[0:02] [music]

Kevin Garber: [0:09] Good morning, good evening, hello wherever you are in the world. It is Friday the 11th of September 2015. Did you know it is my birthday month?

Nic Barker: [0:17] Really?

Kevin: [0:18] Yes, Virgo. 20th of September.

Nic: [0:21] I'll get you something nice.

Kevin: [0:22] Please do. It's a Sunday, though. Next Sunday, my birthday.

Nic: [0:28] We're having birthdays for whole months now.

[0:29] [laughter]

Kevin: [0:29] I think so. We've actually got few Virgo birthdays in our office. Good old the famous Jimmy, our famous dinosaur.

Nic: [laughs] [0:37]

Kevin: [0:38] Anyway, you're listening to Episode 63 of the "It's a Monkey" podcast. As nearly always, it is a beautiful sunny day looking in downtown Sydney, Friday afternoon.

[0:46] We have had a long week here in the ManageFlitter office. We've really worked hard to carve out 45 minutes for you, so we really hope you enjoy this podcast. We have a fantastic podcast.

[0:59] As always, we're going to kick off with some news. As always, there's lots of tech news. This week, we have Apple Conference. We'll be talking a little bit about some changes to Tinder.

[1:12] We've got an interview coming up later on in the show with Eric Elliott, who wrote a fantastic article on how to build high velocity development teams, really one of the best articles I've read if you're a tech founder, if you're managing teams. Eric runs a business that trains people in JavaScript. He's a JavaScript evangelist, I would say. We speak to him later on in the show, so that's coming up a little bit later.

[1:46] As always, or often, with me is Nic Barker, who is the product lead at ManageFlitter, front end doing all sorts of bits and pieces, backend commonly known as full stack, beyond the full stack.

Nic: [2:02] Yep, as always, or often, it's good to be here.

Kevin: [2:06] Digging in bits and pieces. Let's first talk Apple. Big week, lots of announcements, quite confusing for us non-Apple folks like me that aren't absolute obsessees. Exactly what they announced, new phones, new iPad, talk us through some of the announcements yesterday in San Francisco.

Nic: [2:26] It was pretty standard for one of their interim conferences, the same sort of thing we've spoken about before, how one year they'll do the S models for the iPhones, and then the next year they'll do sort of like the big reboot.

[2:41] This was a pretty typical interim year. They refreshed a lot of products. On the less exciting end, there're new iPad minis and new standard size iPads as well. They just refreshed the hardware in all of those. There was a bunch of cool announcements about the watch, although I don't personally have one so I can't tell you from personal experience how it's going to affect me. They're releasing a new watch operating system.

Kevin: [3:12] There was some new, high-end iPad release?

Nic: [3:15] Yes. Moving into hardware, essentially they have released a 13-inch, or they are going to release a 13-inch, Retina iPad. Any of you who have a 13-inch MacBook Air or 13-inch MacBook Pro, it's going to be the size of the screen of your laptop, which is really, really huge. It will be the biggest tablet on the market, I'm pretty sure, or close to at least.

Kevin: [3:40] They didn't announce any chances to MacBook Airs or MacBooks today.

Nic: [3:44] No.

Kevin: [3:44] Absolutely nothing on that side.

Nic: [3:46] It was all mobile devices, everything either running iOS or watchOS essentially.

Kevin: [3:51] I believe the price points on some of their new phones are plus north of US$1,000.

Nic: [3:55] Oh yeah. The iPhone 6S and the 6S Plus came out. [laughs] It's always confusing to remember the order because, as I was saying before, I don't know if a lot of you realize, but Samsung has phones out at the moment called the Galaxy S6 Plus. There's the Samsung S6 Plus and the iPhone 6S Plus. They're going to be on the market at the same time. It's really confusing.

[4:28] They released refreshed models of both the 6 and the 6 Plus, so 4.7 inch, I think, and the 5.5. There are some really cool new features that have come out in the hardware space that are really interesting, the biggest of which you'll be hearing about is this new thing called 3D Touch.

[4:48] If any of you have seen the new Force trackpads on any of the Apple laptops, their MacBook Pro and the new MacBook, the thin one, the trackpads can now sense pressure. Essentially, you can do different things depending on how hard you click. There are two levels of click that you can get by pressing harder.

[5:12] They've basically taken that tech, and they've put it behind the touch screen on the new iPhones. You can sort of click the touch screen. They have haptic feedback for it, so it feels like you're actually clicking a button. It allows you to do all these sort of sneaky new features. You've got to go watch the videos if you want to get a really, really good visual preview of it.

[5:34] Essentially, they're doing stuff like, if you're on the home screen, you can now do the new Force click, the 3D click, on the message app, for example, the messages app, and instead of opening it, it will open a small little quick menu that has "compose new message," "reply to most recent message," that kind of thing.

[6:00] They're doing all these new quick look preview features which you've never really been able to do on mobile devices before. It's really pretty revolutionary, actually. There haven't been many changes to the way that the touch system works since Multi-Touch, which allowed you to do pinch zoom and stuff like that. It's really, really interesting what they're doing with it.

Kevin: [6:25] The price points...Our Australian dollar has weakened a lot, so in Australia, I would imagine, they're going to be, what, $1,300, $1,400, $1,500?

Nic: [6:33] The new phones, yes, outright at least.

Kevin: [6:35] I was thinking this is the top end.

Nic: [6:36] Yes. These are the very top end phones. Another little interesting thing off to the side, people often talk about, "Oh, you know." There's the famous comparison which is like before the new range of phones came out Apple had released like 12 phones in total, and in the same time period, Samsung had released like 800.

[6:57] People always go on about, "Apple always thinks really carefully about the products they release. They make sure that if they do something they do it right." One of the things that went counter to that at the conference this year was they quietly removed the iPhone 5C from stores.

[7:15] They've stopped selling them, basically. In the background of this conference, they've decided that the budget 5C was not a good idea at all. [laughs] They've silently killed it in the background.

Kevin: [7:25] It might have been cannibalizing the high-end products as well.

Nic: [7:28] Yeah, who knows? I don't think they actually ever released really solid numbers on that, so we don't know how it went as an experiment, but it seems it didn't exactly work out for them. [laughs]

[7:39] Final thing, I think, that I can remember was the Apple TV got a refresh. They are opening the operating system, finally. People have been predicting this for a long time. They're opening the operating system on the Apple TV, which funnily enough is called tvOS, to developers now. There's going to be apps built specifically for Apple TV. They're refreshing the hardware as well, giving it a nice touch remote and stuff like that.

Kevin: [8:08] Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, he thinks the future of TV is basically apps.

Nic: [8:15] Yeah. You're just going to have a big mobile device running on your TV that allows you to watch movies and stuff like that.

Kevin: [8:21] Sort of anecdotally, I can say for many, many years I never had a TV. A couple years ago when I moved into a new place I bought a smart TV. That's exactly right. I watch YouTube on it, Netflix. Netflix Australia I'm pretty disappointed with.

Nic: [8:37] Yeah, me too.

Kevin: [8:38] I find the inventory pretty poor. It's obviously licensing issues, et cetera.

Nic: [8:43] I doubt it's their fault, to be honest. [laughs]

Kevin: [8:44] Yeah, I also doubt it's their fault. I use the SBS on demand, ABC on demand, things like that. I very, very rarely watch free-to-air live TV. I think we had this chat earlier in the office. Live TV, live radio is really in trouble.

Nic: [9:02] Absolutely.

Kevin: [9:04] It's really in trouble. It's going to have to morph, at the very least, if not just totally be revolutionized.

[9:08] Talk us through any of that. The Apple Watch, there's a whole heap of new Apple Watch besides the software. I believe there're new faces, new straps, all sorts of releases.

Nic: [9:21] Yeah, they're releasing a whole lot of different colors for things, different colors like combinations of both the color of the hardware, the color of the metal, obviously, and there're innumerable new number of strap options and stuff like that.

[9:35] I think one of the really interesting things that Apple is now realizing, for a long time they really had clamped down on the range of industrial design that they were offering. They would offer one type of computer. It was silver. That was it. When the first iPhones came out, there was only one version of it.

[9:56] Now, if you go on their website, basically, across their entire range of devices they've released this new rose gold, is the color, which is sort of pinky. They now have that across all of their devices. I guarantee you that people are going to want to be matching this stuff.

[10:13] They're going to have the same color phone and computer, or they get the same color dock for their phone and that kind of stuff. I think offering people the ability to choose these colors is actually going to be a really big thing for them.

Kevin: [10:26] We spoke about it in the last podcast, how the Apple Watch is the number two wearable after the Fitbit.

Nic: [10:31] It is.

Kevin: [10:32] I've been using my new generation Pebble watch. I enjoy it, mainly essentially as a notification device. The user interface has got a lot to be desired. We bought Kate Frappell, who is a designer and general hands-on-deck here -- I don't know what to call us all here -- an Apple Watch to have a bit of a play with it.

[10:55] I actually decided to drag Kate in, she's just come back from a holiday and Kate, you want to pop in the mic, Nic's mic, and I want to chat to Kate about the Apple Watch from someone who's actually used it. Kate is an iPhone user, uses Instagram a lot, Pinterest a lot, Facebook a little bit, Twitter a little bit. Kate, firstly, welcome to the podcast.

Kate Frappell: [11:22] Thank you, good to be here.

Kevin: [11:23] Talk nice and closely to the mic.

Kate: [11:26] Very close.

Kevin: [11:28] How long have you been using the Apple Watch for?

Kate: [11:30] Probably about two months? Not long before I left.

Kevin: [11:35] Talk us through what you're loving about it, what you're hating about it, how it's integrated with your everyday life.

Kate: [11:41] At the moment, I'm similar to your Pebble, actually really enjoying the notifications. I think they call it the haptics, the vibration behind it, is really nice. The sound as well, sometimes you turn on silent, but it's easier than looking at your phone. I think in social interactions as well, it's not as pressing to open your phone, you can just be like, "Ah," that's it.

Kevin: [12:07] We spoke about this problem earlier though, that often we look at our watch for notifications and we're concerned that people are looking at...When you look at your watch, because you're running out of time, you're under time pressure, it's quite offensive at times. If you're having coffee with someone and you're looking at your watch. Sometimes I have to say to my friends or someone, "I'm going to look at my watch. I've just received a text message."

Kate: [12:30] Makes you look a little bit impatient, sometimes.

Kevin: [12:31] Yeah, I don't have sound on my Pebble though. Pebble has no sound.

Kate: [12:35] No sound? OK.

Kevin: [12:36] No.

Kate: [12:37] It's interesting. I would imagine that it would be very muted by it's not, it's quite clear. Same with if you make a phone call as well.

Kevin: [12:44] Yes, so the Apple Watch, you can make a phone call. I can't make a phone call on my watch. But you can actually talk into, what's that...

Kate: [12:54] Microphone?

Kevin: [12:55] What's that cartoon where he spoke into his watch? Anyway.

Kate: [13:02] It does feel very 007.

Kevin: [13:03] Yeah. Good conversation starter I bet? A lot of people asking you about the watch?

Kate: [13:09] Yeah I just went to Dominick's in lunch, and this guy came over, "Is that an Apple Watch?" It's like yeah. He's like, "Can you make phone calls? Can you send messages?" It's like, "Yeah." It's good, now I think the main thing is Siri, she picks up very well. You just have to say, "Hey, Siri." She's like, "Attention is grabbed."

Kevin: [13:29] So you can make a calendar entry really easily.

Kate: [13:31] Yep. Messages are easy. I think what I really like is maps as well. When you're driving, for me, it revolutionized how I get from A to B if I don't know where I'm going.

Kevin: [13:43] I've also got the maps one pretty good as well. I get a vibration on turn left, turn right.

Kate: [13:49] Yep, vibration. Even if you're mid-driving, you don't want to look at your phone, it's dangerous. You just say, "Hey, Siri, I want to go home." And she'll be, "OK." They'll give you directions home straight away.

Kevin: [14:03] Look, I have to say the only time I've ever had iPhone envy is wanting an iWatch, or sorry, an Apple Watch, because it's so much better than the Pebble. I have to be honest. What other apps are you using on the Apple Watch, regularly?

Kate: [14:20] Regularly? Weather, weather is good. The interface also has by the hour, so it's easy to check. I have to admit I haven't really used this app yet, but I think it would be good is the boarding pass, to the wallet. It comes up and it puts the QR code on your screen.

Kevin: [14:37] Yeah, that's cool.

Kate: [14:38] I wanted to use that at the airports, but I wasn't too sure at the time.

Kevin: [14:41] A bit too new.

Kate: [14:42] It's a bit too new, yeah. I feel like that. Same with the Apple Pay. It'd be good to use, and looking at the interface...

Kevin: [14:49] Is that working in Australia?

Kate: [14:52] Oh, I'm not too sure, maybe.

Kevin: [14:54] That would be really cool as well. Interesting. You mentioned Pinterest, were you using Pinterest?

Kate: [15:04] Pinterest haven't got an app yet.

Kevin: [15:05] Really?

Kate: [15:06] When the Apple Watch was being launched, they were pitching as if they were going to have an app. It was really interesting, they were going to almost show you where the places that you had pinned were, and show you directions there, so you could visit the places that you pinned.

Kevin: [15:22] Or pins close to where you are.

Kate: [15:24] Close to where you are, yeah.

Kevin: [15:25] Very geolocation.

Kate: [15:26] It was a good idea, but they haven't done it yet. Same with Facebook, there's no Facebook app.

Kevin: [15:29] Is there no Facebook Apple...interesting.

Kate: [15:31] No Facebook, no. You can get Facebook notifications, because that just comes out of your iPhone, but you can't, there's no Facebook app for the watch.

Kevin: [15:42] I notice you're still wearing it. I sort of have to force, I wouldn't say force myself to wear it, but I can live without it. It's not as compelling as my mobile phone. On the weekends, I don't wear it, during the week I wear it because I like to get the notifications and things like that. Do you miss it when you don't have it on? I don't miss it that much, to be honest, my Pebble.

Kate: [16:05] Yes and no. I think even on my trip, I started in New York and Canada, so it was very city-based, and I wore it all the time and used it. When I got to Alaska, I didn't really have much use for it. The battery would run out and I might wait for a couple days.

Kevin: [16:23] What's the battery life like? Mine is about a working week.

Kate: [16:27] A week?

Kevin: [16:28] Maybe a little bit less than that.

Kate: [16:29] Nah, not a week. You have to charge it probably every day and a half to two days.

Kevin: [16:30] But yours is a big color screen.

Kate: [16:38] It's very easy to charge, though. They've made the cord easy, it's just magnet, and you plug it on.

Kevin: [16:46] No doubt they charge you a fortune if you would need to replace it.

Kate: [16:49] Probably. I heard the accessories are very expensive.

Kevin: [16:52] Yeah, I heard like a strap for an Apple Watch is like 200 bucks or something.

Kate: [16:55] Yeah, the watch itself is 500, the lowest one, and then all the accessories after that are 200 bucks.

Kevin: [17:00] Ah, no wonder they're the richest company in the world.

Kate: [17:03] They make a lot of money.

Kevin: [17:04] They've got it down pat. Kate Frappell, it's nice to have you on the podcast.

Kate: [17:08] Same to you.

Kevin: [17:09] We'll drag you in again some time. Kate usually does the editing for this podcast as well, so if you're listening to it, you have Kate to thank. You can follow her on Instagram. Do you have a Twitter account?

Kate: [17:21] Yeah.

Kevin: [17:22] You do?

Kate: [17:22] I've got heaps of followers now.

Kevin: [17:23] Do you? Oh, because you use ManageFlitter.

Kate: [laughs] [17:24] Woohoo!

Kevin: [17:28] Remote account management.

Kate: [17:29] Yes.

Kevin: [17:32] Thanks, Kate.

Kate: [17:32] Thank you.

Kevin: [17:33] So, yeah, we thought we'd give you from the [inaudible 17:35] face, Apple Watch. The next best thing to me having an Apple Watch was having someone in the office having an Apple Watch, and I can see every day, and get a bit of envy around.

[17:45] Next story, Tinder, which I find quite interesting. I was talking to a friend on the weekend who is an absolute, I call her the Tinder Queen, and she was showing me how she uses Tinder.

[17:59] Nic, what I found really interesting was Tinder's almost like a social media network, right? You match with these people, they stay matched with them. You upload photos which are called moments, which stay live for 24 hours, and people can like these moments, and it definitely seems more social media network than dating app in many ways.

[18:21] Tinder have recently announced the premium version a few months ago, which are very clever, which allows you to have a back button in case you didn't say yes or no in the right way, and you can match in other locations in the world. Now, they've released something called "super like," apparently, which I think is a bit of a dumb idea. It's almost like they're looking for, "OK, so not only do I like you, now I super like you!" Anyway, tell me your thoughts about Tinder and all its bits and pieces.

Nic: [18:54] I think it's really interesting what you said about Tinder moving towards being more of a social network, or trying to be more of a social network, because since dating sites first existed, they've all had this same problem which is that their business model has the antithesis of retention.

Kevin: [19:16] Exactly, once we're successful, you stop paying us.

Nic: [19:19] Yeah, exactly. So, the better you are as a dating service, the more likely you are to lose your customers. Tinder started off as it was very much about the speed of the match, and they were promoting that, it's the fastest way to date, you don't have to worry about filling out these huge profiles or anything like that. Then obviously with creating these moments and stuff like that, they've been moving towards having a bit more of a permanence around your profile on Tinder.

[19:53] But unfortunately now, as a result of that, they've swung a little bit too far back in the other direction and people aren't taking it as seriously as an app for actually dating any more. A lot of people use it just casually for fun, without an intention of going on any dates with the people who they actually swipe on.

[20:14] Tinder, in order to combat that, they've introduced this feature called super like. To give you a little bit of background on it, Tinder has a very, very simple UX model, which is just you can swipe right to indicate that you like someone, or swipe left to indicate that you don't like them, and if two people swipe right on each other, it will give you both a notification that you matched.

[20:42] What super like does is, if you press super like on a person, as soon as they see your profile it will notify them that you've clicked super like on them, even without you making a decision on them at all.

[20:56] Rather than being a mutual match, it actually notifies them as soon as they see your picture that you've hit super link on them, kind of thing. So, basically, they are trying to create these two parallel classes, essentially, one of people who are actually serious about the dating element, and then other people who are just more into it casually, as a bit of a social network I think.

Kevin: [21:19] Interesting, and in the TechCrunch article which we'll link to in the show notes, spokesperson from Tinder said that they may introduce other filtering features as well. So, if you match with people and then you can filter them by eye color, closeness, location...What's interesting about these products whether you look at Tinder or Snapchat is, they all line up becoming media platforms, in a way.

[21:52] You look at Snapchat as now these media products are pushing a lot of stories and things on Snapchat. Apparently it's doing incredibly well. I haven't seen any of the latest things. Tinder is becoming more of a social media network and something.

[22:08] I guess the risk for them is always cannibalizing their initial value, but maybe they reached such a critical mass that they can afford to muck around with it.

Nic: [22:17] Yeah, the interesting thing is about all these networks. Very wise people, a number of them, have said that often the speed at which something rises can predict the speed at which it will fall. I guess a lot of these networks, especially like Snapchat and Tinder are birds of a feather in terms of how fast they expanded initially. Their initial user acquisition numbers were just really very, very impressive.

[22:49] One of the problems that they're having now is that they have to be very intelligent about how they release new features now, because the products are so simple, that every new feature changes it quite dramatically. They have to move in a direction now where they can actually retain these numbers and they don't get seen as just another fad that turned up and then disappeared 10 years from now.

Keith: [23:11] In a way Twitter, the Twitter challenge, in a way, sums up what they face. Twitter is sitting at 300 million users. Does it focus on these 300 million users, make business cases within that, and serve these 300 million users and be good at being what Twitter has been good at being up until now, and being even better at that? Or does it go, OK, we want to be one billion and beyond, and we actually need to become something very different to reach that.

[23:41] That's the same for Snapchat and Tinder, and there's a case for both. I quite like the former arguments. I think otherwise you land up being too many things to too many people, but yeah.

[23:57] Facebook, I don't want any of these, and especially Twitter, in my opinion, it will be like, "Well, we shouldn't be trying to be Facebook. Facebook is Facebook."

Nic: [24:11] The really interesting thing about all of these companies in this dilemma, of which Twitter is one, is that these social media networks are extremely vulnerable to the whims of their users en masse, because the idea of leaving a social network is a very I guess viral is the correct word, it's a very viral idea.

[24:32] As soon as a mass exodus starts among your social group, you don't want to be using that network anymore and it just spreads from one person to the next. They're always extremely worried that making the wrong decision could have their entire user base collapse overnight.

Keith: [24:47] It's not exactly the same type of product, but Craigslist is very famous for not making any changes.

Nic: [24:55] They've been exactly the same the whole time.

Keith: [24:57] They're still sort of style of 1997 or whenever it was started. If it's not broken, don't fix it type story. But that has its own risks as well.

[25:13] You use something, which I don't know many other people using, which is Telegram.

Nic: [25:19] Yes, I do. Telegram, I don't know if we've actually spoken about it on the podcast before.

Keith: [25:28] We might have, it's a WhatsApp equivalent, a more secure WhatsApp.

Nic: [25:30] Yes.

Keith: [25:31] Built by the Russian Facebook, the equivalent of Russian Facebook, and those developers.

Nic: [25:37] One of the original founders of VK -- was it VK? -- one of the Russian, major Russian social networks. It's funded by a trust that was started by him, and basically their main central focus is they want a clean, extremely fast, no frills I guess, messaging, instant messaging experience, and on top of that they want it to be as secure as possible.

[26:04] They don't want people to be able to snoop on your messages, and if you want, you can even create totally private encrypted chats that even Telegram is totally unable to read themselves. Even if they were served a subpoena by any particular government wanting to read the messages, they wouldn't be able to decrypt them even. It's very focused on privacy, security.

Keith: [26:27] I want to know what you chat with about your friends that you need this level of unencryptable, I mean [inaudible 26:30] conversation. Surely it's not just about the latest single by an indie band?

Nic: [26:39] I've never subscribed to the argument of, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about. It's the same reason people have curtains in their house, even if they're not doing anything in particular that's interesting, it just makes you feel...

Keith: [26:59] There's a comfort.

Nic: [27:00] Yeah, exactly. It makes you feel more comfortable knowing that even if you're doing just boring things, at least in private. [laughs]

Keith: [27:07] It's like where I live in Sydney, the position happens to overlook a big building with lots of apartments, and a lot of people, one of the first things when they stand on my balcony is, "Oh, wow. You can see into those people's apartments." And I say, "Yep, believe me, nothing ever interesting happens."

[27:27] [laughter]

Nic: [27:28] That's not surprising.

Keith: [27:29] It's probably the same on these chat networks, 99.9 percent of chat is just totally benign.

Nic: [27:34] Imagine how boring it would be to be one of those people at the NSA who has to sit there [laughs] and just sift through all these chats to try and, oh, God.

Keith: [27:42] Anyway, that's social media networks. We're going to take a quick break and we're going to play an interview with Eric Elliot, who's from Parallel Drive, he wrote a fantastic article about building high velocity development teams. Remember you can tweet us at @MonkeyPodcast, you can email at podcast@itsamonkey.com, you can follow us on Twitter, you can follow us on Facebook, we love hearing from you.

[28:08] We love putting these podcasts together about every two weeks. We're trying to be more diligent about them. This is Episode 63. We're going to take a short break and we'll be back with the interview after the break.

Female Announcer: [28:20] The "It's a Monkey" podcast is brought to you by ManageFlitter. ManageFlitter helps you to work smarter and faster on Twitter. With ManageFlitter, you can schedule tweets for appropriate times, gain insight into Twitter connections, grow your Twitter account, and much more. Go to ManageFlitter.com for a free trial.

Keith: [28:41] You're back with It's a Monkey Podcast. My name is Kevin Garber. We talk about everything related to tech, the tech economy, startups, on this show. As most of you know, I built a little company called ManageFlitter which has over three million users and one of the big, if not the biggest, challenge in my job is finding the right people to join us for this crazy startup journey.

[29:06] One of my team members the other day actually sent me this article called, "How to Build a High Velocity Development Team -- Be the Quantum Leap."

[29:15] It's an absolutely fantastic article. If you're a startup entrepreneur, if you want to be a startup entrepreneur, even if you're a developer, this article really captures the challenge, the difficulty the various aspects of building, and the challenges of building a development team.

[29:36] I'm happy to say I managed to track down the author who is Eric Elliott, who is the founder of Parallel Drive who teaches and trains people up in JavaScript. Eric has also worked at places like Adobe, et cetera.

[29:49] Eric, thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast.

Eric Elliott: [29:52] It's my pleasure to be here.

Keith: [29:55] What was your initial motivation to put together this fantastic extensive article about building high velocity development teams?

Eric: [30:08] I think most of it just came from frustrations that I've had over many years in the industry, and I just wanted to help teams avoid these problems that crop up again and again in just about every project I've ever seen. I took at stab at trying to condense all of my dev leadership experience into a single blog post, and hopefully, I got enough in there to be valuable.

Keith: [30:40] You certainly state pretty early in the article, "Nothing predicts business outcomes better than an exceptional team. If you're going to beat the odds, you need to invest here first." I know it's a cliché, people talk about the team, but really that statement is absolutely 100 percent true. It is all about the people and nothing but the people.

Eric: [31:04] Absolutely. It's not just having the right people, that's a big part of it, but it's also figuring out the right team dynamic, putting them in an environment where they can work well together and mesh as a team, is really important too. That's a process that I think it gets overlooked a lot.

[31:26] I think primarily the biggest factor is that companies tend to undervalue their developers in a big way, and try to treat them all the same, like they're all cogs in a machine.

[31:39] I really wanted to stress, no, when you hire a developer, that developer represents about a million dollars per year in value if you're a good company. So, you don't want to treat them poorly, you want to set them up to succeed in your company.

Kevin: [31:56] Developers are really interesting people. I'm a tech-oriented CEO, but I'm not actually a developer per se. I really, really enjoy working with developers. I find the way they see the world is quite different, and I hope that doesn't come across as patronizing to any developers, but I really, really enjoy working with developers. They seem to have a couple of extra processes, so to speak, around the way they see certain things, and on the flip side, I think they are certainly quite different to manage than non-developers.

[32:45] Developers, a lot of the time, the information is very much, the communication is very much information exchange, for example. So, a lot of people get frustrated if they've never worked with developers before, they don't understand why developers don't like small talk, for instance, generally. I'm generalizing here, but to a lot of developers communication is just information exchange, it's not small talk.

[33:08] Also developers don't tend to enjoy negotiating, and things like that, they like the best offers up front, and fairness. Quite a few people are going to need to manage or build developer teams. They're really going to need to understand all these nuances to managing developers.

Eric: [33:26] Yeah, and I think there's really a lot of different types of developers, and as we expand the tech education and things like that, we're going to start reaching a much broader type of individual who's attracted to the field. In a matter of fact, I think that times go on, more and more every field will become a developers field.

[33:54] In terms of developer typecasting is going to start to evaporate a little bit, but it's really good to understand that developers, what they do every day, is they practice logic and when you do that all of the time, your brain kind of gets stuck in that mode. For instance, when you interrupt a developer who's deep in thought, they might be a little bit cranky, but that's because it takes them about 20 minutes to synch back into the deep thoughts that they were thinking about.

[34:32] I think just being aware of those types of things that developers are very interested in, in facts, and everything is quantitative, and there's empirical evidence for everything when you're talking about things. If a designer says, "Hey, we should change that button color," the developer is probably thinking, "No, we should A/B test it and see what the data says." Yeah, it's important to understand things like that about developers.

Kevin: [35:06] You really push for collaboration amongst developers as well.

Eric: [35:12] Oh, absolutely. One of the big problems in the industry is that there's a very wide range of skill sets and there's so much to learn about development that no one developer can learn everything they need to know. What's really important is that developers have the means of communicating with each other easily without interrupting each other constantly.

[35:35] Asynchronous communication like online chats tend to work really well for developers versus a lot of people are used to working in an office together, and they just walk over to their neighbor across the aisle and start talking to them. With developers, that's probably not the best idea because that interruption is going to cost the business a lot of money, first of all, because when you interrupt a developer, like I said, it can take them 20 minutes to synch back into the problem.

[36:04] So, asynchronous chatting and communication that way, or emails rather than going in and interrupting them is probably the best way to get them collaborating well. There's also things like GitHub that let developers review each other's code using pull requests, and they can make comments on the code changes that some other developer made, so they could catch mistakes, or perhaps know a better way of doing something, and there are opportunities to educate, but it also works the other way.

[36:37] Some developers will have a lot to teach, the more experienced developers will have a lot of wisdom around how they think about code. Exposing junior developers to the great code of a senior developer who's got a lot of experience is very valuable too. Yeah, definitely collaboration is essential when you're working with developers.

Keith: [37:01] Let's talk about this. You addressed this issue of languages. Obviously, there're all sorts of languages in our industry. We like to take the attitude that smart developers can switch, and change, and learn development languages as they need to.

[37:22] You're very bullish on JavaScript. Talk us through why that is, and why you feel that. Do you feel that a language agnostic attitude is best, or developers should perhaps focus on certain languages? Talk us through a little bit on your thoughts on that.

Eric: [37:43] Firstly, I think it's wise to agree that developers really can pick up just about any language and learn how to be productive in it. So, that's very true. It's also very wise for developers to do that.

[37:59] I wouldn't want to know fewer than three programming languages, personally, because different languages have different ways of thinking about problems. They force you to think differently about the same problems.

[38:17] Being able to go into a different language and just see a completely different angle, on a completely different approach to problem solving, is extremely valuable in and of itself. So, I would encourage a developer to at least the junior developers who are just getting started, every year or year and a half or so, go ahead and take your spare time and learn another language, and just get at least conversant in it. Get good enough that you can write simple programs.

[38:54] But on the other hand, I think that specializing is also important. A lot of the people that are the most successful have gone really, really did in a certain area. I think that that's extremely valuable as well.

[39:12] In terms of a specific language for your application stack, I strongly believe that all of your Web properties should be...Did you catch all of that?

Keith: [39:26] No, you switched, it sounded like your mic switched something, but keep on going. All of your Web properties...

Eric: [39:34] I strongly believe that all of your Web properties should be written in JavaScript, and the reason for that is that JavaScript is the only universal language, which means another word for that is isomorphic, which means that it's the only language that runs natively in the browsers.

[39:53] It's also the only language that you can code in one language, and can you have the same application, not just the same libraries or things like that, but the same application running on the server, and in all of your clients including mobile and browsers. I think that the impact of that is dramatically under-appreciated in the industry. I really think companies can save about half of their development time, or 50 or 60 percent even of their development time, just by picking JavaScript.

[40:30] Another great thing about JavaScript is that it's the most popular language in the world, which means there are the most developers writing for it, which means there are the most solutions that are already finished that are open source and you can incorporate into your projects. But it also means that it's easier to hire for, because there are a lot more people that know the language. Definitely JavaScript, check it out.

Keith: [40:57] Eric, do you feel in our little neck of the woods in Australia, there seems to be a real skills crunch in developers, I believe in Silicon Valley and other parts of the US, there is as well. Long term, do you see a problem that there's not a diversity of people getting attracted to the industry?

[41:19] Does it still have a perception issue, or is it just because I'm a CEO on the one side of the table, so it always seems like there's a shortage of candidates? Is there actually a shortage candidates, and are enough people being attracted to this industry?

Eric: [41:33] There is certainly a shortage of candidates, and one of the problems is that we're just not teaching it like we should. I strongly believe that computer programming is the next, it's literacy, literally our kids that are growing up in school today, by the time they get out and they graduate into the workforce, in 25 years or so, there's going to be in the United States alone, there's going to be four million fewer driving jobs, just driving vehicles, because they're all going to be replaced by self-driving vehicles.

[42:12] The jobs that get replaced, they're all going to be the programmers who design those systems and design the apps that work with those systems. Believe me, there's a whole industry of commuting apps that are going to pop up for people who are just sitting in these self-driving cars with nothing to do, because they don't need to pay attention to the wheel anymore.

[42:35] Those kinds of things are really important. It's not just one industry, it's every single industry across the board, is going to be replaced a lot of human workers are going to be replaced by artificial intelligence, and robots, and just more efficient processes, and more efficient way of doing things. A lot of those people need to be training in the skills that will matter in that economy. Our future economy is much, much more digital than our current one. So, we really need to be training people for that.

[43:15] There's definitely a current shortage. In the United State alone, there's a standing demand for over 300,000 developers right now. There's at least 90,000 JavaScript jobs alone, paying more than a hundred thousand dollars a year, that are not being filled right now. This is standing demand, go any time and you can search and there're 90,000 open JavaScript jobs.

[43:46] That's just in the United States. Worldwide, it's much, much bigger. By about 2020, this gap is going to increase to about a million open jobs for programmers that are not getting filled because there just isn't enough talent in the marketplace.

Keith: [44:07] I think there needs to be a seismic shift in the way we look at literacy, and I think computer programming is still viewed as an optional subject, something to do if you're interested in maybe perhaps. But we don't treat arithmetic, or reading or writing that way. We don't ask for kids, "Well, if you don't like reading or writing, you don't have to do it." I think code's got to be up to a certain level at least, everyone should be able to whack up some markup or a little JavaScript app, at least to that level.

Eric: [44:41] Yeah, I completely agree. I don't understand why students are forced to take statistics in high school, but they're not forced to take computer programming classes, when they have the same kinds of applications. Things like calculus, and trigonometry, we teach the students those things, but we don't teach them how to apply those things on computers where they're most often used in the real world.

[45:12] If you're getting an engineering job, and you're using those kinds of techniques, you're doing some kind of programming. It's ridiculous to me that we teach them how to do it on paper, but then we don't teach them how to do it in a way that's going to make sense to them and transfer to usable skills.

[45:33] I don't remember which country it was, or even which professor it was, but somebody went and was speaking in South America -- I think it was a famous physicist -- and they were talking about the state of science education there. They were talking about how the students would learn something about, for instance, how light reflects off of surfaces, and polarization, and things like that. They're talking about this polarization filter and the professor says, "What would happen if you held this up to the window and looked through the polarization filter at the water outside?"

[46:15] Of course, a polarization filter, it'll invert the polarization, so it changes the way that light is perceived that makes it disappear or appear, and that's why we have polarized sunglasses to help us avoid things. They don't understand the connection. They can tell you the formulas, they can tell you exactly what the rules are, but they don't understand that this has a real world application.

[46:45] I think it's ridiculous that we're teaching students these things. A lot of people in the United States, they learn algebra, then they have no idea how to use algebra once they leave high school.

Kevin: [46:56] You also make a point in your article about remote culture, working remotely. This is quite a contentious issue. Marissa Mayer, when she moved into Yahoo! As the CEO, she ended a policy of remote work. There're some companies like Automatic, which are the creators of the WordPress platform, they are only remote.

[47:21] We've had a mixture of both, to be honest, I'm always after the right team, and if it means they're remote, I don't really care. To put it blunt, we don't have the luxury of just over calibrating the things on our end. If someone is smart and fits with the culture, we'll make it work.

[47:40] You make some specific points about remote culture and you seem to be very in favor of it.

Eric: [47:48] Yeah, absolutely. I just want to make one more point about the last topic before I run into this.

Kevin: [47:54] Sure.

Eric: [47:56] I'm actually hosting a film called "Programming Literacy," and that's being produced by JS Cheerleader on Twitter. That film is all about the need for better education and getting more people into the pipeline for computer training. Definitely check that out, it's ProgrammingLiteracy.org.

Kevin: [48:17] ProgrammingLiteracy.com, we'll put a link in the show notes.

Eric: [48:23] Addressing remote culture. I think a lot of people have this false perception that being in an office means that you're being productive. When you're talking about developers, or even just anybody who has to really concentrate on their work to get something big done, absolutely the opposite is true.

[48:49] If you're in the office, chances are you're getting distracted by a conversation that your coworkers are having, or weighing in on some API design that somebody else is responsible for, or you're getting distracted by the smells coming out of the kitchen. I know in San Francisco, at least, a lot of the startups have kitchens right there in the offices.

[49:14] Those distractions are tremendously costly, and really a developer, if they're tackling a tough problem and not just correcting some copy on a website or something, a developer really needs big blocks of time, like three hours of uninterrupted time to just clear some of the big hurdles. What happens in the office situations is that developers in the office don't get a chance to do that.

[49:42] So, what they'll do, is they'll come in very, very early or they'll stay very, very late so that they can get that interruption-free time, or they'll spend their weekends clearing those hurdles, and then they're working 60 or 80 hours a week, which is not sustainable in the most productive way. If you're overworking your workers, the productivity will actually drop off around 40 hours a week.

[50:11] The idea that the office makes people more productive is just patently false. It's a complete lie that we tell ourselves. I think that especially developers tend to get really passionate about they're working on, and you can trust them to be working on the problem that's driving them crazy while they're at home. If you don't trust them, why did you hire them in the first place?

Keith: [50:38] I think that's the crux of it. I think it's about hiring right, and I think some people do genuinely enjoy, even developers, enjoy being in the office and enjoy experiencing that magic that happens when you can sit around a room, or go for a walk together. But there're some other times where even partly remote, or they want to take a couple of days at home, et cetera, but to trust them that they know what's best for productivity.

Eric: [51:10] Yeah, absolutely. Speaking of productivity, one thing a lot of managers do is they count the number of tickets that a developer is clearing and calling that productivity tracking. That's not the case at all, because a lot of developers, a lot of the senior developers will spend a lot of their time answering questions for junior developers, or mid-level developers, and mentoring them in their careers, and helping them with the problems that they're working on.

[51:41] A senior level developer's impact is dramatically undercounted by those project tracking tools. Whereas a lower-level developer who's not answering questions all the time and has less experience at recognizing problems and common things that crop up, they're basically throwing a quick fix in the general direction at a problem and moving on to the next one. Those kinds of things don't work at all, that kind of productivity monitoring.

[52:17] If you really want to know whether or not your developers are being productive, once a week, just ask them to demo what they did that week, and show the complete code and what they've been working on for the week. Then you can see by their demonstration whether or not they're making enough progress.

Keith: [52:37] I think it must be particularly frustrating for developers, this must be quite a common problem in non-technical companies when your managers are non-technical people, and they over simplify some of these metrics.

Eric: [laughs] [52:50] Programmers tend to trust numbers. If they see statistics staring at them, they think, "Yes, this is real. This is representative." They have a tendency to overlook the more human aspects, the stuff that can't be easily quantified.

[53:13] A lot of engineering managers start out as developers and programmers themselves, so they don't ever learn the really important soft skills that come into play when you're talking about developer productivity.

Keith: [53:32] It is. I mean, being as someone who's at the opposite end of the table as the CEO and leading the teams, it is something that's a bit of an art -- when to push, when to pull, when to leave it alone, when to check in.

[53:47] I think one of the mistakes that I have seen by some friends who have businesses, and lead technical teams as well, is, at the end of the day, you can't forget that these are people. Their productivity is also going to wax and wane. They got their life, and that's OK actually. This is a marathon we're in together. As long as, over the long haul, we all produce something, that's OK.

Eric: [54:14] Absolutely. I try to tell managers, when you're talking about a really experienced developer, give their work more time to produce value. They're the ones that are mentoring the rest of your team, so they're obviously not going to make as many short-terms wins as even the most junior developer in the shop who might come out of the gate firing.

[54:43] There's this real value that's being injected into the company by anybody who has a lot of knowledge and willingness to share that knowledge with the rest of the staff. That stuff is really hard to track and really hard to quantify, but you can feel it just by observing their interactions with the other developers and by asking the other developers that work with them what it's like to work with them.

[55:14] A lot of the junior-level developers will be ranting and raving about how much they're learning on the job because of this developer. That really takes a lot of time, and you have to let the value sink...

[55:27] [break in audio]

Kevin: [55:29] What I like about our industry, as well, is that it is an industry where junior and inexperienced people can actually contribute a huge amount. I'm always saying to the team that I'm always open to the right juniors.

[55:45] I guess it's unusual in our industry that a lot of "juniors" have been coding since they were 12 years old. In a way, they've actually had five years' experience by the time they hit the workforce.

Eric: [55:57] Yeah. I started learning when I was really young. I know a lot of other developers really get into development through video games that they got addicted to as kids and they just wanted to learn how to do it.

[56:09] There are a large number of developers who really started to learn this stuff before they were 10 years old, even. By the time they get to the workforce, they might have 10 years of experience in the language you're hiring for, and it just doesn't show on their resume.

[56:30] Junior developers can be tremendously good at soaking up new knowledge because they don't think they know everything. Whereas, a lot of senior developers, they do think they know everything...

[56:37] [break in audio]

Kevin: [56:49] That's OK. You're with us.

Eric: [56:51] Sorry. Yeah. A lot of senior developers do think that they know everything and they're harder to coach. It's harder to get them to improve, and it's harder to change their mind about things. Whereas somebody who's really junior, a senior developer can come along and train them up in the way that you guys do things at your office in a really short time.

[57:18] It's amazing how much people can learn when they're collaborating on projects. I think that that's really underestimated in classrooms. If you give a bunch of high school students laptops and say, "Make this game in JavaScript," and just walk away for three months, when you come back, even if none of them knew anything about JavaScript, when you come back, there's a good chance that there's going to be a JavaScript game on that laptop when you get back there.

[57:50] I think it's a tremendously beneficial thing to hire those junior level developers and get the fresh blood into the system. They have new ways of thinking about things. They can approach problems in a different way. They might bring something very valuable to the team that you didn't think that they would.

Kevin: [58:10] Again, as you mentioned, there's less rigidity. As we get older, I think all of us, we atrophy in certain ways.

[58:23] I always love to bring on the grads and the new fresh pair of eyes. In fact, I try to coax out of them what they're actually seeing, to see any operational sort of things that don't make sense to them and to try and make it safe for them to be really honest, to question something about practices and go against my own...Naturally, part of my job to be conservative in certain areas, to actually push back on that, and to let them refactor, rework, bring in the new tools, bring in the new technologies, and not just go with the historical momentum.

Eric: [59:06] Yeah, another great thing about junior developers is they might have really good ideas about new emerging platforms that a lot of people are starting to use that you may not be aware of. You can come up with good integration ideas and things like that and working with technology that you wouldn't have normally thought of.

[59:27] For instance, we're coming up on a big augmented reality, virtual reality kind of renaissance. In the '90s, it didn't really set in, but things are really starting to take hold in that department now. Maybe they have some really great ideas or really great experience with some technology in those areas that you haven't experimented with.

Kevin: [59:49] Absolutely. I guess, Eric, we're very lucky to, to work in an industry that's really at the forefront of changing the world. Sometimes I wonder if the people in business and people sitting on their Facebook apps realize how the tech geeks of various ages and various flavors are literally building and running the platforms that are shaping the world today.

Eric: [60:20] Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point. A lot of the kids coming up today, they're digital natives. They were born into this Internet-connected society with screens that change when you touch them and interaction that's a lot more high-touch, a lot more of the visceral experience.

[60:42] They're going to view the world very differently than people like me who've been around for a lot longer. I think that's the challenge of moving forward is being able to adapt to those changes in the way that people view the world and interact with new apps.

Kevin: [61:00] It's always exciting when you see a baby playing with an iPhone. They're just swiping and swiping and swiping the screen.

Eric: [laughs] [61:06] One of the things that I like best is when you see a baby trying to swipe the TV screen or trying to swipe a magazine or a book cover. They don't understand why it's not working. They think it's broken.

Kevin: [61:22] Exactly. Eric, it's really been fantastic talking to you. Eric Elliott, the Founder of Parallel Drive for training JavaScript. We'll put some show notes up. Eric is the author of a fantastic article, "How to Build a High Velocity Development Team." If you're a startup person thinking of building a tech startup, read that article. It really nails it.

[61:42] Eric, I really appreciate your time joining us on the podcast.

Eric: [61:47] Thanks for inviting me. I've really enjoyed it.

Kevin: [61:49] Thanks a lot, Eric. We'll be in touch. Bye-bye.

Eric: [61:52] All right.

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Kevin: [62:33] Nic, definitely a topic close to our hearts, building, retaining, and finding, how to build a high velocity development team, be the quantum leap.

Nic: [62:45] Yeah. Obviously, the author is very, very interested, I think, in a very undervalued area when it comes to building dev software engineering and programming teams in general, which is education and mentoring other people on the team. Obviously, that affects what he has chosen to do with his own personal startup at the moment, obviously teaching people JavaScript.

[63:20] Yeah, one of the interesting things that I really would like to talk about as an aside is the idea of JavaScript in general. For those of you who aren't necessarily familiar with software engineering and programming, JavaScript is a lightweight scripting language that traditionally, for a long time, has been the language that runs in your browser. When you go to a website, a lot of the visual elements that you'll see will be controlled, created, or manipulated in some way with JavaScript.

[63:57] Just recently over the last number of years as were spoken about in the interview, JavaScript has finally made the leap to being used in the back end, and in so many different places. Often people joke about JavaScript running space ships at some point eventually, but I suspect it's going to get there, but you sort of get the point. It's really interesting to see how it's expanded and gained favor as a language.

Kevin: [64:35] What was JavaScript spun out of? Was it a W3 Consortium thing? Or what was the origin of JavaScript?

Nic: [64:43] I believe, and not a hundred percent certain on this, but I believe that it was create at Netscape, originally, I think. It was a project by just two or three guys, Brendan Eich -- I don't know how to pronounce his name in particular -- one of the original creators of JavaScript.

Kevin: [65:05] It's important to note that actually the link between Java and JavaScript is actually not strong.

Nic: [laughs] [65:11] Non-existent unfortunately, yeah.

Kevin: [65:14] I think for non-technical people, it's confusing, that they both have the word Java in them.

Nic: [65:17] Definitely.

Kevin: [65:23] Yeah, you're right, it's Netscape. JavaScript was originally developed by Brendan Eich while we was working for Netscape.

Nic: [65:29] Yeah, I have no idea how to pronounce that guy's name unfortunately, I'll have to look up the phonetics on Wikipedia to see it. Apologies to him if he ever hears this and I've made a horrible mockery of the pronunciation of his name.

[65:42] He ended up being I think the CEO, the Chair, or the Director, something along those lines of Mozilla in the later years. Obviously, a lot of people are not familiar with the fact that Netscape, a number of people in Netscape, it ended up being spun out into what we now know as the Mozilla Corporation, who, of course, make Firefox. The browser Firefox is probably the thing they're most famous for at the moment.

[66:13] Yes, JavaScript has been around for a long time, and it's actually so interesting, even as a non-technical person to learn about the history of programming languages, and which ones have come in and out of favor over the years. Now, of course, things are going to change even more drastically the way that he was speaking about teaching coding to primary school students or people when they're very young.

Kevin: [66:39] I feel so strongly about that, as you probably can tell in the interview. I feel so, so, so strongly about the fact that coding, it's not being taken seriously enough.

Nic: [66:49] Yes, I agree.

Kevin: [66:50] I know we've got a vested interest because we're always often looking for developers and the demand for developers far exceeds the supply. But there's no discussion.

[67:06] I know Atlassian. We're looking out the window. Atlassian is across the street from us. I know Mike Cannon-Brookes has spoken about the same problem as well, that if we have to whether globally or in Australia, we're leaving a lot of innovation on the table, whether it's a cure for cancer, or the next social media network, or whatever it is that changes our lives.

[67:30] Kate and I were talking the other day about Facebook, and how the concept of ambient intimacy has actually changed our life. How you can stay in touch with people, it's scalable, it's made it scalable to stay in touch with so many people. I was saying to Kate, because she's a lot younger than me, that well, surely maybe people just did more face to face 20 years ago. I'm like, "No, we didn't, you just lost touch with people, that's all that happened."

[67:55] Anyway, the point I was making, with more developers, that's what's driving innovation is a lot of technical innovations, and we need to take that seriously.

Nic: [68:04] Absolutely. I honestly, honestly believe that in the next 5 or 10 years, there is going to be a new startup unicorn which appears around the area of programming education, private programming education, and they're going to spread to a lot of different countries.

[68:23] I guarantee you, at first, it's going to be a lot easier for people to expand support or send their children or whoever it may be to private programming schools, than it is going to be to change the public schooling curriculum, because everybody I think knows there are very few people who would have gone to a public school or a high school that was still using text books that were printed 30 years before they got there. The public school curriculum doesn't exactly change at light speed. I really think there's going to be a huge demand for private programming tutors as the new generation of people grow up.

[69:09] In the same kind of way, parents who are very serious about their kids succeeding early on in education, send their kids to tutoring for maths, and for science, and for English kind of things. I guarantee you there will be a huge surge in sending kids to private lessons to learn coding.

Kevin: [69:33] What do you think, as a developer, about a lot of what Eric says about finding the right developers, retaining, and your attitude toward your development team?

Nic: [69:45] Well, it's really hard to know with this kind of stuff. There are a lot of attitudes towards how you should build a development team and that kind of thing, that are all at very different ends of the spectrum. I think it's very representative of how new the field is.

[70:07] If you went to a civil engineering firm, you'd probably find a very similar managerial structure at the vast majority of all the places. Whereas every single programming company, ever single software company that you go into, the management structure is different, the project management structure is different, the way that they actually treat and nurture their developers is very different. Obviously, it's very much a matter of opinion.

Kevin: [70:38] The interesting thing is as well, you can get your technical architecture wrong, your product right, and succeed. The best example of that is Twitter. For years, it's interesting reading about the history of Twitter, and for years, they never had an admin back end. For the first four, five years, they had no visibility...

Nic: [70:58] ...into anything.

Kevin: [70:59] ...into anything, and that's why they were going down so frequently. Now they're a company turning over five, six billion or something like that a year, which there's very few companies in the world that do that.

Nic: [71:09] Yeah, absolutely. A little tidbit of trivia there for you, any software developers who are listening to this, or even people who are just familiar with the industry -- Twitter was originally built on Ruby on Rails, and unfortunately they are now held up as the prime example of how difficult it is to scale Ruby on Rails into something that's really big.

Kevin: [71:32] In fairness, everything is difficult to scale.

Nic: [71:33] Yeah, that's very true. Unfortunately, I've experienced this a couple of times now, and I really think that moving into the future it's going to become a very common thing for startups to do, to do a really, really fast build a minimum viable product as fast as they can, using the technology that's built to produce these things as fast as possible, and then after they prove product market fit, throwing the whole thing out and building it again with a plan to expand really big. I think this is going to become a common trend.

[72:10] It's what people are doing anyway, but at the moment, they're spending a couple extra months or even years struggling with that initial architecture before they decide that they need to rework it. Whereas if they came out at with the plan that, "OK, this isn't going to last for that long. If we succeed in product market fit, we'll rebuild this and do it properly," I think that would save a lot of time and a lot of developer heartache, especially in a situation like Twitter. They should have realized years before they did that they needed to just rebuild the entire architecture, essentially.

Kevin: [72:43] In fairness to them, it's been stable and good, and everything has been fine for quite a while now.

Nic: [72:47] Oh yeah. For the last couple of years, it's been great. They have a huge number of exceptionally talented engineers there as well. We've just been reading about some new software packages they've been putting out for developers, Fabric, if you've heard of it. They have a great dev team now. They got on their feet eventually. [laughs]

Kevin: [73:09] It's interesting you say about building the prototypes, et cetera. Especially in the States now, a lot of the very successful angel investors and seed stage investors don't invest anymore unless there is a working prototype. In the old days, you could do it based on a business plan, but now unless there's a working prototype or some type of traction, because it's a lot easier, a lot cheaper...

Nic: [73:35] It's so cheap. It's so cheap to get a working prototype out the door, prove product market fit. The problem, I think, in my opinion, occurs when you start trying to take that initial MVP prototype and expand it out, build on the same foundations, to try and support a massive, massive user base once you hit that J curve. That's when the problems start to arise.

[73:58] The really interesting thing is we've talked before about how Facebook has tried to handle it, the fact that they're still using PHP in some cases. We should definitely link in the footnotes of the show, if you're interested. There's a fantastic question on Quora about how and why Facebook still uses the language PHP in their architecture. It's a fantastic answer.

Kevin: [74:22] I love Quora.

Nic: [74:24] Yeah, it's a really, really interesting product. I think they took what Stack Overflow did so well for developers, and they expanded it out to really be successful for the average person.

Kevin: [74:36] I think the average user of Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, they don't understand...Let me rephrase that. There's not an appreciation for actually how complex these systems are because they just work and the UI is simple.

[74:51] I think there's a blog, High Scalability or something. There's a blog that teases apart a lot of backend infrastructure for these sites. You can see the complexity of load balances and shards and all sorts of things.

[75:07] The way I explain it to my non-technical friends, and I might have spoken about this before on the show, to make a sandwich for yourself is really easy. To make it for you and a friend, still easy. For three or four people? Well, you have to start thinking and planning a little bit. A dinner party for 10? Starting to get challenging. When you've got a room full of 500 people and they all have to be served at the same time...

Nic: [75:30] That's serious logistics there.

Kevin: [75:31] It's like, "Good luck with that." Right?

Nic: [75:33] Yeah.

Kevin: [75:33] It's a similar type of scenario with scalability issues where things just compound. They're seriously smart people. There is seriously smart infrastructure, whether it's Google, Twitter, or Facebook, and the fact that the uptime is so fantastic.

[75:49] We live and eat and breathe it as well at ManageFlitter. It's on a smaller scale, but there's a lot of deep technology behind keeping this stuff up and running.

Nic: [76:01] Yeah, which circles us back around to this whole argument about teaching people to code when they're young. Unfortunately, one of the reasons that people have very little appreciation for these systems is they have absolutely zero understanding of even the fundamentals of how they're built. I wonder if that's going to really change things.

[76:22] It's definitely going to change things in the security industry. One of the only reasons why a lot of sites these days...We've all heard about these massive hacks that have been happening on Ashley Madison and stuff like that.

[76:35] One of the reasons that everyone is still sort of safe at the moment is we just have so few people who are actually educated enough to know how to hack into these sites or whatever along those lines that sites can afford to be a little bit sloppy with their security, because there are just so few people who are actually trying to exploit these things.

[76:56] As soon as we start teaching kids to program, the equivalent of being a teenage rebel is going to be hacking into Facebook. [laughs]

Kevin: [77:05] I think I went to a talk, it might have been a TED Talk, about someone that's taken these special ruggedized laptops into Africa and basically just given them to the young kids and let them play around with them. They locked down a lot so you couldn't get into the command lines and everything, but, of course, kids being kids...

Nic: [77:28] They worked it out.

Kevin: [77:29] They worked it all out, which is a fantastic thing in a way. Right? It's fantastic. Now, you can imagine. I'm from South Africa. I would regularly meet people who I felt, if they had opportunities for education, would be doing fantastic things.

[77:45] You can imagine how much untapped entrepreneur hunger, technical hunger, there is there. As a humanity, as a species, we've still got a lot to go horizontal with giving equal opportunity. I think as an industry, if we can use our own tools to solve our own problems, if we can create startups and tech startups...This is where government can play a role to stimulate these things.

Nic: [78:20] Yeah, absolutely. All you have to do to really comprehend just how important programming and software development is look at how many sites online, do you think, are there where for extremely cheap you can hire a professionally qualified civil engineer, you can hire a surgeon, you can hire a lawyer, you can hire whatever.

[78:46] None of them exist. There aren't these kinds of things where, "I'll just go online to this website, and I'll hire a surgeon in Bangladesh." You know what I mean? This kind of thing doesn't exist because it's just not feasible, but for programming, you can hire an absolutely fantastic developer anywhere in the world really easily because it's totally decentralized. You don't have to be local in order to be able to do it.

[79:12] It's producing these incredible results now in developing countries in which people are able to work because they're very qualified. They can learn all this development stuff online for free. The hardware is not expensive. You can use an old PC or whatever to do your development.

[79:32] Then they can work for these huge overseas firms in developed countries and earn a very decent wage from that kind of thing. It's a great equalizer in a way, I guess, development as a skill.

Kevin: [79:44] It is. I think in places like Bangladesh and India, I don't know what the stats are, but I think a huge percentage of the development efforts are for...

Nic: [79:54] Overseas companies.

Kevin: [79:55] ...overseas companies.

Nic: [79:55] Yes, absolutely.

Kevin: [79:56] Good export earners for them as well. I also wanted to say I know we have a lot of listeners from the US. A lot of the people in the US that I meet are a little bit unaware that Australia is closer than they think it is. It's only one flight away from the West Coast. Our Australian dollar, at the moment, is really low. If you're looking for a great, cheap holiday, especially if you're a developer, right?

Nic: [80:25] Yeah.

Kevin: [80:26] Come check out Australia, and come visit us. It's always sunny here. It's not as dangerous as people make it out to be.

Nic: [80:35] Not too many snakes and spiders.

Kevin: [80:37] If you have a little bit of savings, you're going to get around 70 cents...

Nic: [80:42] Yeah, absolute bang for your buck at the moment [laughs] US to Australia.

Kevin: [80:46] You get one of our dollars for 70 cents of your dollars. It's great times for you.

[80:55] Anyway, that was Episode 63. Hope you've enjoyed it. We've always got a lot of opinions about everything. If you've got an opinion, tweet us @MonkeyPodcast. Email us at podcast@itsamonkey.com. Even if you want to give a product a punt, send a little voice mail message through. We'll play it on the show.

[81:12] We'd love to hear from you. We have listeners from all over the world. You can also subscribe for an email notification if you go to itsamonkey.com. Pop in your email address. I put together an email that just goes out and says, "Hey, the latest episode is live." That way you don't have to think about it. Subscribe in iTunes. There's some great other tech podcasts. Podcasting is definitely hitting a nice resurgence.

Nic: [81:36] Definitely.

Kevin: [81:37] The Re/code, Kara Swisher is from Re/code. She's put some great podcasts up. She's got one of Marc Andreessen, one with Chris Sacca where he speaks about his opinions on Twitter, which is really, really interesting. He's one of the biggest shareholders of Twitter and ex-Google. He had a budget in his 20s when he was working for Google to build some data centers for Google. In his 20s, he had budgets of billions of dollars [inaudible 82:01] .

[82:02] [crosstalk]

Nic: [82:04] Wow. [laughs] Wow, that's amazing.

Kevin: [82:05] Yeah, a really interesting story. Check out. We're always happy to promote any other podcasts as long as...Spread the word about our podcast, and we will see you in two weeks. Wherever you are, I hope you have a good one.

[82:21] [music]