Software Engineering Daily

Bots on the internet can be malicious, helpful, and everything in between. A bot that responds to all of your tweets might call you a socialist–that is malicious. Google crawls the web to index Google search. That is helpful. Social media marketing bots schedule 200 Twitter posts to go out throughout the day. That is either a little annoying or a little helpful depending on who you are.  

Bots are being used to amplify political viewpoints. An amplified viewpoint can serve as a gravity well for like-minded individuals, and help a sparsely supported political cause find its footing. Sometimes that amplified viewpoint is completely fictional or unfalsifiable. Real people believe that Hillary Clinton is a lizard alien because they have seen that story shared by enough Twitter bots.

So-called “fake news” is a topic that has been discussed on so many other podcasts. What is not reported is the connection between link bait and advertising fraud. When a botnet is able to make an article go viral, thousands of people organically click on the link to that article. That organic traffic is used to launder fake clicks.

These bots that are spreading “fake news” might be controlled by conspiratorial Russians. But it doesn’t have to be that complicated. Anyone who wants to make money in online advertising fraud is incentivized to make salacious media–whether it is real or fake.

Samuel Woolley is the director of research at Political Bots. He works with Jigsaw, a division of Alphabet that seeks to make the Internet safer. In today’s episode, we talk about political bots, advertising fraud, and the connection between the two.

Software Engineering Daily is having our third Meetup, Wednesday May 3rd at Galvanize in San Francisco. The theme of this Meetup is Fraud and Risk in Software. We will have great food, engaging speakers, and a friendly, intellectual atmosphere. To find out more, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup.

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Engineers in Silicon Valley see a world of constant progress. Our work is creative and intellectually challenging. We are building the future and getting compensated quite well for it.

But what if we are actually achieving far less than what is possible? What if, after so many years of high margins, gourmet lunch, and self-flattery, we have lowered our standards for innovation? And if Silicon Valley has been lulled into complacency, what does that say about the rest of the United States?

American exceptionalism has faltered and complacency has risen in its wake.

Today’s guest Tyler Cowen is an economist and author. His new book The Complacent Class is the final book in a trilogy that describes a decline of American output and a decline in American mindset.

Complacent America has lost its ability to assess risk. Children are prevented from playing tag for risk of injury. College students protest against speakers who might present challenging ideas. The number of Americans under 30 who own a business has fallen by 65% since the 1980’s–millennials are too busy going to business school to start businesses.

In his books, Tyler weaves together history, philosophy, and contemporary culture. He presents hard data about many different fields, and theorizes about how the trends in those fields relate to each other.

He also has a podcast, Conversations with Tyler, and in this episode I tried to mirror his interview style. If you like this episode, you should check out his show–he has interviewed people like Ezra Klein, Peter Thiel, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

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In this episode, I gathered questions from listeners in our Slack channel and Twitter feed. The questions I answered include:

We always want more feedback and questions. Please email me, join Slack, and fill out our survey!

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Big technology companies have so much going on at any given time that a journalist can tell any type of story they want to about it. Depending on what angle you observe the company from, you can write a story depicting that company as good, evil, growing, or about to crash. The truth only becomes apparent to outsiders with time.

Amazon’s culture and business strategy were detailed in The Everything Store, a 2013 book by Brad Stone. I read The Everything Store before working at Amazon, then I read it a second time after working at Amazon. The book is an accurate and balanced depiction of Amazon’s ethos.

Brad’s new book The Upstarts documents the rise of Uber and Airbnb, two companies with a similar controversial valence to Amazon.

It was a pleasure to speak to Brad because I admire his engrossing storytelling as an author and his strategic analysis as a business journalist. After discussing business and technology with him, we explored journalism–Brad is senior executive editor at Bloomberg.

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Developing a product requires careful balance between engineering, sales, design, and customer service. The founding CTO of a company often needs to take on each of these responsibilities, because when the company only has a few people there is nobody to delegate these different tasks to.

Cullen Zandstra is the CTO at FloQast, a SaaS tool for accounting close management. It isn’t important what that means–we do describe it in this episode, but the actual software product that we are discussing is less important than the general discussions we have. Cullen gives detailed explanations for how to develop a software product.

In the past, Cullen worked at MySpace. After we discussed his current company FloQast, we discussed some of what he learned at MySpace, and why the social network proved to be less durable than Facebook. We also had some great discussion as to why Google+ was ALSO less durable than Facebook.

Also–I should mention that FloQast is hiring engineers in their Los Angeles office. And thanks to my friend Patrick Mathieson for connecting Cullen and myself.

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