A lot of people in tech lost their jobs this week—and in 2022, generally. Twitter is one situation that many of us are watching closely. One theory is that companies are beginning to prioritize lean teams and sustainable growth over hypergrowth. Are we looking at a turning point for how tech gets built?
On today’s podcast, Ben, Matt, and Cassidy reflect on job losses in tech, repojacking on GitHub, the ethics of generative AI, and what it would take to make us switch browsers.
Episode notes:
The team questions whether a print out of 60-90 days worth of code is the right benchmark for whether to lay someone off.
Ben gives our podcast listeners a heads up to reports of repo jacking on GitHub (who got ahead of the issue quickly).
We reflect on whether or not we’re okay with generative AI—and question tradeoffs between copyright and the ability for more people to create stuff.
Ben discusses how his internet browser might be becoming his second brain.
Matt and Cassidy get props from Ben for their rising popularity on Stack Overflow’s YouTube channel.
Follow Ben, Matt, and Cassidy.
TRANSCRIPT
[intro music plays]
Ben Popper Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Stack Overflow Podcast, a place to talk all things software and technology. I hope you have printed out your code and are ready to send it to us express mail because we will be reviewing it this week to see if you are a good listener of this show or not, if we want to keep you around. No, I joke. I am Ben Popper. I am the Director of Content here at Stack Overflow, along with my wonderful co-hosts, Cassidy Williams and Matt Kiernander. How's it going, y'all?
Cassidy Williams Hello!
Matt Kiernander Hello.
BP So the news we cannot avoid– Elon Musk, one of the world's richest folks, bought Twitter, took it private, and I don't want to comment too much directly on him or on the company, that's not what we do on the show, but I think from a software development perspective, the most interesting nugget, which came from a former colleague of mine, Casey Newton at The Verge and Platformer, was that a call went out for all developers to print out their code and that it was to be brought to Mr. Musk for review so he could decide who was an ace programmer and who was not. Then another email went out saying, “Oops, that's a big safety no-no. Tear up all that code. We'll be coming around and inspecting on your machine.” But Cassidy, Matt, realistically what could one person, a genius he may be but is not an expert in many disciplines, know about somebody's work ethic or capabilities from looking at a printout of their last week of code?
CW I'm very curious to see how all of these things will unfold particularly on the engineering side because so many people are talking about layoffs. Now it's just become a meme on Twitter itself where it's just like, “Well, if anybody knows of roles, I was the person who made it so that way your DMs are impossible to search through,” and stuff like that.
MK I honestly dislike that trend of kind of memeing on layoffs and stuff that's really quite impacting.
CW Yeah. It feels icky.
MK I think it's quite distasteful to be honest. But yeah, the whole reviewing last week's code, I think programming is very much kind of like writing. You kind of need context and to understand what's going on and where is the snippet. You can't just look at a day's worth of output and rate somebody.
BP Right. That’s what I was thinking. Maybe last week's job was to fix a memory leak or to make something less cluttered, not to write code. Or maybe your job is deprecating a feature which happens and can be great for a company if it helps you focus. The one thing I could see is like, “Show me last week's code or your most recent code,” and it's like six months old and it's like, “Oh, well you haven't really been working.” That I could see as, okay it's just a quick check. Are you actually here or not, because people might have been checked out for a while.
CW But even then you need the lines of code for that? Say, “This is the Git log or this is a high level set of bullet points of the things that I've done.” Overall, that truly made no sense. It made no sense. Ugh, gosh.
MK There's a lot of knee-jerking to a lot of stuff that's been happening. Because with software developers being very active on a platform like Twitter, it's something that they care about, they’re kind of invested in. A lot of people, Ben and Cassidy, I know you've been on the platform for a long time.
BP 14 years.
MK Yeah. So there's a lot of people who are software developers deeply interested in this, especially with what happens to the developers at Twitter. And there's just a whole lot of chaos happening here that's very relevant.
BP I think it's fair for us to have some opinions on stuff that works directly with developers and how you would review a developer in the abstract. I don't want to comment on Elon or Twitter directly. That's not what this show is about. But Matt, to your point, it's impossible for other software developers to look away. We all communicate and sort of watch Twitter as kind of the news and what's trending, and so seeing certain things like now people are being asked to work over the weekend to produce a new feature and that's going to be the culture now, that's a big, big shift and the future failure or success at Twitter I think will be tied up in that. What kind of company is this? And other people have said, “I'm not going to work over the weekend. I'm not compromising in that way.” So I think it's definitely interesting and there's no looking away from it.
CW There have been some commentary pieces around in general, just because the economy is not great, there's no secret about that. But fundraising right now is difficult for most startups, layoffs are happening all over the place, and people are saying that this will be a very interesting vignette and look into the fact that a lot of tech companies probably don't need as many employees as they do. They could probably have a bit more of a lean machine. And a lot of startups in general are just like, “Oh, well when we get funding we can hire this many people so that we could grow,” and I think that more companies now will be prioritizing sustainability. And I think what'll be interesting is seeing how much will they trim down the team? How much will they change the engineering culture in general? But also just how will they try to make it a more sustainable platform as a business in general?
BP Right.
MK On the note of sustainability as well, I do wonder how that's going to impact potential growth and output as well. Whether or not they're going to look at sustainability from an employee perspective, whether or not they're going to say, “Okay, we have to lean down, but we also have to reduce our growth expectations to match,” because anytime you speak to a company or senior leadership team that is not something that they want to do either.
BP Yeah. Cassidy, to your point, it's always fascinating to me to look at a company like Instagram or WhatsApp where they just found some incredible product market fit and a lot of the marketing was done word of mouth, essentially. I think Instagram had like 15 employees at the time it was sold for a billion, and WhatsApp had like 50. And so it is possible to get to massive scale and to have a very slick product and to really meet the needs of users without even having a hundred employees. And so it's kind of like, “But what about all those other companies that now have 70, 80, 90,000? What are all those people doing?” It'll be interesting to watch it play out.
CW Yeah. I think there's so many different examples of companies like that, even teams within companies. A friend of mine used to work on Google Forms, and I don't know how big the team was at the time, but for a long time that team was less than 10 people managing all of Google Forms, and that's a pretty big piece of software that a lot of people use. And so yeah, I can see that being a very common trend that we start to see more and more.
MK That really puts into perspective some of the teams that I've been on throughout my career, and looking back and saying, “Well if there's 10 people who are working on a product that large like Forms, what was the idea in scaling the teams that I was working on to that point for much smaller products as well?”
CW Yeah, because sometimes you just don't need them. And I'm not saying this to be like, “Yes! Make those slashes Elon,” or anything like that.
MK Not what we’re advocating.
CW I don't want anybody to lose their jobs right now. I just think that there's going to be a very interesting trend of smaller teams and more steady growth rather than hyper growth.
BP All right. I wanted to touch on a few other items in the news. I just wanted to say this word because I thought it was so cool. GitHub shut down a potential threat– repojacking. Man, I just wanted to say repojacking. It sounds very cyberpunk, sounds like house music.
MK Sounds like a good EDM mix.
BP Yeah, exactly. Sounds like a really good EDM mix. Basically, you are giving away a name and you're changing a name in the repo and somebody comes in and scoops up the old name and then goes out and quietly pretends to be you. And I thought about this in the context of Twitter. Are there such things as a verified repo? Do they have ways of saying, “Yes, this really belongs to this person.” Because that's kind of what this is attempting to do is use the name as the ploy to get you in.
CW No is the very quick answer. I do think that's something that's worth looking into, just because unfortunately harassment does happen on GitHub and stuff and so people will pretend to be someone else, or start spamming you and stuff and there's not much you can do about it besides block and report. I could see with this whole concept of repojacking and taking people's code that could be something not great. That's where I think a lot of times they've relied on the cynicism of developers who tend to look at the number of GitHub stars and how many forks does it have to kind of assess how legit a repo is.
BP Yeah, I think you're right about that. This new account probably wouldn't, maybe though there's bots who can help you get stars and people kind of play that game and stuff like that. It seems like they have gotten on top of this before it became too big of a deal so that's a good thing.
[music plays]
BP Having a hard time figuring out what's being naughty or nice in your application? Consider adopting Splunk Observability Cloud. You can observe any application anywhere in real time using open standard instrumentation. Learn more at splk.it/sopodcast. Make sure to use that link if you're interested in checking out more about observability, and that way you'll let them know the podcast sent you.
[music plays]
BP All right, next item– investors have the hots for generative AI. I also have the hots for generative AI. Who doesn't? Cassidy, would you consider the company you work at now to be generative AI?
CW It is generative AI. I have a particular amount of hots for generative AI myself because that is what my company does. But it's been really interesting because of this very funky climate that we're in. Now is the time to raise if you are in generative AI. My company Contenta, we were in the generative AI index that the Scale VC company just released last week and we were on an index that Sequoia released recently and there's so much inbound and it's very interesting to see, which I'm not trying to just boast, “We're amazing.” I think it's truly just because investors really have the hots for it right now and it's really interesting to see if this could be a cool gold rush. But what I think will be interesting is how to make it so that it doesn't just produce spam, because you both might have seen that Jasper AI recently raised one of the largest Series A’s ever. I think their Series A was something like 125 million and their valuation was over a billion dollars for a Series A. That is wild, especially in this climate. It's good for them, but there's already articles on the other side of it being just like, “Oh, just so you know, Google's deprioritizing the spammy articles that you're putting out just for SEO fluff,” and stuff. And so on our end, we're trying to figure out how do we generate high quality content that isn't spammy? Because when you have an AI that is so good at generating anything that can add a whole lot of noise, and you have to figure out how you stick out amongst that.
BP I think the other fascinating area of this for me is that it unlocks so much creativity. It can produce so much powerful and useful content and it seems to be getting better at such an astonishing rate. But I'm sure your company is thinking about this, the issues around sort of copyright and what goes in to train the machine are very interesting. In your case for Contenta it’s a little different because your customers are supplying the content for the MidJourney types and stuff like that who now have an enterprise account. In their terms of service they explicitly say, “Look, if you get sued we're not responsible. We're not claiming we have the copyright for this. You use it at your own risk.” So both it's interesting that VCs would be willing to invest in that and I also want to see how it develops and plays out and where the law ends up landing.
MK I do wonder if that's going to be for the greater good type of thing that might happen later on down the line where people kind of realize the benefit that all of these AI tools have on creativity and their own workflows and everyone kind of just accepts, “Okay, so my original artwork is going to be fed into this machine which is going to enable other creators to generate more stuff too, but then I'm also going to be able to benefit from that at the end of the day.” So everyone might just decide, “Oh, this kind of sucks and the copyright thing is a little bit of a gray area, but at the end of the day it's benefiting everyone more than it harms.” I don't know.
CW I don't know. I think that's where, again, there's lots of companies in this space right now, and I don't think all those companies are going to end up being there at the end of the day just because you have to find that exact point of, how do you make this useful where general people are just like, “Wow, this is a pretty good thing and this is a useful tool,” because so much of it is. It's just like, “Well, you're ripping off artists now. That's not cool.” You don't want that to be a thing and so how do you make this a tool that makes a human's job easier without being bad, for lack of a better word.
BP Right. Yeah, I would be interested in a version where it's only stuff that's way out of the Creative Commons, like you can only reference artists that are from pre-1850 or whatever because there's no copyright that exists there. And if it's post, I want a license and that artist is going to see a little bit of the revenue whatever it may be. All right, small news, Slack has typing info in threads. Typing info– what's typing info?
CW Oh, so like saying, “Cassidy is typing,” in a thread?
MK Exactly, yeah. This is an article that just popped up today and it was written by The Verge, and they were very positive about the benefits that it offered because for a media agency, there's a lot of collaboration there. Software developers, it's the same thing. Somebody posts a thread. It's hard differentiating who is actually typing within a thread versus who is actually doing it within the main channel and contributing to the main block. And so now that separates the two so you can see who is writing a one liner in a thread as opposed to kind of typing up a whole message to the entire channel which might be important.
CW That is nice. It's small, but it's a quality of life improvement.
MK Yeah. It's like, thank you for doing that. It's something that is genuinely useful.
CW I’ll take it.
BP Show me your code from last week. Wow. Thank you, thank you. All right, I don't know if y'all know about this company but I just wanted to bring them up. The Browser Company, they came onto my radar, Cassidy knows, great. I'm excited because a friend of mine, Ellis Hamburger, who has the best Twitter handle of all time, @Hamburger, left Snapchat to go work there, and they're all about building a sort of privacy respecting next-gen browser that isn't connected as much to the data collection and more about personalizing your user experience. I think they're kind of a pre-revenue thing, but interestingly today they hired somebody who was very deeply involved in the creation of Google Chrome– little web browser you might have heard of. So Cassidy, tell me a little bit about what you've heard and what your thoughts are on the Browser Company.
CW So honestly, I mostly keep track of them because I like their design and logos and stuff. They have cool hats.
MK I was just about to say their website is pretty immaculately designed. It's very pleasant to browse through.
CW Isn’t it nice? So I mean, I'm sure their technology is amazing but I do really appreciate that. A lot of their values and what they're putting out there reminds me of is our podcast that we had a long time ago. I don't actually remember when it was, with Alexander Obenauer, who is doing a lot of research about the future of the personal operating system. It feels like they're doing that very similar type of work but for the browser. And I'm all for it because everybody's been getting away with kind of harvesting data for so long that it's kind of nice to see people trying to move against that grain.
BP Yeah. I mean the complication to me is that browsers now are increasingly built into larger ecosystems that act as a second brain. We've talked about second brain a lot. I rely on my browser to sync from desktop to mobile and across multiple machines and remember all my passwords and have my favorite sites ready, and it's hard to give all that up or redo that or re-import that. And at the same time, I completely agree about the distraction element, the context switching, the privacy and tracking. None of that is stuff I particularly want in a browser. Do I like alternatives? Absolutely. I like alternatives. I also feel trapped. I feel trapped by the convenience. So there you have it.
CW Well, they're designed to keep you in. I remember I was talking to someone where they were saying one of our biggest competitors is sleep, actually. Because if people are doing that then they're not using our services and so they have to figure out how to design it so that you keep using us and not sleeping, and it just is so dystopian to say that out loud.
MK Just on the subject of being locked in as well, when it comes to mobile, especially the Apple ecosystem, as far as I'm aware a lot of the third party browsers like Chrome and everything else, they all have to use Safari underneath the hood. I'm going to have to verify this, but I'm pretty sure that when you're building another browser with an iOS application it's all using the same underlying technology. So I'm not sure how something like this would work in an Apple ecosystem sense. With Android it might be very different. But there's going to be some hurdles I think that people are going to have to jump through to get this personal experience that's not air driven.
[music plays]
BP I want to shout out actually both of you. Matt, you did a video with Jon Chan that got over a thousand views on our YouTube, and Cassidy, you were in the video about job hopping that got over a thousand views. And I know a thousand views on a YouTube video is not great, but for Stack Overflow videos we're reaching new milestones here. We're going from 50 to 100 to 500 to 1,000. So thank you to everybody who watched the videos, and to the growing audience there that's checking our stuff out, we appreciate it.
MK Also the comments on the Jon video as well were very, very sweet. So thank you for anybody who's listening who posted on there too.
BP Yes. We're small enough where people are still generally positive.
MK Yeah.
CW You have to stay in that sweet spot.
BP Yeah, exactly. We don't want to get too big. All right, thank you as always to Alessandro Suglia, awarded two days ago. Came onto Stack Overflow and got a lifeboat badge for helping to save a question with a negative score and give it a great answer, now it's got a positive score. “How to get the string before .(dot) and after /(last) slash in Java.” Alessandro has the answer for you and I will share it in the show notes in case you've ever run into this problem. All right, everybody. I am Ben Popper. I am the Director of Content here at Stack Overflow. I am @BenPopper on Twitter. I will share my Mastodon username in the near future in case you want to follow me there. But if you really want to get in touch and just chat with us or any of the hosts or suggest things, just hit us up, podcast@stackoverflow.com, or leave us a review. It really helps.
CW I'm Cassidy Williams. You can find me @Cassidoo on most things. I'm the CTO at Contenda doing all that generative AI magic.
BP Oh, so hot right now. Generative AI, so hot.
MK I love the Zoolander reference. Thank you for that. It's been a while, I should watch that movie again. And I'm Matt Kiernander. I'm a Developer Advocate here at Stack Overflow. You can find me online on YouTube and Twitter for now @MattKander.
BP Very cool. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening and we will talk to you soon.
[outro music plays]