066: 10 Pounds of Dirt in a 5 Pound Sack with Michael Coté

Michael Coté: @cote | cote.io | Pivotal | Software Defined Talk

Show Notes:

• 00:54 - Pivotal
• 04:39 - Being a Professional Muller aka Analyst
• 11:08 - Iterative Development
• 32:54 - Getting a Job as a Professional Muller aka Analyst

Resources:

• Pivotal Cloud Foundry
• GemFire
• Greenplum
• Pivotal Labs
• Wardley Maps
• Software Defined Talk Episode #79: From a vegan, clothing optional co-op to working with banks and oil companies - Coté’s professional life, part 1
• Software Defined Talk Episode #85: Being an analyst without being an asshole - Coté’s professional life, part 2
• RedMonk

Transcript:

CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode #66. I am a developer, Charles Lowell at The Frontside and also host-in-training for 65 episodes. This is my 66th and I'm flying alone this week but we do have on the show with us a very special guest. Actually, the person who taught me how to podcast, I think it was about 10 years ago and he was like, "Charles, we should do this podcasting thing." I started my very first podcast with him and I still haven't figured it out. But his name is Michael Coté and he's a fantastic guy and welcome to the show, Coté.

MICHAEL: Thanks for having me, Charles. It's great to be here.

CHARLES: Now, what are you up to these days? You're over at Pivotal.

MICHAEL: That's right. I work at Pivotal and probably people who are in the developing world know them for Spring. We have most of the Spring people. Then we also have this thing Pivotal Cloud Foundry. We're not supposed to call it a platform as a service but for matters of concision, it's a platform as a service that's the runtime that you run your stuff in. Then we also have a bunch of data products like GemFire and Greenplum and things like that. Then, 'openymously', if that's a word, we have Pivotal Labs. Now --

CHARLES: I think, it's eponymously.

MICHAEL: Eponymously, yes. Now, you might remember Pivotal Labs as the people who use Chef Scripts to configure their desktops. Remember that?

CHARLES: Yeah, I remember that. I was into that.

MICHAEL: Yeah, in coincidental kind of way, the inspiration for the project Sputnik thing, which is coincidentally because now Dell Technologies owns Pivotal so all of that stuff has come for a full circle. I guess also since I'm intro-ing myself, I work on what we call the Advocate Team because we don't call them evangelists. No one likes to be called that I guess. I guess there's 12 of us now. We just hired this person, also in Austin actually McNorma who's big in the Go community and apparently can make images of gophers really well. I'm sure she does many other extraordinary things, not just the illustrator master. Everyone else basically like codes or uses the terminal but I do slides.

CHARLES: Well, that's your weapon of choice, right? It's a more elegant weapon for civilized time or something like that. I'm going to look it up on Wikia.

MICHAEL: Yeah, basically what we do on our team is we just talk about all the stuff Pivotal does and problems that we solve in the way people in an organizations like would think to care about our stuff. Most of what I do is I guess you call it the management consultant type of stuff. Since I have a background as an analyst and I used to work on corporate strategy and M&A at Dell so I have a vantage point in addition to having programmed a long time ago.

If you're changing your organization over to be more agile or trying to devops, we would say cloud-native with a hyphen. How do you change your organization over what works and doesn't work? Most people in large organizations, they sort of pat you on your head. I'm sure you encounter this. That sounds really nice that we would be doing all of the good, correct ways of using computers but we're basically terrible and we could never make that happen here. Thanks for talking with us, we're going to go back and stew in our own juices of awfulness. You've got to pluck them out of that self-imposed cannibal pot there in the jungle and show them that they actually can improve and do things well.

CHARLES: Would you say you feel like your job is being that person who shakes them away and can be like, "Good God! Get a grip on yourself!"

MICHAEL: Sure. That's a very popular second or third slide in a presentation -- the FUD slide, the Fear of Uncertainty and Doubt slide where you're basically like, "Uber!" and then everyone just like soils their pants because they're afraid that are like Airbnb and Uber and [inaudible] and Google is going to come in and, as they say, disrupt their state industry. I try not to use the slides anymore because they're obnoxious. Also, most people in large organizations nowadays, they know all of that and they've already moved to putting on a new pair of pants stage of their strategizing.

CHARLES: You've got the kind of the corporate wakeup call aspect of it but then it's also seems like a huge component of your job which is when you were at RedMonk, when you were at 451 and even to a lesser extent, it was Dell who was paid well to just kind of mull it over, like just kind of sit there and asynchronously process the tech industry, kind of like organizational yeast and let it ferment, kind of trying to see where the connections lie and then once you've made that presented, do you think that's fair? That's what sprung to mind when I heard you say like, "Yeah, we just kind of sit around and think about what is Pivotal and what does it do and what's it going," but like how do you get that job of like, "I'm just kind of a professional muller."

MICHAEL: That's right. First of all, I think professional muller is accurate, as long as, I guess mulling is also for -- what's that thing you drink at Christmas that you put the little --

CHARLES: Mulled wine. Like low wine.

MICHAEL: I can feel like that sometimes late at night. But having a job as an analyst, I was an industry analyst at two places for a total of about eight years or so. Then as you're saying doing strategy at a company, now what I do here, essentially a lot of what you do is very difficult. I know it sounds to people. You just read a lot of the Internet. You just consume a lot of the commentary and the ideas of things that are going out there and you try to understand it and then synthesize to use that cheesy word. Synthesize it into a new form that explains what it is and then finally, the consultant part comes in where you go and meet with people or you proactively think about what people might be asking and they say something like, "What does this mean for me? And how would I apply it to solve my problems?" I guess as an example of that -- I apologize for being a little commercial but these are just the ideas I have in my head -- Ford is a customer of ours and they also have invested in us which is kind of novel. We have GE and Ford invested in Pivotal and Microsoft and Dell Technologies as an interesting mix but anyways, they have this application called the Ford Pass Application. I drive a Ford Focus --

CHARLES: Like Subaru? But you do drive a Ford.

MICHAEL: Yeah, because I don't care about cars. It's a bunch of nonsense. I see this app and basically the app, if you have a more advanced one, it might tell you your mileage and even like remotely start your car. But it doesn't really do that much. You have the app and it will tell you information about your car and where to park and it even has this thing where it links to another site to book a dealership thing, which is annoying.

CHARLES: Why would you want to book a dealership? To buy another car?

MICHAEL: Well because the Ford Focus I have is notorious for having transmission problems so you're like, "I got to go and take it into the dealer to get all this recall stuff taken care of," so wouldn't it be nice... I don't know if you've ever worked with a car dealer but it's not desirable.

CHARLES: Yeah, it would be nice if they didn't charge $6000 for everything.

MICHAEL: Right. It's a classic system of having a closed market, therefore that jacks up prices and lowers customer service usually. What's the fancy word if there is a negative correlation, if you were to chart it out? Like price is negatively correlated to your satisfaction with it. Kind of like the airline industry, not to bring up a contemporary topic. You pay a lot of money to fly and you're like, "This is one of the worst experiences I've had in my life," whereas you go to the dentist and get a root canal and you're like $20 co-pay. Loving it.

[Laughter]

MICHAEL: Anyhow, this Ford Pass application doesn't really do very much so what does that mean for what I was explaining. If you go look up and read about it, starting back in the late-90s, your extreme programming and then your Agile Software Development and your devops nowadays, one of the major principles is what you should do is ship often. Maybe you should even ship every week or every day. Don’t worry about this gigantic stack of requirements that you have and whatever you should be shipping all the time and then we've trained ourselves to no longer say failing fast. That was a fun cheeky thing back in the late-2000s.

CHARLES: Did we trained ourselves not to say that anymore?

MICHAEL: I don't hear it very often.

CHARLES: Man, I got to go scrub my brain.

MICHAEL: Yeah, well this is why you consult with me every 10 years as I tell you the new things.

CHARLES: Okay, here we go. We're going to have you on the podcast again.

MICHAEL: That's right. You have this idea of like, "We should be releasing weekly," but then if you go to Ford, you're like, "What does that mean?" To shave the shaggy dog here, essentially the idea that they're shipping this mobile application that doesn't really do very much is an embodiment of the idea that they should be shipping more frequently. This may be a stupid example. It's not that it's not going to do very much like permanently but as I have witnessed, very frequently they add new features so Ford is in this cadence but there's this app that instead of working on an application for two years and having everything in it, they're actually releasing it on, I don't know if it's weekly but they're releasing it on a very frequent basis, which allows them to add features.

What that gets you is all the advantages of a fast iteration cycle small batch thing where they can study this actually a good feature. They can do all your Lean Startup nonsense. That's a very like weird, perhaps example of how you explain to someone like a large car manufacturer like Ford, this is what devops means for you. Therefore, why you should spend a lot of money on Pivotal? Now that's the part that lets me pay my mortgage every month, the last bit there.

CHARLES: Right so Pivotal builds apps.

MICHAEL: Well, the Labs people build apps for you.

CHARLES: I'm kidding Coté.

MICHAEL: Yeah, they actually do. The Labs people are like a boutique of another boutique like ThoughtWorks is kind of a boutique but they're kind of a boutique-y version of ThoughtWorks. That probably is terrible as someone who markets for Pivotal to do that. Do you ever notice how political candidates never really name their opposition? Like you never really want to name your competition but anyways...

CHARLES: Pivotal marketing are going to come crashing through your window. Everybody, if we hear them in the next five seconds -- well, I guess you can't call 911 because this is not live.

MICHAEL: Yeah, that's true. The Labs people build stuff for you and then the part that I work, in the Pivotal Cloud Foundry people, they have the actual runtime environment, the cloud platform that you would run all that stuff. Plus all the Spring nonsense for your microservices and your Spring Boot. I understand people like that.

CHARLES: So good for Ford, for actually being able to experience, either in the development and the joys and the benefits that come with it. But this is actually something that I actually want to talk about independently was as I kind of advance in my career, I find myself pushing back a little bit against that incredibly tight, iterative schedule. Shipping things is fantastic and it's great but I find so much of my job these days is just trying to think out and chart a course for where those iterations will carry you and there is a huge amount of upfront design and upfront thought that it is speculatory but it's very necessary. You need to speculate about what needs to happen.

Then you kind of measure against what's actually happening but I feel that kind of upfront design, upfront thought, we had this moment we're like, "We don't need that anymore. Let's throw it all in the garbage." In favor of doing things in these incredibly tight loops and finding where's the clutch point, that kind of long range thinking and long range planning comes and meets with the iterative development. I have no idea. What's the best way for those to match up those long cycles and those short cycles? Where is the clutch play?

MICHAEL: I'll give you two and a half, so to speak trains of thoughts on that. One of them is I think --

CHARLES: Two and half trains of thought, I like that. Can we get straight to the half train of thought?

MICHAEL: Yeah, I'm going to start with the half, which is just taking all of your questions and putting periods at the end of them before I round up to answering the question. I think a lot of the lore and the learnings you get from the Agile world is basically from consultants and teams of consultants. Necessarily, they are not domain experts in what they're doing so their notion is that we're going to learn about what it is we're doing and we don't actually know we can't predict ahead of time because we're not domain experts so they almost have this attitude of like, "We'll just figure it out on the job." Let's say The Frontside gets hired to go work on a system that allows the Forest Service to figure out which trees to go chop down or not --

CHARLES: If you're the Forest Service, we are available to do that.

MICHAEL: I'm guessing you don't have a lot of arborists who have 10 or 20 years of experience working there.

CHARLES: No, we don't.

MICHAEL: And so you have no idea about that domain so in doing an iterative thing, you won't be able to sit down and predict like everyone knows that when you send the lumberjacks out, they're going to need these five things so we're going to have to put that that feature on there. They need to be able to call in flapjacks when they run out. That's just what's going to happen so you don't know all of these things they need to do so you just can't sit down and cogitate about it ahead of time. Also this comes in from the Lean Startup where there's a small percentage of software that's actually done globally and the notion of a Lean Startup is that when you're doing a startup, you're never going to be determined what your exit is, how you cash out, whether that's building a successful long term company while you get sold to someone or whether you IPO, you're not going to able to predict what that business model is so you just need to start churning and not think a lot ahead of time.

Now, the problem becomes, I think that if you are a domain expert, as you can do the inverse of all the jokes I was just making there, you actually can sit down and start to predict things. You're like, "We know we're going to need a flapjack service," so we can predict that out and start to design around that and you can do some upfront thinking. Now similarly, developers often overlook the huge amount of governance and planning that they do for their own tools, which I know you're more cognizant of being older or more experienced, as they like to say.

But basically, there's a bunch of, as we used to call it when I did real work and develop stuff, iteration zero work like we're going to need to build a build system, we're going to need a version control. You actually do know all these things you're going to need so there are all the things you can plan out and that's analogous to whatever domain you're working in. Sometimes, at least for your toolchain, it is worth sitting down and planning out what you want. Now, to hold back the people who are going to crash in my window, one of the things you should consider is using Pivotal Cloud Foundry. That's probably something you should cogitate on ahead of time.

CHARLES: I think they're going to crash through your window and give you a Martini, if the marketing ninjas are going to do that and if you mention them in a positive light.

MICHAEL: You know, it's 10:52 Central but if we were in London, it would probably be an appropriate time so we'll just think about that. Now, on the other hand, you don't want to go too overboard on this pre-planning. I'll give you an example from a large health insurance company that I was talking with recently. They had this mobile app -- it's always a mobile app -- that had been languishing for 15 months and it really wasn't doing anything very interesting. It was just not working well and they could never release it. This is a classic example of like, "We took a long time to release a mobile app and then we never released it again and then it blows." It's not achieving all of the business goals that we wanted.

Mostly, what a health insurance company -- I've talked with a lot of the health insurance companies -- want with their mobile app is at least two things and probably many more but these would be the top of the list. One, they want their customers, their users to look up what their health insurance is, figure out doctors they can go to, the basic functioning that you expect from your health insurance company.

And two, they want to encourage their customers to do healthy behaviors because if you think about it as a health insurance company, health insurance in my mind is basically like this weird gamble of like, "I'm gambling on the fact that you are going to be healthy," because then I pay out less to you and you just give me money so the healthier that your users can be, the more profit you're going to make. That's why they're always trying to encourage you to be healthy and stuff like that.

The mobile app was not achieving, at least these two, if not other business goals they have. They basically were rebooting the effort. The way they started off is they had -- I don't know how many inches thick it was -- a big, old stack of requirements and the first few iterations, the product team was working on it and talking with the business analyst about this and going over it and what they sort of, as we were calling Pivotal Labs the product owner but the person who runs the team, realize is like -- to cut a long story short -- "This is kind of a waste of time. We shouldn't just prioritize these 300 features and put them in some back road and execute on them because these are the same features that we based the more abundant application on, we should probably just start releasing up the application," kind of like the FordPass app.

That said, they did have a bunch of domain experience so they had a notion of basically what this app was going to do and they could start planning it out but they figured out a good balance of not paying attention to, as Martin Fowler used to call it the almighty thud, of all the requirements. What they ended up doing is they basically --

CHARLES: What's the almighty thud?

MICHAEL: You know, he's got some bleaky or whatever. It's basically like we started a project and I think it's from 2004 and someone FedExed me about 600 pages of an MRD or whatever and I put it down on my table and it made a loud noise so he calls that the 'almighty thud', when you get this gigantic upfront requirement thing.

What happened in this health insurance thing is they stopped listening and talking with those people and they kind of like chaff them out, not like when your rub your legs together but they kind of distracted them to that fact but eventually, they just got them out of the cycle and they started working on the app. Then lo and behold, they shipped it and things are working out better now.

CHARLES: Hearing what you're saying and kind of thinking it over, I think if you're going to have an almighty thud, what you really want is you want all that upfront research and all that upfront requirements gathering or whatever, not necessarily to take the form of a set of features or some backlog of 300 things that the app 'needs' to do or 'should' do but just a catalogue of the problems, like a roadmap of the problems.

MICHAEL: Exactly.

CHARLES: You know, that actually is very valuable. If it's like, "These are things that are true about our users and these are the obstacles that they face. If we do choose that we want to go from Point A to Point B, where we are at Point A, then we actually have a map of what are the things that are sitting in front of that and what are the risks involved." It's like if you got -- you played, you're from my generation, you play the Oregon Trail, right?

MICHAEL: Yeah. "You have dysentery."

CHARLES: Right. I don't know where I'm going with this analogy but my point is developing that app is like going from Kansas City to Portland. But the thing about software is you don't necessarily have your corn meal. You don't need to say like, "We're going to need six pounds of cornmeal and we're going to need these wagons and we're going to need these mules," because this is software and you can just code a mule if you need it. But you might not need a mule, if the rivers are not in flood... I don't know. Like I said, I don't know where I'm going with this analogy. But do you see what I'm saying? The point I'm trying to make is that having the map of the Rockies and where the passes are is going to help you.

MICHAEL: Yeah, this is probably where I'm supposed to expertly rattle off what Wardley maps are and how they help, which is fine. I think that's a great tool. There's this guy Simon Wardley and he's actually a great contemporary philosophizer on IT-led strategy. I think he works for CSC who no longer owns mercenaries but they used to -- Computer Science Corporations. I think they own a little bit of HP Services Division but he works for some think tank associated with CSC and he has got a couple of OSCON talks on it, where it's called a Wardley map and it's a way that you start figuring out what you're saying, which is to say your company's strategy.

Using your front metaphor of the era of tall hats, if you remember that other movie, if you're on the Oregon Trail, broadly your strategy is -- and people get all up in your face about the difference between a plan and a strategy and we'll just put mute on them and edit them out of the audio because they're very annoying --

CHARLES: We'll call it an approach.

MICHAEL: That's right. Your plan or your strategy -- and pardon me if I use these phrase free and loosely and everything -- is you would like to get to Oregon and you would like to live there and maybe grow apples or start a mustache wax company or some donuts, whatever it is you do out there once you get to Oregon and their strategy is -- what are the assets that I have. I have a family, I have some money and I also know some people who are going there so I'm going to buy a stagecoach and a mule, then I'm going to kind of wangle it out and we're going to go over there. Also, part of our strategy is we're going to go through the northern pass because we're used to winter versus the southern pass, which isn't the Oregon Trail because reasons.

Maybe Texas isn't part of The Union yet so I don't want to deal with the transition between whatever that weird Texas thing down there --

CHARLES: The desert, there's the southwest and the desert.

MICHAEL: I don't have the capabilities to survive in a desert so I need to go to the north and hopefully I won't be like that movie and have a grizzly bear rip up my backside and everything. You sort of put together this plan. Now going back to what you would do in IT world is to your point, someone does need to define what we would call the business value or the strategy, like what you want to do. Looking at the Ford thing, what Ford wants to do is they do cogitating thing ahead of time and they're like, "We manufacture cars," and you've got electric cars and Uber. That's where the scarce light comes in.

In the future, who knows that people will still buy cars? It might be like that I-Robot movie where all the cars are automated and you just go into one. As a company, whose responsibility is to be as immortal as possible, we need to start making plans about how we can survive if individuals no longer buy cars. Let's do that. This is a huge upfront notion that you would have and then that does trickle down into things like my Ford thing -- I'm kind of speaking on their behalf -- if we have a direct connection with people, maybe eventually we introduce an Uber-like service. You can just check-out a Ford car. Then maybe this and maybe that. It's the strategy of how do we set ourselves up to do that.

Now, I think the Agile people, what they would go for is it's really good to have that upfront strategy and you'll notice that in a lot of lean manufacturing in Agile talk, no one ever talks about this stuff, much to my extreme annoyance. They don't ever talk about who defines the strategy and who defines that you're working on this project. That's sort of left as an exercise to the reader.

The Agile people would say like, "The implementation details of that are best left to the development team in an Agile model." Just like the developers are always arrogantly are like, "Hey, product manager. How about you f-off about how I should implement this? I am the expert here and let me decide how I'm going to implement the feature that you want for me." It's kind of like that rushing dolling down of things. To the development team, you worked on some, what was it? Band frame wire thing, a long time ago? It was basically like, "We don't know it. Maybe this is not the case. Let's pretend like it was." We don't know exactly how you're going to implement this stuff but our goal is that there's bands and they need sides and ways of interacting with their users so let's just figure out what that looks like but they had that upfront idea of ways that they were doing things.

CHARLES: Let's start walking.

MICHAEL: To add on some more. There's another edge case that you're making me think of, which is a good way of thinking through almighty thuds versus how much planning you have and that's government work. Government work that's done by contractors and especially, military contracting work. What you notice in government work is they have, seemingly way too much paperwork and process. They literally will have project managers for project managers and the project managers have to update how the project is going and they reports. If they don't do the reports correctly, their contract is penalize and you might even get fired for doing it.

If anyone stops and says while the software is working, they were like, "No, no, no. don't be naive. It doesn't matter if the software is working or not, if we don't fill up the project report, we're fired." Until someone like yourself or me, it's just like your head explodes and you're like, "But working software, not a concern." In that case, it actually is part of the feature set, part of the deliverable is this nauseating amount of project reporting and upfront requirements, which has this trickle-down effect of annoyance but that's what you're getting paid for so that's what you do and if you want to make yourself feel better about it. I don't know how it is in the rest of the world but in the US, basically we think the only person worse than maybe, Lucifer is the government.

I don't know why this comes about. We enjoy the fruits of the government all the time but for some reason, we just think they're awful. Whenever we give money over the government, we want to make sure that they're spending it well and if they're not corrupt and they don't hire their entire family to help them run the government and make sure that they're making extra money globally in their businesses, I wouldn't know anything about that. But essentially, you want to make sure there's no corruption so transparency is almost more important than working software. The way you achieve that transparency is with all this crazy documentation.

CHARLES: Here's the thing. I agree the transparency is fantastic but nothing is more transparent than working software. Nothing is more transparent than monitored software. Nothing is more transparent than software whose, by its very nature is radiating information about itself. You can fudge a report but you can't fudge a million happy users.

MICHAEL: Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that the way that things currently operate is the ideal state. I'm saying that that desire for transparency has to be addressed and for example, using your example, let's say you were delivering working software but you were also skimming 20% off the top into some Swiss bank account -- you're basically embezzling -- and then it turns out that you need 500 developers but you only actually had 30 developers. There was corruption. The means even though the ends, even though the outcome was awesome, the means was corrupt so that's the thing in a lot of government work that you want to protect against.

I just bring that up as an edge case so a principle to draw from that, when it comes to almighty thudding is like sometimes, that is part of the deliverable. We would aspire in our fail, fast, Agile world to not have a bunch of gratuitous documentation as part of the deliverable because it seems like a waste. It would be like every morning when you battle with your kids to get their shoes on, you had to write a two-page report about how you’re getting ready to go to school stuff with your kids was going.

As a parent you would be like, "I don't need that." However, maybe if you were like an abusive parent and it was required for you to fill out a daily status report for you to retain the parentship of your kids, maybe it would be worth of your time to fill out your daily status report. That was an awfully depressing example there.

CHARLES: Let's go back to the Oregon Trail. What I'm hearing is that -- and we will take it back to the Oregon Trail -- you also need to consider, as were saying, you have some sort of strategy which is we want to go sell apples and moustache wax. But what we're going to do is we're just going to start walking, even though we don't have a map. But obviously, if you send out scouting missions, like you know where you're going, you know the West Coast is out there somewhere, you start walking but the stakes determine how much of your resources you spend on scouting and map drawing --

MICHAEL: Yeah. My way of thinking about strategy and again, people strategy is this overloaded word. But my way of thinking about strategy is you establish a goal: I would like to go to the West Coast. Now, how you figure that out could be a strategy on its own, like how did you figure out you want to go to the West Coast. But somehow, you've got to get to a prime mover. Maybe those tall hat people keep beating me up so I want to go to the West Coast.

I want to go the West Coast is the prime mover. There's nothing before that. Then you've got to deal in a series of constraints. What capabilities do I have, which is another way of saying, what do I not have? And what's my current situation and context? On the Oregon Trail thing, you might be like, "I have a family of seven. I can't just get a horse and go buy a pack of cigarettes and never show up again." I guess I could do that. That's probably popular but I, as an individual have to take this family of six other people. Do I have the capabilities to do that? How could I get the cash for it? Because I need to defend against all the madness out there, I'm going to need to find some people to meet with. You're thinking and scenario planning out all of this stuff and this gets to your point of like, "If you're going to Oregon, it probably is a good idea to plan things out." You don't want to just like the next day, just figure it out. [inaudible] tell a joke. It's like, "Why do they sell luggage at the airport? Is anyone is just like, 'Screw it. Pack a clothes and we'll sort it out at the airport.'" It's an odd thing to sell at the airport. But you do some planning and you figure out ahead of time.

Now, to continue the sort of pedantry of this metaphor, the other characteristic of going to the Oregon Trail, unless you're the first 10 people to do it is hundreds, if not thousands of people have done it already so you kind of know what it's going to be like. It's the equivalent, in a piece of software, if they were like, "This application is written in COBOL. I want you to now write it in --" I don't know, what are the kids do nowadays? Something.io? I-want-you-to-write-this-in-a-hot-new-language.io and basically just duplicate it.

You’re going to still have to discover how to do things and solve problems but if the job is just one-to-one duplicate something, then you can do a lot more upfront planning for it.

CHARLES: While you're doing it, making the Uber and Airbnb.

MICHAEL: Yes.

CHARLES: Then you're done.

MICHAEL: I think that's the truth and I want to put it another way. We used to be down here in Texas, the way we run government here is just lovely but we used to have this notion of a zero-budget, which is basically like, "Assume I'm going to give you nothing and justify every penny that I'm going to give you." I think that's a good way to think about defaults. I mean, about requirements is default is you don't need any and only get as many requirements as you need. If you're building tanks or going to the Oregon Trail, you might need a lot of requirements upfront that are actually helpful.

CHARLES: But like a suit, you're just going to just strike out naked walking with.

MICHAEL: That's probably a bad idea unless you --

CHARLES: Yeah, that is a bad idea but that's the bar but what happened if I were to do that? I might make it for 20 miles.

MICHAEL: And build up from there and then have all the requirements that you need. I'm sure when Lewis and Clark went they were like, "We're going to need a quill and some paper and maybe a canoe and probably some guns and then let's see what happens." But that was a whole different situation than going to establish Portland.

CHARLES: That was an ultimate Agile move. That was a pretty Agile project. They needed boats, they built them but they didn't leave St Louis carrying boats.

MICHAEL: Right and they also didn't have a family of six that they needed to support and all this kind of stuff, right?

CHARLES: Uhm-mm.

MICHAEL: There was a question you asked a long time ago, not to steal the emceeing for you --

CHARLES: I would say, we need to get onto our topic --

MICHAEL: Oh, yeah. Well, maybe this is a good saying, what you're asking is, "How do you get this job?" and I don't think we ever addressed that.

CHARLES: Yeah, that's a great question. You said you had to consume a lot of stuff on the internet.

MICHAEL: Right. That's definitely how I do the job but I think how I get the job, there's an extended two-part interview with me on my Software Defined Talk Podcast Episode, available at SoftwareDefinedTalk.com, where I talk about my history of becoming an analyst and things like that but the way it happened is I don't have any visible hobbies, as you know Charles except reading the stuff in the Techworld. I would read about what's happening in the Techworld and would blog about it back in 2004, 2005 and I was discovered as it were by the people at RedMonk.

I remember for some reason, I wrote some lengthy opinion piece about a release of Lotus Notes. I don't know why but that was a good example. This is back when all of the programming job were going to be off shored and I thought it was imminent that I was going to lose my job. I was looking for a job and I shifted over to being an analyst. That like the way that you get into this kind of business is you establish, there's two ways --

CHARLES: You established expertise, right?

MICHAEL: Yeah, which is like always an unhelpful answer because it's sort of like, I was joking about this in another podcast, it's like Seth Godin's advice about doing good marketing, which is the way you do good marketing is you have an excellent product. If you have an excellent product that everyone wants to buy, then your marketing will take care of itself. I think if I'm asking how to market, I'm trying to figure out how to market a bad product. That's really what people want.

CHARLES: That's also just not true. That's just like flat ass not true. That's a lie.

MICHAEL: I mean, people who want to know how to diet better are not already healthy and dieting successful. You can't start with the base assumption of things are going well.

CHARLES: Well, it is true. I like to think that we have an excellent product. We sell an excellent product but the thing is you can just sit on your excellent product all day and you have to tell people about it. If you want them to come sample it and try, maybe eventually buy it like the advice that you just need an excellent product. I'm amazed at anyone who can actually can say that with a straight face.

MICHAEL: Well, he only writes like 150-word blogpost. I think his point is that you should aspire to have a unique situation and then marketing is easier. Similar with everyone's favorite example like an Apple or like a Pivotal or a ThoughtWorks. We eat all three of us and yourself as well, once someone gives you the benefit of the doubt of listening, you can explain why what you have is not available anywhere else.

CHARLES: What it boils down to is if you want to easily differentiate, allow people to differentiate your products from others, then be different. That's fair. I'll give --

MICHAEL: To summarize it, it begets more of the tactics of how one gets a job like I do. What's the name of the short guy in Game of Thrones? 'Tyrian'? 'Tyran'? 'Tyron'?

CHARLES: Tyrion.

MICHAEL: At one point, Tyrion is like, "I do two things. I know things and I drink," so that's how you get into this type of business as you establish yourself as an expert and you know things. Now, the third thing which I guess Tyrion was not always required to do is you have to be able to communicate in pretty much all forms. You need to be good at written communication, at verbal communication, at PowerPoint communication, whatever all the mediums are. Just knowing something is not very useful. You also have to tell people these things.

CHARLES: I think Tyrion is pretty good at that.

MICHAEL: Yeah, that's true but he doesn't ever write anything. There is no Twitter or things like that.

CHARLES: I feel like [inaudible] been a pretty big deal in the blogosphere.

MICHAEL: Sure, no doubt. The metaphor kind of breaks down because the lattice for the continuing counterarguments do not exist in the Game of Thrones universe but whatever.

CHARLES: They've got the ravens. That's like Twitter and it's bird.

MICHAEL: That is true. Knowing how to deploy a raven at the right time, with the right message is valuable.

CHARLES: We buffer up our ravens so that they fly right at eleven o'clock.

MICHAEL: That's true. I could be convinced otherwise.

CHARLES: That's why they arrived both at 6PM in the Westeros --

MICHAEL: I guess true to the metaphor of a tweet, most of the communications in Game of Thrones is either, what are they called? Little Birds? That the [inaudible] always has and then the Big Birds. You've got to tweets and the blogs.

CHARLES: This is like it's nothing but Twitter.

MICHAEL: Exactly. You got to really communicate across mediums. Now that the other thing that's helpful and you don't necessarily have to do this but this is what I think gets you into the larger margin. The more profitable parts of the work that I do is you have to be able to consult with people and give them advice and consulting is largely about, first figuring out the right opportunity to tell them how they can improve, which usually is it's good if they ask you first. I don't know about you but I've found that if you just pro-offer advice, especially with your spouse, you're basically told that you're a jerk.

CHARLES: Well, it'd be like a personal trainer and walking around me like, "Hey man. Your muscle tone is kind of flabby. You got to really work on that."

MICHAEL: The line between a good consultant and being overly-explain-y is difficult to discern but it's something that you have to master. Now, the other way you consult with people is you study them and understand what their problems are and you're sympathetic to them and I guess you can be like a British nanny and just scold them. That's a certain subset of consulting.

CHARLES: Don Rickles of consulting?

MICHAEL: That's right. You just help them understand how all of this knowledge that you have applies to them and hope solve their problems like the FordPass thing. When I went from being a developer to an analyst, it was a big risk to take on. I think I probably took like a $30,000 pay cut and I went from a big company health insurance to being on a $10.99 and buying your own health insurance which a whole other conversation. We talked about that every now and then but like it's a risky affair. It's not a promotion or even a lateral move. It's just an entirely different career that you go into. Then you talk with people a lot. As an analyst, you're constantly having to sort out the biases that you have with vendors who want to pay you to save things versus end-users who want to hear the truth. You can't really see a lot of Gartner and Forrester work but the work that you can see publicly from people like RedMonk, it's pretty straightforward.

CHARLES: Yeah it is and whatever they did, a piece that was for one of their clients, there was always a big fat disclaimer.

MICHAEL: Now, the other thing I would say is what I've noticed -- not to be all navel-gazing -- about myself and other people who are successful at whatever it is I do is there's two things. One, they constantly are putting themselves out there. I remember and this is probably still the case. This is probably all in Medium. There's probably a Medium post every quarter that's like, "If you're a developer, how do you give more talks. What your first conference talk?" Basically, the chief advice in there, other than bring business cards and rehearse is essentially like you just got to get over that idea of self-promotion. You basically have to self-promote yourself incessantly and do all those things that you find nauseous and be like, "Me, me, me," which is true. You've got to get over that thing.

If you're like me and you're an introvert who actually doesn't really like that many people, except a handful of people like yourself that I'm friends or family with, you have to put on the mask of an extrovert and go out there and do all this extrovert stuff or you'll fail. I shouldn't say you'll fail, you won't increase your overall comp and margin and everything. You'll basically bottom out at about $120,000 a year or so because that's about as much as anyone will pay for someone who just write stuff but doesn't actually engage in the world and consult. You've got to do that. Then the other consequence of that is you always have to be trying out new types of content and mediums like here we are in a podcast. Long ago, you and I, in 2005 or 2004 --

CHARLES: You got me to sign up for Twitter.

MICHAEL: Yeah, like we started off a podcast because I remember hearing the IT conversation stuff and John [inaudible], who is a big inspiration for me, a role model, I remember he was just trying out podcast and I was like, "All right. I'll try that out. That looks like fun," and then here we are.

CHARLES: I remember you tried out the podcast and you're like, "Let's go into your backyard or my backyard. Let's talk about software for 15 minutes." I remember that very clearly and that was 12 years ago. Then I remember also like with Twitter, you're like, "Now, you should sign up for this Twitter thing," and I remember I did and that's when it was still coming through SMS on your phone and like "I’m walking around Teatown Lake. I’m going to get tea." And I was like, "Oh, my God. This is so fucking stupid." But little did I know, you were actually signed me up to a service that changed my life.

MICHAEL: Yeah, it was the stage direction era of Web 2.0 where you're just supposed to give people your status updates, instead of your searing insights. But yeah, you've tried it all these different mediums because again it goes back to your job is to communicate. You need to tell people things that you know.

CHARLES: Coté, what is your strategy on virtual reality?

MICHAEL: My strategy in virtual reality. Well, you've caught me, Charles because I'm not into that. You remember when Time Magazine had that Chinese lady who was like a... Not Frontside. What was the name of the big virtual reality thing that was big...?

CHARLES: Second Life.

MICHAEL: Second Life, who is a Second Life millionaire.

CHARLES: Yeah, she had armies of people. She was mining some resource in Second Life and then reselling it and she made a lot of money.

MICHAEL: I don't really like visual mediums so as Marshall McLuhan would say 'hot mediums'. I guess I like the cool mediums. That's not my thing. That's where my principle fails. Maybe I'll do that one day.

CHARLES: This is pretty hot. This medium is pretty like --

MICHAEL: I think maybe audio broadcast is hot. I'm just pretending like I know. This is another trick that you can deploy that my wife has picked on is most of the time, 78% of the time, I actually have no idea what I'm talking about. I just know words. I don't actually know Marshall McLuhan theory. I read that one book a long time ago and I remember that scene in Annie Hall where he gives a little diatribe to whatever the Woody Allen character is. That's the extent of my Marshall McLuhan knowledge.

CHARLES: Was Marshall McLuhan actually in Annie Hall?

MICHAEL: He was.

CHARLES: Don't sell yourself short, Coté.

MICHAEL: Sure.

CHARLES: You know things and you drink so let's talk about that second aspect because I know that you like me whole tearing up as a role model.

MICHAEL: I should say since we're both happily married, except for the third thing that he does which he --

CHARLES: Oh, right.

MICHAEL: Another unmentionable word. He too freely hangs out with the ladies.

CHARLES: Right, anyway aside from that, throughout doing all this stuff, you keep a very, very chill perspective on things. I feel like the tech world gets so wound up around itself and it gets so tight and so stressed about its own problems. There's constantly wars in JavaScript and before we were in the JavaScript world, we were warring in Ruby. I remember when Twitter went over to using Scala instead of Ruby. Oh, my goodness, it was terrible times. I feel like there's a lot of stress and yes, you want to take it seriously but I feel like you've always been able to maintain an even-keeled perspective about technology which actually allows you to commentate on it effectively and intelligently because you're able to unwind yourself from the squabbles of the day and see maybe a bigger picture or something like that.

MICHAEL: That's nice of you to characterize me to use a -- is that a hanging, dangling participle there, when you're in [inaudible]?

CHARLES: Yeah, I don't know.

MICHAEL: I think that's also just a function of being old.

CHARLES: So are you actually not stressed or is it just part of your persona of being an extrovert or something like that?

MICHAEL: About the tech world? No, I'm not stressed about that. As you kind of outlined, especially I was not sent the demographics for the show, which is fine. I'll overlook that but I'm guessing that that was a joke.

CHARLES: Who got some designers, developers --

MICHAEL: I'm guessing there's a lot of people who actually are on the frontlines of working on software. I think this happens also in the white collar set. But essentially, it's really easy to slip into over allegiance to something and I don't know what rhetorical fallacy this is but it's the bias of over allegiance to something, you get all wrapped up in defending a tool over something and the virtue of it, whether it's Emacs and vi. I'm sure reactive people, whatever that is, have all sorts of debates.

The thing is when you're heads down on this stuff, you don't realize how petty all those discussions are. It's not so much that it's a waste of your time but it's just one battle in an overall war that you have. It's good to have opinions and figure things out but you should just relax about it because the more angry and emotional you get, you're going to make a lot of mistakes and decision and problems. I wish I had an example of this but this is one of those things that intuitively as you ages as developer, it's not like your literal age. It's just the amount of time you've been developing software. You could be a 25-year old who's been developing software for 10 years and you would probably get this notion but you just realize that stuff changes and you just learn the new things. It's kind of not a big deal like one day, you're going on and on about how vi is great and the next day you're using that Atom editor and then whatever and you just use the tool that's appropriate and it's annoying when you're younger and people are applying Hacker News with like, "You should use the tool that is appropriate," which is a stupid reply. That's just kind of how it is.

Also the other thing, in the more white collar world, as an analyst, especially doing strategy for a company, you can't be biased by things because then you'll make poor decisions as an analyst. Also when you're doing strategy in M&A that result in bad business outcomes so you actually be very unbiased about things.

CHARLES: I think it applies in everything. If you get too emotionally invested in one particular approach in software, literally in anything you do, it does result in bad outcomes. The problem is you may not actually realize the consequences of those bad outcomes far down the road from the poor decision that you made that caused you that outcome so you might not necessarily connect it back.

MICHAEL: Yeah, and I keep bringing this up but I think another effect of being calmer in your nerd life is having something that you do outside of your programming life, which is either having a family or having hobbies or something like that but you know --

CHARLES: Or having a wild turkey.

MICHAEL: Yeah but you've got to have something, a reason to stop thinking about your tech stuff or it'll consume you. I suspect when you see the older graybeards who go on and on about open source and they're very like... I don't know. What's the word? They’re very over the top and fervent about tech stuff. It's probably because like me, that's their only hobby and they haven't figured out how to how to control it. It becomes part of their identity and it defines them and then they're down this twisty, turny path of annoyance to the rest of us.

CHARLES: Again, don't sell yourself short, Coté. You've got plenty: you love the cooking and eating and the drinking so close this. Do you have a favorite drink that you've been mixing lately?

MICHAEL: No.

CHARLES: Or any kind of favorite food because every time I go over to your house, even if we're having pizza, there's always a nice hors d'oeuvre or something to drink, something to tweak that appetite for something special. I kind of wondering if there's anything that you're into.

MICHAEL: I have some very basics. One, I don't know if I drink a lot or drink a little. I think the science on this is very confusing, kind of like drinking coffee. I try to drink less. I basically go back to the basics of I want cheap wine that's not terrible. That's what I'm always trying to discover. I think I've also started to rediscover just straight vodka. That's pretty good. I think that fits into the grand scheme.

CHARLES: I just can't do it. I can't follow you there. I need some, what do they call them? Gin florals? I can drink gin --

MICHAEL: Oh yeah, that's good too.

CHARLES: That's about as close as I can get to straight vodka.

MICHAEL: And then food-wise, I just wrapped up finally figuring out how to cook fish and chicken without it tasting terrible.

CHARLES: Oh! What's the secret?

MICHAEL: No, I want to put a disclaimer out. There's a EULA on this. I'm not responsible for anything bad that happens but what you want to do is cook at about 10 degrees less than you're supposed to. A chicken is supposed to be 165 degrees but you take it out of the pot when it's like 150 or 155 on another part of the pan. Fish is supposed to be 145 degrees but you take it off when it's about 130 or 135. It cooks a little bit more but these guidelines to cook your meat to that thing, it ruins it. Also you can brine a chicken and things like that. Also, what you want to get is an instant meat thermometer. One of those that you can just poke in your meat so you're always checking the temperature. That's what I've been working on.

CHARLES: I have a theory about that. I will laid out really quickly, maybe it's just because the juices. It's the juice that so yummy there so you want those to be locked in and boiling but not boiled away. I'm going to give that a try on my --

MICHAEL: And fish is particularly tricky.

CHARLES: Because all it takes is five minutes. Sometimes, it's two minutes and 30 seconds too long and you ruin the fish.

MICHAEL: Then the next theory I want to try out is that you can actually fry fish in pure butter but you've got to paper towel it off afterwards because too much butter ruins it. But I think if your paper tower it off like you do grease off of bacon, then I think that's how you achieve -- not as good as a restaurant because in a restaurant, they have those butane torches and the crisp it up on the outside or reverse sear or whatever --

CHARLES: Is that what they do? Do they just run their torch right over the fish?

MICHAEL: That's all I can figure. They might also be professional cooks who know how to cook things.

CHARLES: They might have done it a lot of times. They might have had someone like Gordon Ramsay yelling at them constantly. "I can't believe this fish is so terrible. Waah!" All right. I'm going to give the fish a try. I'm going to give the chicken a try and I'm going to give everything that you just spent the last hour talking about, also a try.

MICHAEL: Well, thanks for having me on. It's always fun to have a show with you. I just posted yesterday our second revival of the Drunken Retired Podcast, which is over at Cote.show. It's just '.show'. URLs are crazy nowadays. I guess the only self-promotional thing I have is I'm over in Twitter @Cote. It'd be nice if everyone should just go follow me there because I'm always very sad that I don't have enough followers and they'll never verify me. I don't understand what the problem is. I'm clearly me.

Then I mentioned earlier, the main podcast that I do is Software Defined Talk, which is at SoftwareDefinedTalk.com and you should come spend a lot of money on Pivotal stuff. I'm happy to tell you all about that. Just go check out Pivotal at Pivotal.io

CHARLES: I guess that is about it. We will talk to everybody later. Thank you for staying tuned and listening to this supersized episode. Come check us out sometime!