We Have More Work To Do with Tim Banks

Tim: [00:00:00] Far be it for me to say like I have all the answers. I mostly have questions.

Matty: It’s time for Arrested DevOps, the podcast that helps you achieve understanding, develop good practices, and operate your team and organization for maximum DevOps awesomeness. I’m Matt Stratton. Kolide sends employees important, timely, and relevant security recommendations for their Linux, Mac, and Windows devices right inside Slack. Kolide is perfect for organizations that want to move beyond a traditional lockdown model to one where employees are educated about security and device management while they’re fixing important problems. Visit kolide.com/ado to sign up today. That’s K-O-L-I-D-E.com/ado. Enter your email when prompted to receive your free Kolide gift bundle after trial activation. You can try Kolide with all its features on an unlimited number of devices for free for 14 days, no credit card required. Try it out at kolide.com/ado. Do you want to improve your software team’s productivity but don’t have the information or visibility to know where to start? Zenhub helps teams build better code faster with a developer-friendly productivity management platform. Zenhub empowers startup and scale-up teams to get more done in less time wherever they are. With the best-in-class GitHub integration, team productivity insights, and AI-driven automation, Zenhub helps you plan work, track progress, and see the big picture across any team. Automate your agile and get hours back each and every week for building features your customers want. Get started for free at go.zenhub.com/arresteddevops and enjoy 10% off your first year subscription of ZenHub. Do you ever start a query going in your log aggregator, go get a cup of coffee while you wait, and by the time you get back, it’s not the answer you needed and you’ve started to forget what you were looking for to begin with? You don’t have time to waste like that when you’ve got issues that need fixing now. Whether you need to understand your entire overall system or drill down to the individual user level with traces, Get the right answers fast when you need them with Honeycomb. Go to honeycomb.io/arresteddevops to use it for free. Back in November of 2020, which was a year ago from now when we’re recording this episode, and who knows when you’re listening to it, uh, I had a great conversation with Tim Banks. We initially thought we were going to talk maybe about the role of operations or something technical, but Conversations go where they go. And there were a few things that we chatted about that in the context of 12 months later might be interesting to revisit. And also just, I love talking to Tim and you all love listening to Tim with his mellifluous baritone. So Tim, welcome back to Arrested DevOps.

Tim: [00:03:10] It’s great to be back, Matt. I’ve missed being on here.

Matty: So we, first of all, if you do want to go back, if you go to arresteddevops.com/breakingdowngates, that is the episode we did with, with Tim Banks last year. Some stuff’s happened, right? Like if we kind of think back to where were we in November of 2020, maybe we were, we’re hoping that we were at the tail end of all of this quarantine and lockdown and pandemic stuff. And oh, what foolish summer children we were. So maybe we’ll be careful with our predictions this time. But what do you, if you kind of look like, what’s the last 12 months looked like? Maybe we’ll start for, you know, you’ve been through some changes. We’ve all been through some changes. What’s, what’s kind of new?

Tim: Oh man, so 12 months ago, let’s see, let’s see, I’ve been— I’ve gotten divorced, I’ve moved, you know, into a new place on my own, I’m on a different job, I’ve made some breakthroughs in my own mental health and dealing with mental illness. Yeah, just a whole bunch of stuff. And I’ve started doing like talks and things again. And yeah, I’ve just done it like a— literally like a reboot. Of not who I am, but like a lot of stuff I was doing. Still doing jiu-jitsu though, like that, that hasn’t changed. But become like, I’m like a cat person. I mean, not that I’m not still a dog person, but I’m also a cat person, and that’s kind of weird, you know. Just a bunch of things have, have happened that I would never have predicted a year ago.

Matty: [00:04:39] And then probably especially the, the cat person. Yes.

Tim: Yeah, you know. Yeah, mostly. Yeah, it’s like, I mean, I still obviously, we still don’t put beans in chili because It’s not chilly.

Matty: There are bridges that are too far. Yeah.

Tim: But I think it’s interesting because some things we very well could have and did predict, you know, that things have gone over the past 12 months. But Matt, how about you?

Matty: Yeah, it’s been a minute. And if we kind of think about when the last time you and I talked, it was November of 2020. I think about that, you know, conferences are sort of a thing that I think we were just coming off of having done a virtual DevOps Days Chicago, which we ended up skipping this year. We, for the first time since 2013, I guess, when we started doing this in 2014, there wasn’t a DevOpsDays here in Chicago. And I think we were all hoping that ’21 was going to be a year when we got to be back in person again for events, which we did a little bit. But I think maybe we could talk a little bit about, you know, we’re just about what, 3 weeks out from KubeCon North America? It was about 3 weeks ago. And you and I were at DevOpsDays Houston a little bit ago too. Things are starting to happen. I’ve changed jobs too, and kind of went into this A couple episodes ago with Emily Freeman, but yeah, I’m working at Pulumi now. So this is, you know, things change back in the DevRel game. I have a dog now, which is fantastic. It’s funny because I’m just right before this was sending out kind of the scheduling poll for the year-end wrap-up show that we do here on Rest of DevOps. It’s a no-guest, host-only, all-skate episode where we kind of look back at the year. And so maybe this is a little bit of a preview of that. One of the things we talked about I think last time was there were people were getting pushed around a little bit. When we talked last year, we talked about, you know, this was when we were sort of looking at this idea that there were so many roles and so many jobs that had been previously considered there’s no way they could be done remotely. And then, you know, the pandemic forces your hand. And I don’t recall if I said this, but I feel like I might have on the show because I felt like I was saying it a lot last year, which was We learned things through the disruption of the pandemic that I hope we weren’t going to go back on and go back to the old way. And I feel like that maybe is a little bit what a lot of organizations are starting to do with this insistence to go back. And we’re seeing people not necessarily putting up with it though.

Tim: [00:06:58] Yeah. So I think this is, we talked about how companies could have been doing better during the pandemic. And what you saw and what I think we’re seeing now is kind of a divergence. Companies that kind of listen to their employees. And there have been some major upheavals in how employees are leveraging the power that they have. And we’re in the midst of what they’re calling the Great Resignation right now. Maybe someone can go back and pull this clip from before, but we both said toward the end of last time we talked that what’s going to happen is that the second that people can leave the jobs where they’re being mistreated or where they were being mistreated a year ago, The second they feel comfortable to do so, they will. And they have, right? Folks either didn’t go back to their in-person jobs or folks are quitting the jobs they have. We’ve seen this all throughout tech. Folks are quitting jobs and like, yeah, I’m going to figure something out later. Or they quit jobs and they went to the places where they had been treating their employees really well. And so now the power, the leverage is all in the hands of the employees right now, it seems. And this is affecting everybody across the board. And it’s kind of interesting and good to see in a lot of ways. But I think you did bring up a thing. It’s like, you know, all right, well, people were going to go back to the office and things are going to be back the way they were. And like, no, no, they’re never going to be the way they were. This has been a cataclysmic change in the— in, in how work is viewed and how it’s done for many industries. And I, you know, my personal opinion, I think that’s for good. But I think it’s very interesting how we see in tech, you know, how different roles have moved around, how collaboration looks, how after a year and a half plus, how culture has changed. And I think a lot of folks, the ones who are very adaptable, kind of went away from this, well, it’s only going to be for a little bit, they want to go back the way it was, to saying, okay, well, We’re going to adopt this because now that we’ve been doing it for so long, it works, or we’re going to make it work. And then there’s really no need to go back to the way it was.

Matty: [00:09:14] I think that rationally and logically makes sense. In 2020, I was spending a lot of time just professionally working with a lot of state and local government agencies. Those were my customers in the job that I was doing then. And there were so many things that just would never have been done in the public sector. That the hand was forced with COVID And that was the conversation that I had with so many of these agencies, which is cool. You’re actually all very excited that you found out that this worked and you were able to do it. Please God, don’t throw this away like the second that you can. And that’s why we’re not going back. But I think there’s organizations that feel like they can. A couple of the things have to do with this belief that we talk about people who have the philosophy of managing by walking around. If you want to be able to pay attention and supervise and do all that, I think a real, very real part of this has to do with real estate investment that’s already there. You’ve gone and you have this 5-year lease on this incredibly expensive San Francisco office that you don’t want to leave empty. I think a lot of orgs are going to sit there and a lot of managers, I should just be honest, Leaders, executives are sitting there and saying, well, we did this remote thing for the last year and it didn’t work. But did you really do the remote thing, right? Or did you do the make people work from their dining room table in the middle of a global pandemic, which is not remote work? And even that actually probably worked pretty well, to be fair.

Tim: [00:10:43] Did it work or did they get by, right? It’s, was it surviving or was it thriving? And the numbers are now saying, if you look at the increase in burnout, as people were working from home more, it looks like they were just surviving. And they were surviving because company culture didn’t change to a remote work forward. And a lot of folks were like, you know, you hear things, well, you have to be active on Slack, or I have to be able to see you, you always have to be on, I need your cameras on, and things like that. A lot of companies didn’t really adjust to the new reality of what it’s like to, to work from home or work remote. And a lot of managers couldn’t learn how to actually manage people instead of just overseeing them. And there’s a big difference between the two, like the difference between leadership management and just like, I need to see what you’re doing. And so the— you’ll see those burnout numbers and people quitting bad management as the leading drivers for folks who are just saying, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna do this anymore. If you’re seeing retention problems, that is a lagging indicator. Right? So, it’s been a year plus now since there’s been this pandemic, and folks are having retention problems. That is a lagging indicator that tells us that they’ve been fucking up this entire time. And it’s too late now, because now to replace these people, because it’s such an employee-forward market, they’re going to have to fix that culture if they want to really survive. And not that that’s a bad thing. Like, if you’re having hiring problems, right? If you cannot staff positions of people that have left, That’s your problem. That is a you problem that you created. And now you’ve got to fix it.

Matty: [00:12:23] We’re kind of all reading the Twitter accounts and seeing the posts of people basically telling their boss to go fuck themselves when the boss is like, come in, sorry you had PTO, but come in anyway. And kind of all this stuff about nobody wants to work. And you’re like, yeah, no, it’s more that nobody, you don’t want to pay anybody. Um, I mean, where’s the analog within kind of tech jobs, right? Like it’s, It doesn’t sound as egregious as like local Culver’s is shutting down because the employees are like, we’re getting screwed over, we’re not showing up. But I mean, we’re kind of starting to see some stuff like, is it— I mean, Wirecutter right now, I was just reading that today, the Wirecutter union. This is— this shit is getting real. And it’s so— it’s not just your local Burger King is what I’m getting at. It’s not just the memes that you’re seeing. It’s everywhere.

Tim: Bad management knows no industry. Right? And that’s what it is. And it doesn’t even have to be malicious. It doesn’t even have to be incompetence per se. It’s just someone who can’t or is having a hard time adjusting to the new reality. Someone could have been a great manager in person because they knew how to do that. But if they can’t adjust to what the change— what the pandemic has changed the work environments to, they have now no longer good management. It’s like, you know, it’s like relationships. You can have 2 people that are, you know, good in a relationship, but some circumstances change. Now they’re toxic for each other. And that’s, that’s where you run into these things. It’s like, it is across the board. And before, like we talked about, women were leaving the workforce first, and now it’s everybody. And that burnout that happened, like I said before, is because folks did not adjust. The management didn’t adjust, companies didn’t adjust their culture. And that, I think, was the hard part. So many companies— and you’ll see shitty, you know, C-level execs and people out there on Twitter like, oh, you know, we have to go back because you can’t do company culture from your bedroom, or whatever that idiot said. And then the thing is, it was like, I was like, well, then change the culture, right? Because culture doesn’t have to be a monolith. Everything changes over time. Our culture changes. Technology drives cultural change in everything it touches. So you can’t tell me that a technology company has to have a static culture. That don’t make no sense.

Matty: [00:14:45] Well, you can’t even define your culture. Your culture is a reflection of the behaviors of the people that work there. You know, I mean, so to your point about saying, well, our culture doesn’t support that. Well, yeah, because that’s not what you were doing. So if you want your culture to reflect this other way of doing that work, do work that way. And then your culture will, because that is actually what culture means. I think it’s interesting too, because it really is like this inflection point that was, that I feel like, yeah, the pandemic kind of forced the issue, but There were the beginnings of this for years and years. We were seeing things like, I remember this is an old story. I’m gonna say it’s an old story that also was like, what, 7 years ago? It was so old, but it feels old. But it’s one of my favorite DevOps Day stories, just like from the experience of how community can help. And there was this guy, and he worked at a— he lived in a small town where it was one of those towns where basically there’s like one employer, right? There’s the one company. He worked in tech, but it was like, if you live in this town, you work for you know, whatever, Pharmacorp, blah, blah, blah kind of thing. And he had an absolutely shitty job and he somehow found his way to like DevOps Days Philly or something like that and made some connections and discovered that, you know what, you could, he could work in tech remotely and pretty much quit his job and got a much better job and went on to be a very successful, I actually, someone I knew, but I haven’t seen in a really long time. I’m hoping he’s still being successful, but like, that was the beginnings of that. Like, and I think we’re seeing, we were seeing stories like that over the last 7, 8 years, but they were scattered because you had to be like in Bad News Bears, right? Like, because quitting a job is scary, especially when healthcare is tied to your job. Oh, so many things. It had to get real bad. And it’s kind of like employers are making it a little easier. To do that now by being super bad, maybe, right? What pushed this? Like, why, you know?

Tim: [00:16:48] Because I think we were able to distract ourselves with a lot of stuff before the pandemic. We were going to conferences, we were having company perks when you traveled, we were— you were able to like, I’m just going to go out on the weekends and do something to decompress, de-stress, whatever like that. You don’t have— you didn’t have that during the pandemic. And so, it was just you and your shitty job and your shitty manager. And after a while, people are like, I literally cannot deal. I cannot deal with this. And so, people made the choice to leave. And it was a really bad situation. But the other thing too is now that everyone, or probably a lot, so many employers were remote, you could switch jobs and your commute didn’t matter. And you could switch jobs and moving didn’t matter. So, the world became your oyster. So, you didn’t have to apply to whatever was within an hour of your home. Or whatever was a reasonable commute to your home. You could apply anywhere. And right, and so that I think is another reason too, is that employers are like, wow, we really can spread our wings as far as where we can hire. And they’ve been able to benefit from that, the ones that are good. Now the ones that are like, well, we’re still going to stick with the Bay Area only, as soon as we open back up you’re gonna have to move— as they’re seeing when they do that, people don’t move. Because they have options.

Matty: [00:18:08] Now let me throw this at you though. So we’re using— we kind of keep going back to this example of like the expensive San Francisco office and the whatever. I mean, I’m, I’m from the Midwest. Like, again, actually, my— you know, I’ve worked for Valley, I’ve worked for tech companies, but really what I think about still when I think about places that you work, I think about insurance companies, banks, manufacturing. The, all the sort of like traditional enterprise. So when you think about like, not to pick on, but a company like MasterCard that’s in Missouri or Target in Minneapolis or whatever, those are local employers. And it’s not about like, oh, we’re only going to hire in San Francisco or whatever. Like, do you see that like places like that, because they’re not— I’m going to cut this. I almost said they’re not trying to recruit top talent, and that’s not what I meant, but they’re Let me say that again. A place like that is not trying to play into the mystique of the superiority of Silicon Valley or whatever. Because I think there’s a lot of West Coast companies that that’s part of the jam is that this is in San Francisco or this is in the Bay or this is in Seattle. Like, are they adjusting to that or is that just sort of part, again, part of that regional thing, right? They’re not at, no one’s asking you to move to Minneapolis to work at Target.

Tim: [00:19:26] No, I mean, and I think it’s interesting because that Bay Area mystique, Silicon Valley area mystique started a while ago. And honestly, I don’t know why. And I will say very equivocally, and I don’t care how much hate I get, it’s bullshit. The notion that San Francisco is the best place to do anything is dumb. I’m not saying there aren’t smart people. There’s smart people everywhere. The thing is that people who had money who were in San Francisco didn’t feel like leaving San Francisco. They had connections at local schools that they thought were better somehow. That’s why everyone started picking people out of Stanford instead of like, like that was it. And it just became like the kind of Ivy League cliquiness that, that we hated in other industries, right? When you, when people thumbed their noses at Wall Street for being, you know, kind of corrupt as far as like how they monopolize power and monopolize money away from everywhere else where they think they’re the center of the world, that is Silicon Valley and, and the West Coast as a whole because that spreads up to Seattle. And Portland too. And I said it and y’all can get mad about it, but it’s true. The one thing the pandemic has taught us is that you’re hiring people from all over the country who are brilliant and smart. And that was the thing that, that people who have been railing for inclusion had been talking about, that you can hire folks that aren’t in San Francisco, never went to a Bay Area school or one of these prestigious schools, and maybe don’t have enough money to relocate or want to relocate so they can spend 7/8 of their paycheck to try and get an apartment in the Mission District. And so the pandemic, the working remote because of the pandemic has allowed that transition to start to happen. And you’re seeing some of that, but it’s also playing itself out in these folks that were living in San Francisco, now going and gentrifying other areas and driving up the rent there and stuff like that. But you know, that’s, it’s still the same point is that you can now decentralize the influence. And I don’t think, I don’t think the Bay Area is never going to not have that influence, at least not for a long time, because that’s still where money’s concentrated, but the talent is no longer concentrated. There. And people don’t think that the talent is concentrated anymore because they’re watching it leave.

Matty: [00:21:36] So I hear you and I agree with that. I still want to go back to this non-Valley, non— no, I don’t want to say startup, but not— I don’t want to say non-tech company because every company is a tech company. I get it. But you’re more— again, these traditional enterprises.

Tim: Yeah.

Matty: That, for lack of a better word, I’m going to say are Midwestern flyover country stuff, right? Like they are not. But the thing is, like when I think about it, this is anecdotal with exceptions of Apple being an exception and some other places. I think a lot of the tech companies are not pushing the return to work as much because they know that because this has happened. But people I know that I talked to that are working at financial institutions, insurance companies, pharma, stuff like that. And again, in tech, They— I feel like those places are doing more of the pushing people to come back and looking less to hire remote because those have—

Tim: those are older industries and they’ve always been that kind of the risk-averse. They’re the ones that still probably make you dress business casual or, you know, you can’t have tattoos and stuff like that. Like, it’s those industries that are still very, you know, archaic in their culture. And so they’re going to do that. They want you to come back. Not only do they visit in their management, but like you— in their management styles, but like you said before, they also have deep investments in real estate, you know, that they need to do and they can’t get out of. So they may as well use it. They can’t— I’m actually going to write it as a loss if no one’s going to use it. Although some of those financial institutions, they can write it off as a loss because they’ve been able to cook the books a little bit on those things. But for the most part, yeah, they’re doing that because they don’t know how any other way to operate. And this pandemic was road bump for them, but they are definitely an in-person culture. And the people who are making those decisions, the VPs, the middle managers, have built their entire career on being able to oversee people directly. And that’s why you see that. And that’s why it is like the thing, every company is a tech company. Well, no, they’re not, right? If we’re being honest, right? Every company has and utilizes tech. But this that we’re seeing now, the ones that are pushing folks to come back, that is how you know who’s a tech company. And who’s not, because if you’re not a tech company, and you have that older culture, and you have that thing where tech is an expense, and your product is your financial manager, or your product is your retail people or something like that, then you’re bringing people back because you don’t know any other way to operate.

Matty: [00:24:10] So, taking that into account, I don’t have the numbers on this, and I wish I did, because we’re gonna basically— this is, uh, my caveat that this is all speculation unless Tim actually knows this information. But I did read a tweet about something else that— and I remember where it had to do, and it doesn’t really matter— but something, the fact of that you could calculate that 1%, greater than 1% of tech workers work for FAANG, which made sense. But taking that aside, I still want to think that the majority of people working in tech are working for these more traditional companies where it’s like, yeah, where it’s like our job is to move some JSON files from one endpoint to another, right? They’re not changing the world, you know, it’s not all this other stuff, it’s just getting shit done, which is fine. And I’m not talking down on that at all because shit’s got to get done. But when we talk, the reason I say that is you say like, okay, a lot of these organizations where these people are working are where this change isn’t happening. But I think that affects a disproportionate number of people working in tech. And I think one of the things that people who are on this podcast, plus also people listening to this podcast, but especially those of us, we forget just how little of a sliver of people working in tech we are talking about when we talk about a lot of this newer way of working, right? Like, and the reason I bring this up is I, my boss at PagerDuty, it’s fine. I’ll, you know, there’s no shade at Alex, but he’s the We would talk about how people would do so. We were talking about it like, oh, you know, I said, people have this certain way of working. He goes, no, no, enterprises don’t even do that anymore. And I’m like, yeah, they do, man. And he’s like, no, I talk to enterprises all the time and they’re not working that way. And I said, dude, you’re talking to leadership at enterprises that had the awareness to say they wanted to talk to the founder of PagerDuty. Like, like, I’m like, how many organizations are not even on that radar? Of thinking about that. And I’ve run into that. I mean, it was, I had a friend who was a business analyst at a pharma company here in the Midwest and everything the way they do shit is all the stuff that if you talk to any DevOps person on Twitter, it’d be like, nobody works that way anymore. I’m like, oh, they so do. So I think that’s one of the things, like, when we think about that, like all of this, like, how is that going to affect this? Like, so we’re talking about like, okay, if you don’t, meet people with what they need, like you said, the remote work and stuff like that, you’re not going to get the people. Are these companies not going to get the people?

Tim: [00:26:45] I think they’ll get some people, but I think we’re talking about the differentiation between tech workers and the tech industry. So the tech industry is, is who we’re talking about when we talk about people that can have more remote and have the kind of discussions we’re talking about versus a tech worker who is not in in a tech industry. And those are the ones that have maybe the more kick thinking. And we’re talking about tech workers, whether they work in healthcare, whether they work in financial, whether they work in construction and logistics, whether they work for airlines and all— any place where they have a software developer or someone who’s handling their computers and printers and stuff like that, they’re going to have people that work in tech. But that is not the tech industry, or they are very clearly delineated where it’s like the people who work for like Home Depot retail, and then the people that work for Home Depot’s e-commerce section. So in the e-commerce section, they largely operate like a tech and they will be remote and they’ll have kind of privileges. Like I said, it’s almost like a separate company. It’s like working for Amazon where it’s essentially a separate company. They have a distinct culture flying under one or flying under one flag. But for the tech workers that do not work in the tech industry. They’re seeing how their, their colleagues who do work in the tech industry, how they have it, and there’s now more disparity in that than ever. And they’re like, fuck this, I don’t want to do this, I want to work somewhere else. And they’re able to do that.

Matty: [00:28:18] I think that is generally the case. That’s what Gartner used to call bimodal IT. When you sort of have the differentiation, there are still innovative, and by innovative, I mean perceived as innovative, as value add to the organization, technology workers in a lot of these traditional places where they are building. They’re not, they’re not running the internal billing system. It’s, and pharma is the best example I can think of. There’s everybody I know in pharma that is working for these systems. They are not like internal billing systems. They are like the things that trials are run through and they are run like you would run your like old school help desk, like the way we did like internal IT. Anyway, it’s, I think you’re right. I think it boils down to that. This is why bimodal IT is not a good way to run your organization because it creates more of a differentiate between the different parts of your organization. And anybody that you’re keeping in that like slower or older way, you’re going to continue to have attrition of talent. Doesn’t mean you’re attrition of people, but attrition of talent. There’s, and that was why I was asking when I was thinking about it is like, are you, I don’t think you’re going to have a scenario of we can’t hire anybody, but you’re not going to drive for that. And I think this also gets to just how everything needs to change. And I had some really interesting conversations again, back with public sector folks where the public sector just doesn’t pay like the private sector. That’s just a fact of life. You’re going to work for the Texas Workforce Commission or something like that. You are not going to make the money that you’re going to make working for Uber or, you know, even not even doesn’t have to be a Valley startup. It can be just anywhere. So one of the— what’s that?

Tim: [00:30:08] But you got a pension. Yes.

Matty: Well, so, but that’s one of the challenges that a lot of these leaders in these public sector orgs, what these agencies would tell me is people, they would be hiring people in and they would want to, they, it’s like the smart ones, I guess, or the forward-thinking ones were starting to understand that you, they had to be okay with it. You know what, someone might come and work here for a couple of years and that’s it. They’re not going to make their career working at the Secretary of State of Illinois, you know, or whatever, like they’re going to go somewhere else and you plan for that, right? If you know you’re as an organization, you’re never going to be able to offer that. It’s like, it’s like a great manager is a great local, like from a local perspective, a great manager is one who says, hey, you’ve outgrown this team. I’m not mad you’re leaving because you need to go somewhere else and fly, right? Like, as an organization, sometimes you might have to do that and then say, then you come back. And it’s, it’s hard because of how we’re so used to building our organizations. It’s failure on the manager if someone leaves.

Tim: Like, It’s interesting because like having worked in, I made my bones working in government contracting and public sector stuff before I came into the private world. And it’s very interesting because career longevity is the goal in private sector. After a couple years, you just want to stay there forever. And so the, your motivations are different there. And I will, and it may sound like I’m throwing shade at public sector, and I am throwing shade at public sector. Because I can, because I’ve been there. And so what happens in a lot of public sector places or public sector environments is that you are incentivized to stagnate technologically, right? You’re going to stay on Oracle because you’re an Oracle administrator and you want to get your 20 years or 25 years or whatever it is. So you’re not going to look to move off of Oracle and you’re going to shit on any move any idea, any notion to do that. If you are running an HBox financial system for the thing, you don’t want to move off of that because you spent 5 years doing that. You got all the certifications and you want to stay on that for the next 15 years because you want to retire. And any move to a new technology that could bring in new people is a threat to your job and a threat to your stability. And I’m not saying that this is even like a forefront motivation, but it’s always there as a conflict to progression and an incentive to stagnation. And so, I’ve often said that public sector is where people’s careers go to die because once you get hired on, once you’re there a few years, once you reach senior level, you don’t, for the most part, you don’t really go any further. It’s just, that’s what, and I’m not throwing shade at the people who make those decisions. I’m throwing shade at the industry as a whole because that’s what incentivizes. So you don’t go, for the most part, to public sector to do cutting-edge stuff. Now, that said, I’m going to throw a shade at private sector stuff, and I’m gonna, I’m gonna name names here because they’re not even the same company they used to be anymore. But like, it’s been long said that old things that, that people who used to work at Rackspace is that a lot of talent goes through Rackspace, but none stays because they don’t do anything to want to get people who are growing in their career to stay for the most part, because they wanted to have this, we’re always going to be the same, we’re never going to change kind of culture. They had their chance to really innovate and do some really cool stuff and be something like a major player in there. And they, they stagnated. They wanted to keep their kind of like fanatical and this, we’re a customer service company or like that instead of being a technology company. And so what happened is people would move up in Rackspace and then be like, well, I can’t go anywhere because it’s not really structured for me to do anything new, or for me to really like explode and try new technology, because they— the company itself was more interested in stagnating. And so they left. And so people would do that. I know a lot of amazing— if you look at everybody who’s ever worked at Rackspace, the list is long and distinguished. But the— if you look at people who’ve worked at Rackspace for like 15 years, the list becomes increasingly less distinguished because they’re like— it’s almost like they’re public sector. They’re doing the same job. Where they’re managing the same team that they were. And so, so I, I really feel like this gets back to that kind of thing is like, why do people leave jobs? Like before, people used to leave jobs for pay raises. And that was the thing. And, and that was the argument, kind of like the schism, um, between folks who are like, you gotta stay at a job for 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 years or whatever, especially people that were incentivized to not have to, you know, recruit more versus folks saying, well, I can go here, I can stay here. And I can get a 2% raise on my review or can interview somewhere else, get a new title and get a 20% raise. Why would I stay here if I can get a 20% raise? And it doesn’t make any sense to say that you’re not benefiting anyone else. Well, now the thing is that people aren’t even leaving for the raises because the management was so bad. They’re just leaving so they can not hate. And if you can do both, that’s even better. And I know people who are in that boat. It’s like, not only was I, you know, I paid because, you know, the it was good enough is what I had. And it was— I didn’t— but now people have options. People really have a lot of options. They don’t have— like I said, they don’t have to work within a few miles of their home. They don’t have to work, go into an office, especially if you’re neurodivergent or if you’re a parent and you have other things going on. If you can work from home and manage that, all the better. You don’t have to rearrange life around work. And that’s a hell of an incentive. And so now To sum it all up, there are now so many more really good reasons why people will leave jobs. And the only reason that they’re going to stay now is because they like the money, they like the job, and they like their manager. And if you’re not checking all those boxes as an employer, you’re going to have headcount problems.

Matty: [00:36:05] I think even in a lot of private sector industries, what you described for public sector continues to apply. Again, a lot of these traditional enterprises, I think back to when I worked at the bank and stuff, and there were people, and again, granted, this was over 10 years ago that I was there, but these people are still, first of all, there are people that were like, you know, this is my 35th year working here at, I’ve been through 17 different names of this bank, and I’ve sat at the same desk because we’ve continued to do this. But even so, I’m like, if I go back and I looked at my LinkedIn for people I worked with back at at the bank, for example, back in 2003 or whatever, whole bunch of them probably still there, which is good. Good for you, man. If you’re doing your thing. I mean, I just anecdotally always makes me laugh is I had a project manager I worked with who, when layoffs were coming around, he said, you know what, I’m fine because he had so much seniority that it would cost— he wanted to get laid off because he would pay more, like he was retiring soon enough. Like, let’s say he had 2 years left of retirement, but if they laid him off, they had to pay him 4 years of severance. So he was like, number one, sure, lay me off. That’s great. Number two, they never would because it’s actually more, it’s cheaper to keep him around doing nothing than to lay him off because of how much more time they, you know, just sort of be like, hey, just chill out for the rest of the time. I mean, and this is a whole other whole episode. There were people I worked with. I remember this guy who sat in the cube next to me. Him and one other dude were like the only 2 people who knew this one system that had very little to do, but that’s why they were around. And they just sat on the phone with each other all day long. And I just got to hear the one side of the conversation on the off chance that they’re, you know, they were basically kept around on the off chance there was something to do with this one particular thing. And I was like, you know, on one hand you sit there and you’re like, that’s good work if you can get it. But on the other hand, eventually that system’s going to get retired. And where are you going to be?

Tim: [00:38:01] We think that, but then a lot of these financial systems, they never do. They never do. I mean, there’s still people patching COBOL out there.

Matty: I remember going into one of the data centers here at Bank One Plaza, which— that was when it was Bank One— and the computer operator, there was this system sitting in the corner. He says, you know what that does, right? And I go, No. And he goes, nobody does. But like, no one wants to turn it off. Who the hell knows what it is? So this is stuff like that still happens, which is why, yes, we are doing all this amazing innovation and God bless DevOps and SRE and all this other shit. But you know, there’s still an awful lot of, there’s still a lot of work to do. And y’all are doing a lot of great work out there, even if you, no matter what you’re doing, even if you are running a data center full of machines that nobody knows what they actually do, but you’re afraid to turn them off. You’re doing good. You’re doing good work.

Tim: But I think what’s, what is really interesting, it’s like we’ve talked about like what has changed and what it hasn’t. And then I think KubeCon North America next year is in Detroit, which I think is fan-fucking-tastic. It is about time that we stop having this stuff like in the most expensive places possible. And that’s kind of like how, how’s the industry changed? How have conferences changed and things like that? You know, virtual conferences, they’re nice enough. They have allowed a lot more people to, to attend conferences. But for the part of— for the purpose of conferences, I think for the most part, people really want to be in person, right? But when we go back in person, like, I’m still like, please stop going to the Bay Area. Please stop going to like Pacific Northwest. Please stop going to New York. Like, go to places where people can afford, like I was thrilled to be talking at the summit I just did, but it was in Napa. You know how expensive Napa is? Like, you know, they’re going to do next year back in Lake Tahoe. And I know how expensive Lake Tahoe is and how hard it is to get to. Like, it’s just, we need to do better on getting people to conferences by making them more accessible, having them in places where they are. Less expensive, and then talking the talk about being inclusive and actually thinking that we want to support, you know, marginalized businesses and stuff like that. One of the things you and I talked about before, Matt, was like here, like in DevOps Days Austin, and I’ll call that one out because I love DevOps Days Austin, but we have it at Darrell K. Royal Stadium, which is here at the University of Austin, Texas. It’s really It’s a nice enough space, not the best space I’ve been in. It was nice enough, but it’s like here at UT and it’s this thing, but we’ve got a historically Black college right on the other side of 35 that we don’t go to. We don’t have meetups at, we don’t even have— and why not? Why don’t people use that space? Why don’t people try to include the historically Black college, you know, in these discussions or even book some room there? Give them some business, throw them some money. I’m sure they would love to have it. Why don’t we do that? Why, if we go to Atlanta, why aren’t we looking at any of these historically Black colleges around there? We do conferences in DC. Howard is right there. These colleges have conference centers and convocation centers and places that can, they have conference rooms, stuff like that, places that can fit us. But we’re still too busy going to a super, super ritzy kind of place in San Francisco. And no one can explain to me why. And I really feel like in the year of our Lord 2022, we should have learned from our lessons about trying to be inclusive and trying to get everybody in there. And yeah, I know there’s probably another soapbox like that, that Tim is on, but the fact that it still remains— like, one of the things that I’ve loved about virtual conferences is talking to more people than I’ve ever been able to talk to and having more interactions with folks because they’ve been able to attend somewhat. And I don’t want to fucking give that up when we go back to in-person conferences. It’s bullshit.

Matty: [00:42:09] I think you make an exceptional point that is very aligned to what we were talking about earlier, which is again, like we’re talking shit at organizations that are like in a rush to go back to the way it was before. And I am the first one to say like, yes, I went to KubeCon and it was amazing to be back in person again. But I don’t want us to lose what we’ve gained. And it doesn’t mean that everything has to be virtual. I think that’s one of the general problems with this entire discourse around this is people read everything as extremes, right? Because heaven knows there’s no room for any kind of nuance in any of these conversations. So if you say something like, hey, we should still have remote capability, we should still do some virtual conferences. And the response is, but we have to have them in person. We’re like, can’t it be both. And it doesn’t mean hybrid. It means like sometimes have some events that are— and you want to know something, to be quite honest, this is just— it’s crazy to me. We were doing virtual events before there was a pandemic. They weren’t the norm, but they existed. And actually, All Day DevOps is a great example. That has been virtual the entire time. And it’s been awesome. So like, you can do this. It doesn’t mean you have to do a hybrid conference. There is room in our world of in-person conferences for there to be virtual-only conferences as well. There’s room for both, but like you said, how do we take the gains that we’ve gotten, both continuing specifics of things that we have done, because there’s accessibility things around virtual that aren’t just about travel, that are about depending on your neurodiversity, depending upon your preference. I mean, it’s totally fine. Like, that’s one of the things I want. If you’re listening to this podcast right now and you actually prefer virtual conferences to in-person conferences, That is okay and totally valid and valuable, and you should feel good about that. And don’t feel like you’re wrong for thinking that because all the noisy DevRels on Twitter are talking about how much they miss seeing their friends in person, myself specifically, right? Like professional conference-goers, this was our social network of seeing people. We’re also very loud. There’s lots of people that are getting great value out of this. And to your, your point about like, just, What are all the things we can do to, like, let’s not go back so quickly to just doing things the way we were doing them. And there’s push all those boundaries, push all those norms. I’m not trying to provide excuses because there’s no excuses. I think there’s some of the reason when you understand a reason, then you can figure out how to change it. So like one of the things to your point about why have these community events are not considering historically Black colleges and universities, some of that just has to do with the diversity of the organizers. This is why we talk about why diversity of that matters. And it’s not because you’re trying to be exclusive, but you might not even be aware of those facilities in the first place. And I don’t mean aware, like, yes, I know those colleges exist in Chicago, but it’s not an excuse for like doing shit in Napa or Tahoe or at the Jarvis Center or anything like that. There’s also the matter of, this is again, I’m giving the reason so that I can provide the challenge. Part of the reason that you have the events at the same place year over year is because you’re just used to doing it and you know how to do it there. And I will tell you, as an event organizer, when we look at venues, one of the things that is almost always the biggest tick in the box is we’ve done it there before and we know how to do it. That doesn’t mean that’s an excuse for not looking for other venues. That’s me challenging event organizers, including myself. It’s unfortunately too late for DevOps Days Chicago 2022 because we’ve signed a contract, but We’ll keep working on it. Oh, to say like, okay, that’s great, but have you considered, right? You know?

Tim: [00:45:56] Yeah. Um, and I want to say like, it’s more than just that. Like we talk about like travel, like costs, like the event tickets don’t need to probably cost as much as they, they do, or pass along some of that along more to the sponsors, especially these trillion-dollar companies that like to sponsor these conferences. I’m sure they could pony up a little bit more. They, they have enough that they could buy entire— so you can’t mean to tell me that they can’t sponsor nothing for plane tickets, or they can’t sponsor nothing for hotel rooms, or they can’t sponsor some facilities to make sure that people with kids maybe can have some place to feed them if they can travel or something like that. And I don’t know the answers, but if I’m a concert organizer, if I’m a— if I’m a— if I am a conference organizer with a large enough attendance typically And I want to get that attendance to be more inclusive. I’m going to talk to the people who haven’t been included in the past and figure out what the fuck we can do, right? Where it needs to be. What facilities have to have. I want to talk to neurodivergent people. I want to talk to people with kids, especially young kids. I want to talk to people who still got to work, can’t get them days off. Can we, what can we do to work with their employers? What can we do to make travel? What can we do to get stipends? What can we do to get food? What can we do to do all this? Like, it’s not an unsolvable problem. Fuck’s sake, we just made it through somewhat through a pandemic. You mean to tell me that we can’t figure out how to do an inclusive conference? That’s not an excuse that any of us should be willing to accept in 2022. Like, and I’m not trying to shit on anybody, but I am trying to shit on you.

Matty: [00:47:23] Whatever you’re doing, you can do more. And the— this is now just sort of a little bit of— I was gonna say unsolicited advice, but whatever, you’re listening to my damn podcast, so you’re gonna hear my advice. Because maybe that’s half of why you’re listening. The other half is to hear Tim’s. But a couple of things to bear in mind. And again, always remember, like, my main lens of this is local community events like DevOps Day, you know, which are not at the scale of tens of thousands of people that are not at a for-profit event or whatever. That being said, a lot of these DevOps Days, we get a bunch of money and that’s cool. That’s good. And if you do it right, you’re turning that back around into making it accessible. So I just want to address like a couple things because people might not think about this, but, and I’m going to tell you how to do it. So I will give you the sort of dirty little secret. Maybe it’s not even dirty little secret, but just the thing to do. Many DevOps Days could run completely funded by sponsors. One of the problems with a free conference, especially an in-person conference, is when shit is free, lots of people will sign up. And a large percentage of them will not show up, but you will have already had to pay for their cost. So that being said, I’ll tell you a couple of ways we do that. One is we make them as cheap as possible. And also, for example, at DevOps Days Chicago, we have an on your honor, and I don’t even mean on your honor, you can self-select and say like, this is, I can’t afford this. I would like this ticket for free. You know how much you have to explain about yourself in order to get that free ticket from us? You need to check the box that says, I would like a free ticket, please, because my employer doesn’t pay for this and this is too much for me. That’s totally fine. Like, so that’s me telling you conference organizers, if you’re going to offer something like that, do not make people have to justify to you why they deserve it. Even if that’s not what you mean when you say, explain why, whatever. So you should do things like that. I understand you need to charge money because it means people will show up. Fine, make it easier. There’s ways you can do this and ways you can do it where people don’t have to feel like shit because they don’t want to spend $200 or $250. It’s not your damn business why, you know. So sorry, that is my little soapbox on that because I see that as something where people have the best of intentions and don’t realize how actually damaging it is to do that kind of thing.

Tim: [00:49:54] It fucking sucks. I’ve done it before. It’s goddamn demeaning. And I feel like we can do so much better than that. It just takes a little bit of empathy. It takes the willingness to say, hey, we’re going to do it a little bit differently so we can make sure that we get more people. And the benefits are fantastic. Like, our industry has been more inclusive than it’s ever been as far as I’ve seen it. And we’ve been for the better for it. We’ve been able to have more difficult conversations about the technology we produce, about how we treat people in this industry. You know, how we treat workers and, and to ex— and what to expect for ourselves. We’ve been able to say like, you know, hey Netflix, man, that’s fucked up, and not— and our tech employees are going to work behind you are not going to tolerate that. We’ve been able to say that, you know, hey Amazon, we don’t like the way you do this, because we’ve got more people that are willing to speak up because they don’t feel as unsafe. And not that it’s not difficult, but this is just what we’ve been doing with the little efforts that we’ve been doing. Like, and so that our potential to do more is even better, but we have to get more people in We have to get more people networked in. We have to make more people feel like they are welcome and part of this organization and not gatekeep even unintentionally by using location and cost and things like that as a deterrent, whether you want, mean to or not. The fact of the matter is still the same. Like, and it’s not just like, and we have done better, not great, but we have done better about making making our panels more inclusive. But if you look out in that audience, if you look out in that audience and it doesn’t look like something you would consider inclusive, then you have more work to do. And even if it does look super inclusive, you probably still have more work to do. But the fact that— the, the fact remains that we still have problems that we need to solve, and we’re some of the smartest people in the world in this industry. So these are problems we can solve. We just have to prioritize them. And I don’t know how else we can talk to— talk about it, but it’s not a— it’s not a drum I’m going to stop beating at any point. You know, like, the pandemic has taught us a lot of lessons, and one of the lessons that I’ve learned is that, that we need a platform to talk about this stuff. Not just the pandemic, but all the stuff that happened in 2020. We need to talk about these things. We don’t want problems to, to go unsolved. We certainly don’t want to regress. And there are efforts to do that too. So, so I, I really feel like we can be a driving force for positive change through this industry. We just have to be willing to do the things that are uncomfortable that we’re used to and listen and be humble. And I’m far be it from me to say like I have all the answers. I mostly have questions.

Matty: [00:52:32] You have some of the answers.

Tim: Yeah, but there are still things that, that we need to say. It’s like, look, man, hey, we need to do this better. And to say that is a start, but for too long, that’s been all we’ve been doing. And I’m fed up with that.

Matty: So, this has just absolutely flown by. If you have ideas on how you think we can do all this work better, we would love to hear about it on Twitter. You can tweet @ArrestedDevOps. You can probably find Tim or myself if you go to our show notes, you’ll see everybody’s Twitter. And speaking of, if you go to arresteddevops.com/we-have-work-to-do, you will find this episode’s show notes. If you go to arrestdevops.com/itunes and leave us a review in the iTunes Store, theoretically that helps other people find the podcast. Yes, I still call it the iTunes Store because I don’t want to fix that redirect, even though it’s probably not been called the iTunes Store for probably 3 to 4 years, at least at this point. You can subscribe to Arrest DevOps on Spotify or iHeartRadio, and also on Audible or pretty much anywhere fine and less fine podcasts are made available. Tim, it’s been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show again.

Tim: [00:53:39] Matt, I’ve had a great time. It’s been great.

Matty: Any, where can people, what’s next for Tim Banks out there in the world?

Tim: As always, you can find me on Twitter @ElCheffe. You know, I’m at the Duckbill Group now. So if you want to get some good cost optimization consulting, feel free to hit us up and you might get me. But aside from that, you know, I’m around, you know, I’ll be there for shitposts and thirst traps.

Matty: Absolutely. This is Arrested DevOps, and remember, there is always DevOps in the banana stand.