or just get a pay grade upgrade or what are they trying to do? Again, a great question. You've opened up, this might be open-ended because this speaks to my critique of higher ed. In a lot of cases, Jared, I really don't know why they're there. I really and truly don't know. I mean, they have no interest. Well, sometimes they have no interest in the topic. Sometimes they have no interest in the topic and they do the work. Sometimes they have no interest in the topic, they don't do the work, right? So I'm okay. These are all adults.

So it would be a much bigger issue with me if I was at HBCU. Not that I care about the students anymore at HBCU, but it's just different. These folks are going to be okay. They're going to be okay. They're going to be just fine. So I think they want the degree

for promotability or something. Everybody wants a degree. But what higher ed has done with this and you can blame COVID. I don't we have almost removed the requirement of quality from online programs. Right. And that is a shame. If you're an instructor, you have to figure out ways to ensure that there's quality of program, because if you do it the way that you can get by with doing it, there's no guarantee that there's going to be any learning outcomes. And that's sad. A lot of self-study.

Like I'm teaching a course at community college now. And look, I'm not berating you. I'm not going to name the community college. I love the people. I love the people. But this is like an asynchronous course. Now, I'm giving lectures. There's no meeting times.

There's no exams. And I'm not the biggest fan of exams. But there's no like other than it's a red. You may have seen it. It's the red hat course and it's a good course for what it does. But that's not the way I would teach Linux. That's not the way I would teach Linux. But I don't want the community to think I'm not grateful. I am grateful for the opportunity to do what I'm doing. But I just have a lot of a lot of concern that quality is not in where it should be. Describe quality in educational terms. I understand it in chocolate, let's say. I like chocolate. I'm down with chocolate. Strawberry ice cream.

I can tell you, yeah, strawberry ice cream. But how does quality get quantified in educational processes? I can give you the pragmatic. I'm going to give you both. I'm going to give you the pragmatic answer and I'm going to give you the kind of the philosophical answer. Pragmatically, you've got a couple of things that you want the student to be able to do at the end of the class that they may or may not have been able to do when they came into the class. You want them to understand a couple of things that they didn't, objectives. You want them to leave this class with some concepts and something instruct up to the instructor to determine what that is and how there's always a broad versus deep dilemma

that's just, that comes with the turf. But once you establish your objectives, then you see, okay what is it going to take? For me, I build activities. I want them to be able to do things on a mainframe, so I build activities to lead them to do those things on a mainframe. And then I have them write up

this most important thing for me, I have them write a narrative of what they just did, you know, 100 to 150 words. So once they've done all that, I'm pretty sure they've got it. They've got parts of it anyway. Now, from the more philosophical standpoint, you want the student,

and I don't know how you would measure this, but you want someone to leave a class with the feeling that it has been a profound experience. I've had several. It's not been all of them, but some of my class, many of my class. That was a profound experience. That was a profound experience. I'm not going to use the term. I learned something there. It was moving. I was moved. But what happened to that class? What I learned? And it could be historical. It could be technical. I don't care. A guy taught me software engineering one time.

It was moving the way he taught it. It was just moving. I mean, when you're in the presence of a great teacher, it's special. It's special. But yeah, so you got objectives. And everybody's got objectives. But the problem is the way they're assessing, you can't do this with paper and pencil tests. You can't tell me. The thing is, I teach by teaching people to do the thing. To me, that's everything. To do the thing and understand the thing they're doing. That's success for me. Because I don't care what your GPA is. I don't care if you got 100 on a test. That doesn't mean you can do the thing. I don't care how many searches you got. It doesn't mean you can do the thing. don't care how many searches it doesn't mean you can do the thing i need to see you do the thing that's what i see

yeah that's deep i mean it's kind of like a a variation of learn by doing in a way too because it's like you make them do so they you know what i mean like that's that's a an adage of uh of how to do or how to learn on your own self you Right. You learn by doing, and if you could do it, well then, hey, you kind of know what you're doing. You learn. Think about the term expertise. You can only acquire it. You can take 1,000 tests.

You can go to 1,000 classes. Right. You can only acquire expertise one way. That's by doing the thing purposefully over and over again for a statement. That's the only place expertise comes from. And if expertise is our goal, we need to be focusing more on how to get them along that path than how to have these artificial or subjective assessments. What you're about to hear are real reactions from PagerDuty users in response to seeing signals from FireHydrant for the first time.

PagerDuty, I don't want to say they're evil, but they're an evil that we've had to maintain. I know all of our engineering teams, as well as myself, are interested in getting this moving the correct direction. As right now, just managing and maintaining our user seats has become problematic. That's really good, actually. This is a consistent problem for us and teams is that covering these sorts of ad hoc timeframes is very difficult. You know, putting in like overrides and specific days and different new shifts is quite onerous. Oh, and you did the most important piece, which is didn't tie them together, because that's half the problem with PagerDuty, right? Is I get all these alerts and then I get an incident per alert. And generally speaking, when you go sideways, you get lots of alerts because lots of things are broken.

But you only have one incident. Yeah, I'm super impressed with that because being able to assign to different teams is an issue for us. Because like the one the one alert fires for one team and then it seems like to have to bounce around and it never does. Which then means that we have tons of communication issues because like people aren't updated no i mean to be open and honest when can we switch so you're probably tired of alerting tools that feel more like a headache than a solution right well signals from fire hydrant is the alerting and on-call tool designed for humans, not systems. Signals puts teams at the center, giving you the ultimate control over rules, policies, and schedules.

No need to configure your services or do wonky workarounds. Ingest data seamlessly from any source using webhooks and watch as Signals filters out the noise, alerting you only on what matters. Manage tasks like coverage requests and on-call notifications effortlessly within Slack. You can even acknowledge alerts right there. But here's the game changer. Signal natively integrates with Fire Hydrant's full incident management suite. So as soon as you're alerted, you can seamlessly kick off and manage your entire incident inside a single platform. Learn more or switch today at firehydrant.com slash signals. Again, firehydrant.com slash signals. are either of you familiar with Oppenheimer Dr. Oppenheimer yeah the physicist yeah right

I recently I haven't gotten through the whole movie. It's a three-hour movie. And other than knowing about the hydrogen bomb and the atomic bomb and knowing as just a person in culture in the last hundred years aware of Dr. Oppenheimer, I'm not really that familiar with his life and his work and whatnot. But in the movie, there's something that happens scientifically that he says is not

possible because the math says it's not possible. But in the very next room, somebody proved that the atom could be split because they were doing the experiment. They were not doing the math calculation. So here's one room over Dr. Ahman, and we know what he did. And we know that he, you know, in lots of ways, he was a very brilliant man from a physics standpoint. But in one room, he's doing the math and saying, no, that's not possible. In the next room, somebody has done the work and proved that it is possible. And he's just like flabbergasted that, you know, the math didn't work that direction. But yet somebody in reality can prove that they were split in the atom.

And here's what happened with fission earlier days of it whatnot so this is an example of somebody that's really really well known name wise and has introduced something into society that is profound right in one room saying not possible with math next room it is possible with doing good that's a great example it's funny she mentioned a physicist uh a physicist is responsible for me not getting tenure at A&T. I bear no ill will whatsoever. Tell us more. Tell us more. So I walked on water at A&T.

I had the second highest award, $7.5 million award from the federal government in the history of the school. Everybody just assumed tenure was a done deal. I'm an old head. I know the politics of the university. Tenure is never a done deal. Never. So they had like a restructuring and my dean who hired me i did what my dean said he got demoted he fell out of favor

there was a there was a coup d'etat you know it was a coup d'etat and my side lost and so this other dean who was a physicist and a very well respected physicist he said well we don't need to be teaching mainframe because it's obsolete. Mind you, at the time, we had the highest average starting salaries on A&T's campus. So, you know, but off my head, so I go in peace. No, I better, it wasn't personal. The man just didn't understand what we were doing. He just didn't understand it.

He really didn't. Well, that's a great way of looking at it, Cameron. I don't know if I could look at it that way. What other way is there to look at it, Jared? That's productive. Yeah, I mean, woe is me. Oh, you see, you put that qualifier. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I didn't say I was going to be productive. See, you guys may have time for non-productivity. I don't. I'm too old. So everything I do has to be productive. I gotcha. I gotcha. So go back to the learn by doing thing.

When I was at university, my best teacher, you know, I'm talking about profound teachers. My very best teacher was an adjunct. And it was a night class because he was a databases guy, a practitioner. And he was out there doing databases all day long. And then he came to our school and taught us databases. And I learned more from him in a night class as an adjunct than I did from any of my other teachers who were full-timers, and they were doing the theory.

And that taught me something, which is like, you've got to have your hands in the dirt. I mean, you don't have to, but I feel like the teachers who are active and are practitioners, day-to-day pragmatics, using the stuff, they just have so much more working knowledge, maybe less theory. Maybe they have the theory as well. But for me, they have what makes a better teacher.

I wonder if that resonates with you or if you've found teachers that are the opposite of that. You say resonates. You guys are psychic or something. Look, when I was at Georgia State in Atlanta, Georgia State was the only school in the town where you could get a master's degree part-time. Georgia Tech, Emory, Atlanta University, Mercer, you all had to go full-time. Now, who are you going to be taught when you go to a full-time academic program? A bunch of academics that have been nothing but professors.

There's a place for that. Don't get me wrong. There's a place for that. But at Georgia State, all of my professors, they they had their jobs they were actually doing the thing so yeah i will submit to do to you you can't teach somebody how to dig in the dirt unless you've dug in the dirt yourself you can teach them how somebody else dug in the dirt but you can't teach them how to actually dig in there because you've not done you've not dug in the right yeah and that was a good and i'm still using that knowledge base today.

Right. 90% of what I learned, I learned from that program. I learned from that program. These guys are good. Gosh, I wish we could somehow, I mean, maybe even in bootcamps, I'm thinking beyond your bootcamp specifically, but a lot of teachers in more of a,

the startup bootcamp ecosystem, if you will, a lot of these people are day-to-day practitioners who then decide to teach. I mean, I did it for a little while myself teaching web development. And for me, I was doing web development all day long. So I had that credential and I had the legit real world experience, but I didn't really know how to teach very well. So I had that problem. I didn't have a PhD in education like yourself. And so a lot of us practitioners though, out there doing the work with our hands in the dirt, we don't necessarily know how to pass on our knowledge very well. And

so there's kind of a mismatch there. No, and I mean, that is a dilemma. And I don't think you need a PhD to be a good teacher. I know you don't. A lot of the best teachers I've had were, you know, some of them didn't even have degrees, but that's neither here nor there. How somebody can become a good teacher, I really can't tell you. All I can do is tell you the books I've read, but a lot of people that are good teachers, they've read different books or they haven't read any books, so I don't know. I can tell you how I became a good teacher, but I don't know if that's the way you're going to become a good teacher.

I know the thing is just to make sure that you focus on the doing. You need to always be teaching them how to do the thing. There's a place for pure theory. There's a place for it. I'm not saying there isn't. But Lord knows the community I come from, we've had enough theory. We need some money. We need money.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, theory is a great thing, but we need to get paid. Right. So speaking of getting paid, one of our clips we put out on YouTube of you from the last time was called Cobol Programmers Are Aging Out. And it's got some good comments on it. One of the things someone said a couple months ago, this is Joe Cooper, 1703. He says that, and responding to the overall thrust of the video, which was you and I talking about how there's nobody to replace a lot of these legacy programmers who are aging out of the program, right?

Like this is why you're doing your work. He says that salaries don't reflect it. He says COBOL has a much lower average salary than many other languages. It's on the low end down there with PHP, et cetera. I'd be happy to herd big iron, but I've have to take a big pay cut too. If those giant companies need COBOL programmers so bad, they need to be willing to pay competitive rates. Does that resonate with you? I don't know if that's true or false.

Yeah, no. And I'm not going to say it's not true. I will tell you this. I hear a lot of commentary about this. All I can tell you is what I know. The people that we're training in boot camp, they're going to start around 60. They're going to go to 80 within a year.

So that's not rich. It's not starving. My students that are coming back in the field that there's a seasoned program professionals, they're getting between 60 and $75 an hour as contractors. That's what they're getting, right? So I know other people may not be seeing the same numbers. When I see that people aren't going to make decent money from what I'm teaching, I'm going to teach something else. I'm going to teach something else. Now, I don't know how I add this to the conversation. There is really not the shortage of COBOL programmers right now that people think there is. It's just not, right? It's just the people that need them just don't know where they are. But there is going to be. Five or 10 years, there's going to be because nobody's

teaching COBOL. And these folks are retiring every day and if you're not teaching something and you somebody believes somebody's got to learn how to do that and somebody's got to teach about to do that so so you think today's training will be more valuable five to ten years out because no no i do i can say that without reservation because of the dynamics of it people are retiring at one point and people are coming to an entry at a much lower point right so so the numbers are what they are but and if i didn't believe that i mean and i'm coming to an entry at a much lower point right so so the numbers are what they are but and if i didn't believe that i mean and i'm open to data to the contrary because i don't the last thing i'm going to do is mislead students not going to enough of that's going on sure but i'm just not seeing those bad numbers though i'm not what is the working environment of one of

these developers like is it remote work from Like, sometimes you're attracted to environment and sometimes you're attracted to a money outcome or a financial outcome. You know, 80 grand a year is not that bad of an income. It's a really great income. But at the same time, if you're a software developer, you can go and get a quarter million dollar salary at a startup or something that was just recently funded

doing different work. So maybe that's this person's commentary from that perspective. hit a quarter million dollar salary at a startup or something that was just recently funded doing different work so maybe that's this person's commentary from that perspective yeah i'm not trying to really go there necessarily but i'm just kind of curious like if in five to ten years there'll be a shortage that means we need to have a we need to have more come into it so that means there has to be desire to come into it and potentially an environment where they're in software development and called themselves a software developer, but then choose a lane that makes less money in comparison to other lanes they could choose to be in. So what is the environment? What are the opportunities? How does it work? Do they get great pay? I mean, great vacation. Are there other

benefits? Like what are the non-monetary non-financial strictly salary speaking benefits of that environment for folks great question and i will tell you i mean you make some great points adam because 80 grand a year is not a lot of money for an experienced seasoned developer yeah but i will tell you this coming in the door a lot of my folks have not written a line of code right they've not written a line of code. So it's a great, it's the only entree for them into the industry, to development. Now, once they get there,

once they get with Bank of America, wherever they're going, they're a developer. They're using the same tools everybody else is using. They're using Git, they're using Jira, they're using all the big data stuff.

Same tools. There's one set of tools now and one set of development processes. Also, they're working with applications that are talking to other languages. Go, Python, Java. So they are becoming becoming in the truest sense of the word developers and i've not seen one of my students that came in as a very no matter what junior developer they were they stayed and all these i'm talking about came in mainframe side of the house

all of them are senior software engineers now. All of them. Not mainframe engineers. Senior software engineers at the enterprise level. So it can lead somewhere. It can lead to those other things. And I've got folks making $250,000 now. I've got people making $250,000.

But they're architects. They're architects. Or they're in sales. But the money's there. I'm just trying to get them in the door i buy the money argument i buy the money art but then at the same time when somebody says okay they can make more money doing something well tell me how to place this person better than if that's true tell me what better i can do with this person because this person has no background

this person if they don't get in the mainframe door then open another door for them let them in another door right that's interesting they haven't written a the mainframe door, then open another door for them. Let them in another door. Right. That's interesting. They haven't written a lot of code, though. You were saying before what makes them take the courses. You said, I don't know. I don't know what makes them take the courses. Well, that was the other people, right?

Those were the full-timers. Yeah, those were students. Those were university students. I see. They're taking a degree for credit. I don't know. Yeah, the boot camps, you find out the first day if it's right for you or not. You find out day one.

Six hours a day, five days a week. So of the boot campers, how many of those people are just, you know, they sit down that first day and then day two you don't see them again? We've lost two. We lost two out of, we started out with 22, we're down to 20. That's not bad. And we lost two, we had 14 last time, we lost two. Okay. But I don out with 22 we're down to 20 and we lost two we had 14 last time we lost two okay but i don't think we're gonna lose anymore we have one young lady that's lagging a little bit but we're working to catch everybody else is on par and how do you select

them like how do they come in is it just whoever signs up or is there a process in this case it was done by my client who is an apprenticeship intermediary they select them we were not involved in the selection process at all and for this core it's not problematic when it becomes problematic i'm gonna say look if i don't select the people i'm not doing the boot camp because i don't do failure i don't do failure so but in this case they select and they did a good job they did a good job i don't know what their process is i think they have some assessments and things but um the last time we had like one little kind of high-level assessment, then we just interviewed them. We just interviewed a bunch

of people. Because a couple of conversations with you, all I need to tell whether you can do this, because the only thing you need to do mainframe is to be able to read, write at the sixth grade level and have a hell of a lot of determination. That's it. I love that. I mean, that's a lot of people. That's a lot of people. less paying jobs can be transitioned to something else like this, where those skill sets transition easy, or they have learned something else that in a different application are worth way more. Can you point to other industries where people are like camping out in lesser paid jobs, lesser valued jobs that would translate somewhat, not so much easy in quotes easy, but have a path, you know, a more viable path as part of how well you know your students

and where they came from. You mean to mainframe or to something else? To mainframe, to this in particular, because you said a sixth grade education, reading education, and determination. Let me think of the non-tech people, because tech backgrounds always help. But I'll be honest with you. Our last boot camp, it was full of comp sci majors, but there was a woman who was a social work major that ran rings around them. So tech background plays a role're not getting paid as much, that if they knew of where else to go, could apply their skills, what else are folks doing out there that are, they're not getting rewarded well enough if they could just go to a boot camp like this

and reassign their determination to a new focus? Well, I mean, you may have given me something to look at because that is really a demographic that we hadn't tried to identify right and maybe maybe by by default we have identified those people when we're interviewing them we but i don't identify them as being a particular industry or something if somebody's doing something they don't like what they're doing and they know they're getting some kind of marketable skills what they're doing they want to do something else no i can't give you a job role but i think i kind of understand what you mean. What about the attributes of the social work you mentioned?

You said she ran rings around them. What are the attributes of that person? Not so much where they came from. I don't know if she was taking notes, but I would ask a question. Okay, everybody, how do I create a data set again? And she would give me step by step. Room for IT and comp sci majors. Everybody quiet.

Now, maybe they knew it. They just didn't want to answer. And she would do me step by step. Room for IT and comp sci majors. Everybody quiet. Now, maybe they knew it. They just didn't want to answer. And she would do it over and over. And not only could she recite it, she could actually do it. I don't know how she did it, but she just paid attention. And she's an insono now in a lead role.

So, I mean, yeah. But honestly, Adam, I really don't try to figure it out that much. I know having good parents is good. Not necessarily money, but somebody who teaches you something about delayed gratification and seriousness of life. That's true of just about all of my students. All of them come from people. Somebody brought them up right.

Not necessarily money, but somebody just taught them right from wrong. Sure. The basics. Well, determination, I mean, that's taught to a certain extent. Some people, I think, maybe are born with it. I don't know, more or less, but like a lot of times you learn determination by example, like, you know, someone in your life who's over you, whether it's your mother and father or whoever, a boss, an uncle, a teacher, and like this person just not going to give up and you are alongside them growing up or whatever. And you see

them and then you see their success and you're like, okay, that's what success looks like. It comes on the other end of this determination. And then you just do what people do is you just start to mirror that in your own life. And then eventually you own it for your own. And I mean, I think it's such a huge predictor of success in so many aspects of life. You're absolutely right. In two cases. My ex-wife, Adam, you mentioned the courage she

showed. She fought brain cancer for 10 years. The courage she showed, you can't witness that kind of courage, that kind of resolve without it affecting you. And my maternal grandmother, who I watched go through serious health challenges living with us, never complained, never had a bad word to say about anything. Every day, she was a double amputee. She just wanted us to roll her out on the porch so she could watch the squirrels play in the trees. And when you're around that, it affects you. At least it affected me. Yeah.

So sixth grade education plus determination equals success in this program. Yes. And I feel like let's get more people into this program. You know what I'm saying? Absolutely. Send this out. I feel like let's get more people into this program. You know what I'm saying? Absolutely. Send this out. I will say this because I know you guys are tech guys.

I am playing with a bunch of different early models like with middle school people and high school people. People are reaching out to me. There's only 24 hours in a day so I'm trying to work them in. I'll keep you guys aligned. It's not necessarily mainframe. We're just trying to get them into thinking. It's all necessarily mainframe. We're just trying to get them into thinking.

It's all about thinking, solving problems. I'll keep you guys posted about that. That's interesting. Well, I just think if you have this vacuum coming, essentially, or I guess brewing, really, in five to ten years of a need when folks do begin to further age out and you've got less, like you don't have the problem now, but in the five to 10 year mark, there's a bigger problem where you have less incoming. You'd want to, you'd want to keep this program full, you know, and not just marketed,

but for marketing sake, but for help sake, you know, there's lots of people out there that choose a different opportunity because the opportunities are limited. And so their choices are limited. And so they choose the best of what they've got available to them, which is how kind of we all are. But, you know, if you can transition, I mean,

if you got this education, I mean, you can have this determination too. I was going to say, Jared, you can probably teach them determination as well. If you can't like maybe a prerequisite, this class is those skills that you mentioned to those,

those attributes, but then maybe a, a week on determination, you know? Might take longer than a week, but I like the idea, you know. I do too. what's up friends this episode is brought to you by one of my good friends one of my best friends actually one of our good friends tailscale and if you've heard me on a podcast you've heard me mention tailscale several times in unsponsored ways because I just love Tailscale. And I reached out to them and said, hey, we're talking to a lot of developers. I love Tailscale. I'd love to have you guys sponsor us. And they reciprocated. So what is

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I'm a resilient. I think I'm kind of a resilient person. I can pretty much get through a lot of stuff. If there's a hurdle, I figure out how to get over it, around it, under it, dig under it. Whatever it takes. If the goal is worth it, so to speak, you know, the determination is required. There's times I'm like, you know, I'm ready to like, okay, this is the wrong road. Let me turn around. And my wife's like, nah, we're going to keep going down this route.

I see where we're trying to go here. And she's an example of that. And there's times that's been the case where in other cases has been me, you know, there's a, there's a, I guess it's not really a philosophy necessarily, but something we lived by more recently in this last year, I, I kind of learned it even more myself was you never know, unless you ask right in life. And so the example was we were just on this random drive out in Fredericksburg here in Texas. There's a place called Enchanted Rock and it's a national park. So you have to pre-reserve to get in there. It's usually pretty busy.

And we were just on the drive in the area and we're like, oh, there's Enchanted Rock. We should go check it out. And the sign says, no vacancies. You have to pre-register. Basically, don't try to come in. The sign said this. And I'm a veteran.

And so I was like, okay, I can get into state parks because Biden passed something where you can get into state parks as a veteran with just your id and i'm like babe let's just we want to go on this little family adventure i should just let's just go and ask and she's like no the sign says this i mean this is what the sign says my wife is a by nature rule follower her mother was an educator So that should tell you something. All right. And she's like, no, but the sign says this, but I'm like, but babe, the sign can be wrong, right? The person that we talked to may look at this family being like, no, they should come in here and have this adventure, right? And we had the best time ever. So we made it through the gate. I'll spoil the

story for you. But we go up there to my wife saying, she's like, no, we can't get in there. The sign says this. I'm like, let's just try. And so we go, I'm my wife saying she's like no we can't get in there the sign says this let's just try and so we go i'm like you never know and before we went in i was like we're in line waiting to get to the to the toll booth so to speak and i'm like babe and kids in the back you you never know in life until you ask and it's basically you never know until you try as well right you never know if you could do something in life unless you ask or unless you try right and so we get up there and sir how you doing good to see you are there any openings yeah actually we had two cancellations

so let me see your id okay go ahead park over there you're good to go well we had the best adventure my kids climbed this massive rock but it's it was pretty steep like you would not want to fall down this thing we would not have had that adventure we would not have had the memories nor the pictures if i didn't just go and ask and if i had said in that moment in the flip side seeing my wife is so determined and i'm the you know in sometimes quitter or wanting to turn around in this moment i'm the one who said hey we don't know unless we ask you know and so I don't know why I told you all that story, but that came to mind. Good story.

Because that was a moment where, like, we would have not had these really precious memories from that adventure unless I just asked. Your kids are never going to forget that. Never. Oh, it was one of the best adventures ever. And we have that. We have photos of it. We're on top of this mountain. My three-year-old, he was a three-year-old, climbed this mountain.

We never thought he would be like, I can't go anymore. Let me pick this kid up and carry him. No, he was ahead of us as a three-year-old. And I'm like, wow. I learned a lot about myself and my kids that day. And just generally, we just had so much fun. It was the best ever. It's a good story with a good lesson.

I agree. I agree. I agree. There's this jingling sound, Cameron, that I hear. It's not a problem, but I'm wondering if it's like, it sounds like a wind chime. It is. It is. It's the doors open for the dogs to go in and out.

Gotcha. It's actually a pleasant sound. A lot of times we'd stop a show and say, hey, can we not have this? But it's actually kind of a nice sound. I thought it was like in Silicon Valley, Jared, there's a two and a half second song that Guilfoyle plays every time Bitcoin is not profitable enough to continue to mine. That's the song You Suffer by Napalm Death. Oh, yeah, that's a whole song. It's like a second.

It's an alert. Whenever the price of Bitcoin dips below a certain value, it's no longer efficient to mine. When it comes back up, it is. So I need to know when it breaks that threshold so that I can remotely toggle my rig at home. Okay. Any idea of how often that might happen? Bitcoin is very volatile, so...

This is so loud. A lot. Good. All right, right well let me turn it down or something only in silicon valley only in silicon valley and that's kind of like a version of that maybe it's like hey a new a new developer entered the mainframe world the time right every time a chime the cobalt program is born yeah exactly on cue not even on purpose on cue i love that what's a good next step i mean uh you're an educator you're leading folks i mean it's got to be a fulfilling life that you're doing i mean are you are you very filling yeah you said before you were unhappy you were depressed you had some time like before. How are you now?

How do you feel about life now? Never been happy. My state of mind has never been better in my entire life. I can't remember a time in my life where I was more at peace with my existence and more sure about what I'm supposed to be doing my time, spending my time while I'm here. And for the future, I just want to do more boot camps. I'm not trying to grow too big. I would like to expand them. I would like to open up something in India.

We're working on a business model because we get requests from a lot of Indian individuals, not companies. But I don't like to take money from individuals. I don't mind taking money from companies. That doesn't bother me a bit. But, you know, especially in India where people don't have a lot of money. But we're working on a business model. Maybe you guys can help us work one out i don't know that's interesting what does it cost what's the normal boot camp cost we can we we can do them for 60k we're doing for 60k more or less i mean we'll we'll it just depends on how much i need and we can make a profit of that

everybody makes out and see the companies don't see the mind because you know they can train 20 people they can train up 20 people you know they can train 20 people so it's cost effective for them right i like that getting the companies to pay for it versus the individuals we back when we started our deal back in 2013 2014 time frame it was all a business to consumer it's all individuals and that was always very difficult because they're having to come up with some cash up front and then there's there's other models we know that people have tried where you don't pay until you get a job and like, you know, with more or less success. But a lot of these boot camps are expensive for individuals, but for a company and they're getting the value out of it. Yeah.

That's a win-win. I mean, I just, if they say that's too much, I'm like, okay, call us back next year when it's not too much. Yeah. Because this price is right. This price is right. So in the areas that we run in, which is a lot of startups and big tech firms, there's been a lot of trepidation lately. There's been more layoffs. There's been the release of more sophisticated AI. Programmers, Devin, the most recent one, made a wave online as being a more sophisticated code generation AI tool that can kind of start projects from scratch and code them up from scratch. So we're all sitting here thinking about our own jobs over the next five to ten years as working software developers.

And a lot of people have gotten laid off and there's so much competition amongst even senior engineers who've gotten laid off. They're having a hard time getting rehired And so people are out of work for extended periods of time. I'm wondering if you've seen any of that from your perspective there, if you're feeling any of that, if there's talk of, you know, we don't need another bootcamp camera and we're going to train an AI to do all of our COBOL programming for us or something like that. No, I haven't heard that, but I've heard of it in other sectors. I mean, one of the problems with COBOL to do AI is that so much of the business logic is embedded in the program that they're going to be really hesitant. There's this general hesitancy to just refactor that because you got to understand what those, particularly if you're gonna move to another language moving to using COBOL is less problematic

but just leave the COBOL code just leave it alone it's fine it's fine you know if you want to run the a let AI do an analysis of code that's fine just leave it alone it's okay it's not it's not hurting anybody sure what about like the mainframe? The people who are maintaining the mainframes now and will be retiring over the next five or 10 years? Oh, I'm not seeing AI touch the systems programmers, the guys who actually write the assembler code that keeps everything together. I'm not seeing it touch them. I'm not seeing them in the least concern.

And maybe, look, I know probably less about AI than any other IT professor you find. So I'm trying to bring myself up to speed, but it's even a little too fast for me. But I've not seen any concern on the part of the senior engineers mainframe side. Not that there shouldn't be any, but I've not seen it. Yeah, fair. I would imagine since it's because of its its age and depth i wonder if like if documentation like how would an llm really compete or know you know so much like there's got to be a lot out there yeah it's also behind the doors you know it's proprietary in a lot of cases so the llm has to train on some sort of model to get there but adam that is a good point a lot of this

stuff is in people's heads it's just in in their heads. It's also like the most high-risk code, right? This is like financial transactions where, I mean, there's more high risk than finance, but it's pretty high risk, right? Yeah, it is. I mean, it can do a lot of damage. I mean, there's things with military and other code that's probably more lethal, but this financial stuff can cause us a whole lot of problems. You don't want to play with it. Well, our Practically AI podcast, guys, did have a Jack Shanahan, who's a retired lieutenant general from the JAIC, the Joint AI something.

I don't know. High up in the DOD and the national security strategy towards AI. Very fascinating episode. It's in the feed for those who are. Oh, I got to check it out. Yeah, it's really interesting. And they're working their way. I mean, they're working their way towards AI enabled killer drones, but they're, you

know, they, but they start small. Like that's the thing I learned is like start small, low risk, right? Easy to revert stuff and and slowly build from there. Don't hop right into letting it run our credit card transactions and stuff like that. Well, you guys are kind of at the bleeding edge. What do you see? What are your concerns about AI? Because I think you guys see more than most of the population. Well, I haven't seen exactly what this new Devin tool can do. The demos are always very impressive and yet they are demos. They are demos. Yeah, they absolutely are. Especially pre-recorded demos.

I mean, don't put too much trust into those, but what they are showing is the ability, at least with Greenfield software projects, to take high level instructions from a product owner, or it could be a programmer like myself, and say, my old thing that I always said is like, when can I say make Facebook but for dogs, you know? When we can say that and a program can code that up, then like pretty much I've been replaced as a software developer. But so far, it's all been likeive. It's making us move faster.

How can I write this function better? How do I not have to remember so much, et cetera, et cetera? That's all great. I think that's probably my personal take. I think that's where this current stage of technology with the transformer models kind of stops. It plateaus, and we just get better tooling based on the current LLMs.

And there's not another step change until we have some sort of new technology that comes out that has a step change i think that's the case but there are impressive enough demos where people are like that's pretty close to not needing a developer at least for small greenfield projects and so maybe for startups maybe for small businesses you know they need less software help. That's about what I'm seeing. Where does quantum figure in with AI? That's a scary combination.

Yeah, I don't know, man. That's where it gets beyond my day. Yeah. I mean, getting my head around quantum physics is not a pleasant experience. It's just, it makes my head hurt the most recent thing i read about quantum is that the practical applications and usages are less broad as they thought it would be and further away than they thought it would be i had some financial reversals and i had to drive uber for gas money and um i had a duke university doc student in quantum and i know his professors i hang out with duke a lot and he said

yes we're not as far along as you guys think we are you know we're not as far along we we can't do that yeah we're not as far along as you think we are but i mean it's coming it's coming don't know when well three years ago we weren't as far as we could be as we are today with LLMs and training models and stuff like that either. I think it really does get, you know, back to Silicon Valley, to Guilfoyle's advice to Richard, or to, what was his name? To Jared.

Sorry, it was the other Jared. Jared? You Jared. Yeah, his name was Jared. Not me, Jared. Well, his real name was Donald. Donald Dunn, but everybody called him Jared.

It's a whole thing. He was like, Someone tell me how to feel abject terror for you build from there i kind of feel like you know at some point quantum is going to come around and something will be applicable and when it does if we have paradigms of artificial intelligence or just at least generation you know i mean someone was saying recently i don't know if i would call it intelligence. I would just call it like a repeater, some sort of thing that can take something that's been done before and repeat a version of that that makes sense.

And it's up to the human to apply if it actually creates something of value, which is really hard to consider. But if we do get into the quantum world where it's a whole new paradigm shift and we're no longer bound by the status quo of what a computer is and it's a whole new world and there's legitimate artificial intelligence out there that can be leveraged in that world, it's going to be pretty crazy. I mean, mind you, in the 60s, a PC was – I mean, a computer was something that fit in a room. You couldn't conceptualize a PC being something you put on your desktop. It wasn't even thought about. Right. A load in your pocket or on your – Yeah, much less in your pocket.

Or on your glasses. Oh, your watch. Your watch. Nowadays, computers have computers, right? Like you got – I just had a conversation with Kyle Weins from iFixit, and I knew these things, but there's this idea of parts pairing. So inside of any given iPhone, well, I suppose even the Touch ID version,

there's a parts pairing between that Touch ID sensor and some other part within the iPhone. So you couldn't just replace that one thing. You'd have to replace a larger piece of it, is the long story short. But the point is what exactly is the point gosh it's changed all good friends you don't need a point what are we talking about gosh well you said computers have computers oh yeah thank you gosh i'm like so knee-deep in

explaining parts pairing i forget my point come on yeah i mean that computers have computers essentially like you have a part that has its own smaller microprocessor that has a serial number and things like that. So when you pair it with another know, an alternate version of working, maybe slower clock speed, et cetera, because that part is not in quotes verified because the microprocessor, the computer within the computer says, I'm not an OEM. I'm not an Apple original. You shouldn't trust me kind of thing. Or the other part says, because you're not OEM or Apple original, I can't trust you and operate the same way. So therefore, I operate in a degraded way. Which I think is just

so interesting. Like your computer literally has its own computers within it. It's kind of crazy to think about. But thanks for getting me back on track there, Jared. I was lost for about a second there. I could tell. Parts pairing, man. Parts pairing is interesting. That was a good conversation.

We were there with you. We were like, here comes the big point it comes the big point well yeah any given reason well good to hear that there's not uh major things going on from your perspective in your particular sector that i hear about yeah i mean i hear about less the ai stuff right now i think and more that just paired with the fact that there's a lot of trepidation around jobs just in big tech and in startup land, in Silicon Valley area. Of course, of course. And so a lot of people are hurting right now. And it was weird because we thought we were kind of coming out of it in terms of end of last year, coming into January, things were looking up

and the market has never been better. And they keep telling us this. You can look at the numbers and they're all big, but the layoffs are still happening. The work conditions are still not great. Opportunity is scarce. And a lot of very talented people are out of jobs, which means they're all fighting for the same jobs. Right. And that's tough. Young cats like you out and stealing the wars that's got to make you real uneasy me i could care less i'm i'm at my last stop this is where i'm gonna be yeah this will when i'm when i leave here you're gonna find me right here so i'll be right here but it's got to

be i mean there's got to be a concern you know i don't know because you don't know come with ai and economic stuff it's just a very unpredictable landscape. Yeah. And I just, I mean, I hope we should, one doesn't even know what skills to acquire. You know, you don't even know what skill set. Right. Can I sell this?

Yeah, I mean, this. Well, last year, everybody was talking about prompt engineering was going to be a new skill that everybody needs to learn. And now it's like, isn't, weren't we already doing that with our Google prompts? You know, we were already prompting Google for what we want. Now we're just prompting something else. Right. And of course it is something you have to get good at. The best developers and the best tech people know how

to find the answer to their solutions more than they know all the solutions. Right. Right. Right. So being able to find answers as part of that determination. Yeah. So of course, yes, you need to learn how to engineer the prompts in order to get out of the language models help that you need to do your job. But people were acting like that was going to be a new career path. It's like prompt engineer. And it's like, that lasted like six months as a career path. And now it's like, nah, it's just part of everything else.

And so what do you learn? You know, maybe you just go learn mainframes. I don't know. Well, I can tell you that. I can tell you that they're going to need mainframes, but I really don't know. I mean, to get people to, if I would advise somebody today, I don't know, I would come to you guys. What should they study?

What should they learn? You know, I say Linux and Python. Can they still sell Linux and Python? I mean, I know Linux and Python, but I don't know what else they should learn. I mean, what should they learn? In one sense, things are changing at all times. But in another sense, things get, they build on top of other things. And I don't think Linux or Python are bad bets for like the next decade.

Do you? I mean, I just don't think they would be. I really don't. Where can you apply Linux knowledge specifically in the market? I don't know. I don't know if it's that much the linux skills specifically adam but i will expand it to cloud skills and i don't think you can acquire cloud skills without understanding linux you might be able to might be able to at that point isn't it simply just apis and interfaces

and i suppose determination because like you're willing to like get past certain things agree no no i agree i mean kind of a couple steps we're removed from linux you may have the understanding of maybe even like kernel things or which flavor of linux suits the best task i just wonder because i mean no i mean i i can't disagree with you at all because being a heavy aws user that's because before i ran my bill up so i couldn't afford to pay it. But I'm like, okay, I would not know how to teach an IT curriculum today because I would teach them these constituent technologies separately, like database, web programming. But here they're using them all together with, like you say, a series of APIs and tools and stuff. So I don't know how far they have to drill down. I can't answer that question i really can't well we're starting to see a pendulum swimming back

away from the cloud yeah and that there's that too there's that too there's a lot of pushback i think it's just like people getting tired of the the bill maybe you know like why keep paying the rent when you can own it i think there's that aspect of it and then there's this aspect of like well the control even you know just literally giving you know several small like not small companies a small handful very large companies the lion's share of the influx of dollars going into what is called the cloud when the cloud is simply you know what you could make of it in some cases like you can get your own rack and stack servers you can co-locate you can do a lot of stuff if you're willing of it in some cases like you can get your own rack and stack servers you

can co-locate you can do a lot of stuff if you're willing to put in the work of literally sourcing the server buying it now you're you have your responsibility layers grown right you no longer have to just be responsible for certain things beyond the api you have to be responsible for the actual machine itself and stuff like that and maybe you're willing to take that risk on but that's really what the cloud has promises is like, let's just give you a working thing. You never have to worry about it. APIs have SLAs and SLOs, and we adhere to those. You pay us X dollars, but I mean, there's lots of examples out there where you're overpaying over years for cloud when you can be on-preming. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Now what form is this pushback taking? of the cloud back on-prem

and building their rack and stack and servers. And they're doing Linux administration and they're doing all that stuff. That's a revolt. That's a revolt. Yeah, exactly. And they're doing that almost purely for cost savings. I would say that's their primary motivation.

And the cost savings are significant if you are in that group of people who have a stable business with known growth you know trends because of the cloud provides a lot of things but the main thing it gives especially for startups is that dynamic scaling right like being able to scale it up scale it out scale it back down again that's really powerful for companies who don't know what their server demand is going to be so that that's one. And then there's also this movement of taking cloud APIs to either your own hardware or to co-located

and cheaper VPS-style infrastructure. So now you're still, everything we learned about the dynamic scalability of cloud APIs and AWS and others have given us, what if we could use those same APIs, but like build them on our own hardware, for instance? And that's another movement. And that one's about, I think it's also about probably privacy plus cost, but without losing

a lot of what the cloud provides. It's trying to have the best of both worlds, I guess. Well, I know this is not a total analogy, but it's somewhat analogous. 20 years ago when I was at the airport, Hartsfield Airport, Atlanta, when I joined, the COO that hired me, everybody was a contractor, a contractor of various companies. He brought all the function in-house, the database, the networking, everything in-house and saved a ton of money. Now, it's not the same as cloud, but it was kind of the same principle.

You've been farming this stuff out to contractors. We're going to bring it all in-house. He saved a ton of money. Now, it's not the same as cloud, but it was kind of the same principle. You've been farming this stuff out to contractors. We're going to bring it all in-house. And he saved a ton of money. Yeah. I mean, there's advancements happening there. I think even with integration layers, even networking is probably a big deal for cloud, right? If you can have your database talk to your application server on the same network at a higher speed that's probably worth it like we experienced what was the latency we had jerry with with neon we had like a little bit of latency that we were okay with because we called out to our database versus having it like literally in the same network on the same you know in the same stack basically and that's a

an example to some degree that's still cloud-based but yeah it is but yeah yeah amplify that a couple of thousand times and you can yeah same concepts right so there's another fella ben yubua with feedbin which is a business that runs an rss reader service and he's a small business i mean i think he's got himself plus maybe an employee but he went completely out of the cloud to his own on-prem infrastructure and it was a project that took him months to do. And his primary reason wasn't money, although he saved money doing it over the long run. It was worth the investment because it paid itself off.

His reason was because he could just eke out way more performance out of hardware that was not cloud-based hardware. And again, knowing exactly what his application is doing, being like intimately understanding the needs of his application. Is it write heavy? Is it read heavy?

How much is it hitting the database, et cetera? He could build custom infrastructure that just works great for Feedbin and makes it way faster. And then it makes a better product. So that was another reason why he did it. But we're just telling a few stories here. None of this is like a massive migration away.

The cloud's huge. Understood. But you have given me the first I've heard of tangible technical specificity. Because I've heard some rumblings, some grumblings, cost, cost, cost. But you told me specifically kind of what was going on. So, I mean, you see what you see. Everything is ad hoc until it's not. Right.

Well, if you're not in the cloud where are you yeah learned a lot today i knew i would as did i as did i awesome well you know when folks like us get together somebody's gonna learn something that's right that's right all right thanks cameron that's a lot of fun. Thanks, Cameron. Bye, friends. Bye, friends. We had so much fun talking to Cameron, and we hope you enjoyed it too. The guy is just so enthused about helping people, about educating, about living life. And that enthusiasm, it's contagious. If this is your first time hearing from him, go back in the catalog and find our episode called Mainframes are still a big thing from earlier last year.

That one's much more focused on mainframes, COBOL, and the tech side of what Cameron teaches. Thanks once again to our partners at Fly.io, to our beat freak in residence, Breakmaster Cylinder, and to our friends at Sentry. We love Sentry and have been using it for years. If and when it's time for you to check them out, use code changelog. That helps us because it tells Sentry that we're making an impact on their business. And it helps you because they give you

a hundred bucks off their team plan. Once again, use code changelog, all one word. Next week on the changelog, news on Monday, some reverse interviews on Wednesday, where we share a couple of podcast appearances Adam and I have made lately. Next week on The Change Log, news on Monday, some reverse interviews on Wednesday, where we share a couple of podcast appearances Adam and I have made lately. And on Friday, should software developers specialize or generalize? It depends.

And I'll be joined by my new friend Adolfo Ochagavia for the next installment of our It Depends miniseries. Stay tuned right here. Please share our work with folks who might dig it. And let's talk again real soon.