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A podcast about neither tech nor people but both and how, if we want technology to move as fast as the consumers want it to then we must admit it's time we started to consistently do the Human Work. With a total of 50 years in tech between them, author, start-up founder, thought leader and influencer Duena Blomstrom and VP of Engineering for Evora Global, Dave Ballantyne, the hosts of this show come from the two opposite sides of the equation above and debate how we can best meet in the middle. The hosts are also neurospicy, Duena is diagnosed AuADHD and Dave isn't yet formally diagnosed, the couple are (still) newlyweds and they won't hold back from real talk, banter or the occasional swearword!
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the people and tech podcast. We have had an episode for you that's out, but we're thinking of putting it because it is horrendously bad audio we prepared while we were on on our annual honeymoon, isn't it? We'll see. Maybe you'll keep this horrendous one, or maybe we'll find some way to make it slightly better.
Dave:I think we just push it. I think there's a lot of value in pushing that.
Duena:I mean matter how bad it is. Right?
Dave:Yeah. That's right. Cool. Maybe it's just one of those cases we have to say that the substance over style wins.
Duena:Fine. Fine. No.
Dave:We just have to do something which is substandard and will hate.
Duena:We use these discussions of trade offs Yes. A lot these days, don't we? But we think we're making the right decisions, hopefully, for the most part. Now, like, a couple of quick things. Just last night, you wouldn't know when last night is, but just last night, we have had a late night podcast with, some friends.
Duena:And we hope to be keeping these conversations going because they they were genuinely god's end. It it kick started our our, week and our our, daily, at least, if not our our sprint check-in in in a way like never before because it was super energizing. Are you disagreeing with the content or looking at the sound and being worried about something? Just a quick one.
Dave:No. No. No. You you carry on. I'm not worried about anything.
Duena:You looked at.
Dave:No. No. No. No. All quizzical because I'm looking at something we'll be talking about a bit later.
Dave:But that's my bad for not concentrating on being in the moment.
Duena:Thank you for saying that, and please thank me back for calling you
Dave:for for calling me out
Duena:on that. Thank you. Otherwise, you
Dave:would have been stressful and having a moment where we can just tie everything out.
Duena:Right. That's the one. So It's impossible. It is. Right.
Duena:Are we leaving the city? We should. We should. So I can see him. Just to give you some context for those of you that are listening, I obviously can see him, and you can do on on on Google later on on not on Google.
Duena:Yeah. On Google. Everything's on Google, isn't it? Look on on our YouTube channel later to see him be distracted, clearly frowning just as I am telling you that we had an amazing moment with our besties on a podcast.
Dave:I did. I'm not I'm
Duena:This is not going to work well. I'm not gonna be convincing anyone it great when when he he feels this way physically. So that's why I called him on it. Then also because, as everyone knows, I famously want to have every human being I've ever met. I would have to pause for a second.
Duena:I'm I've received personal message that is disturbing. I wanna deal with it, and I don't wanna pretend it's not happening. So I'm gonna just pause this if it's possible
Dave:Okay.
Duena:Or leave. Can I pause instead of stop?
Dave:Oh, welcome back, everyone.
Duena:We're back if we're back. We're back. We hope we're back. So apologies for that, but we wanted to leave it in because it's a it's a real moment. And I wish more people did that, and I encourage my team to do it whenever they can, which is when something there is no more clear delimitation between our real our real lives and our professional lives.
Duena:Right? So when life it's norm it's it's normality and it's it's everydayness but into our professional life, and that happens at any point now. They're all in intricated in ways that they have never been before. I encourage everyone to take a second and figure that out first and not continue anything. Right?
Duena:So if you're on a live call or in a meeting, whatever it is, excuse yourself for two seconds. We used to be able to do that in real life meetings. Right? You'd be like, I need to go to the ladies' room. These days, you can't even tell anyone on a Zoom you gotta go to the ladies rooms.
Duena:And if you can if you just disappear without a word, it's a bit bizarre. No one excuses themselves, right, for no reason. And I think it's wrong. I think it it it definitely is now adding to these things we need to start putting in place, which are things like, let's have shorter meetings. Let's have smaller teams.
Duena:Let's close the ranks on human bits, and let's pause it when you have to. And this is an example of that, which is I received a text. I thought it was a bad text from our little one. I obviously I forgot what we were talking about, what we were gonna tell you, what story, what anything. I just went like, oh, no, my child.
Duena:And I could have carried on and done this podcast like I've many times done with with thinking something horrible is happening to my child in the background because, unfortunately, my entire working career, I have had to have moments like that. I've had texts saying my child is just being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, and I had to get on stage and still deliver a speech or or being told that he's just getting a horrible fever, they don't know what it is, and he's had a a bit of a seizure as little kids would do. Right? But I wasn't just down the street. I'd be in another continent, so it would mean two flights until I got to find out.
Duena:So I had to steal myself for surviving this uncertainty of not knowing if my kids are alright while still delivering on professional things. And I tell you now, that's dumb, and there's no reason to do that. And it didn't help my child, didn't help me, didn't help the people I protected from reality, didn't help anything. So stop work for life, and try not to stop life for work is genuine advice. Anyhow, it wasn't a bad text to wrap it up.
Duena:It was actually a nice text. He had found something.
Dave:Right.
Duena:Go back to the story. So we had this podcast with our friend, which was more of a dinner party. Would you
Dave:call dinner party. That's right.
Duena:Yeah. Or chat or or drinks, virtual drink session. And what we normally talk to them about, we talk to them on the podcast as well, which is practically technology. We happen to all be married to technology, and they are illustrious names. Brian and Dana Finster and and Trace and and Bob Bannon.
Duena:They are illustriously devs married to ops and
Dave:Devs married to devs.
Duena:And devs married to devs. That's right. And they they have podcasts and enterprises and the name in the community because they've been fighting for practically human death without knowing that that's what they had or without even categorizing themselves as that for many years alongside us. We've known them some years in the community, and they are lovely, amazing people. And we thought, you guys have to see the interaction between them as you sometimes are being put through the interaction between us.
Duena:So we got them together at long last, and they spoke to us for a while, and that should be with you guys this week or last week. I don't know when this this come out anymore. Anyhow How
Dave:can it be with them last week?
Duena:We can't. We can't grab any time?
Dave:No. Goddamn it.
Duena:I was gonna take that as a failed sprint. We can't I believe.
Dave:Imagine how productive our sprints would be if we could go back in time.
Duena:Hell, yeah. At least to delete things.
Dave:Yeah. Because that you know, if you could go back in time, that's the first thing everyone's gonna do, isn't it? Just go back to that failed sprint.
Duena:And delete everything.
Dave:Well, yeah. Yeah. Start again. That's that's absolutely gonna happen.
Duena:That would true. That's not a detour or anything. If I had tried the detour like that in the middle of the of the story, you would have had a word with me. You would have had a disappointed face. Your detours are better, though.
Duena:You like your detours better than mine, which, you know, can't be blamed for. Everyone does. Yeah. Another question. Mine are colossally long and boring.
Duena:So
Dave:No one said that. Okay.
Duena:Good. So we talked to them. And the topic yesterday was meant to be about other things. How did we all end up being married to tech? What about our kids?
Duena:Shall we do a play live that one of those that we call a teaming play. Let's talk about our kids, our lives, our our journeys, and we promise to do that next episode. But now we were taken by by Brian in the the midriff we proposed. Have you guys all read the Dora report? Shall we discuss the two surprising findings about practically what he will explain a lot better than I and and Dave can reiterate, which is the fact that he didn't quite see the CI recognition he would have liked to have seen the the report?
Duena:And secondly, and maybe most importantly, what we ended up talking about is the finding that TBD, was found by the DORA report to be connected to Borno. That was kind of the the headline. Right? We hadn't read it at the time. We admitted we hadn't read it.
Duena:We had known about the same headlines that he was quoting, but not in any depth. And so we we vowed to first read it and then have any informed opinion. All I kept in the podcast repeating was burnout is a much bigger context that needs to be seen as an organizational level, at the team level, at an individual level, and we all have responsibility in each of those levels to to sink it. This is not a technology only problem. But I think I don't know if that point quite resonated with my audience at the time.
Duena:And what I what I'd like to use today to do is expound on that because I don't even think that Dave is very clear. I I would have felt in the conversation yesterday that Dave Dave, Brian, Dana, and and and Tracy and Bob are all kind of probably Bob. I'm not quite sure on Bob yet. I'm presuming now that Bob has a much more overview. No.
Duena:A much more, I would presume, practical view of things, much more,
Dave:like He works in operations.
Duena:Yes. So I think Bob and I see things more of a helicopter y way in a way that you four don't because you have been in while you have been in many positions and seen obviously everything, your your primary dev position has cushioned you from organizational matters Mhmm. To the degree that yesterday's conversation was comfortably what could possibly make you be burned out? And I like that. I let that go.
Duena:It was the wrong framework, I thought, for the level we should be at in the technology level. I thought we do take our heads out of why do we feel that way and bring it a lot closer to who should be dealing with us feeling different. And I think we did that without realizing it because we started talking about the connection between TBD and Bernal Strouse a little bit, and we all had theories on that. I have a very strong theory that it's practically, if you read my books, my my supposition is there will be a higher correlation because all of these higher ways of of delivering technology, the lean methodologies coupled with, you know, the agility we need to show in process, coupled with the cleanliness of code we need to show by doing TDD, by doing an ownership based software development that allows us to be clean, to be. They all need us to have an intense human element, which is the hard, difficult bit that makes us burn out when we get to it.
Duena:So I've said this all along. I think technologists are a layer that are gonna be more affected. But I didn't bring us to that layer Mhmm. Because you guys were so into this is what happened to me, and I wanted to hear those experiences. Right?
Duena:And I'll let you I'll let you talk in just a second.
Dave:Oh, thank you.
Duena:Everyone's waiting for that second when you finally get to you. And I'll ask you for exactly what did you think to prepare with that. What did you think during that conversation? What I thought was we need to get our head out of how I felt it, how you felt it, and allow for there's multiple ways of feeling this. But whatever it is, we can agree on one thing, and that thing is we gotta do this human work at the technical level.
Duena:That was all I took out of it. So it's ecstatic that the Dora report wrong or right made this conversation happen.
Dave:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think you got a good, theory and supposition around what that is. And, yeah, I think that's definitely got legs.
Dave:It's very hard to pierce through the Dora report, and I think you've highlighted that, you know, they asked four questions around well-being of
Duena:I didn't get into it properly. At this time, I'm not sure. I wanna double check this. I wanna check how many they were, but I would be interested to see what amount of Mhmm. Research they used.
Duena:I presume they used the Aristotle set of questions, and they cannot have been a couple. There must have been a few 100.
Dave:Oh,
Duena:okay. But even then, like, I it doesn't matter what amount of questions you have, obviously. Right? You might have the one mythical question, like, give the to your heart. Doesn't matter.
Duena:Right? See straight into their hearts and see the burnout.
Dave:Yeah.
Duena:I'm not even describing, like or or rather, I'm not attacking how many questions what the set was necessarily, but I am hoping that it has in built these big contexts. Right? The organizational context, the team context, the individual context, and all of the Aristotle research at the minimum. At the end of the day, this is the ZORA report. So surely they got a bit clear.
Dave:Yeah. It's all safe.
Duena:I'll figure that out over the next week or so. Yeah. But anyways, for you, that conversation, talking about these things. Right? Clearly, just from from you are the latest to come to the
Dave:Table.
Duena:To the table of fighting human death in that group. Right? If you look maybe you and Bob are the latest, if you wish. Mhmm. But but everyone was a reluctant comer at their time.
Dave:I do think everyone does come to this subject reluctantly. Maybe we'll touch on that a little bit later on. But, you know, the stereotypical view of the developer and I think we touched on this one before as well, actually, of how that developer role has changed from being that jack of all trades. Right? The project used to be, you know, end to end.
Dave:Right? A developer a single developer could take a product end to end. And now unless it's the smallest, simplest of things, that's just impossible to do. And to fit that into a large enterprise, again, is, you know, just joking. So
Duena:Are you saying, just to clarify for me, not being insidious, and and I completely agree if you are, but correct me if I'm wrong, that they they've lost that ownership. The end to end ownership has disappeared in the fact that they became a clog in the machine.
Dave:Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I can remember, you know, some of those first things I worked on when I was, you know, a commercial Lone Wolf programmer rather than just a toy missing in in in my Spectrum and Amiga's programmer.
Dave:That I was working in pretty much isolation on some of those things.
Duena:Then that was fun, wasn't it?
Dave:Yeah. Yeah. Because you're much easier. As I said, you know, was touching before. It's a lot easier to get into flow.
Dave:You've got a single process. You've a single target. But at the same point, this was 88, something like that, I think. Yep. 88.
Duena:Look. I get it. I would have liked to have been a developer.
Dave:World was, you know, a much more different place then as well. And I can remember, you know, the manuals we have to get, like, you know, just pages and pages and pages and pages and pages of books and dead trees everywhere.
Duena:I think we have a bunch of these still as trophies in in your office.
Dave:Who can yeah. I mean, like, every time I go to the the tower of books I've got in there, it's just like I don't wanna feel like I'm a nineteen thirties book burning Nazi just, you know, just throwing them all over the scene.
Duena:Take a couple of the pictures of the Dave Farleys were trying to not burn, but at the same time that that I'm lying. Those are some of the the real DevOps tenants are thin, I think. That's hilarious. The truth is if you put a tome of all of the manuals and all of the, agile for dummies and all of the real ones and all of the nonreal ones together. But you also put the tone off, but what do I really need so that I get this stuff?
Duena:Yeah. It will very clear they have a much thinner layer. But who who is capable to see where that value is, where that layer is? So then you become either stacked with useless information or you become this becomes diluted. We've discussed this almost every episode.
Duena:But at the time, we needed it. We all had to go through this. We had to go through the tomes and and distill it. We're the ones that throw the distilled bits. Let's be honest.
Duena:Right? Yeah. Because we need to stop the modesty somewhere. But what we've done is despite the fact we've inundated the world with content, some of us, we still haven't even touched the the corners of explaining to people that are stuck in those tomes, in those manuals. They remember how to do business by a b c, always be closing, or always start with an intro, have 20 pages and the template from some well meaning character in the street.
Duena:Who knows? Yeah. Right? But those tenants have, you're right, have changed. I'll let you get back to the story.
Duena:I'll shut up for a second.
Dave:Okay. Yeah. No. But, yeah, taking it from that lone wolf programmer developer where he was responsible for everything, and you had no mean of support from, you know, a wider online community in any way, shape, or form were tough. If something didn't work, you know, we can now spend ten minutes seeing it didn't work and then off onto, you know, ChatGPT, Stack Overflow, something something something.
Dave:But back in them days, you were done. There's nowhere to turn. And I can remember, yeah, just one of those weird buggy issues you just couldn't get around with the framework I was using. It just flashing blue rather than yellow or something. And it's just like, now what the figuring out do I do?
Dave:Yes. Don't get there. But now with everything being put into the team and everything being everyone else's responsibility, does that get diluted? Does that sense of ownership get diluted? Does everyone if you've got a team of five developers, does everyone feel 20% of the ownership, or does everyone feel a 100% of the ownership?
Duena:And they have to because your biggest argument, counterargument that you encounter over and over again and this is your live sales training. Let's face it. Right? This conversation we're having, we don't have any other time to have to churn through these concepts as well as we do together. It's why we have this platform.
Duena:We finally arrived at this. Just last week, I was screaming at everyone. I believe, if I remember correctly, something towards and I don't. I have to admit that was quite an intense period we've we've gone through. But just last week, I was absolutely screaming from the the depths of my soul that you will never outcode ChatGPT.
Duena:Yeah. I still believe that. You will never outcode ChatGPT. So where we're going towards Mhmm. It isn't even so whatever you're describing is increasing, and it's getting
Dave:ChatGPT as it is now. Yeah. Why? You know, it's still Okay. I didn't
Duena:mean ChatGPT, obviously. I meant you won't
Dave:In three or four years ago.
Duena:Forever outright outright or outcode AI. Okay? This is not even about coding. This is take it come come down if you're it's not about the developer communities. Speaking of which, I'd like us to take this one step backwards and say, the donor report became a tool for the business community only when some of us in the agile community noticed it and started going, oh, sorry.
Duena:Excuse me. This is this thing they have over here in the technology sphere that applies just fine to banking as well. And that's just exactly the same thing in pharma. And that is that is how the community is starting the business community started understanding where psychological safety is coming from, what the deal is with the with the Googleized Total project. If it hadn't been for the DORA report, maybe it would have been harder because it's all these CTOs that practically brought it into the organization and went, this is a thing.
Duena:And I've said this all along. It's historically important to the kind of growth and and my observations of the of the of the anthropological nature of the agile industry and community. But outside of that, and you can find that in my second book that everyone found too complicated, and no one's reading to the tune of under a 100 pounds like I told you in the other episode. Right. No one sees it.
Duena:No. Now we're side by side. He was actually pointing to one of the books, not the new one, which you can see right there.
Dave:Let's do that. There we
Duena:go. But the older one. I don't think anyone's even looking at this. But, anyhow, if they are, that those are the books we need you to please purchase. So that we make more than a 100 ever.
Duena:You should do this. Woah. I promise we did not. We wouldn't have. But I'm so sorry.
Duena:Are you alright?
Dave:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fine.
Duena:You stabbed in the back I'm so my book?
Dave:I know. But if I was a gambling man, I'd say there was or suspicious man at very late. I would say there was definitely something in that, but I'm not. So I'm gonna put that down to pure accident and pure idiocy of my
Duena:own point. Listening to this, Dave was being a supportive CEO and showing you what you could purchase because he has been not even telling you about the software that you could purchase at all, but he was putting my book right next to him behind him, and it fell. And not only fell, but he very poisely did what those what he must have seen that models on the podium do and continued walking
Dave:Absolutely. With
Duena:my books
Dave:The show must go on, and it's not He was quite Yeah. The show must go on, but we've taken about a three minute diversion to explain that.
Duena:That's right. That's right. Yeah. Anyhow, so that which which is why it's better to maybe look at us than listen to us because we're more boring than in listening to us. But I we don't know if we are boring.
Duena:Right back, are we boring? Are we can we cut some bits? Can we actually, don't tell us what we should be doing. I don't give a flying what you think. So I lie.
Duena:I give a flying what you think. I wish we all thought good things. Right? But, anyways, back to this conversation with our friends. Right?
Duena:Dave has been there, lived through that. I think he's the newest to the to the idea of human death. I also don't think that Bob had had the name for it, and he I don't know that he's always thought of it that way. So, obviously, maybe the maybe that Bob is the newest to it, I would say, because mister Ballantyne had three years of intense training in EQ. Mhmm.
Duena:What human that is, he has edited books, let them stab him in the back, and learned all these concepts.
Dave:And The books I edited have not stabbed me in the back.
Duena:No. However, I I wanna maybe you guys didn't understand in my conversation last week, but he has been he's made a lot more than cups of coffees. Man many of these concepts have been passed between us. We've discussed the topic of burnout from every possible angle while this has been written. A lot of research has went into what do we know so far, what has Microsoft found out, what has GitHub found out, what has Google given us, because Google, again, for the billionth time, the most amount of research we have comes from the Aristotle project and the what's the other one project?
Duena:And the Leadership One project. It always escapes the name. So the two of them are what Google has given us on a bigger set of data than we have from any other enterprise. And we if it leaves us with nothing other than search and and the workplace knowledge, they they've done enough for humanity. So I'm big a big fan of the report.
Duena:I hope that none of this is necessarily true, that they said trunk based development burns you out. But here's my theory. What if it does?
Dave:They said there's a correlation.
Duena:Okay.
Dave:Let let's let's pick the words why there is a they have reported a correlation between using trunk based development and higher burning.
Duena:And we what if we agree that it is higher? And what if we then again, I I tell you, I believe I have said, and you might be able to come convince me otherwise because you're the one that remembers my books better than me sometimes. I believe I have said this many times, and I remember I said this on a call with Tracy years and years ago when we met, which is techies are going through a bigger and more immediate burn out than we can measure. It's bigger than other people because they've had intense an intense period of intellectual burnout pre pandemic, and they are having an intense period of emotional burnout during pandemic and post pandemic because of how they are now which is not because of the pandemic only. It's because of where technology happens to have landed.
Duena:We have started with the the techies who are now in their forties and fifties are people who have gone through generations of learning, generations of code, generations of world changing around them. It the the impact of have us having gone from some of most of us, paper to digital. Most of us, from analog to digital. Most of us, from command and control to servant leadership. Most of us, from this is how selling works to who knows what works, and it's only connecting and passion.
Duena:And, yes, most of us from coding or writing in a corner to having to do intensely human activities together where we pair, program, we talk to each other, we podcast, we are honest, we show authenticity, it started with little plates on Instagram, and it never goddamn went away. And now we have to open and bear our souls in a in a professional fashion. It's fucking uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable. We are untrained.
Duena:We don't know how. It has finished us. It has burnt us out more than other. I believe it. Absolutely.
Duena:A million percent. And you know what? Maybe they don't have the data to prove it, but they're onto something. And it is a 100% where it's going, and the DORA report with or without the paper would have then proven the fact that there is human debt in the world, and that this human debt is burning the technology world faster than anywhere else because it is a tech led culture.
Dave:Mhmm. Alright. Good. Alright. So other than that
Duena:We got nothing.
Dave:No. No. No. No. There there was some and, actually, just on the subject of burnout, I don't know if you read this line, but it was talking about documentation and quality documentation.
Dave:And let me quote from the line here again then. However, increasing documentation this
Duena:is Are rather you reading from it now, blive? I never heard this open.
Dave:This is what I was looking at earlier when you said you're looking quizzical or something.
Duena:Yeah. But okay. But that's still not fair. You're still cheating. You never told me we're doing it.
Duena:I'm doing it blind.
Dave:You just got it in your though.
Duena:No. I don't. Okay. Okay. What does it say?
Duena:Let me know.
Dave:We're asking you for your opinions.
Duena:Yes. Blind.
Dave:You don't need that.
Duena:In this Alright.
Dave:So increasing documentation quality doesn't lead to a better well-being for everyone. As the quality of documentation increases, some respondents report increased levels of burnout.
Duena:Of course. They hate it. They hate doing that. Who wants to write documentation? Nobody.
Duena:Who wants to do admin? Nobody. Who wants to pull up their phone and make a sale? Nobody. Let me tell you, these shitty parts exist in every job.
Dave:Yeah. Yes. Other than they say quality documentation is foundational. Absolutely. Yeah.
Dave:But no one likes doing it, and everyone gets burned out by doing it. So why what's going on?
Duena:What it doesn't matter what's going on. Why don't we just outsource this completely to AI? Mhmm. Strip it. Take it away from them.
Duena:They never liked it. Take it away. We have a a golden opportunity to allow people to be creative and human. Free them from the shit that's easy to free them from. The automation, the the lack of having resources, the lack of training, free them from that.
Dave:Yeah.
Duena:Yeah? Take away the shit that burns them out. Cheap at it. What else? Tell me what else goes up.
Duena:I'll tell you right now. When they have to give handovers, it they'll improve. But I I think without reading the shit, it's completely brilliant. And I'll tell you now. Yeah.
Duena:They the devs will not like it when you make them talk to others. Yeah. They have too many meetings. We've done this for the last five years. Yeah.
Duena:They are too busy. They are what is it? They are these are the these are the things they're telling you. Right? They are not having any time.
Duena:Those are the what they're telling. But what they really mean is I you you you pulled me out of flow. And if you pulled me out of flow a certain amount of time that I feel is fair and I owe it to you because I I made this contract with you that I'd be out the flow doing x, y, and zed with you, I'll give it to you. Because that structure, that's clarity, you wanna depend on me. I wanna depend on you.
Duena:It's it ticks all the Aristotel's. For me, it ticks all the Aristotel's for you. I'll come and do that. Yeah. Anytime you pull me out of flow because I had to fucking fix something else that I perceive is a favor to you, enterprise or team or product owner, because it ain't my job, and I hate it.
Duena:And fuck you. Take your testing elsewhere and take your fucking documentation elsewhere and take any time you and me talk to a human elsewhere because those are the times that I'm doing you a favor because the only time you brought me here for is to be in flow. That is the reaction you get. That's the the very at the very core of this is what Dora has caught probably is a figment of fuck you, team. Fuck you, enterprise, for making me do something McKinsey calls the outer loops.
Dave:Yep.
Duena:Let me tell you. There's correlation between these two things. Neither of these things are right, but they're all sensing human debt.
Dave:So McKinsey, the outer loops is not wrong. It's just not right.
Duena:No. McKinsey's outer loops exist. Shit developers don't like exist. All of these things are activities outside the flow, like documentation writing, like doing testing, like talking to other people, like having to do whatever is admin and you don't wanna do. All of those bit you don't wanna do that are outside the flow are outer loops
Dave:Mhmm.
Duena:Fucking burn you out and make you feel some kind of way because they're all needed if you do trunk based development. Let me tell you. Yeah. Yes. When you have ownership end to end and you care about what the fuck you make, you're gonna need to do all of those, and you'll hate it, and you'll be burnt out.
Duena:Yeah. And you'll be less productive when you're burnt out as per the outer loops of our friends, McKinsey.
Dave:Yep.
Duena:And this is the time for us developers and tech community to go, yeah. That's what's happening. Now you can either pay me better and understand my limits, or I won't show up correct. I won't give you a good code anymore.
Dave:Mhmm. Yep. That makes that's perfect perfect sense, I think.
Duena:It does to me, and you Yeah. Does it to anyone else?
Dave:I don't know. That's what we're to bat. That's that's the team we're batting for, though. Right? And that's the message we're drilling in and drilling in and drilling in and tell them and tell them and tell them again.
Dave:And we Go back to Aristotle. Get it all measured. Get it understand what it's about. See developers with a different lens. Treat people as humans.
Duena:It's not difficult.
Dave:It shouldn't be.
Duena:No.
Dave:It shouldn't be.
Duena:We'll do this for the next twenty years so you can come back and listen to us next time. But, I mean, what I would like us to get is, like, a couple of developer stories. I think we even had some of those do you think we can kind of get one developer story or two developer stories in here if you find them in our recordings?
Dave:Yeah. I'm sorry. Sure we can do.
Duena:There's some stuff about when you were first starting out in Chatham. There was some stuff about my first beginnings in seeing developer teams in Sweden. I think if there was one. Yeah. Yeah.
Duena:We should get those in if we can. Listen, you guys. If we find those, they will be inserted right here. Ding. Ding.
Duena:Ding. This is what I saw
Dave:there. Yep. Okay. So you went to a Swedish office block.
Duena:We started working technology since I graduated high school or even before that in ways or others. It was more on the, I don't know, kind of general side of it.
Dave:Yeah.
Duena:Where as this was the first time, my first time ever kind of coming very close to the psychology of developers, if
Dave:you wish. Right.
Duena:And this is for a Swedish company. No. Yeah. A Swedish company run by an American guy called I don't know if you want me to call him or not, but I can ask him. And he he had developed practically a a genius thing.
Duena:He had developed a DHCP six engine. At this time, it means absolutely nothing to no one. It didn't mean anything to me at the time either. Probably didn't mean anything to many people at all because no one knew what I p v four was. Forget what I p v six was.
Duena:Mhmm. And I p v six was a a dream, a distant dream at the time that we are having this conversation.
Dave:Yeah.
Duena:Yeah? And so he was going around telling people, the world of Internet is gonna change. All of your infrastructure is gonna be kind of fucked. Would you please have this other thing
Dave:Yeah.
Duena:That I have made for you? And they all went, wow. Don't be fucking ridiculous. One, none of that is happening too soon. Two, that would be too big of an investment.
Duena:Three, there are competitors at work that have a lot more money that have made this. Yeah. Ironically, one of his competitors was a company called Man and Mice making DHCP as well. They had the VP of sales briefly called Georg Ludwigshorn. Somewhere else in the world with an unbeknownst to the two of us, we were competing.
Dave:I'm sorry. Yeah.
Duena:At Slytis. And then but we didn't know this until years and years later, Georg and I, who then later obviously became my boss as the CEO of Meniga. Anyhow, at this time, I'm in I'm in Sweden, and I'm entering this vast office building with with god. Now now that I realized that all of these things mean so many other things, right, in in the right light. So the vast office space, but in it, various spaces had had what looked like an organic growth to extend themselves from being a potential each of these developers could have easily had one office to themselves, maximum two people in an office Mhmm.
Duena:If they wanted to. They were that those kinds of long rooms. Perhaps half of this you know what I remember. You you remember what I'm all about. Where you could easily put two desks and still have room around them Yeah.
Duena:So two developers could happily and that was the and some execs would have just one, some developers would have two in them. Yeah. Well, let me tell you, this imagine this picture is that same size of a room, that now instead of having two big desks with their back to each other so developers face each other and work, they were having four desks them up like that. And I never even questioned until today why they were like that considering the space in the room and the configuration of every other room. They didn't have developers in that.
Dave:Yep.
Duena:So let me tell you. I think they gravitated towards this model. I think they naturally formed themselves into this motor.
Dave:Yeah.
Duena:I don't think Padmeir would ever say, you are in a team with me, you're in a team with him. I think these people just kind of grew that product like that by chatting to each other and standing up and looking over the other guy's shoulder for twenty seconds of their programming. And that they had banter, they had the same music, each room had a different type of radio they liked to listen to. These were Swedish developers, so they would often kick off their shoes before starting to develop, which made me sweat and never be able to bring a corporate client over.
Dave:Mhmm.
Duena:Unless I convince them to put them back on, which I have done over my career for multiple Icelandic company. Please put your shoes on. That that did it. I I
Dave:would have to
Duena:go low. I understand why you want your shoes off. But for now, I need everyone to profesh because these fuckers are coming from England and they don't understand. You need to be comfortable. The amount of times I have to say that.
Dave:Uh-huh.
Duena:And I had wrongly believed that all these all developers everywhere have this kind of molly coded, you know, kind of situation where work started at nine and ended on the dot at five. Uh-huh. But equally, there was a fika break at ten. A fika break is a wellness, have tea, have that is Mhmm. Almost religious across various institutions in Sweden.
Duena:Don't get me started though because this is why it gets bad. Yeah. This is where well intentioned things get bad is when that fica thing applies in a hospital while people are dying as well.
Dave:Yeah.
Duena:Yeah? Anyways, in a programming environment though, let me tell you, it's fine. You can afford it Yeah. That they have a tea and a coffee. And then they get back to work, put their head down for
Dave:Couple
Duena:of work for a couple of hours.
Dave:Yeah.
Duena:And then they would emerge for Lunch. A mandatory team lunch. Everyone and their dog would seem to me like a mandatory one. Mhmm. Seemed to them like a bug.
Duena:Everyone and their dog was putting their shoes back on and walking regimentally. And it wasn't just our office. It was all other office building. We're walking regimentally to the lunch halls where people would have a beard, a type of lingonberries, and some some some meatballs, and have this conversation about either life, very little was changing in life. Yeah.
Duena:How the kids still good? Great. How about this problem? How do we make this new thread work? Because I keep getting this error?
Duena:And they would finish this and they would go back down for an hour or two. And towards three or four, they would have a lengthy, what I would call, chatty meeting. A lot more animated, maybe a laugh or two over a coffee. And then they kind of decide what they do tomorrow, and they would go the fuck home. And the code these people had churned had made this other type of Internet.
Dave:Mhmm.
Duena:This DHCP v six thing.
Dave:Yeah.
Duena:And let me tell you, a lot less people than I'm comfortable to tell you because I don't remember what we were saying to the market. But let's just say they were comfortably under two teams if they were to have been organized like that. Mhmm. But they looked like they would have been comfortably 2,000 as our competitors were. Yeah?
Duena:Mhmm. This is why they they did that because they had a life they adored. Yeah. They were potentially doing TDD, potentially doing TBD, potentially doing all the pairings in a natural way that still allowed them to do loads of their flow and to have loads of their regimented simple pressure. I still think that's the perfect isotope for Yeah.
Duena:Developers. But that world does not exist. No society affords that world because these people are practically in a club and functional for maybe a day or two, a month. But that entire day or two were at the level that no other teams could.
Dave:Yeah.
Duena:Meanwhile, they had friendship and some work. Mhmm. And that's what people are productive at. Who can afford that? Because then with today's political greatness, madness, and lack of being able to gravitate, and lack of well-being and all of that, you need a billion instead of 12.
Duena:That's what's happening.
Dave:Yeah.
Duena:That's why you're bloated. It's because you don't know how to make this environment for your developers. And then now you your developers are inserted into the end to end ownership idea, and they're incapable, unwilling because they heard of these places in Sweden where they could just eat lingonberries
Dave:Yeah.
Duena:And unprepared. So we need to fix that.
Dave:Okay.
Duena:Not at Yeah.
Dave:And how do we replicate that in a remote work environment? I mean, it sounds ideal. I'm very jealous.
Duena:That's it. And it doesn't exist. It only exists in this insane society where they okay. Let let's let's let's be clear. This is an economical problem.
Duena:The reason you can't organize people like that, yeah, is because we do not have the amount of money it would take to have that hundreds of thousands of people be productive only at their best. Yeah? So we need to kind of force them to be productive at other times. Yeah? When I'm here is is is saying, let people only have 1,000,000 millisecond of brilliance all their life and wait for that one and pay them meanwhile.
Duena:I'm not insane. Right?
Dave:Yeah.
Duena:You have to ask a minimum amount of unpleasant effort along happiness. I'm Yeah. Yeah. I've never said otherwise. And people have to have some adulthood, some professional geothological sense, some some ethics, some common sense.
Duena:But outside of that, if you make the tweak that, how much do you need to put from money and understanding and and and and organization and permission versus and and and and tools versus how much do they need to put from their personal responsibility and meet in the fucking middle and find the responsible place. But I hold both parts responsible, not the organizational. It's the developers that don't agree that it is the Lindenberry they're after. It's the people who don't say, this is too much for me. I don't you brought me I don't know what meeting I'm in.
Duena:Well, I'm doing your thing, but you're in a product meeting so that you fucking understand what these product owners know that the client wants. What? I'm just bothered. Why am I here? I just wanna be fuck you.
Duena:I wanna write code. I don't wanna be in this meeting. I don't want your ownership. I don't care what this product does to the end consumer. So now I think we need to go each of your developers have to be has to be told about project that is total and tell them each of these bits are a bit a little bit your responsibility as well.
Duena:How are we doing for dependability? None of my problems. Yes. It is. Are you dependable?
Duena:Yeah. How is structure and clarity? Well, I don't fucking know about those. You do. Did you well, you're very clear with your boss.
Duena:Do you know for a fact when you need to do this Passover to whatever it's called to quote. Or, like, you know, psychological safety doesn't matter to me. Don't be fucking ridiculous. Or I don't care about my impact. I just sit here and write code.
Duena:But that's only you're an asshole. You should.
Dave:Yeah.
Duena:Like, we need an episode about developers' responsibility towards the Aristotle pledge. The Aristotle pledge for everyone. Mhmm. Both organizations and developers. That's what it needs to be.
Duena:The Aristotle project pledge. Just fix each of these, asshole. Yeah. And we know just how.
Dave:Yeah. Well done, baby. We fixed the world again.
Duena:Mhmm. But if we don't find those, let's let's pretend we never said that, and we'll get them in the next episode.
Dave:Okay. Yep. We'll certainly do that.
Duena:Alright.
Dave:But here's another stat, which I'm not sure it's surprising, but the number's big. Right? And this is when it's talking about failed deployments.
Duena:Mhmm.
Dave:Now performance level of elite, let's start at the top. Deployment frequency on demand, change lead time less than one day, change failure rate five percent, still seems quite high, failed failed deployment time, recovery time one hour, less than one hour, and 18% of respondents is doing that. So well done, all of those people. Yeah. Right?
Dave:That's chunk based development. That's flow. That's TDD. That's testing. That's all your good bits put in place and perhaps even a psychological safety.
Duena:Maybe even if if you're lucky.
Dave:Now on the flip side of that, if we go down to the low performance thing, which let's assume this is nineteen eighty six, seven, eight practices, deployment frequency between once per week and once per month. And even once per week
Duena:It was it's quite ambitious sometimes in some is doing that today?
Dave:Yeah. No. In some enterprises, once per week is unheard of.
Duena:Sorry. Some enterprises?
Dave:Most.
Duena:Well, what is the percentage? Because you can look at that data in front of you. You know what percentage of enterprises. They presume.
Dave:Okay. So this is 17. So 17% of respondents
Duena:Are doing that.
Dave:Yeah. But But in a low performance level.
Duena:Prices were respondents. Let's not forget you have top performance in the dollar report. Yeah. There's several thousands of the best organizations in the world. This is the top of the team of the crop.
Duena:Yes.
Dave:And and
Duena:And the cream of the crop of the trim of the crop still yeah.
Dave:Yeah. Yeah. So perhaps there is a big so maybe these numbers are skewed, but because with picking the cream of the crop, we're not Joe Blow software team down the road.
Duena:There is some of the Joe Blow software team down the road element, of course, as well. Either I don't I would doubt that the that the that the segmentation of the respondent is an an an okay because if anything they know what to do is kind of make sure not only that these findings are good, but that they extrapolate.
Dave:Yeah. Look. I'm no statistician, but anyway
Duena:No. We're not. But we still believe that them to be correct. But what we do say is, is there a skew towards performance? And there is.
Duena:Let's face it.
Dave:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, let's carry on. So the change lead time between one week and one month and the change failure, right, mate, is massive 64%.
Dave:So you're telling me nearly, you know, seven out of ten deployments fail in those enterprises. How is that not soul sapping?
Duena:Well, can I ask you something else? I can attack that. You might not like or I might be wrong. This is a good one, live. We would have discussed that.
Duena:Why is it maybe those deployments were part of an agile process of them failing fast?
Dave:No. Because the failed deployment recovery time is get this between one month and six months.
Duena:So did I'm I'm lost. What is a failed recovery?
Dave:To get you back to a working state.
Duena:Of what? No. Yes.
Dave:No. I mean, again. Alright?
Duena:Saying in this batch, they didn't calculate all the little experiments. Because then if that's how many are failing, that's great. They just miss their learning.
Dave:No. No. No. People
Duena:are that unintentional. These would have wanted them to
Dave:be about this. If you experiment, how often do you deploy?
Duena:Oh, so you mean non UAT conversations? Yeah. Post UAT failures?
Dave:I'm assuming this is all production systems could be wrong.
Duena:But that's what I'm asking because it makes a massive, massive difference. Okay. Because if it is what I think, it just shows you those people are doing testing and are moving fast.
Dave:Yeah. I don't think it's making any limitation here, but I don't think that is what they mean.
Duena:But do you see how opposite these two can be? Yeah. Post UAT, great. They're doing agile. Past UAT, are they fucking kidding?
Duena:Everything's crap.
Dave:Yeah. But, no. I I would assume that this is just production.
Duena:You know, let's come back to this.
Dave:Let us
Duena:If make it a marked point and convert it.
Dave:And even then, if you're deploying to UAT using these manual fashions, which let's assume the low performing teams are doing, you can't do that with a experimentation AB process.
Duena:Okay. Now you lost me, and I won't I I The turn of or or a game.
Dave:The lead time is simply not fast
Duena:enough Okay.
Dave:For you to be able to do experiments.
Duena:So you're saying that the the the timings you're reading are saying that there's no way that they could be these could be quick popcorns I'm talking about.
Dave:Absolutely. My product owner says, hey. If we change this from green to red Yeah. How many more people buy? And we'll say, we can tell you in six months.
Duena:Oh, no one's using experiment. I'm only talking about popcorn technology experiment. I'm not insane enough to think that anyone's popcorn experimenting in sales with tech. Yeah? I mean, we're talking much bigger enterprises would never have happened.
Duena:I'm talking about you know, I this is maybe important. Every time we we talk about something, we should maybe and when it comes to technology of things, it's really important to me that we start showing what the the limitations we presume are, but we equally start attacking them.
Dave:Mhmm.
Duena:And in our case, it's easy because we have to do that live with each other. But here's how I think about it in my autistic mind. Right? You have technology, and then you have to my mind, this big technology circle contains data. Yeah?
Duena:Contains ops, contains sick. If you wish to think of them that maybe contains, forgetting someone hardware or something else. This is all soft, and I suppose there's, like, some hard component of tech as well. Sorry about that. Everyone in the manufacturing industry.
Dave:Mine are cloud.
Duena:No. But that's a different dimension to it of it to me. Right? So in this in this big port of tech, you have these big, kind of concepts.
Dave:Yeah.
Duena:And then as you come into the industry, you'll find if as a newcomer into the industry, what I found was or I never knew I was a newcomer to the industry, but, apparently, I was. So the the and the industry, in my mind, was, you know, the tech community. Well, let me tell you, there is no such thing as a tech community. It's as real as Santa. There is no such thing.
Duena:The what there are there are pockets that don't even correspond to these, like, big necessarily correspond to these big areas we just talked about. They are pockets that kind of cut through, but they don't even cut through. I then found out in an a parallel way so that you can kind of figure out what's what maybe it's for regions. Maybe it's for philosophies. Maybe it's for anything of value.
Duena:Maybe it's for the way we we we we congregate or we work or we maybe it's the time it's none of that. It's there it cuts in every which direction, and it's a community that's a tech community and doesn't know it is what I found. Right? What I found is a data community, a security community. At best, what I thought, okay.
Duena:Well, let me go a step higher for good god's sake. This is insane. A DevOps community, which that is, I if I'm honest, the one where I my heart went the most. Those were the most human dead fighters. They knew the most.
Duena:They tried the most. They had tried everything. It's almost like the more advanced type of human lived in the DevOps community, I thought, that kind of intersects with the agile community. But this agile community became kind of who is old school for the, religiously for the manifesto or isn't and just kind of became religious and stuff. And it all now is becoming attacked by, in my mind, by this new generation, that is maybe not not not wrongly coming from other sides of tech.
Duena:And let me tell you what side of tech they think they're coming from. They'll tell you they're prod. Yeah. These are new kids that will tell you they're in prod. They're not.
Duena:They're developers. Early developers who knew they have to have end to end, who were realized Aristotle kind of exists, who are curious about life and learned quickly how awesome agile was, caught on to all the things and others, and then swiftly moved from development into into product. And now they're getting it. They are the new type. And in my view, product owners and product developers is all you're gonna have.
Duena:The development job as it is today will not exist until we can protect it in a completely different way.
Dave:We've already seen it. Right? Chat GPT, build me a system that does x. Then what does a developer have to do? You know?
Dave:And if you think about the tech debt we've got and does tech debt exist in an AI driven world where it can just simply replace itself? Everything. Right? Yeah. Well, not get everything right, but can simply replace itself.
Dave:Does it remember the tests we put it through it? Does it remember, you know, all those different nuances? Right? And I think still got to adhere to the laws of garbage in, garbage out.
Duena:Oh, yeah. But And common sense and adulthood and maturity and all personal That's okay.
Dave:The AI doesn't care about
Duena:that. They don't start me at the end of the episode. Right.
Dave:Anyway, what
Duena:We do need to wrap up.
Dave:Do need to just say, actually, let's wrap up. But going back to this change fader, like, 64% is hideous. The cost to the enterprise, let's not worry about the people. Right?
Duena:We never do, do we?
Dave:No. But having to roll back 64% of your changes Mhmm.
Duena:You know? What money does that cost then?
Dave:Exactly. Well, it's right. System's down. Roll back. They're not click your fingers.
Dave:How did it fail? Right? And I've, you know, almost had some robust discussions, so we say, on, you know, database deployment scripts and how they roll back. And they're saying we haven't met cost. You haven't met on the rollback scripts.
Dave:And it's just like, I don't even like, depends which stage this goes wrong at. Why? What how what data has sort of been half bathed through this? And what saying we need to wing it.
Duena:And I don't even know what exact example you're on, but why have to continue your point, why haven't you as an enterprise kept an eye on it, and how has it not crippled you? Why was this so from your day to day that you could just live with it and cover it? And that's where this intersection between you and I will, I hope, become super powerful to those listening to us is because I can translate what that means to, like, to an enterprise, and you can translate what that means to a developer.
Dave:Yeah.
Duena:And the I think we should keep doing that as much as we can, but I think this failure rate should be something that a developer themselves knows about Mhmm. And should be something that the product owner cries about. It should be something that an enterprise is worried about because it's human debt. But what the DORA report says is you get this failure rate that Dave is talking about, it starts by saying, as ever, it has always done this, by saying what we see as the bigger correlation between elite and success development and and performance and and Okay. Is is very clearly the state of your culture.
Duena:That says that unequivocally, and I think that is the biggest gain that we are clear that if tech wants to move, tech needs to look at culture. But look at culture will not mean bring some new episodes about purpose in, or it will mean absolute things. Things like everyone pledging, like, the Hippocratic oath to abide by the Aristotle Google findings personally and as a company or as a team at all levels.
Dave:Yep.
Duena:And then we can go somewhere.
Dave:Yeah. And I I think it feels like we're picking apart the door of port, and I think, may you know, maybe that's to its credit.
Duena:We haven't.
Dave:We should
Duena:have torn.
Dave:98% of this, we're just like, if someone's saying, how can my enterprise perform better? Back.
Duena:Exactly. So if we say you know, we know that the people listening to this have the discerning power of knowing, and I will repeat this in writing for as many days as necessary from here on. Again, at the end of the episode, if it had not been for the DORA report, we would not be where we are in the business world, not in the in the in the technology world, in the business world. And, you know, I take some credit. I will because I have banked on and on alongside others that this is the DORA find this is the findings that DORA shown in their report to matter from the Google Aristotle because they have then expanded it.
Duena:So if it hadn't been for that, we would not have psychological safety in every HBR report, and then psychological safety from every Forbes genius that paid them £400 to be in a council and, every newspaper copy and pasting things we've said eight billion years ago. So it is absolutely to the credit of the tech community, of the DevOps community, of the agile community, of the Dora community, and of the researchers behind the the the the Google Aristotle project that we are where we are today. And it's not much where we are, and we have fuckload more of human debt. But the fact that we can all live another day and attempt to fight it is thanks to these pioneers. We we we left you with some big ones over there.
Duena:Again, I've only said what I've already said what I've always said, which is bigger human debt in tech companies, it will come to bite us faster because we live in a tech led culture. So, see you next time, and, hopefully, you enjoyed listening to us and you're subscribing. See you soon. Buy the block. Buy the bloody software.
Duena:Change the world. Yeah. Fight human death. Bye.
Dave:Bye bye, everyone.