Tech Team Weekly

This week, our main story is the debate over whether companies (and employees) should be happy to disclose salaries, in an attempt to drive pay equality, a chat made somewhat harder by Neil's repeated inability to pronounce the word "equality". We get deep into discussion about our experiences with knowing (or not knowing) how our colleagues are paid, companies and countries who we've seen get the balance right, and the challenges of introducing salary negotiations in the job-hunting process.

But there's more! We'll also be talking about a secret new privacy-shattering setting in Chrome which is enabled by default, and bemoaning the lack of accessibility options in some modern games (and championing others which lead the way). You'll also hear what we've all been up to this week, including a top quality J-Lo story from Sanj, unexpectedly relevant election news from Neil, and Gwen basically doing everything under the sun. Plus there's an awful lot of Diablo II discussion for a podcast which isn't from the year 2000.

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Start  

LINKS DISCUSSED THIS WEEK:

Incident.io

Ministry of Testing: Test.Bash() 2021

YouTube: Neil's Continuous Quality with Postman session

Jamie Tanna: Providing a Public Salary History page

GOV.UK: Equality Act 2010

Blind social network

YouTube: Kevin Goldsmith: How does Salary Work? (LeadDev 2019)

The Verge: Apple keeps shutting down employee-run survyes on pay equity - and labour lawyers say it's illegal

The Register: Google emits Chrome 94 with 'Idle Detection' API to detect user inactivity amid opposition

IGN: Deathloop's Lack of Accessibility Options Is Disappointing Players

Tweet thread from Courtney Craven (Can I Play That) outlining Deathloop's issues

On this week's episode, we focus on some of the bad habits that we've seen when using communication platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, and how we can help to adapt and prevent lost productivity. Plus one of us has job news, one of us is preparing for a return to the office, and another of us has automated their way to some prime cinema tickets!  

Additionally we've got another Amazon voucher to give away, courtesy of the meal delivery service CookMyGrub.com!

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Start

STORIES DISCUSSED THIS WEEK:  

Technically: Vacation isn’t the answer to employee burnout

Wired: We finally know the true toll of all those bad Slacks

No Hello

Neil Studd: My Communications Readme

TechRepublic: How to make a developer relations team work for your company

BBC News: Sir Clive Sinclair: Tireless inventor ahead of his time

Dick Smith's 1978 iceberg prank

InfoQ: Travis CI Vulnerability Potentially Leaked Customer Secrets

BBC News: Microsoft's passwordless plans lets users switch to app-based login

GitHub: Fortran MVC web platform

On this week's episode, we look at the controversy behind an issue whereby planning applications were mistakenly modified in production by a junior engineer who thought that they were working in a test environment. We'll discuss whether we should lock-down our production environments more, whether we should protect our staff against being able to make critical mistakes on real data, and our general thoughts on testing in production.  

Plus there's plenty of our usual life updates in The Stand-Up, where you can find out the result of Gwen's driving test, Neil's week one experiences with his Peloton, and Sanj rolling up his sleeves to work on some (awesome) new graphics for the show, and adding automation to our website! 

Plus, courtesy of the kind folks at CookMyGrub.com we've got another opportunity to win a £20 Amazon voucher - tune in to find out how!

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Start

STORIES FEATURED THIS WEEK:  

ShlinkedIn

Glean blog: How we discuss engineering improvements at Glean

Sky News: 'Your proposal is whack': Council worker mistakenly rejects planning applications with sarcastic comments - but decisions are legally binding

Statement from Swale Council

Reddit thread: "Accidentally destroyed production database on first day of a job"

LondonTechWatch: The August 2021 London Venture Capital Funding Report

London Tech Week

Mayor of London: Technology Design Lab

OWASP Top Ten

Wired: One Woman's Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia

We're finding our stride in Episode 2, even though one of us is slightly under the weather. This week's discussion focuses on a recent trending article about modern challenges with hiring and technical interviews: we talk about technical tests, coding interviews, and how many rounds is too many. Plus there's loads of comments from our glorious listeners, we couldn't do this without all of you.

If you're here for the off-the-cuff asides, we've got plenty of those: we mull over the idea of recording an episode from within a videogame, and Neil makes plans to hack his new Peloton bike for the benefit of the podcast. Also, by complete accident, we're completely swear-free this week!

We're sponsored this week by CookMyGrub.com who have kindly offered to give away a £20 Amazon voucher to one lucky winner - tune in to the episode to find out how to enter!

High-fives to our new Patreon supporters this week: Dan Billing and Gilles!

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Start

01:45 The Stand-Up

07:15 Social Engineering

16:24 This Week's Epic

42:08 News Bytes

50:47 Competition Time

52:59 The Wash-Up

STORIES FEATURED THIS WEEK:

Better Programming: If software engineering is in demand, why is it so hard to get a software engineering job?

Quora post: If software engineering is in demand, why is it so hard to get a software engineering job?

Docker: Updating and Extending Our Product Subscriptions

BBC: Fake Banksy NFT sold through artist's website for £244k

BBC: Banksy was warned about website flaw before NFT hack scam

Better Programming: Bored of VS Code? Try Lite-XL

CSS-Tricks: Introduction to the Solid JavaScript Library

Welcome to the debut episode of Tech Team Weekly! As is always the case with software development, our first attempt at a 30-minute podcast turns out to be just over an hour long. We look at the ongoing saga of working during the pandemic and "The Great Resignation"; plus recent innovations at GitHub, including Copilot and Codespaces.

We introduce a few of our regular segments, including our workplace updates in The Standup, views from listeners in the Social Engineering section, and our "building in public" section entitled Podcast Driven Development.

Plus, learn more about Gwen's ongoing bathroom quest, the mystery of our missing debut tweet, and everyone takes the time to gush about Neil's current employer.

For everything related to the show, visit www.techteamweekly.com

TIMESTAMPS:

00:02:50 The Standup

00:12:15 Social Engineering

00:17:44 Epic - Salary cuts for remote workers?

00:31:05 Epic - The Great Resignation

00:47:10 Epic - GitHub Copilot & Codespaces

00:58:52 The Wash-Up

STORIES FEATURED THIS WEEK:

Reuters: "Google employees who work from home could lose money"

RTE: "Would you take a pay cut to stay working from home?"

New York Post: "Google rolls out ‘pay calculator’ explaining work-from-home salary cuts"

Wired: "The Great Resignation is here and no one is prepared"

BBC Worklife: "The Great Resignation: How employers drove workers to quit"

The Independent: "This is how a boss should react when employees quit, expert says"

The Register: "GitHub's Copilot may steer you into dangerous waters about 40% of the time – study"

The Register: "After 15 months in preview, GitHub releases Codespaces – probably the fanciest new shiny since Actions"

YouTube: Visual Studio Code: "The Dot"

Welcome to Tech Team Weekly, a new podcast launching next Monday! Join your hosts Sanjay Purswani (The Engineer), Gwen Diagram (The Manager) and Neil Studd (The Tester) as they guide you through the latest technology breaking news from the UK.

Please subscribe and share with your colleagues! Follow us on Twitter @TechTeamWeekly, or visit our website: https://techteamweekly.com.