The Swyx Mixtape

Watch Naval on the JRE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qHkcs3kG44
Tiago's quote: https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1410739112261214209

• Read: https://blog.coinbase.com/announcing-coinbase-fact-check-decentralizing-truth-in-the-age-of-misinformation-757d2392d61a
• Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoZG89pDzzY (33mins in)

Coinbase Fact check: https://blog.coinbase.com/factcheck/home

Announcing Coinbase Fact Check: Decentralizing truth in the age of misinformation

Every tech company should go direct to their audience, and become a media company.

Whether traditional, social, or corporate media, we’re all just typing words on the internet.

As Coinbase and the cryptoeconomy grow, we’ve seen more interest from the media, government, and the general public in our business and in crypto overall. This increased awareness has been great. Unfortunately, we also see misinformation published frequently as well, whether in traditional media, social media, or by public figures.

This doesn’t always come from negative intentions. Our business, and crypto, can be difficult to understand, and often people are rushed to post first impressions online, making mistakes in the process. At other times, misinformation comes from people pushing their own agenda, or from those who have a conflict of interest.

This is not unique to our business or industry of course. Every company experiences this to some degree, and it can be incredibly frustrating.

So how should companies respond to misinformation?

The choices

Option 1: turn the other cheek

The most common advice you’ll hear from PR firms and boards is to work behind the scenes to correct misinformation, but never engage in public fights. This might mean working with journalists to fact check a story, or to send internal emails to employees when misinformation is spreading on social media.

Pejoratively, one could call this the pacifist’s approach. Yes, you’re taking regular beatings from a bully, but don’t fight back. Just focus on building a great product and helping the industry grow, and everything will work out in the long run.

On the surface, this approach makes a lot of sense. Why pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel, or with internet trolls who have too much time on their hands. After all, most of your customers probably never see the misinformation, and it can just draw more attention to respond publicly. Companies should never lose focus on the primary objective: building great products.

On the other hand, it can be very damaging to a company’s brand to let misinformation spread unchecked, and working through third parties to share your side of the story rarely is effective. You might, at best, get a short quote in a narrative that someone else controls.

If you look at companies like Facebook, they suffered enormous brand damage when traditional media coverage of them went south (although their business metrics seem to be unaffected). Accurate or not, traditional media has a conflict of interest when covering this topic, as they are in the process of being disrupted by tech. Yet to a large degree, Facebook turned the other cheek and didn’t respond or point out this conflict.

Option 2: fight

The opposite end of the spectrum is to actively fight back. Any time someone posts false information about your company, it’s war. Come out swinging and never back down.

This is a legitimate strategy that some companies have engaged in. Amazon’s recent responses to Andrew Yang or Elizabeth Warren are in this direction, along with FedEx’s CEO aggressively pushing back on a story they found inaccurate. And Peter Thiel’s takedown of Gawker may be the canonical example.

The advantage of this approach is that you are standing up for yourself. The downside is that warfare can be time-consuming, taking your energy away from building. You need to be prepared to go all the way, and it needs to be in line with your brand. There is an old quote which says “never wrestle with a pig, you both get dirty and the pig likes it”.

Option 3: publish the truth

I believe there is a reasonable middle ground between these first two options, which is to simply publish the truth, in a thoughtful and respectful way, and build a direct relationship with your audience. Companies no longer need to go through biased intermediaries to communicate with their customers and stakeholders. They often have equal or greater reach via their blog, podcast, YouTube channel, or through their own product. In many cases, the only organization that knows what really happened is the company itself.

Tesla is a great example of this middle ground approach, in their Most Peculiar Test Drive blog post. Other examples include Apple debunking the claims of a cover piece or our own post correcting facts in the New York Times. These examples take a reasonable middle ground of trying to just share the facts.

This “fact check” approach is not about antagonizing or embarrassing others, but simply sharing what happened through your own channels. It also means sharing the good along with the bad, with radical transparency. Companies are often reticent to share negative facts, in their inherent desire to look good, and therefore also have a conflict. To become a source of truth, companies will increasingly need to be comfortable sharing facts which paint them in a negative light as well. There is nothing like sharing mistakes, to build trust.

Every company is becoming a media company

Traditional media has been a powerful source of accountability for centuries. In more recent years, social media has as well, as any individual can share what is actually happening. The power of both these institutions is staggering, and they serve an important function. But traditional media and social media each come with a healthy dose of misinformation, and I believe people’s trust in these institutions has been in decline in recent years.

Companies are now emerging as a third source of truth, and can create accountability when misinformation is spread via other channels.

Amazon and Netflix built their own studios, Hubspot acquired the Hustle, a16z is

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddKDPikKbNk

Timestamps
00:00:00 Intro
[00:00:11] Four Components of Developer Experience
[00:02:08] API Design
[00:03:27] Documentation
[00:06:52] Learning Journey
[00:07:59] Feature Mapping Presentation
[00:11:10] Companies With Great DX
[00:12:58] Most Misunderstood thing about Developer Experience [00:15:46] Docs as Service Team not Endpoint
[00:19:33] How to Focus

Listen to The Changelog: https://changelog.com/podcast/466

Stdout's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/stdout/videos?view=0&sort=p&flow=grid

watch Steve Yegge's podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GurMGEDHUY

Transcript

[00:00:00] So this week we've been going through Steve yogis podcasts and his greatest hits his updated perspectives on the big clouds and what they're doing right. And what they're doing wrong. But the other thing that Steve is really well known for is his views on tech interviewing. And he's done in big tech interviews and quite a lot of them.  

And we all know they're broken in some way, but it's often in very stark reminder of how broken it is. I think there are two anecdotes here. I want you to look out for, which is the first, the one on Jeff Dean. Just look out for that name. And second, the one on them reviewing their own packets and applying too high of a bar saying too many nos. There's a lot of false negatives in the industry.  

Both false negatives and false positives. R a problem. Of course. And he's just some ways to handle them. But overall, I just think we, we deserve some reminder of how flawed it is when we do our own interviewing. I thought I had a bad run of it doing two interviews a week. And he did multiple a day, sometimes three at once. And i just think this is a fantastic story to go over 

So the thing about interviewing is it's a terrible signal. It's, it's better than a phone screen. And a phone screen is better than a resume screen. If you just look at someone's resume, how sure are you that they're good. I mean, in any, in any discipline, right? You know, you wanna, you wanna, you want an airplane, airline, pilot, you look at the resume. 

Will you just hire them based on the risk? Not usually. So the resume is, is your first filter. It's the first thing where you basically take a stack of resumes and there's an art to reviewing resumes and looking for people that are kind of trying to cover up, uh, things that, that, that, uh, they may not know. 

And they don't want you to know that they don't know. So they try to cover it up in their resume. So you can look for. Weasel words, and it's all kinds of things you need, but basically you're taking the resumes and you're, you're sorting them into two piles, right. That the keeps in the don't keeps and there's of course, the old running joke in the industry about how you want to take some resumes and just throw them in the trash can because you don't want to hire unlucky people. 

And so if you throw in the trashcan, that person was unlucky, but they do sort of the resumes into the I'm gonna follow up. And the ones that you just say pass. So writing a resume is really important. And part of, um, a book. Passing technical interviews would be on how to write a great resume. And this comes up again when you're writing your resume, so-called resume for what you've accomplished your company. 

When at time it's time to get promoted. So the art of resume writing never, never gets old. It never leaves you and is always an important part of your career. Being able to represent yourself. But that's a, that's just step one and it's a bad filter. You don't want to just base your decision on a resume. 

Would you marry somebody based on their race? Maybe, but probably you'd want to meet them first. Right? So the next step is a phone screen and everybody hates doing phone screens. I actually love doing phone screens. I, for some reason have, um, never really had an issue with them unless there's a bad connection or something, but a lot of people just hate talking on the phone and they even more hate having to ask people technical questions on the phone. 

So I often got stuck with phone screen duty at every company that I ever worked. Because you can actually do a pretty good job, not a great job, but a pretty good job of predicting whether they're going to pass their interviews based on my phone screen. Cause my phone screens would go for two hours if necessary to sort of, you know, get a comprehensive look at what this PR this candidate is good at because the general rule is like the longer you spend evaluating somebody than the better. 

Idea. You're going to have of whether they're going to work out. Long-term just like the longer you have a relationship with somebody before you decide whether to marry them or not the better you're going to know how that marriage is going to go. Most likely there is a point of diminishing returns and we'll talk about that. 

But by and large, The amount of vetting that we do in the industry today is nowhere near enough. And I'm going to, I'm going to talk about the consequences of that and how we, how we arrived at that conclusion. And so on in this, in this talk, but at a high level, I don't believe in interviewing anymore. I, I ha I'm a strong skeptic. 

I think that interviewing is so flawed. It's it re any company that really wants to get ahead of their competitors and succeed needs to spend some time re-inventing their interview process. And probably having people spend more time with candidates than they're spending today. It's, it's just not a very good signal. 

And I said that at Google once, uh, Google, I said it in, in an email, uh, replied on some public thread somewhere, um, in the early days, maybe 2008. And. Some director got mad at me and said, oh, we didn't like that. We didn't the [00:05:00] records in life that you said that you had, that you're a skeptic of the interview process. 

We were talking about a company that hires scientists. We're talking about a company that, you know, one of their models is speak truth to authority, and this director was an ass and, uh, he got what was coming to him eventually. At the time, you know, he was just like, well, everybody's upset because you're, you're, you know, you're questioning the sacred interview process. 

You farted in church is what he told me. And so, uh, and so I haven't really been able to tell people this for my entire career because they feel that it's undermining their, um, ability to attract the best. I guess, but the reality is if you marry somebody after dating him for four hours, you're probably going to get a surprise. 

Maybe it's a good surprise. Uh, but most surprises are not so good in that department. And interviewing is the same way. So if you're going to keep your interview. Uh, panels the exact same way that they've been doing it since Silicon valley was invented by the arse hole shot shot key. Uh, then, um, then you're going to need a better process for getting rid of people who are no good. 

You're you're going to need a, you're going to need to double down on your process for managing people out. That's actually how Amazon gets by and gets such great. They aggressively manage out under performance because they know that underperformers are gonna sneak in. And, uh, it's because the interview process is fluid. 

So it's just a best effort. The problem with the interview process is that it takes a lot of time. It's really miserable for engineers to do more than two or three interviews per week. And most companies try to cap it so that you're not talking to more than maybe two people per week. Okay. Or three, if they're really busy, uh, because it takes you. 

Uh, an hour out of your day to, to interview the person. And you may have a interview pre briefs where everybody gets together and maybe divides up what people are going to talk about. It's not recommended at some companies, but some companies do it anyway. And then you may have a post brief where everyone gets t...

Listen to Steve Yegge's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0xmHrQJdAw

the

first in this little series was i talked

about their ability to root out disease

and dysfunction in the

organization and squash it immediately

the second one was about their focus on

retail customers and individual people

and how they put that front and center

in first and foremost and there was no

also customer service mentality there

in this episode what we're talking about

is

that situation where grabs servers would

run on amazon's cloud

so it's like a rental service it's like

we rent computers

from from amazon and we have other

options we could have been on google's

cloud we could have been on microsoft's

cloud and there were some efforts

actually to get onto microsoft's cloud

at least part of the computing just to

really mostly i think for negotiating

leverage but

but the reality was grab was not really

that important

i mean there are a lot of companies on

cloud

essentially someday all companies that

have any sort of computing in the

background which is most companies will

have uh a cloud presence okay

and so you know huge huge names you know

netflix runs on amazon

go figure they don't have their own data

centers as far as i know

everything you know i certainly know

their biggest

they're uh they're amazon's biggest

customer or they have been and they go

in and out of being amazon's biggest

customer

you look at the top 50 customers for

amazon and uh grabs not in that list

you look at the top 100 customers and

grabs probably not in that list just in

terms of how much they're spending okay

corporate customers uh you know pretty

pretty sizable chunk of money but not

not really a blip at amazon scale

and yet

uh

whenever i had a question uh about

amazon's cloud let me tell you what i

what i did

okay

um

i would say

hey bob can you come over here for a sec

yeah

notice i'm not touching a phone or a

computer uh

i'm talking to bob over here who who is

from amazon he's an amazon employee he's

a cloud specialist and uh knows how to

answer a lot of customer questions uh

he's an engineer uh and and sue you know

bob and sue she would do the same thing

they'd come in we had all these these

different account reps in a rotation

uh and they would uh they would come

over and say yeah what do you need what

do you need what were they doing in my

office in graham's office in downtown

bellevue we're not a top 100 customer

they can't that how does that even scale

they can't have enough people to go and

sit on site with every single customer

now you could make the argument oh well

grabs kind of important because you know

they're going to be the gateway to

southeast asia and so on and so they're

masasan's investment they're big and you

know there's a lot of you know smoke and

mirrors and you know it's it's all true

and it's going to come true and and grab

is going to be dominant but it's never

been a foregone conclusion i mean uber

was competing with him and then now

gojek's competing with him and gojek has

a bunch of really big investors and it's

not clear-cut right you know that

they're that they're gonna be big and

why would you bet on a customer that's

gonna be big when you've already got

customers that are already big

and yet amazon had people sitting in our

offices you know uh they offered we said

yes

uh you know microsoft got into that and

they sent some people too and that was

that was fine you know you know us too

um

but it was never really the same

so so i'm gonna i'm gonna close with a

with a story about uh i'll close this

off with a story about um

the conferences okay the developer

conferences because those are sort of a

customer interaction sort of a way that

they

can demonstrate customer obsession

and it's kind of um it's not a direct

thing it's more of an indirect thing you

know and how successful the conference

is

but you know it's a it's a it's a signal

uh so the story is i was at my grab in

my um

my first year

it was 2018

uh i joined just late the previous year

and uh my boss mark porter

he said hey steve yeah let's uh let's go

to re invent

reinvent is amazon's cloud conference

okay it's about aws

and it's in las vegas and you know i'm

in seattle and so it's only like a two

and a half hour flight

and so it made sense you know for for

for me to go and represent uh you know

as a head of engineering and ads and all

that stuff uh but i didn't want to go uh

you know i like i don't like conferences

i don't know why i don't like them i

just don't like them like they're

they're a waste of time they just

they're just like um

i could go on and on about how how

shallow they are but they're they're

nothing gets done at a conference

and they're

i don't see the point a lot of people do

like them they like they got their badge

and their lanyard and their packages

swag and they're like i'm in a

conference and they feel important or

something and people speaking at

conferences feel important i've done

that too and then it was ultimately it

was like why did i do that what was what

was the goal here right just building

brand recognition with developers i

guess

you know fine fine

it's fine that they have them and it's

fine that some people like them but i

didn't want to go okay because i was

busy like my job was very stressful and

i'll talk about my job at grad and how

working with asia from the united states

is just in general in in another episode

and mark's like oh come on man you got a

year to come you got to come it's like

you have to

and he was very insistent and i'm like

okay fine you know fine i'll take the

hit for the team and i'll go to las

vegas and bring my wife along and we'll

upgrade our hotel room at our own on our

own dime and we'll try to make it a fun

trip because conferences suck and i

don't want to go

but we'll do some gambling

so we go to re invent which i've never

been to before in 2018

and

uh well i went and i learned um

there were basically three components of

the conference that i want to compare to

the microsoft conference that i went to

a couple of months later

the uh the first one was the keynote

speech

i want you to remember these things when

i talk about the microsoft ones uh the

keynote speech is you know by andy jassy

i don't know if he still does it but at

the time you know for many years andy

jassy would give the keynote and you

know what a keynote is right a keynote

is some self-important person standing

up there and going well i'm really super

glad that you all came and boy i'm sure

making a lot of money off this and let's

head u...

Watch Steve Yegge's podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9v4z46Ea35Q

a

company is like a body

it's not like a person like a human

being it's like a thing it's an entity

that has its own agenda and its own

goals and its own control of resources

and its own value system

and uh

the individual members of the company

kinda don't matter as long as they're

doing their job

and the company cares about them right

the way you care about your heart and

your lungs but if you had a chance to

replace them with a better heart and

lungs you would and that's the way

companies operate too a company you know

sort of maintains its own health

uh uh or asks for government handouts

those are the sort of two options

and um and so to understand you know and

the original people who started the

company sure when it's small and it's

just a small group of people it's just a

group of people but when it grows to a

certain size everybody becomes

replaceable

okay

and this is important to understanding

why amazon is so dominant across the the

board okay in everything that they do

it's it's really crazy so

so what happens is um

groups can get diseases

and sometimes we call it dysfunction but

it's it's really a disease it's an

ailment right uh you know to give you a

really simple example you might have one

family member who's uh a real problem

somebody who's in and out of jail and

always you know uh getting in trouble

you know with the law or always stirring

up trouble at family gatherings or just

generally a problem right

you can have those in companies too

right maybe not getting in and out of

jail they won't last long at the company

most likely unless they're the ceo

but you have people that are creating

problems okay

uh

and uh

so that's not really a disease so much

as like a wound you know like a

pulled muscle you know or a sore that's

having trouble healing
ssdsdbut it's still a problem an illness an

ailment with the company

because it's preventing other people

from getting stuff done

if you have a whole bunch of those all

over your body then it's a disease

if you have a whole bunch of people in

your company who are holding on to

keeping other people from being

productive

in any way there's lots of different

ways they can do this then your company

is diseased a great example of this is

microsoft and we'll go into great detail

about this uh down the road in another

another episode

um

it's a really common pattern there are

there are there are companies have a

whole host of diseases that they can get

and they're common like many companies

will have the same disease

and the diseases could potentially

there's a taxonomy you could name them

and you could uh

you know learn how to diagnose them and

learn what the symptoms are and learn

how to treat them and learn which ones

are fatal

i mean like nobody's done this you know

i'm going to start talking about them in

my show you can call me dr steve

uh you you know it's really kind of

advanced to the state of maybe veteran

you know horse medicine at this point

look at a company and just like shoot it

but um you know the the reality is that

uh companies you know they get their own

diseases just like populations get

diseases they can get real diseases or

they can get diseases like being

anti-facts now i'm not blaming

anti-vaxxers if you're anti-vaxx uh you

know don't angrily turn off my show you

know i'm not blaming you for being

anti-vaxxed it's really a failure of the

education system and of uh science uh

marketing and of the government and a

bunch of other reasons uh that that

because it's a very real phenomenon i

mean

there you know some 30 40 of the entire

world's population maybe is is

firmly anti-vax

uh but it is a disease in in aggregate

because it's killing people i mean

that's kind of the definition of a

disease

and so you know how does this happen i

mean diseases can be diseases of the

mind in a sense and companies they do

not have the will

to cure their diseases i mean if you if

you're like you're talking about the old

west and you know you you get you know

an arrow to your to your knee and you

have uh you know uh an infection and you

know you're looking at it and it starts

to gangrene and the doc

doc you know who's your buddy who you

know drinks you know as much whiskey as

you says man we're gonna have to take

that off

okay

and so saw you know sawing your leg off

to save the body to save your life

i mean it happens today still right it's

very painful and traumatic

and breaking up a company

can be very painful and traumatic or

rooting out a systemic illness from a

company because companies are made of

people

and even if companies don't really

matter people do you know and uh and and

there's also a lot of like legal

obstacles to companies just snuffing

things out we do have at will employment

which means they can fire you anytime

they want

at least in the united states and that

is

absolutely huge for productivity i'm not

i'm not uh trying to justify it

uh and you know in europe they protect

people's rights workers rights more than

they do in the united states or in asia

but in the us and asia which are far

more productive than europe

in the tech sector uh you can fire

people at will and it's that constant

threat of being fired that keeps people

sort of behaving keeps the the lungs and

the circulatory system and everything

like working

uh because people know that they're

being held accountable right for being

you know for not not diseased

uh but diseases do happen and you know

amazon i'm i'm gonna just say it right

now

the number one reason that amazon

executes so well is that they are

merciless about rooting out disease as

soon as they find it

and i told you i'm going to talk about a

lot of different specific diseases that

i've seen in action at corporations or

even been a part of okay it's a learning

experience for all of us

uh and uh you know we'll talk at great

length about them but basically there's

situations where

groups of people within the company can

hold the company hostage

this happens all the time a specific

group of people becomes large enough to

become sort of like a a political lobby

or a labor union or you know some sort

of you know

a sub entity within the company that has

its own agenda and it's starting to

fight the host right

and uh and it it's just to give you an

example so that i'm not you know you're

not guessing

being territorial

is a huge disease

in companies a very common one being

turfy that's mine you can't work on that

i'm not working on it and you can't work

on it either

so ...

Listen to Stevey's Tech Talk (10mins in) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUtUAc_ew9Y

• Playstation ad talked about in the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWSIFh8ICaA
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/06/11/playstation-4s-price-and-policies-humiliate-microsofts-xbox-one-at-e3/?sh=377dd8aa133f
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Mattrick

Listener Jeremy Jung emailed in this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbWgUO-Rqcw

and I really liked this comment: 

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Listen to Software Defined Talk (17 mins in) https://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/297

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_computing