1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:08,620 Welcome back, folks. This week, I sat down with Rachel Stevens of Red Monk, where we explored the edges of the analogy around technical debt. 2 00:00:08,980 --> 00:00:17,480 As two people with backgrounds in finance, we had quite a bit of fun, dare I say, too much fun, talking about where the analogy breaks down, 3 00:00:17,480 --> 00:00:29,960 but where we could also actually extract more insight by pushing further into the boundaries around what this finance construct is all about. 4 00:00:30,420 --> 00:00:34,040 Can we learn more? Can we understand more? Can we make better decisions? 5 00:00:34,740 --> 00:00:37,020 Those are all the things that we talked about this week. 6 00:00:37,100 --> 00:00:44,860 And you can also find some more resources in the show notes, slides to the presentation on this topic I presented back in May, 7 00:00:45,420 --> 00:00:55,940 in the show notes published on Pivotal.io, where you can also find a discount code for SpringOne Platform happening in Austin, Texas this coming October. 8 00:00:56,340 --> 00:01:00,140 So we hope to see you there, and I hope you enjoy the rest of this show. 9 00:01:04,440 --> 00:01:12,920 I was talking to my dad about the talk that I gave at Glucon, and it's like, oh, hey, dad. 10 00:01:13,020 --> 00:01:20,740 Yeah, I gave this talk. It was on trading derivatives of tech debt, and I was explaining what I kind of defined as tech debt. 11 00:01:20,740 --> 00:01:26,780 This is the problem when you have an accounting professor as a dad. 12 00:01:27,620 --> 00:01:33,220 He's like, Tormain, what you described really sounds more like a deferred cost. 13 00:01:34,800 --> 00:01:42,400 It's like, but dad, you can't trade derivatives on deferred costs, and that's so unsexy. 14 00:01:44,040 --> 00:01:48,940 How are we going to get anyone interested in wanting to talk about this if it's a deferred cost? 15 00:01:49,860 --> 00:01:51,480 Like, no one even knows what that means. 16 00:01:52,280 --> 00:01:58,900 So, you know, I think we've, I kind of got around that it was like, it was clearly an analogy. 17 00:01:59,760 --> 00:02:02,700 Then, okay, fine, if it helps people. 18 00:02:03,040 --> 00:02:10,660 But I just kind of loved that it was like, well, actually, Dormain, going full professor on me. 19 00:02:10,900 --> 00:02:12,280 That's 100% delightful. 20 00:02:12,900 --> 00:02:13,340 Yes. 21 00:02:13,720 --> 00:02:19,420 And I thought that my guest this week, guest, would you like to introduce yourself? 22 00:02:20,140 --> 00:02:22,020 Hi, I'm Rachel Stevens with Redbunk. 23 00:02:23,600 --> 00:02:31,380 I thought you would appreciate that one, given that you pointed out a number of the flaws in the tech debt analogy. 24 00:02:32,280 --> 00:02:41,960 And, like, I was just reviewing that post for my prep for Glucon, but now I'm like, it wasn't last year. 25 00:02:42,060 --> 00:02:45,060 I mean, it was a couple years ago now, right, that you wrote that? 26 00:02:46,080 --> 00:02:46,480 2017. 27 00:02:47,260 --> 00:02:47,560 Okay. 28 00:02:47,820 --> 00:02:48,160 Yeah. 29 00:02:48,520 --> 00:02:48,820 Okay. 30 00:02:49,880 --> 00:02:53,420 So now you've had, you know, some more time to kind of marinate on it. 31 00:02:53,460 --> 00:02:57,820 But, yeah, you pointed out this analogy has a bunch of flaws. 32 00:02:58,780 --> 00:03:10,160 And so, and then recently, I think I've been hearing lots of people talking about, it's like, you know, I listened to a podcast with some other folks who were just like, we've got to stop calling it that because it's demoralizing. 33 00:03:11,120 --> 00:03:18,440 And we end up with these tech debt boards that, like, you know, we're never actually working on, and it just demotivates people. 34 00:03:18,920 --> 00:03:27,640 And I sort of feel like, hmm, I think the analogy might be being misused in a couple of different ways here. 35 00:03:29,300 --> 00:03:30,580 Oh, that's interesting. 36 00:03:31,120 --> 00:03:34,940 So I feel like there are, like you said, a couple facets there. 37 00:03:35,020 --> 00:03:44,520 I think that one of the things that's important about using analogy is understanding how the party that you're trying to make the analogy to is likely to understand that. 38 00:03:45,020 --> 00:03:49,420 And that was kind of where my post came from, was trying to kind of talk. 39 00:03:49,580 --> 00:03:51,540 So my background is actually in finance. 40 00:03:51,740 --> 00:03:53,140 That's how I started my career. 41 00:03:53,820 --> 00:04:01,840 And so coming into the tech world and kind of getting this view of tech debt from the technical perspective, but also having this view of debt from a finance perspective. 42 00:04:01,840 --> 00:04:14,600 Sometimes the things that people thought were really scary to a finance mind don't necessarily set off all of the alarm bells that people think that they're setting off when they say interesting. 43 00:04:14,960 --> 00:04:17,600 It's like, yeah, the finance world is used to interesting. 44 00:04:17,980 --> 00:04:19,840 That's something that everyone is used to. 45 00:04:20,260 --> 00:04:29,260 The world runs on leverage, and people usually, when we do debt, it's something where it's a known amount borrowed for a known timeline. 46 00:04:29,260 --> 00:04:32,600 And generally, at a known interest rate, it's contractual. 47 00:04:33,080 --> 00:04:34,260 It's not that scary. 48 00:04:34,820 --> 00:04:44,200 It's just trying to make a known, understood, like kind of wise choice on how we want to use our resources now versus in the future. 49 00:04:46,040 --> 00:04:55,600 And sometimes that metaphor, when it comes to tech debt, can fall a little bit short because we don't have a lot of those things as knowns. 50 00:04:55,720 --> 00:05:01,060 And so, like, what we're trying to convey is risk, and we're using the term debt to try to convey that. 51 00:05:01,120 --> 00:05:11,200 And sometimes maybe we don't quite get our point across when we're talking about, like, there's going to be this future unknown state that we're going to have to work to fix. 52 00:05:12,380 --> 00:05:18,180 We don't necessarily know what that's going to be, when we're going to have to do it, how long we can run on the stack as we've built it. 53 00:05:18,800 --> 00:05:23,980 And so, I think that some parts of the analogy don't quite translate. 54 00:05:24,980 --> 00:05:41,420 But I also don't think it should be demoralizing because I think that – so, I'm going to turn it back to you because one of your parts of your talk that I loved the most was when you talked about how all code is debt and how debt really powers not only business but also all of IT. 55 00:05:41,420 --> 00:05:46,160 So, I'm going to turn it back to you because that's where I think that this is where it should go next. 56 00:05:46,800 --> 00:05:47,020 Yeah. 57 00:05:47,200 --> 00:06:00,420 Well, I mean, it's – I guess it's sort of revisiting the analogy and to your point where it's kind of gotten – folks have gotten wrapped around the axle around the wrong points. 58 00:06:00,420 --> 00:06:04,980 And, like, yeah, risk is really the issue we're trying to convey. 59 00:06:06,100 --> 00:06:17,620 And so, looking at all code as the – maybe the principle, if you will, right, of the tech debt. 60 00:06:17,840 --> 00:06:28,300 And this is coming from listening to, you know, folks like Charity Majors, and she's talked a lot about how some of the best engineers she's worked with work really hard to not write code. 61 00:06:28,300 --> 00:06:43,280 And listening to even some of our customers who really extol the value of being able to just strip out as much boilerplate code as possible and just pare it down so that it's simpler to work with. 62 00:06:44,600 --> 00:07:01,020 And, to me, it's sort of, like, looking at it that way, then coming back to your list of, like, here's three knowns that normally when you're dealing with debt, you're dealing with a known amount, a known timeline, and a known interest rate. 63 00:07:01,120 --> 00:07:08,340 It's like, well, if you consider all of your code, the principle debt, then you know the amount. 64 00:07:08,520 --> 00:07:10,060 So, actually, we do have a known amount. 65 00:07:10,120 --> 00:07:12,740 And then you can kind of go out and look at how many lines of code do we have. 66 00:07:12,740 --> 00:07:16,180 I mean, is it really useful to kind of take that inventory? 67 00:07:16,500 --> 00:07:17,540 I'm not sure. 68 00:07:18,120 --> 00:07:21,400 But it's more of just a philosophical mindset. 69 00:07:23,200 --> 00:07:32,840 And then to your point of what's really challenging is thinking about, like, the risk. 70 00:07:32,840 --> 00:07:43,980 And then if you come back to, well, most of the time we have a known interest rate, but there's, in the derivatives world, is where you're dealing with the risk around changing interest rates. 71 00:07:44,820 --> 00:07:54,740 And managing that risk is actually a thing, because there's a lot of, you know, the whole world of, like, credit default swaps. 72 00:07:54,740 --> 00:07:59,920 And it's like, well, that's, well, credit default swaps are really what, you're talking about a default risk. 73 00:08:00,080 --> 00:08:25,380 And then to bring it back to, like, more consumer-friendly terms is thinking about the adjustable rate mortgages and stuff that folks, like, really got, a lot of folks got turned into, you know, upside down underwater mortgage situations for their homes with an adjustable rate mortgage. 74 00:08:25,380 --> 00:08:29,740 Because that known interest rate wasn't actually known. 75 00:08:29,740 --> 00:08:32,600 And so those do exist in the debt world. 76 00:08:32,600 --> 00:08:44,180 And I think that is kind of maybe a way to think about tech debt is you never really have, like, a contractual interest rate. 77 00:08:44,600 --> 00:08:52,840 What you have is, you know, some ways to understand, like, what, if you've got a generally low interest rate, 78 00:08:52,840 --> 00:08:58,980 but also where you might have some potential ballooning interest rate risk. 79 00:08:59,380 --> 00:09:02,640 So to your point of, it's the risk that's actually what's scary to the business. 80 00:09:03,220 --> 00:09:12,900 And I think that's also, it kind of helps you get comfortable with the fact that, hey, you know, we're not going to get rid of all of our code. 81 00:09:13,240 --> 00:09:14,840 Like, that's not the objective here. 82 00:09:14,840 --> 00:09:26,820 The objective is to make sure that we've got manageable interest payments and that we're thinking about how we're managing the risk of, could some of these interest payments change on us? 83 00:09:27,340 --> 00:09:32,800 And I think I didn't really get to spend as much time as I would have wanted to. 84 00:09:32,800 --> 00:09:37,440 I owe the organizers a write-up of this. 85 00:09:37,440 --> 00:09:46,440 But some of the things that I've seen folks do that seem to help them bring those interest rates sort of under control, 86 00:09:46,660 --> 00:09:54,580 things like test coverage and having good CICD pipelines and really thinking about automating their full path to production, 87 00:09:55,240 --> 00:10:05,360 instrumenting that, that's where you can bring a lot of uncertainty and, you know, risk out of the picture and de-risk the code base that you do have. 88 00:10:07,460 --> 00:10:14,240 Yeah, so that's sort of, I think, what I was trying to get at by calling all the code tech debt. 89 00:10:14,700 --> 00:10:17,540 You embrace it just the same way you do on the business side. 90 00:10:17,640 --> 00:10:23,500 And then you start to think about, you know, those interest payments and what interest rate you're looking at. 91 00:10:24,260 --> 00:10:27,040 Did we ever actually introduce where you did your talk? 92 00:10:29,020 --> 00:10:33,640 No, I think I maybe briefly mentioned Glucon and prepping for Glucon. 93 00:10:33,640 --> 00:10:38,280 So this was at Glucon in the end of May. 94 00:10:38,640 --> 00:10:40,560 So I'm not sure when this podcast will go out. 95 00:10:41,840 --> 00:10:43,880 But it was a delightful talk. 96 00:10:44,080 --> 00:10:47,320 And Dorma Mane's talk was called Can We Trade Derivatives on Technical Debt? 97 00:10:47,380 --> 00:10:49,660 And it was such a fantastic talk. 98 00:10:49,680 --> 00:10:51,220 It was like all my favorite things all at once. 99 00:10:51,720 --> 00:10:55,240 And one of the things that I wrote down in my notes while you were talking, 100 00:10:55,340 --> 00:10:57,960 so you had the slide that's like all code is technical debt. 101 00:10:59,140 --> 00:11:04,900 And my note on that is that means that you're in a perpetual state of refinancing. 102 00:11:05,140 --> 00:11:07,520 You're never going to get to the point where you get to pay. 103 00:11:07,620 --> 00:11:12,980 Like if you're viewing it as all code is tech debt, then you never get to the point where you have zero debt. 104 00:11:13,060 --> 00:11:17,300 Like you're never going to live in a world in which you have no liabilities. 105 00:11:17,540 --> 00:11:18,740 You will always have liabilities. 106 00:11:18,740 --> 00:11:28,780 You just get the opportunity over time to refinance and kind of work on coming up with different terms of your loan, I guess, is a good way to think of it. 107 00:11:29,740 --> 00:11:29,920 Yeah. 108 00:11:30,020 --> 00:11:40,480 I mean, if you've looked at pretty much any company out there, they all have debt in place, right? 109 00:11:40,480 --> 00:11:52,420 I mean, the reason a balance sheet exists is to like make sure you're accounting for your liabilities, which, of course, to my dad's point, a deferred cost is a liability that's not technically debt. 110 00:11:53,900 --> 00:12:04,360 But, you know, even if it's something just like an overnight credit facility, I mean, there's all kinds of structures in place that are essentially like, listen, you're borrowing something. 111 00:12:05,600 --> 00:12:16,480 And I do think that there is something to my dad's point of like, one thing you're missing, and I pointed this out in my talk as well, is we have to understand who the borrower is and who the lender is. 112 00:12:16,480 --> 00:12:21,320 Like we're often talking about tech debt from a very borrower-centric perspective. 113 00:12:22,040 --> 00:12:28,860 But if you want to have a conversation about derivatives, you have to understand who the lender is. 114 00:12:28,860 --> 00:12:32,140 And this is another place where the analogy kind of breaks down. 115 00:12:32,900 --> 00:12:42,740 And maybe this is also where, you know, we should say like, listen, you got to, you can either pick a different finance analogy, or you just, you just got to figure out something else. 116 00:12:43,460 --> 00:12:54,040 Maybe we should do a quick segue into kind of talking about how viabilities have offsetting assets elsewhere or equities elsewhere. 117 00:12:54,400 --> 00:12:58,820 And maybe a quick definition of what a derivative is for people. 118 00:12:59,900 --> 00:13:00,340 Yes. 119 00:13:00,540 --> 00:13:02,520 Wow, you're really good at like teeing up these questions. 120 00:13:02,860 --> 00:13:05,280 Usually I'm like, I'm supposed to be asking you the questions. 121 00:13:07,140 --> 00:13:13,520 Yeah, so on the balance sheet, you've got a lot of different items there. 122 00:13:13,860 --> 00:13:21,160 And a lot of assets and liabilities are kind of offsetting each other. 123 00:13:21,340 --> 00:13:32,820 And, you know, they have a natural course between flowing from living as an asset to then a liability, even when maybe there's not even a cash flow event. 124 00:13:34,620 --> 00:13:39,200 So I don't know if that's kind of what you're getting at with that kind of question. 125 00:13:39,400 --> 00:13:46,000 Yeah, I think it just makes sense to make sure that people understand, like when you're saying understanding who the lender is. 126 00:13:46,040 --> 00:13:51,200 So like, for me, as a borrower of something, that's a liability for me. 127 00:13:51,640 --> 00:13:55,100 But whoever lent me that money, that's an asset for them. 128 00:13:55,540 --> 00:13:56,560 Oh, yeah, right. 129 00:13:56,620 --> 00:13:59,420 So like the accounts receivable in a way, right? 130 00:14:01,220 --> 00:14:02,880 So, yeah. 131 00:14:03,120 --> 00:14:05,040 So that's a good point. 132 00:14:05,120 --> 00:14:07,580 And this is honestly, this is where I kind of got stuck. 133 00:14:07,580 --> 00:14:22,580 And it was chatting with your husband the night before my talk that crystallized that even though I don't have the answer to this, it's raising an interesting question for people to explore on their own. 134 00:14:23,700 --> 00:14:32,240 And so it was, he gave me some validation that like, yes, that is an important question because maybe we aren't thinking about that correctly. 135 00:14:32,240 --> 00:14:36,020 And we're writing checks to ourselves and it doesn't make sense. 136 00:14:36,540 --> 00:14:48,800 And so I think my first gut instinct is that it's the business side that's, you know, sort of lending you because they're using that code as an asset to your point of that offset. 137 00:14:48,800 --> 00:15:03,620 I mean, what else do you see in terms of the potential relationship between, you know, the either the borrower and the lender or what the offsetting assets would be if all code is should be sort of considered technical debt? 138 00:15:04,900 --> 00:15:11,940 This is not a perfect analogy, but this is another one that I wrote down in my notes while you were talking on stage. 139 00:15:12,200 --> 00:15:16,560 And it was 401k loan, question mark. 140 00:15:16,900 --> 00:15:19,340 Are you borrowing from yourself in the future? 141 00:15:19,580 --> 00:15:27,140 Like, is this, are you taking away things that are kind of supposed to help your future self that you've set aside for your future self and you're going to take them now? 142 00:15:27,220 --> 00:15:32,860 So that was kind of the thought that I had there is a possible counterparty. 143 00:15:33,320 --> 00:15:39,780 But I think many people would argue that that's not a super functional counterparty. 144 00:15:40,040 --> 00:15:45,440 And if we're trying to argue that debt is a necessary part of life, I'm worried that that analogy might scare people. 145 00:15:46,520 --> 00:15:55,560 I was also going to say, if you can explain how a 401k loan even works, you're way ahead of the game. 146 00:15:56,360 --> 00:15:58,540 Those always seem really convoluted. 147 00:15:58,760 --> 00:16:00,620 And that's maybe part of the problem. 148 00:16:01,820 --> 00:16:11,880 So it's, I see where you're going with that as a potential analogy of like where things might be getting corrupted isn't the right word. 149 00:16:11,880 --> 00:16:20,140 That's, that sounds too nefarious, but, you know, questionable in terms of whether this makes sense and is the right thing to do. 150 00:16:21,640 --> 00:16:24,100 You also asked about the, well, go ahead. 151 00:16:24,620 --> 00:16:30,480 Oh, I was going to say the one part of your analogy that I loved is you, before you were kind of going into the different tranches of interests. 152 00:16:30,480 --> 00:16:39,120 And I loved comparing that to kind of the Martin Fowler's view of like reckless to prudent versus deliberate and inadvertent debt. 153 00:16:39,240 --> 00:16:44,080 And I think that that's a really powerful part of how we could think about technical debt. 154 00:16:44,080 --> 00:16:47,160 And I think, I think that's a part of the metaphor that does very well. 155 00:16:48,700 --> 00:16:49,180 Yeah. 156 00:16:49,320 --> 00:16:57,020 And, and that, that's sort of comes back to your, your other question about defining the, the different types of derivatives. 157 00:16:57,020 --> 00:17:02,100 Cause derivatives are, they're, they're used a lot in the finance world. 158 00:17:02,100 --> 00:17:08,660 It's actually a massive market, but they're not typically done by, you know, consumers. 159 00:17:08,660 --> 00:17:14,960 It's a really institutional level, um, you know, asset class, I guess you would say. 160 00:17:15,700 --> 00:17:26,700 Uh, so derivatives are like, there's a couple of different types, but at their most basic, 161 00:17:26,700 --> 00:17:30,500 it's just kind of an agreement, usually it's a contract of some kind. 162 00:17:30,500 --> 00:17:37,300 And there's usually a sort of the asset, the underlying asset in question. 163 00:17:37,300 --> 00:17:49,660 Um, and so, you know, the, the buyer of this contract is entitled to, you know, some amount of this underlying asset at some price or some interest rate, right? 164 00:17:49,720 --> 00:17:54,380 Since interest rates are usually that the, the fluctuating metric. 165 00:17:54,700 --> 00:17:57,360 And then there's usually a date associated with it. 166 00:17:57,360 --> 00:17:59,780 So if it's an agreement, it's not in perpetuity. 167 00:18:00,320 --> 00:18:11,820 So options are probably the thing that are the most familiar to your kind of average consumer since, you know, you can, as a consumer trader, you can get an options account. 168 00:18:12,540 --> 00:18:18,500 Um, and they're an option is, you know, those contracts are usually written in, I think up to nine month. 169 00:18:19,000 --> 00:18:30,740 Time spans and, you know, you're either buying or selling a, a, a put, um, or gosh, I'm blanking on the other one, but basically it's like, okay. 170 00:18:31,600 --> 00:18:33,000 Um, but yeah, puts in calls. 171 00:18:33,000 --> 00:18:42,020 It's like, so I can either, um, but I buy the right to sell this stock, uh, for this price. 172 00:18:42,560 --> 00:18:45,780 Um, and so why would you want to do that? 173 00:18:45,880 --> 00:18:46,360 Right. 174 00:18:46,380 --> 00:18:55,820 If you own shares in some company and you already stay, you inherently stand to gain if the shares go up. 175 00:18:56,240 --> 00:19:05,840 So how do you help yourself, um, you hedge that by figuring out a way to gain if the shares go down? 176 00:19:05,840 --> 00:19:20,520 Um, and so there's a couple of different ways you could do that where you could sell, uh, the, the right for someone else to buy the stock if it goes to a certain price. 177 00:19:20,520 --> 00:19:29,500 And then you're sort of just collecting, you know, you're, you're getting, um, you're, you're yielding some income on that share. 178 00:19:29,600 --> 00:19:35,560 You don't really plan to sell it, but you know, if, if it hits that strike price, you are obligated to do that. 179 00:19:36,380 --> 00:19:47,360 Um, but you get to sort of make a little bit of other income on the side, or you lock in your ability to sell, you know, let's say you've got something and it's trading at a hundred dollars a share. 180 00:19:47,980 --> 00:19:55,600 And you want to be able to lock in the ability to sell it at $80 a share, just in case the thing craters down to 50 bucks a share. 181 00:19:55,600 --> 00:20:09,380 Um, so you can buy a put, uh, for example, and then you're able to, you know, you're, you, the, the person on the other side of that agreement is obligated to purchase that $80 a share. 182 00:20:09,980 --> 00:20:12,680 Um, and then there's a whole market around that, right? 183 00:20:12,680 --> 00:20:22,240 Those contracts themselves become traded as the underlying asset moves, say closer or further from $80. 184 00:20:22,760 --> 00:20:24,900 Those contracts become more or less valuable. 185 00:20:25,720 --> 00:20:28,420 Um, and so the contracts themselves have a price. 186 00:20:28,420 --> 00:20:37,880 So that's like, uh, you know, a classic form of a derivative and you can replace the stock price with something like an interest rate. 187 00:20:37,880 --> 00:20:48,260 So if I have a loan, I'm already standing to gain if the person who has borrowed this money from me is making their interest payments. 188 00:20:48,260 --> 00:20:50,180 Like I already stand to gain from that, right? 189 00:20:50,260 --> 00:20:57,660 Like I lent them the money and, you know, part of that agreement is they're going to pay me with this interest, but what happens if they default? 190 00:20:57,900 --> 00:21:12,200 So how do you offset your risk that they default is you enter into a derivative agreement where someone else is going to, uh, have to pay that, right? 191 00:21:12,220 --> 00:21:17,860 Or, you know, you, you, you can sell part of that interest rate, right? 192 00:21:18,200 --> 00:21:20,000 That you're picking up in the meantime. 193 00:21:20,000 --> 00:21:23,240 So there's different styles of derivatives you can do there. 194 00:21:24,080 --> 00:21:29,840 Um, or if the interest rate might fluctuate and you want to convert something that's fluctuating into something that's stable, right? 195 00:21:29,860 --> 00:21:32,300 That's a, and like an interest swap. 196 00:21:32,660 --> 00:21:37,180 So those, those are just agreements between two parties. 197 00:21:37,680 --> 00:21:39,720 And then there's a market for those agreements. 198 00:21:40,400 --> 00:21:54,560 Um, now there's this other kind, which is sort of like the, where the collateralized debt obligations, which was another, uh, one of the many cast of characters that showed up during the financial crisis of the 2008 ish era. 199 00:21:55,180 --> 00:22:10,380 Um, you know, the, I feel like the, the collective American public got immediately exposed to a bunch of derivative terms and generally agreed that it was, uh, 200 00:22:10,380 --> 00:22:13,200 uh, complicated and scary. 201 00:22:13,940 --> 00:22:24,440 Um, but collateralized debt obligation is really where, okay, we're, we're pulling together, um, a lot of, in this case, talking about mortgages, right? 202 00:22:24,460 --> 00:22:31,040 So the collateral is the house on the mortgage and pulling those together and then trying, like cutting those into tranches. 203 00:22:31,140 --> 00:22:38,100 And there's really the, the prime loans are in one tranche and then they kind of get progressively less prime. 204 00:22:38,200 --> 00:22:40,500 And then you're in your, your subprime territory. 205 00:22:40,740 --> 00:22:45,640 Um, and the subprime is really just like, those are more likely to default. 206 00:22:46,820 --> 00:23:02,440 Um, and so starting to think about, okay, if you're, if all of your code is debt, but you've got different applications and you've got different profiles and essentially different risk profiles on these different code bases. 207 00:23:02,440 --> 00:23:07,120 So coming back to your point of like, what really matters to the business is the risk on them. 208 00:23:08,280 --> 00:23:15,700 And what if you, if you pull that together and start to analyze it as what are your different tranches of tech debt? 209 00:23:15,940 --> 00:23:32,880 Where do you have, uh, good sort of high quality loans out there, which is your high quality tech debt, uh, low likelihood of default versus where do you have stuff that's pretty risky, right? 210 00:23:32,900 --> 00:23:36,220 It's going to, it could blow up in your face at any minute, right? 211 00:23:36,260 --> 00:23:41,660 You could have a whole bunch of that debt sort of default on you, if you will. 212 00:23:41,660 --> 00:23:46,040 Um, which could mean like, it's impossible to change, right? 213 00:23:46,140 --> 00:23:51,060 That, that code is basically completely unchangeable. 214 00:23:51,700 --> 00:23:54,220 And then you're, you're just really stuck with it out there. 215 00:23:56,360 --> 00:23:56,880 Gotcha. 216 00:23:57,160 --> 00:24:07,320 So like what I love about derivatives is that I think, like you've said, a lot of the audience here is probably familiar with derivatives blowing up the worldwide economy. 217 00:24:07,780 --> 00:24:18,860 Which is unfortunate because one of the main uses of derivatives is to help hedge risk and for people to kind of make informed bets about how things are going. 218 00:24:19,000 --> 00:24:22,860 And so one of the things that I was playing around with, and this is totally a half-baked idea. 219 00:24:23,000 --> 00:24:25,780 So we're going to have to back this one around a little bit. 220 00:24:26,060 --> 00:24:26,300 Oh boy. 221 00:24:26,460 --> 00:24:51,120 So if you're thinking about ways to hedge risk, and then you're thinking about, um, kind of, so if we're trying to think of someone who's helping us hedge our risk, and someone who's like a third party, who's maybe going to take a stake in our code base, would that be someone like a pivotal or like an open source platform like a Kubernetes that takes away a lot of like the risk? 222 00:24:51,120 --> 00:25:03,680 If I had to build everything myself, um, and then try to start, um, you know, making that just a little bit more accessible, a little bit less, um, all on me and more abstracted away. 223 00:25:03,760 --> 00:25:07,020 Like, is it, is, is that subtraction, I guess is the question. 224 00:25:07,580 --> 00:25:07,940 Hmm. 225 00:25:08,900 --> 00:25:09,460 Hmm. 226 00:25:10,740 --> 00:25:28,480 Well, I mean, I think that what's interesting is maybe not so much pivotal, but I think collectively as an industry, if you go back 15, 20 years when, uh, someone declared that the world is flat. 227 00:25:28,880 --> 00:25:42,520 And everyone was frantically, uh, offshoring and simultaneously outsourcing a lot of their IT and code development at the same time. 228 00:25:43,520 --> 00:26:01,220 And in that case, they were introducing, I mean, and this still goes on today, um, they were introducing like this third party that was, um, in theory going to de-risk like the, the whole IT operation landscape. 229 00:26:01,220 --> 00:26:12,080 I mean, including development and all, uh, and I remember distinctly covering EDS, uh, back in the day. 230 00:26:12,080 --> 00:26:16,460 And they had this, I think it was NMCI, the Navy Marine. 231 00:26:16,460 --> 00:26:22,940 It was basically like an internet, uh, built for the department of defense. 232 00:26:23,740 --> 00:26:36,800 And it was a huge problematic contract for EDS that they were around the time I was helping the senior analysts covering that, that particular company. 233 00:26:37,320 --> 00:26:48,460 That contract was up for renewal and it was a big question mark because essentially, like, I think, as I recall, EDS was losing a lot of money on that contract, right? 234 00:26:48,940 --> 00:26:52,920 Uh, the, the department of defense was able to lock in, right? 235 00:26:53,040 --> 00:27:02,720 So they were able to take this variability of this project that they had, which is basically build, build another internet, um, except one that only we get to use. 236 00:27:04,280 --> 00:27:11,060 And they de-risked that by locking in this particular contract with a third party. 237 00:27:12,600 --> 00:27:18,460 Uh, but then as all derivatives do have, right, there's a, there's an expiration on that. 238 00:27:18,760 --> 00:27:26,720 And they'd only barely finished building it by the time the, uh, the contract was coming up for renewal. 239 00:27:27,180 --> 00:27:37,520 And the timeline, you know, for EDS to actually have to be profitable would have required them to have finished building it way earlier and then go into more of an operations maintenance mode. 240 00:27:37,900 --> 00:27:39,200 And that didn't happen. 241 00:27:39,540 --> 00:27:48,740 So now they were like, we need to get this renewal because we're only going to make money on this when we renew and are able to actually just operate this thing. 242 00:27:48,760 --> 00:27:51,460 Cause we just spent seven years or whatever building it. 243 00:27:52,280 --> 00:27:59,820 Um, so in that case, like that to me does, that's sort of sounds like what you're talking about. 244 00:27:59,880 --> 00:28:04,420 It's a little bit more extreme, I think, than just taking an individual code base. 245 00:28:04,420 --> 00:28:13,420 But, uh, there's definitely an analogy there of like, Hey, we're, we're going to take a big project that appears risky. 246 00:28:13,900 --> 00:28:16,080 And, but, but of unknown risk. 247 00:28:16,080 --> 00:28:20,140 And we're going to try and lock in some kind of interest rate around it. 248 00:28:20,700 --> 00:28:24,160 Um, but, and then someone else has to absorb that. 249 00:28:24,420 --> 00:28:32,260 So, but I guess where I was thinking of is, I feel like we, as an industry tend to get really hung up on like this fear of lock-in. 250 00:28:32,260 --> 00:28:36,420 And this concern about where we're getting locked in and who we're locking in when. 251 00:28:37,220 --> 00:28:42,460 And the people who take that to the utmost extreme decide that they're going to build everything themselves. 252 00:28:42,900 --> 00:28:48,800 And then like surprise lock-in party of one, you're locked into your own code base. 253 00:28:49,320 --> 00:28:51,780 Um, and all of the employees who built it. 254 00:28:52,340 --> 00:28:58,960 And I feel like one of the key parts of derivatives is it's that pooling of assets. 255 00:28:58,960 --> 00:29:06,820 And so the more that you rely, not just on your own code base, but on like shared tools or shared libraries. 256 00:29:06,820 --> 00:29:15,120 And like things that can kind of help you, um, kind of collaborate, not just within your organization, but kind of across the world. 257 00:29:15,120 --> 00:29:19,520 And open source platforms, clouds, lots of options out there. 258 00:29:20,240 --> 00:29:27,140 But is that a way that we have decided that we can kind of pool our assets collectively as kind of a hedging thing? 259 00:29:27,240 --> 00:29:29,300 So that was, that was where I was thinking with that. 260 00:29:29,960 --> 00:29:38,960 Um, that does, of course, introduce other kinds of, you have the lock-in risk, you have the risk of, like a dependency risk that maybe you didn't have before. 261 00:29:39,420 --> 00:29:46,260 But I think that, um, I think it's interesting to think about how we think about risk in this industry and how we think about pooling that risk. 262 00:29:46,740 --> 00:29:47,020 Yeah. 263 00:29:47,180 --> 00:29:59,020 So I, I think what's interesting, there's another fun finance term that we get to introduce at this point in the conversation, which is liquidity. 264 00:30:00,640 --> 00:30:01,200 Right? 265 00:30:01,560 --> 00:30:08,980 So I feel like what you're describing is actually the liquidity of the market that you're in. 266 00:30:09,420 --> 00:30:27,760 Because if you're in, you know, lock-in party of one, which I love that expression, because you've built everything custom, and you've implicitly, if not explicitly, but you have implicitly accepted that you are willing to support all this code. 267 00:30:28,240 --> 00:30:35,940 Uh, you know, perhaps even the underlying open source projects, even if everyone else abandons the project. 268 00:30:36,660 --> 00:30:53,700 Um, and so actually, like, uh, uh, Josh McKenty had given me a great sort of overview spiel along these lines of that, you know, that trade-off between the sort of going with certain things that are either actual standards or de facto standards, 269 00:30:53,700 --> 00:31:05,040 and then carefully placing your bets around things that are the really emerging, uh, potential one-offs that you are having to say, you know what? 270 00:31:05,720 --> 00:31:08,700 If I'm the only person using it, that's okay. 271 00:31:09,220 --> 00:31:12,700 I, it's, this is important enough to my business where I'm willing to take that. 272 00:31:12,780 --> 00:31:24,180 And then there's this really scary in-between zone where it's got a little bit of community, or maybe even a big community, but it's not a de facto standard yet. 273 00:31:24,340 --> 00:31:35,980 So you've got to make a call, and a lot of people essentially try to place bets there that they think it's going to become a de facto standard, but it may not. 274 00:31:36,700 --> 00:31:43,400 Um, and when it doesn't, and the community potentially evaporates, then what happens? 275 00:31:44,180 --> 00:31:48,080 Um, and so how does, where does that leave you in terms of liquidity? 276 00:31:49,460 --> 00:31:57,980 Uh, so, you know, you, in some ways, the most conservative position to take would be anything that's not a de facto standard. 277 00:31:58,180 --> 00:32:05,120 You should look at as, would I be okay if I were the only person in this community, and therefore we would be self-supporting. 278 00:32:05,480 --> 00:32:06,360 Is that okay? 279 00:32:07,100 --> 00:32:10,360 And if it's still important enough to your business, then, then do it. 280 00:32:10,360 --> 00:32:18,080 But you're, you're understanding the, the, um, you know, now you're trading fine art and not, uh, securities. 281 00:32:20,920 --> 00:32:26,100 I don't know if anyone else is going to enjoy this conversation, but I'm having a delightful time. 282 00:32:28,180 --> 00:32:34,500 Yeah, I was like, we might have some of them on a niche interest between you and I, but like, this is just like the best hour. 283 00:32:35,100 --> 00:32:47,140 Yeah, no, I'm like, I'm now picturing, like, you know, the Sotheby's auctioneer for that code that you wrote that is so one-off that no one else can support. 284 00:32:47,500 --> 00:32:51,440 Like, you're now, you've got an auctioneer up there. 285 00:32:52,040 --> 00:32:54,420 If you're lucky, it's a Sotheby's auctioneer. 286 00:32:54,980 --> 00:32:57,620 Um, but it's, it's probably not. 287 00:32:58,180 --> 00:33:07,060 Uh, so that's, uh, just, you know, cause they, I associate Sotheby's with like really high-end stuff where there is a market for it. 288 00:33:07,140 --> 00:33:08,240 We just don't know the price. 289 00:33:08,920 --> 00:33:18,540 Um, I don't know what the kind of like, otherwise you're maybe on eBay, just hoping that someone else is as deeply fascinated with your 1997 troll doll collection. 290 00:33:19,320 --> 00:33:23,100 Um, I believe in the late nineties with Beanie Babies. 291 00:33:23,260 --> 00:33:24,340 Oh, I'm, I'm sorry. 292 00:33:24,500 --> 00:33:26,380 I'm, I'm way, I'm way off. 293 00:33:26,520 --> 00:33:33,000 I'm a little rusty on the, uh, the, uh, nineties collector phase things. 294 00:33:34,280 --> 00:33:37,320 Now they have all those dolls with the, like the really big eyes. 295 00:33:37,600 --> 00:33:38,280 I don't know. 296 00:33:38,380 --> 00:33:39,860 I've seen them at the toy stores. 297 00:33:40,280 --> 00:33:40,720 Okay. 298 00:33:40,940 --> 00:33:41,240 Yeah. 299 00:33:41,360 --> 00:33:44,460 They're kind of cute, but I mean, they get slobbered on. 300 00:33:45,300 --> 00:33:46,300 That's where they should be. 301 00:33:46,340 --> 00:33:47,400 They should stay there. 302 00:33:49,280 --> 00:33:50,860 Um, okay. 303 00:33:50,940 --> 00:33:51,180 Yeah. 304 00:33:51,180 --> 00:34:08,220 So entering because it's interesting, bringing the liquidity discussion back to derivatives, there's when you, the derivatives market, there's kind of two different markets. 305 00:34:08,220 --> 00:34:17,840 There's actual exchange traded derivatives where like those, um, the stock options and not, not the ones that, you know, tech companies give out to employees. 306 00:34:17,840 --> 00:34:21,880 These are like the actual, you know, exchange traded options. 307 00:34:22,220 --> 00:34:33,320 Those contracts are, they're standardized enough where, you know, they can just be electronically traded because it's just, it's, um, it's really well-defined and they're all basically the same. 308 00:34:33,320 --> 00:34:36,200 And so you don't have to worry about like this or that. 309 00:34:36,340 --> 00:34:38,220 Um, and there's futures markets for that too. 310 00:34:38,280 --> 00:34:47,820 And I always, my favorite, um, you know, underlying asset in the futures markets, like frozen pork bellies, like it's always amuses me that there's like frozen pork bellies. 311 00:34:47,820 --> 00:34:55,060 And why they're always frozen, um, I mean, I guess, because they're not really worth anything if they're not frozen. 312 00:34:55,700 --> 00:35:05,560 Um, but you know, so like the commodities markets use futures all the time, because if you're a farmer, you inherently stand to gain. 313 00:35:05,820 --> 00:35:06,260 It's weird. 314 00:35:06,260 --> 00:35:13,960 You actually stand to gain if, um, like the weather's bad and the overall crop is bad, but you somehow managed to have a good crop. 315 00:35:13,960 --> 00:35:15,780 It's a little bit wonky there. 316 00:35:16,220 --> 00:35:23,680 Um, but nonetheless, like if, if you have a good yield, you stand to gain because you have crop to sell. 317 00:35:23,940 --> 00:35:36,280 So how do you hedge the risk of what if the weather is just really crappy where my farm is this year and I don't have as many soybeans to sell or whatever it is that I'm growing on my farm. 318 00:35:36,460 --> 00:35:45,920 So I'm going to write a futures contract, um, to lock in that someone else will buy at this price that I would like to be able to get anyways. 319 00:35:46,760 --> 00:35:52,940 But, uh, I may not be able to, and if I have a low yield, I need to get the highest price possible. 320 00:35:54,140 --> 00:35:59,520 Um, and same thing with like oil and all these commodities is like you, you already stand to gain if the price goes up. 321 00:35:59,880 --> 00:36:10,860 So how do you make sure that the, uh, you know, if the price goes down, you're, you're still taken care of, or at least you've offset some of those natural losses. 322 00:36:11,480 --> 00:36:26,460 Um, so those are really, those are big enough markets and they're defined enough where it's really standard that you have high liquidity, but then there's all these off exchange derivatives markets, which are sort of just negotiated between parties. 323 00:36:26,460 --> 00:36:28,900 And it's a huge market as well. 324 00:36:29,320 --> 00:36:33,760 Uh, and that's where you can't measure the liquidity the same way. 325 00:36:34,120 --> 00:36:43,580 And when suddenly you have no one to sell this thing to when you need to, then all of a sudden, like you're the one stuck with that interest payments. 326 00:36:43,580 --> 00:36:50,900 And that's a little bit of, you know, going back to the financial crisis is, you know, that sort of model. 327 00:36:50,900 --> 00:37:00,120 And what happens when you have low liquidity, uh, markets or hard to measure the liquidity markets. 328 00:37:00,620 --> 00:37:11,560 So to your point, if there are vendors standing by able to support the open source software that you're running, right. 329 00:37:11,600 --> 00:37:19,740 That that's an indicator that there's some liquidity in that part of your, your debt market that you're, you're trading on. 330 00:37:20,280 --> 00:37:24,060 Um, I mean, another extreme example is just, you know, going to SAS, right. 331 00:37:24,060 --> 00:37:26,120 It's like, do you even need to be building this at all? 332 00:37:26,720 --> 00:37:36,000 Um, then like, I mean, if you can get away with not writing the code at all to the point of all the code is, is some form of debt, then great. 333 00:37:36,000 --> 00:37:40,900 Just let the business gain the asset without having to take on that debt. 334 00:37:41,520 --> 00:37:41,880 Great. 335 00:37:42,600 --> 00:37:47,720 So, you know, always be looking for those, like if you can do, if you can get away with it. 336 00:37:47,720 --> 00:37:49,840 And those are extremely high liquidity markets. 337 00:37:50,700 --> 00:37:54,360 So in theory, you should be able to like trade in and out of them. 338 00:37:54,720 --> 00:37:58,780 Of course, then you introduce all the integration software that goes with it. 339 00:37:59,080 --> 00:38:06,880 And that changes things a little bit, but, um, it's still probably higher liquidity than, uh, everything written custom. 340 00:38:07,880 --> 00:38:08,060 Yeah. 341 00:38:08,780 --> 00:38:26,080 So one of the things I was thinking of as you were talking is I feel like a lot of the examples that we've given is, um, maybe I hate to assign value, but maybe like a good or like natural uses of a derivative versus like a purely speculative. 342 00:38:26,080 --> 00:38:34,800 I would like to make money use of derivative and, um, which is probably because those other ones lend themselves more naturally to the metaphor. 343 00:38:35,100 --> 00:38:41,740 But I was just thinking how much fun it would be if you got to like specular, speculatively guessing their code base is going to implode. 344 00:38:41,840 --> 00:38:43,480 I want to bet against that company. 345 00:38:43,980 --> 00:38:44,860 Oh man. 346 00:38:45,100 --> 00:38:49,020 Cause I feel like that would be a, I feel like that would be a liquid market of a whole lot of shorts. 347 00:38:49,900 --> 00:38:50,860 Oh yeah. 348 00:38:51,620 --> 00:38:53,340 That I haven't thought about that. 349 00:38:53,340 --> 00:38:55,500 I'm not sure I even want to think about that. 350 00:38:56,080 --> 00:39:16,400 Um, yeah, I mean, and that starts to get into like an interesting, you know, natural question of like, well, if your code is in some ways, every line of code is debt, but your, your software is also an asset, right? 351 00:39:16,400 --> 00:39:20,080 Like what is the counter, uh, weight asset that you report? 352 00:39:20,080 --> 00:39:23,800 Like, why aren't these things reported on your balance sheet at all? 353 00:39:24,140 --> 00:39:37,500 Cause that would then be something that you would have others in the market would have visibility into what those ratios look like, uh, and then be able to, you know, trade the derivatives accordingly. 354 00:39:37,500 --> 00:39:50,440 Um, but yeah, that would be, that would be terrifying to know like, wow, the short interest on our, uh, on our, our tech debt derivatives, uh, is not looking so good right now. 355 00:39:51,440 --> 00:39:59,840 Um, but yeah, I mean, what, uh, I feel like we're, this starts to kind of stretch the analogy, right. 356 00:39:59,840 --> 00:40:01,540 To like, to like, to some of the breaking points. 357 00:40:01,540 --> 00:40:03,520 I mean, I think it's great, it's great. 358 00:40:03,600 --> 00:40:14,900 You've got to find these breaking points, like, because sometimes it's only right up against the edge of the analogy that you find yet another lesson that you can take from it, uh, before the whole thing falls apart. 359 00:40:15,640 --> 00:40:23,800 Um, but you know, we're, it sounds like you're, you're kind of of the mind that we shouldn't throw out the analogy altogether. 360 00:40:23,800 --> 00:40:27,860 We just have to be mindful of, you know, yes, it is an analogy. 361 00:40:27,860 --> 00:40:29,100 So it is going to be imperfect. 362 00:40:29,880 --> 00:40:34,120 Um, and we can't lose sight of what the real challenge is around it. 363 00:40:34,660 --> 00:40:36,840 Yeah, I think exactly that. 364 00:40:36,920 --> 00:40:47,080 And then in addition is trying to remember what it is at the core that we're trying to communicate and then trying to make sure that that aligns with what our analogy is actually communicating. 365 00:40:47,080 --> 00:40:58,220 So just making sure that we've thought through, um, yeah, just thought through what we're trying to tell our business counterparts about the state of our, um, technical stack. 366 00:40:58,640 --> 00:41:11,920 Now, within that, I mean, if some of the things that have come to mind for me as how would you, like the, the goal isn't, um, to retire all the tech debt, right. 367 00:41:11,920 --> 00:41:13,540 That would mean retiring all of your code. 368 00:41:14,000 --> 00:41:16,140 Uh, it's great if you can, right. 369 00:41:16,140 --> 00:41:23,060 So that example I gave from discover where it was like 46,000 lines of code to 6,000. 370 00:41:23,160 --> 00:41:30,160 I mean, I can't remember what the exact numbers were, but they retired like 30 some thousand lines of code, right. 371 00:41:30,160 --> 00:41:31,840 They, they just paid off that principle. 372 00:41:32,140 --> 00:41:32,380 Great. 373 00:41:33,060 --> 00:41:45,200 Um, and like in terms of, well, how do we, what should we be measuring to be able to talk to our business counterparts? 374 00:41:45,200 --> 00:42:04,140 That like, we're, this is code that we're in a good place on, like we've got a good interest rate versus this is code that like, if you want us to get that feature out, like, you know, here's all the, here's where the, the variable risk lies with that particular code base. 375 00:42:04,140 --> 00:42:19,480 Um, or should be, um, or should be, these conversations be happening outside of the context of new feature releases where it's just like more of a, a quarterly report or whatever, like whatever vehicle makes sense to just describe the health of the code. 376 00:42:19,480 --> 00:42:32,800 I mean, on the one hand, things like, I know having test coverage is important, but I also know that if all you're focused on is reporting that we have high test coverage, you can still potentially miss. 377 00:42:33,300 --> 00:42:42,300 The, the risks of being able to change the code itself, like not all tests are the right tests and the tests need to change over time. 378 00:42:43,180 --> 00:42:56,280 And so while test coverage is important and are the test screen is important, like that's, you, you risk kind of warping the conversation a little bit and falling into the trap. 379 00:42:56,280 --> 00:43:00,780 Yeah. And you just risk creating like poor incentives for people. 380 00:43:01,360 --> 00:43:03,720 Yeah. Just, just write the test for the sake of the test. 381 00:43:04,820 --> 00:43:12,500 So, um, one of the ones that I liked in your talk that you kind of talked about generally though is, um, like the friction required to make changes. 382 00:43:12,500 --> 00:43:17,360 And so like how frequently and how easily can you make changes? How brittle is your code base? 383 00:43:17,360 --> 00:43:23,300 So I think that there's probably a lot of things that kind of can feed into that as sub indicators, 384 00:43:23,300 --> 00:43:27,220 but I think that's probably the general metric that you're trying to convey. 385 00:43:27,760 --> 00:43:49,340 Yeah. And then like, I suppose that could just be, um, well, there's a great quote from Adrian Kokroff that I've used a lot where, uh, he talks about, you know, you want to go faster, like count up how many meetings and tickets it takes to get something done, publish the number and make it go down. 386 00:43:49,340 --> 00:44:02,100 Um, and so, you know, yeah. How many, how many meetings and tickets, how long does that process take? Those are all friction points, right? 387 00:44:02,160 --> 00:44:08,800 Is every time you have to schedule a meeting for something, um, or submit a ticket, it's a, it's a point of friction. 388 00:44:08,800 --> 00:44:25,060 So I'm just, I have metrics on the brain too, as usual, because when do I not, um, so thinking about how do we tie thinking about our code as debt, there's then the, the question around trading derivatives and de-risking it. 389 00:44:25,140 --> 00:44:35,420 And who, who would, who would the buyers of that be? Um, but then also how do we at least just report internally on the debt that we're carrying? 390 00:44:35,800 --> 00:44:36,180 Right. 391 00:44:37,880 --> 00:44:51,160 And I think that we've expanded on a lot of possible ways to think about it, but I feel like we've reached the part of leaving the mystery with our listeners and letting everybody else mull this over. 392 00:44:52,960 --> 00:45:00,640 Yes. Um, let the mulling begin. Um, so any, any final parting thoughts for our listeners on that note? 393 00:45:01,500 --> 00:45:09,020 No, I think that, I think I'm coming back to your initial thing about people being discouraged by debt. 394 00:45:09,180 --> 00:45:18,760 Um, and I don't think that either as a person who is working on the code base or someone who's a counterpart to the code base, like the existence of debt is not an existential crisis. 395 00:45:19,140 --> 00:45:30,300 There's always going to be things that you need to work on. There's always going to be something in your backlog. Um, don't let that freak you out. Like that must be part of having code. 396 00:45:30,720 --> 00:45:36,680 So I think, I think it's kind of what you said, like none of this is inherently good or inherently bad. It just is. 397 00:45:37,500 --> 00:45:47,580 Yeah. And it's always tricky then. Like you're rehabilitating what had been perceived as a bad guy, but you're not, you're not trying to rehabilitate this character. 398 00:45:48,260 --> 00:46:12,820 Tech dead in this case, being the character, you're not trying to rehabilitate them all the way to being a good person or good character, good actor. Um, kind of like that, that awkward movie from a few years ago about, um, Maleficent, the sleeping beauty, you know, evil, evil queen, witch or whatever. 399 00:46:12,820 --> 00:46:22,180 And then you're evil fairy. And then it's like, Oh, actually like she was this maternal character or something. It was like, but she still kind of did some like, not so cool thing. 400 00:46:22,640 --> 00:46:37,340 So, or the Vikings, you know, like everyone thinks the Vikings is like these sort of scary, scary folks in history. And then it's like, well, actually they built a lot of trade centers and provided the foundation of the economy in the later middle ages. 401 00:46:37,820 --> 00:46:40,440 I mean, I digress slightly. 402 00:46:40,440 --> 00:46:42,640 Oh, this is a good podcast. 403 00:46:43,540 --> 00:46:54,320 But in this case, it's like, we're not trying to, we're not trying to rehabilitate tech debt to being like, go out and embrace it and load on as much as you can. 404 00:46:54,560 --> 00:47:06,240 It's just more like, it's a tool. It's a tool. It's like, it's new. It's sort of neutral. You know, you don't need to demonize it. Uh, but you know, we don't need to make it a hero either. 405 00:47:07,240 --> 00:47:07,640 Exactly. 406 00:47:08,640 --> 00:47:10,520 Okay. Case closed. 407 00:47:11,900 --> 00:47:12,980 On to the next one. 408 00:47:13,320 --> 00:47:13,640 Yes. 409 00:47:14,040 --> 00:47:24,060 Well, pleasure as always. Um, and, uh, we, maybe we will discover who are the crossover finance technology geeks out there. 410 00:47:24,460 --> 00:47:27,920 Besides just the two of us, uh, who come out of the world. 411 00:47:27,920 --> 00:47:31,560 Maybe, maybe the third one of you can come on the podcast with us next time. 412 00:47:31,720 --> 00:47:33,100 You just make yourself known. 413 00:47:33,540 --> 00:47:36,060 Yes. Like raise your hand on Twitter. 414 00:47:36,160 --> 00:47:39,960 We'd love to find you that one other person out there who loves this stuff. 415 00:47:41,800 --> 00:47:42,460 All right. 416 00:47:42,520 --> 00:47:45,140 Until next time, this has been Pivotal Conversations.