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**Ian Miell:** It would very much depend. I really enjoy the self-publishing, because of two reasons. One is pretty selfish - I take 80% of the money. But more seriously, you don't write books to become rich, you write books because they develop you... And it would depend in which way it would develop me. |
My interests now are moving up the stack towards management and consulting, and so if Wiley came to me and said "Would you like to write a book on money flows in tech, in organizations?" I would be up for that, because it's Wiley, and that would increase my credibility. |
Something the editor told me when I started writing Docker in Practice - because I said, "No one writes books for the money, right?" He said, "Well, you can make some money, but what you'll find is that it puts you in a different category in the industry." And that was very true. Suddenly, doors are opening to me. Not ... |
I always say to people, if someone tells me now "I've written a book on X", I don't think "Wow, they must know so much about X." I think "Wow, they must be really organized." Because the hard bit of writing a book, once you get past the basic knowledge you need to write it, is having the level of organization to hold d... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I can see that. It is discipline, you're right. It is the commitment, it is seeing it through shipping it... Because it's very different -- I mean, maybe if you self-publish you can do chapters at a time, and then the book grows... With a publisher it's a little bit different. It's a bit more structur... |
And still, you managed to write a published book -- well, two, because the second edition is not the same book, as you pointed out... And you also self-published three books. And also, you have the course. We'll add a link in the show notes, but if you're curious and if you want to contribute to Ian's future self-publi... |
**Break:** \[23:11\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I would like us to start going a bit up the stack, as you mentioned... So we talked Git, we talked Bash, we talked history, how it all began... Very different recollections of that. I remember that I started giving you some feedback on the Bash the Hard Way, but I don't think I finished... Maybe like ... |
**Ian Miell:** I don't remember, but yeah, it's fine... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah, I still remember that. When you mentioned Bash, I was like "Ahh, I should have given you some feedback five years ago or three years ago (however long it was)." Yeah, I did like part of it, but then I had to stop. |
So the title of this episode is "Follow the money." And the reason why it is what it is is because you told me that this is something that you have on your mind quite a lot. You've mentioned very briefly money flows, so first of all, I'm curious what money are we talking about? Is it the proverbial money, is it the act... |
**Ian Miell:** Sure, yeah. So I was aware that when we called this "Follow the money", that it would sound like I was saying "Hey, you should get all the money you can as an engineer." And that's very much not what I'm saying... Especially when I mentioned that I worked for banks, it really sounds like I was money-grab... |
I didn't think about this too much as a significant thing, but then we tried to convert to being a product company, and failed. There were also reasons we could argue about, about why that failed... But I took that experience, I had my ideas about we used the wrong technologies, or we had the wrong culture, or whatever... |
There was a common meme when we talk about DevOps and we talk about software engineering development, that when you're young, you think about tools. "Should I use Go, or should I use Java, or should I use Ruby...?" And people really focus on that. Then the wise old person says "No, no, no. It's not about that. It's abo... |
\[28:04\] The engineers think of a platform as this continuously engineered product, and it needs constant investment, and this investment is repaid over time, and the more you build it and the more you automate, the more you get as investment over time. |
But some organizations are still in this very transactional "I pay for something and then I have a thing", and then that's it. So getting them to think in this kind of continuous investment way and selling something that isn't just "Oh, we had ten engineers working for a month, and therefore it costs X", we have this t... |
I saw this in banks, to some extent, because we were building a platform that was consumed by the rest of the business, so it was like a product, but there was actually no way for us to be paid internally for that. So we had - I don't know how many teams - many, many teams using this platform, but the ones who were usi... |
These are all questions that make me think "Oh, you know what's at the bottom of this? It's how money moves around in an organization, and why money moves around in an organization." If you can sort that out, or at least get that aligned with the way you want to work, then suddenly things can move much faster. Organiza... |
I spoke to my CFO where I work at Container Solutions and he said "Yeah, there's this whole thing called agile accounting." And he was a big fan of it. He turned me on to a couple of books on the subject... It tries to overthrow this yearly cycle in favor of continuous accounting... Because that's familiar to us, right... |
So there must be a Conway's Law type thing here, which says that the organizational structure determines the tools and technologies you use, but what determines the organization structure? Well, one way to look at it is the financial structure. How does money move around? So you get this thing of like -- you're always ... |
\[32:06\] Once we go back to that, someone else pointed out - someone very experienced pointed out and called it. Accounts are very used to the idea of investment. If you buy a warehouse, they understand that you buy the warehouse and you have to maintain the warehouse. Amazon don't just buy a warehouse and then think ... |
This is all not new to accountants, they understand it... But we don't talk to them. As engineers, we're scared of -- maybe I speak for myself, but it's a bit like when people talk to us, they suddenly get these jargon words, and we're like "We have no idea what you're talking about." It's like for us when we get to ac... |
I remember learning about the difference between cap-ex and op-ex, and I was like -- suddenly, it makes sense to me why the cloud has taken off, because it's treated differently from a tax point of view and a spending point of view. Suddenly, cloud makes a lot more sense. |
So I haven't formed this into a coherent theory yet. There's still some thoughts sort of flying around in my head, but it's something that I'm super interested in exploring more. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I find that really fascinating, in that you're right, we rarely think about that. Maybe if you're a self-bootstrap business and you have a product that you're working on, maybe the relationship is very clear between what you're investing your time in and the return on that investment. Are you doing th... |
It's interesting of thinking it in terms of money flows, and continuous money flows. I think when you're starting a budget, even your personal budget - you know, like, okay, you're saving money, but don't focus on the pot, focus on what's incoming and what's outgoing. As a result of that, you will build a pot. That's j... |
As I mentioned, a self-bootstrap business - I think it's very clear. A medium-sized business - maybe it starts getting a bit more opaque. 100 people, 200 people... But once you get to tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people, this is completely opaque. You don't even actually -- and I know that some comp... |
So this is very interesting, but again, I fail to see how this would make -- I mean, smaller company yes. Bigger company - it's just impossible. So would you use some sort of proxies? |
Let's imagine that you're part of a big company, and let's imagine that you're working on a product which is sold for licenses, as you mentioned; you buy the thing and you use the thing, and then you renew your license every year. Let's imagine that the team that is working on the product cannot know the cost that thos... |
**Ian Miell:** \[35:53\] Well, yes, this opaqueness is absolutely part of the problem. I think what I was talking about earlier was more like structural stuff. But if we're talking from a point of view of an engineer - when I was working for very large organizations, I had the same question, "How can we measure the val... |
So even that structure wasn't set up for people to think about things in terms of "Well, I'm delivering this value to the business, and therefore I can justify this funding for future growth." It just hadn't been joined up. |
When you're a company of a certain size - and being opaque is fine; most people don't have the time, or energy, or inclination to think about these things. When those companies want to change, they just say to themselves "Oh, we'll just be Agile now. We'll put some posters up, and we'll have some courses, and we'll use... |
In fact, I read a blog piece called "Five things I did to change an IT team's culture." I was given the task of managing an IT team where the director had left... I did five specific things to change the team's culture, from firing someone, to getting my hands dirty on the floor and looking at the pipes of work that we... |
Going to the floor is a huge thing. That's practical thinking, too. But another practical thing that I'm thinking about now is this whole money flows things. And it's not an easy sell, because "Why is this guy who knows about Kubernetes suddenly telling me about cap ex, and op ex, and money flows? This is not what I hi... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** The more conversations I have with different people, the more I realize that it is this holistic approach that people are not taking. They are comfortable talking about being uncomfortable in their own little narrow area, whether it's coding, whether it's operations, whether it's whatever it may be...... |
\[40:25\] Maybe we look up to our managers and our leaders and expect them to have all the answers... But it's a collective thing. It's a team effort. We have to come together, and different people bring different experiences. And you're right, I think this is a very underexplored area. We don't know the relationship t... |
**Ian Miell:** One of the things that I now advise every team that's moving towards CI/CD is not Jenkins over this, or whatever tool that you think... I say "First, measure how expensive it is to make a change on your system." Let's take a CSS change to your site. One hex value change. How long does that take to go thr... |
So now do we do GitHub, or CI/CD? Arguably, they're the same thing... And we then measure the costs of the change now. So now you've automated your tests, now you've done this. Oh, you may still have a legacy QA process that makes everyone feel happy, but it's short-term, because that stuff is destined. We have fewer e... |
Other companies don't have that money flow. They don't have the same thing; they ignore maintenance, and kind of beg, borrow and steal energy from engineers to fix stuff while keeping them busy with other stuff... But they just pretend it's not there. So if you can get measurements on these things, then you can start t... |
\[44:01\] So that's the financial metric... What's the non-financial metric? Well, we can do even more. We have fewer bugs, we have easier rollbacks, we don't have big meetings with lots of project managers in them and tech leads discussing the huge amount of changes that are going in once every month. All these things... |
You also have to link to sales. Sales is a pipe of money, right? And if sales think of things in terms of transactional, they pay for something and it's just done - that's incorrect. With one organization we ended up discussing we should have invisible line items on sales, to say "Well, behind the scenes they're paying... |
But if you don't think about these things when you're starting the process, then it can flounder as you encounter them later. That's a pattern I've seen in all the businesses I've worked that want to change the way they work. You start by thinking about the tools, and then you end up dealing with stuff that you didn't ... |
We have the same problem - we think of things in terms of technology and process, and we like system design, and thinking of things in terms of that, but we don't wanna think about the money; it's kind of annoying. "I have to go and talk to someone about getting -- just give me the money I need to get the job done. Why... |
**Break:** \[46:37\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So we were talking about money flows, we were talking about the cost of change, which is something that really stuck with me. We were talking about the holistic approach to developing and shipping code. Shipping value. It's not just code, it's value, and I think if you start thinking about things in t... |
So with that in mind, what would you say that is the biggest mistake, in your experience, that you've seen developers make? Because you've been around the block a couple of times now, you've seen small orgs, big orgs, banks, startups, everything in between... Maybe there's multiple mistakes that you see developers make... |
**Ian Miell:** Yes, I think it's related to what we were talking about - it's the lack of holistic thinking... Which is completely natural. Because if you're a specialist and you're young, you will have focused very tightly on your domain of knowledge, and worked hard to improve that, and we've all been there. I make t... |
So people were friending me up and saying "I wanna use Docker." And I would have to explain to them "I can't just install it on your machine. There are these following blocks." And some of them were interested, but most of them were just kind of impatient, like "Can't you just give me what I want?" And what I've found ... |
So that's kind of a microcosm; that's kind of a single anecdote. But generally, I see engineers just thinking about things in terms of technology. Here's a perfect example - I made that mistake when I tried to do Erlang in the business. I thought "Erlang is a perfect fit for some of our problems. It's a functional prog... |
So this is a mistake I often see, failing to see -- and it's not a criticism of them, of these people... But if they fail to respond to that challenge, that's the mistake, I think, that they make... Because you've gotta learn these rules of business somehow. Or you can just stick in your own domain and work away at it.... |
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