S1E2 — What We Measure Shapes Who We Become
It is episode two.
Duena:It's Congratulations on a very, very successful episode one.
Dave:Yes. Thank you. It was amazing. Was it not?
Duena:It was. Viral indeed. And what a reaction. Obviously, everyone knows who are doing this well in advance. So but Yeah.
Duena:I don't see why there wouldn't be any. So here's where we left you at. We were gonna tell you a little bit about ourselves every episode. We were going to have a couple of different segment.
Dave:A few.
Duena:A few. Mhmm. We have some guests in mind.
Dave:We do.
Duena:And we Right?
Dave:Yeah. We tech titans and ordinary technical folk.
Duena:Right. And I had a couple of other proposals. And what we've decided is we're not preparing any of these. Whatever we're doing, we're teaming live with you right now. So I'll tell you what I thought of, and then we'll see what they think.
Dave:Right. Because I don't think of anything really. You're the ideas gal. Right?
Duena:Well, two things here. One, I wouldn't put it quite like that.
Dave:How would you put it?
Duena:I would say you have been busy, and I have had more chances to brainstorm. But I'm There
Dave:is yeah. That's a very polite way of putting it.
Duena:I mean, you know, I'd we probably have to cut this. Might have to make this an edit point. We have been very busy, ladies and gentlemen, over the last couple of weeks. We're trying to get into some routine sprints. Dave here, as we may have mentioned it in passing last episode, has just started making some magic with a new company.
Duena:So loads and loads happening.
Dave:When you say just started, but it's, you know, two months.
Duena:Has it been two months?
Dave:Two months.
Duena:Wow. Time
Dave:flies. It's past that point of not being able to say, oh, dear. I've got no idea what's going on here.
Duena:Do you have ideas now?
Dave:Yeah. Do you have
Duena:strong ideas now?
Dave:I've always had strong ideas.
Duena:That must make for a
Dave:Interesting.
Duena:For an interesting conversation. I I'd love to be a fly on the wall for some of those. So there's that happening. We're also growing over here in terms of our understanding of who we are and how we want to present ourselves. We're not gonna be hiding anything.
Duena:We've we've went for the most authentic path we've ever trodden.
Dave:One point? Anything? I didn't anything.
Duena:Right. At this point, we do need to discuss some things again. But, I mean, I'm open for the conversation. Right? Obviously, everyone is aware this is PG.
Duena:Yeah? Yeah. And not that kind of a show. So I'm not sure sure anyone's with it. But obviously, we're going to be making sure that everyone's names are being changed.
Duena:That companies are not being referred by their actual corporate details. Mhmm. We're we're not we're not out to destroy anyone's
Dave:Careers or reputations for companies or
Duena:or bubble. Yeah. But we will try to bring as much as we can of real stuff in. And we were thinking of a couple of things, if you remember over the weekend where we said maybe we can bring a couple of CTOs undercover, we can get them we can change their voices, their faces with a couple of smart filters, and just let them tell us the real.
Dave:How it goes for real? From the cold face of a CTO.
Duena:Right. Or that of a filter on top of the CTO if they don't quite fill the the the need
Dave:Okay.
Duena:Or the ability. See? This is what happens when you think of ideas live. It's it's very difficult to right. It's very difficult to go against it in a considered fashion.
Dave:Yeah. So we might have to change this format and actually and I think of ideas up front.
Duena:I don't think so. I think this is fine.
Dave:We won't script in it. Alright? Scripting's
Duena:out. Mhmm.
Dave:But we might have an idea of the three points we're gonna talk about.
Duena:I would like you to speak for yourself if at all possible because I have a lot more than three points we're going to be talking about. I was going to present our listeners with the lovely segments we are planning. I'm looking at four of them right now.
Dave:This this is news to me, ladies and gentlemen.
Duena:I This didn't is I said it's all live. It's all happening in front of people. Wouldn't all this is it. This is what I meant to real. Right?
Dave:What did you just meant that I know nothing about it?
Duena:Collaborate none of us knows everything. Well, you could have written down there. No. This is new. Some of them are here, but most of them are news to me as well.
Dave:So who wrote them down?
Duena:Well, I did. Well, I don't I won't I'm not there. The whole internal reference we might have to cut. Yeah. Speaking of which, we we can ask you listeners.
Duena:What do we call people? Listeners, people, ladies and gentlemen, sounds very revolutionary and leftist to call them people. Workforces, human resources.
Dave:Yeah. Human resources. Those humans that we resource to do work.
Duena:We need to come up with a name. So what we will do though, and it's a thing I've just inaugurated on our other conversation, is the the we cross pollinate here the secret society for human work advocates. And over there, what we're doing is we're getting people to come on in for a minute or two, tell their story even if it is protected. And then we're getting people to vote live on what they wanna hear next time by using a public trailer board. How do you feel about that?
Dave:Sounds good. Sounds good.
Duena:To be interested in attempting that for hours? Yeah. Shall we list a couple topics, see who resonates with them?
Dave:We certainly could try that. Or even people could set up burner emails.
Duena:Mhmm.
Dave:Just send us whatever burner email. Well, not quite whatever by burner email because, you know, good taste does have to prevail sometimes. Right.
Duena:I don't we won't judge people based on their burner email. Yeah. We won't. So so that can stand. Right?
Duena:We are okay with doing pop ins. We are okay with and those pop ins will probably be about five to ten minutes. Whenever the idea strike in some other conversations, if we think it's something super valuable, we'll get it in.
Dave:He wasn't talking about children's pop ins.
Duena:What's a children's poppins?
Dave:When the children come in and say, I need something quick.
Duena:I have no idea that's an actual word. Here's a delightful side of us, ladies and gentlemen. I I say delightful with sarcastic, but I'm hoping I'm wrong. We I'm not a native English speaker. That's not used to anyone who's ever read me before and attempted to make sense of my long winded phrases.
Dave:And I'm barely an English speaker.
Duena:Dave is a very, English speaker. And so here
Dave:It's just a
Duena:couple of things. Something fell. Yeah. Things fall live. We haven't talked on how to do a live yet, and are conscious we've jumped from one topic to another.
Duena:There's not gonna be any structure here. Why are we even pretending? There's not gonna sound professional with structure and shit. So Mhmm. If we manage to crimsy shit, does that exclude us from going on some channels?
Duena:I don't You're like no Apple. You said shit. Goodbye.
Dave:Yeah. No. Doesn't say.
Duena:She just can can say what can we not say?
Dave:C word?
Duena:Well, to be fair, I wasn't inclined to sort of Yeah. Right. So really, what we're looking at is trying to bring a couple of new ideas in, but we'll we'll think of each of these segments as MVP and and a bit of a just a just a check. Right? Just a little experiment.
Duena:We'll bring it in by the next week. If you guys have told have told us you hated it and it was Yeah. If you
Dave:hate it, we'll just
Duena:be Side.
Dave:Crying into our drinks.
Duena:Yeah. But we'll also axe it for them. Yeah. We'll let it go.
Dave:We'll let it go.
Duena:We'll let it go. Oh, no. I forgot We're what
Dave:and not gonna agile this and do the slow iterative.
Duena:That's exactly my point. We're where? You said axe it. Well, if people are genuinely hated and they have no use for it, of course, we'll axe it. We'll only improve something the customer has told you they don't want.
Duena:I don't mean entire podcast, but I mean various segments. If they're very clear, they don't have any need for any of them. We'll let them go, of course. Yeah. Right?
Duena:Okay. I mean, unless we're making this as a memory for our children's children's children.
Dave:Well, once it's out on the web, you can't put it back.
Duena:I had the moment.
Dave:You had a vision. Right?
Duena:Yes. But
Dave:When we said it would be PJ, but that vision you had in your head wasn't?
Duena:Yeah. No. No. It was. It was just dramatic.
Duena:I'm just wondering, have you seen that video yesterday or so? We can obviously link it. I don't know who's gonna be doing this. It's it's gonna be a a job for an internal human, not some AI linking things where the you know, they're just trying to kind of make it clear how horrendous it is to not think of your kid's privacy over time and, you know, kind of what people could be doing with with their data, with our children's data if they they they get in their position. It's been circulated on LinkedIn and so on and so forth.
Duena:And I was thinking, this is true. We do need to be careful of what we say of them. I don't know why I've entered this tangent. Had a point to begin with. I didn't have a point to begin with.
Dave:You had a point.
Duena:I'm actually pretty proud of this too.
Dave:Yeah. I know you don't. I'm just surprised you've lost it.
Duena:Oh, this is the first. It's like, it's gone. It's a missing point. Is it here? Is it here?
Duena:No. No. Nowhere in sight. Never mind. So back to people voting live, if they will.
Duena:If they won't, they won't. These lights in our studio are very far from being done. We are very far from being clear on what what positions we must be in or how this is going out. At the time that we're recording this, there's no jingle, there's no intro, there's very loose instructions to any editor. Mhmm.
Duena:There's quite some unclarity on the social media distribution strategy, and they're all whip, which I hate. I don't like having loads of whip.
Dave:No. There is a lot of things in flight at the moment.
Duena:Fright. You can say that again. Yeah. So from another little thing I was hoping that we can leave each other with is I want one thing you'll teach me about technology today, and then I'll give you one thing I'll teach you about the world of humans today. So keep that in mind and think of it over the episode.
Duena:You can tell me at the end.
Dave:Mhmm. One thing about technology.
Duena:Yeah. It have it can be like a new piece of info or something I never thought of or Mhmm. You know, kind of something I wouldn't have understood otherwise. Just pick something and kind of explain it to me. Make it three minutes long.
Duena:Mhmm. Mhmm. Mhmm. Well, okay. We'll make it as an edit point, and you'll come up with something that's gonna sound like you did in the moment.
Duena:But Yeah. You can do it later.
Dave:Just invent something off the top of my head.
Duena:Well, or on the bottom of your head. I'm not really interested on what direction of your head it's coming from. Yeah. So I don't even actually have no idea what our respective videos look like, the top one. So are we gonna look like we're looking up at each other?
Duena:No? No.
Dave:That's a massive sequo.
Duena:Is it? It is a massive sequo. I can't tell if you're like, have we cut?
Dave:No. We're still going.
Duena:Are we? Something else fell. Something else is different. I feel like everything I was holding has fallen. And with that our video as well.
Dave:Disaster. Disaster. Disaster.
Duena:Has has stricken. Is that in English? Right. Okay. Really well all the way back and this when we cut this it's good we have to cut it with the accident that's gonna be otherwise it's gonna be really weird because my position has moved.
Duena:So anyways back to this edit point in the mid there we said last week that what we'd like to do is instead of making this very polished, if we know we've we've put something down and we wanna rework or give you a definition or whatever, we'll we'll do so. But that feels like we've given ourselves even more of what to do. Mhmm. And what about cleaning up to dos and backlog this week?
Dave:No.
Duena:I am.
Dave:Oh, yeah?
Duena:I am.
Dave:Normally, you just, you know, five in, three out.
Duena:Wait. Do you mean I should not put anything in? Is that clear now? I see
Dave:you've got got a lot of stuff in flight.
Duena:Do we?
Dave:Yep. Yeah. Just leave some stuff on the backlog. US products are in about more than, like, you know, you're able to choose. We haven't even, you know, charted our velocity.
Duena:Right. We haven't even. No. It's difficult to do if you don't have any.
Dave:Right. We've got some velocity, don't we?
Duena:Has moved.
Dave:Has moved. A ticket. Right. And the hoovering ticket doesn't count.
Duena:There's a hoovering ticket?
Dave:Yeah. I mean, who does not live their life via Trello boards and moving tickets around for hoovering, washing up, cooking, dusting, etcetera?
Duena:I don't feel like you're saying that in an adverative fashion, and we are veering towards a tiff rather than an informational session. Are you drinking on camera?
Dave:No. Because you're talking.
Duena:It's never occurred to me. Goddamn it. I could be silent from 10,000 and do whatever I like while I'm silent? This could be like a life lesson.
Dave:No. Not when you're silent. If I'm silent and you're silent, it's fifty fifty chance what this software is gonna pick up to say who's speaking. But as you're speaking, then I can just take a little swig of the beer and no one didn't would have known any different. I'm
Duena:say anything. Until you picked me up on this point. I wasn't aware. Why is that oh my god. Something like that.
Duena:Okay where do we cut from and do we even cut it? Fuck it just let it out okay I don't have the time to cut this to make it polished to make it good they can have what they can have so backtracking a little bit we've we've gotten a couple of videos we want you guys to see. We've gotten a couple of ideas we want you to think of with us. They are at the intersection of neurodivergence work and people and technology, obviously. We are here to to battle it out.
Duena:Ideally, you'll come up with maybe a scenario for us or a proposal or an idea or a question for us every week. We will keep our eyes open to our social media channels to see if anything comes from there. And just give us a, you know, kind of a a a project unicorn moment and go, what would you do there? I'll tell you what I would do from a human perspective, and they would tell you what he would do from a tech cum human perspective. How about that?
Dave:So that means I'll get two jobs. You get one job.
Duena:No. No? It doesn't. I understand technical concept as well just as you understand human concepts, but neither of us is.
Dave:As long as we're happy that we're both going into peep talking about peep at each other's gray zones.
Duena:Yeah. Very happy doing that. It's all we do all the time, isn't it? Yeah. Well, except for politics, we don't talk about politics.
Duena:No.
Dave:We don't. We do not talk politics.
Duena:Yeah. We can talk about Bruno in politics. You don't know who Bruno is? Yeah. Okay.
Dave:Who's everyone else? Bruno's.
Duena:I mean, you know, not everyone is clear who Bruno is, what the popcorn references are, what the friend references are. All of this, yes. We were going to ask our audiences, would they like a mini dictionary of our internal references? And then we can make an outside video of what they are and pop it into one of our channels. You'll find it somewhere.
Duena:How about that? Would you like that?
Dave:Be an ever growing list.
Duena:I would hope so. Otherwise, we'll stop talking to each other.
Dave:Some coming in, some
Duena:go out. Right. We have a bunch of funnies.
Dave:It'd be a very live document. That's all I'm saying.
Duena:It could all be a live document. Shall we share this podcast document with everyone online? Yeah. Why not? And should we cross podcast?
Duena:I've just had this conversation earlier today with the eminent and amazing Tracy Bannon who you now, I'm sure, know and like after having heard her interview me and be one of the most genius people in DevOps in general, not just because she's interviewed me. And I was speaking to Tracy about the fact that we are cooking something interesting. We might be cross pollinating between a number of podcasts. We don't wanna we don't wanna reveal much to either the listeners or our boys in advance. We'll see where we'll get to.
Dave:Ladies and gentlemen, this is as much as a surprise to me this year.
Duena:We're we're a hell bent on your surprise face.
Dave:I mean, this could just be Dave gets a revelation podcast. Mhmm. Mhmm. Dave gets delivered bad news, good news podcast.
Duena:It's just Dave and his face today podcast. Yeah. What Dave has to leave through podcast. It could very easily turn into that to be fair if we have to talk to me. So
Dave:Yep. Let's face it.
Duena:What what other very sorry. Completely cut you off, like, to the point that people are gonna be like, oh my god. That was bad.
Dave:No. I just think it's about it.
Duena:Oh, no cutting it. A little bit in. Cut you off. Big deal. I didn't realize you were talking.
Duena:Carry on. No.
Dave:You you crack on, love.
Duena:No. You crack on.
Dave:I can't remember. Forgot.
Duena:You crack on for
Dave:It it was a minor point.
Duena:I'm sure it was. So one other thing we had in mind was discussing whether or not we should have something we call a CTO boost weekly proposal. So every week, one of you it don't have to be a CTO. You can be a team leader of any kind. Just kind of you have someone in your team who has done something heroic.
Duena:Just nominate them, and we'll come talk about what they did. It doesn't have to be with their names. For instance, just today, we're gonna be talking about Joy and Jack, isn't it? Is it Joe and Jack that that Dave wants to praise today?
Dave:Joe and Jack, they want to praise today. Yes. Joe and Jack.
Duena:Have they done? Tell us how they've been heroic.
Dave:So we have not like not unlike a lot of systems, really. You know? A fair bit of tech debt. Right. And this week, we were unable to deliver some data.
Duena:Right.
Dave:And we had a couple of guys work, like, every night, every day, every weekend, comparing data, Excel spreadsheets, very, very hard, tedious, boring, dull work. But they got through it. And, again, this is exactly the sort of work the computer should be doing. So, yes, they've done a sterling job, and we should be able to reward them soon, I hope.
Duena:That's really good to hear. And, hopefully, they know who they are and they're they feel slightly at least rewarded by this particular shout out. We all know how important it is for our
Dave:But, obviously, it's not just a tech issue as well. We got product colleagues, sales colleagues, consultancy colleagues
Duena:Testing colleagues.
Dave:Very much all hands to the pump crisis level stuff.
Duena:I can't imagine that anyone would be exempt when it's balls to the wall. What? Crunch time. But how fine are those crunch times?
Dave:Alright. Well, look, this crunch times, this is when you can just JFDI stuff.
Duena:For our listeners? Just effing do it. Right.
Dave:So, you know, you've got waterfall, you've got agile, and then you've got JFDI.
Duena:Mhmm.
Dave:Completely different methodologies.
Duena:I mean, you're not encouraging anyone to be doing that, are you? No. Or to be counting on that as a matter of
Dave:No. No. No. Absolutely not. No.
Duena:But in a crisis Come worst comes to worst.
Dave:Yeah. I mean, I can remember a big crisis a little while back. We had some things over. And I was a good couple of bottles of wine down, and the cool comes in. It's all gone long again.
Dave:So there I was midnight, couple of bottles of wine down, had three or four DBAs crammed around my sharing screen and just like this is what I wanna do. Am I actually doing it? So JFDI, but with a few guardrails in place.
Duena:Right. And, obviously, that only works for that night, and then you have to figure out what the hell and and get it working from then on in in a sustainable fashion. But but out of those moments I mean, obviously, you remember this very vividly, and so does anyone else who's lived and and kind of had to survive through one of these p ones or p twos or ps, whatever numbers they are. Is this a standardized thing in the industry? Does everyone still call them ps?
Dave:No. Crisis p one, p two. Yeah. That's I think it's fairly common. But I would imagine that most of the the tech people listening on to this would know that feeling of getting a call out of the blue.
Dave:Something's gone wrong.
Duena:Yeah. They're getting it done with by hook or by crook that needs to happen sometimes. Yeah. Right. And those are really genuinely very unifying moments for everyone.
Dave:For some people. Yes. Other people, if blame's being tossed around by certain people, which you shouldn't really be doing, try not to do. This is a a blameless culture, but naturally, I do think, you know, some parts of the organization do go straight to blame.
Duena:This is an
Dave:interesting one. Slopey shouldered. Not my fault. Thank you. I'll see you later.
Dave:Nothing to do with me, Jack. Even if they can't help out, which if they could help out, right, which I just cannot fathom why someone who could help out goes sleepy shouldered.
Duena:Right. Oh, I can I can give you hundreds of reasons? Well, okay. I should give you hundreds of reasons. I don't know why I don't.
Duena:People have had human death for too long. People are largely disconnected, have really quit in their minds. They do still show up. They do still do most of the job. But the above and beyond bit obviously is gone, so you you you well know how that is.
Duena:There's loads of ways in which we can burn our people out, extra work, no support, lack of respect, lack of value, letting them exist in crisis are just some of them, but there's also external factors that we're living through every day. There's a cost of living crisis. There's a, you know, there's there's a moment in everyone's can could if you could potentially just stop hitting my view camera, that'd be great. Otherwise, I'll have to move yours as well. You gotta get that.
Duena:A good point. Yeah. Okay. Let's just tighten it up and see if we can end it. At the end of the day, we have a good solid twenty something minutes.
Duena:Once we get to 30 or so, it just means we've suffered enough. I don't feel like we are super smart today. Or I'm
Dave:super hot today. It's very hot this way.
Duena:On through, but maybe we need a air conditioning unit. Mhmm. So useless. This is not gonna work. We're gonna patch it with something else.
Duena:Right? We're gonna have to patch it with, like, extra. Right? Wait. See, one, two, three, and extra so that we can have a cut.
Dave:One, two, three.
Duena:Right. So this is all we have time for today or rather all you should have time to listen to today just because there are enough of those little segments to fill in your hour of driving and or hour of misery on the train having to listen to us. Again, get involved. This is not just us. This is ideally more of a community project than most of your other podcasts.
Duena:We're going to hope that you can get your opinion across, that you can come in and have interview segments, right, stories, and with you that we can kind of bridge this cast between people and technology so that we only have one happy enterprise. Yeah. And
Dave:It's the aim of the game.
Duena:Still haven't closed this. We don't have an end exit phase yet. We should, but we don't. We don't have an interface. We have nothing of value really.
Duena:And we don't know why we started talking to you about these things other than we know a lot of stuff, but we gotta get a lot more organized in telling you what we've learned in our fifty thousand years. We just don't know where to start it from so that we don't quite bore you.
Dave:And not the podcast like it ends, like we're just falling off a cliff.
Duena:Good. So let's just end on a very excited note. Just you wait until you see our podcast next time.
Dave:Very excited.
Duena:Just come back and see how insane we are. Keep an eye on your channels meanwhile. Where you can find us is obviously on LinkedIn. You can find my newsletters either chasing psychological safety on Monday and Tuesdays. It's not been as regular as I would have liked it to be, but it will be from here on.
Duena:Or of course, the future is agile that comes out on Wednesdays. Both both of those are learning thing. But you can find us on our website which is at
Dave:peopleandtech.co.uk.
Duena:That's right. And obviously now we have a really pretty or we think it's pretty TikTok channel and a bunch of other social media platforms coming to people and tech pod from So here keep your eyes peeled and your ears open and your minds and hearts even more so, and we'll talk to you next week. Alright. Bye.
Dave:Thank you, everybody.
