Software Engineering Daily

Software engineers are often one of the last lines of defense against potentially dangerous and unethical practices. Every software company encounters situations where the line between right and wrong is not clearly drawn.

Back in the year 2000 Bill Sourour was asked to code a project to help market a pharmaceutical product in a misleading way. Reflecting on this experience, Bill recently wrote about it on Medium, suggesting that developers should avoid doing things that compromise our ethics in small ways.

The more software defines our real world the more relevant the conversation around ethics becomes. In this episode, Bill and I explore the ethics of modern software development.

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Many people find themselves going down a career path that does not bring them satisfaction. A lawyer finds himself constantly working cases he doesn’t care about. A student in medical school gets completely burned out from hospital bureaucracy. An investment banker no longer finds joy in the accounting statements that she used to enthusiastically study.

Startups offer a different career path. Within a startup, an employee can often find creativity, limited bureaucracy, and highly variable reward structures. These ingredients make the world of startups both refreshing and intimidating to someone who feels stuck in a career that no longer gives them joy.

Breaking Into Startups is a podcast about people coming from non-traditional backgrounds and making their way into startups. Breaking Into Startups is run by Artur and Timur Meyster and Ruben Harris, who join me for a conversation about how they migrated from more traditional careers to startups–and how many other people are doing the same.

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In the 1990s, the barriers to starting a company were significant. Not only did you need an idea, you needed $200,000 for servers and Oracle licenses. With cloud computing, the up-front financial costs of getting a company off the ground have been mostly eliminated–but the idea of starting a company is still perceived as risky.

The process of building software has changed dramatically in the last twenty years, but many of the challenges of managing a software company remain timeless. How do you hire properly? How do you keep track of a software stack that is growing in complexity? How do you handle dissenting opinions from employees?

Mike Wolfe has been building software companies since the 1990s and joins the show to discuss how to build products and manage engineering teams. It’s a wide-ranging discussion including technological trends, interpersonal skills, and startup financing.

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When you are deciding who to marry, you are using an algorithm. The same is true when you are looking for a parking space, playing a game of poker, or deciding whether or not to organize your closet. Algorithms To Live By is a book about the computer science of human decisions. It offers strategies for how to think through everyday life like a computer scientist.

Brian Christian has a background in computer science and philosophy, and is an author of Algorithms to Live By. He joins the show to explain how the same algorithms and data structures we use for our computer programs can be applied to the real world.

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Many programmers listening to this podcast are working at a big company, and they would prefer to be running their own software business. Patrick McKenzie has been writing about this topic for several years on his blog Kalzumeus.com. Almost a decade ago, he was working as an enterprise developer at a large company in Japan. Over time, his side projects started making enough money to justify his leaving to work on them full-time.

Starting a small successful software business is not about luck, or taking big risks, or having your muse deliver some brilliant insight. It is about studying the markets where you can build software that can deliver value. Patrick and I discuss this topic, as well as Stripe–where he now works today. He sold his small businesses to go work full time on Stripe Atlas, so his story of transitioning back to a big company is fascinating as well.

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Large technology companies have no shortage of data. But raw data itself does not provide a competitive advantage. Many companies are bottlenecked by a shortage of data scientists who can query that data effectively. This results in an organizational dysfunction where people lining up to ask questions of the data science team are unable to move as fast as they want to.

Tomasz Tunguz saw this when he was working at Google, and he continues to see it today from his position at Redpoint, where he works as a venture capitalist looking at companies. The problems with the “data supply chain” led him to write “Winning With Data”, a book about how technology companies can successfully operationalize, explore, and act on their data.

We’ve done many shows about the interactions between software engineers, data engineers, and data scientists. This episode is a great complement to previous episodes, providing a holistic view into the way data moves through an organization–and I highly recommend Tomasz’s book “Winning with Data”.

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