You are techY podcast

Ellen (00:01):
You are listening to the You are techY podcast, episode number thirty.

Intro (00:09):
Welcome to the You are techY podcast where it’s all about growing in your techy-ness so you can find the tech job of your dreams and now your host technology learning coach, Ellen Twomey.

Ellen (00:29):
This podcast is sponsored by our all new course, What Tech job is Right For Me? Visit us at youaretechy.com/start to check out our new course and find what tech job is right for you!

Ellen (00:44):
Derek Sivers is an author, entrepreneur, musician, Ted talk speaker, and self-taught developer. To say that Derek has created his own path is an understatement. He’s unique, thoughtful, and supremely interesting. He’s featured in the mega hit Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss and a popular Ted talk speaker. He’s a self-taught developer who developed his skills out of the desire to build a musicians self-publishing house designed to scratch Derek’s own itch and those of his musician friends. Derek resides in Oxford, England with his son where he spends his days writing, thinking and connecting intimately with his email list. He actually responds to their emails. Isn’t that amazing!? Derek is first and foremost a thinker. He consistently says things that make me think, well I’ve never really thought about it that way. It is a huge honor to say Derek, welcome to the show.

Derek (01:52):
Thanks, Ellen. And I am so happy to talk tech. You know it’s funny I get all of these emails from people or even podcasts that want to talk about business and say well tell us how did you start your business? And I think again and then you emailed and you said I want to talk to and I thought. Oh yes, it’s actually my favorite thing to talk about. I wish I could talk tech all day long cause it’s, it’s this thing that I spend all my time doing but no time talking about. So I’m very happy to be here.

Ellen (02:21):
Well, we are happy to have you. And I know that the listeners out there are really going to get a lot of value from just thinking about tech and we call it growing in their techy-ness and just looking at it from all sorts of different angles cause they’re really trying to figure out, you know, where they fit. But here’s a really important question that comes up, especially cause I talk to moms a lot and you know, and bringing women to tech so often that as moms, so I’d love to know what role Parenthood has played in your career decisions.

Derek (02:56):
It’s the main thing. I mean metaphorically it’s like parenthood is the house and everything else is just interior design. You know, it’s like that’s the thing that everything else has to fit around. Yeah. It’s funny when people ask me sometimes like why I’ve made certain life choices or moved here or there and it’s like, well, for my kid, well that’s, that’s the main reason I do things. So, yeah. Sorry. For me it’s just, it’s almost hard to separate parenthood and career decisions.

Ellen (03:34):
I totally agree. And I think that’s true of, of so many women that I talk to and moms I know for me. Financially, it wasn’t really that important for me to make a certain amount. And then when I started having my kids, I was like, now, wait a minute. First of all, I’m paying for childcare if I’m gone and second if I’m going to be gone for them, it needs to be impactful work that I’m doing and meaningful and a lot of different ways. And so it just, I think it kind of just shifts a lot and changes our mindset and how we want to really maximize our time with our kids always.

Ellen (04:12):
So what advice would you give to a woman, and let’s say specifically a mom who’s considering a career in tech, but here’s the thing, she’s probably nervous about whether or not she’s capable for that work.

Derek (04:27):
Oh, I have so much to say about this. Okay. Well, first do Ellen’s techy coaching, but that’s obvious. All right, so on, okay, let’s, I think there are a few different aspects to this. There’s gender, there’s parenting. And there’s learning. So on the gender subject, I mean I think tech is more of a meritocracy than a patriarchy. There’s that great line from the movie, The Matrix, where Trinity is like this legendary anonymous hacker. And then when Neo meets her for the first time, he goes, Oh, Whoa, I thought you were a guy. And she said, most guys do. So I think like, yeah, men will have their prejudices, but I think it’s kind of similar to being a white person, learning to speak Mandarin, right? Like if you go to China, people will look at you doubtfully since you don’t look like most Chinese speakers, but if you don’t let their doubts bother you, then you can blow them away when you show them that you actually know what you’re doing.

Derek (05:37):
So by this token, women might even have a little advantage, like by standing out and being the exception and being a little more memorable because of it. You know, when I every now and then what I get an email from a woman that’s like an open BSD developer or like a PostGresQ UL program, I’m like, Whoa, cool. Well, I met like 99 guys and one woman in that field. And that’s like you stand out, you know. So on the parenting subject, so I knew this successful executive in New York city who said that being a mother was her secret weapon because she knew her time was limited, like she couldn’t work overtime. So instead she had to make her limited hours more effective like she had to triage and delegate. And I think in tech it’s really tempting to obsess over that final 1% of a project or we stink time on, you know, what do you call it?

Derek (06:44):
Like shaving and bike shedding. But if you know that you have to leave at four o’clock, well that kind of prevents you from falling down those rabbit holes. So lastly on the learning subject, I think it’s really helpful if you’re feeling intimidated or overwhelmed to start a project first. Like something you need to do something where you will have massive intrinsic motivation. You know, like a web app that you want to exist or a a mobile app that you want to exist and decide to do that first and then just learn how to do that thing. 

Derek (07:32):
Yeah. I think that I never could have learned programming in general. Right. I feel bad for people that are just like, well, I guess I should learn coding and they start taking a course but they don’t even really know what or why. And they’re just, they’re trying to remember everything because they don’t know what’s more important or less important. But for me like necessity is the best teacher. I never could have learned programming in school. But yeah, I learned programming cause I had to write like first I started this website not knowing what I was doing. I knew basic HTML. Like basically, you know the HTML you can learn in an afternoon. And that’s all I knew. And I just had a static HTML website. But then because of that, I was doing hours of manual labor per day. Like orders were coming into my little store and they would just show up as an email.

Derek (08:30):
And I would have highlight my mouse over the first name, control C alt tab, go into my database program, control V alt tab, highlight my mouse over the last name, control C alt tab, the new program control V, highlight my mouse over address, line one, control C alt tab control V. So Ellen, I was doing that like two or three hours per day control C, control V. So I said, okay, I have to learn how to automate this because if this turns into six hours a day, like if my orders double, I am going to die. I can’t do this. I need to learn how to automate. That’s a lot of pain. Yeah. So with the most massive motivation. Hell yeah. I learned programming but never could have done it if it was just a class. But that said, by the way, I want to give one little tiny shout out here to the best programming course I ever took.

Derek (09:27):
Okay. Which is Angela YU spelled Y-U-A, has an amazing iPhone like iOS of course on you. To me, if you go to Udemy.com, U D E M Y .com I think it is. If you search Angela, you, iOS 13, it’s like 15 bucks, which is ridiculous. It should be like 1500 bucks. I don’t know why it’s priced at 15 bucks, but it’s, it’s one of those things where it’s like, you know, regular price, $500 now 98%, but for 15 bucks it’s like 16 hours of video. It’s, it’s well done. It’s an amazing course. Like I sat down and learned how to make an iPhone app in like two weeks with her course. It was so well done. Yes.
Ellen (10:15)
Oh, I love that. I love it. I do think my audience is going to think I paid you to say to get a project and have massive intrinsic motivation, but I indeed did not know that.

Derek (10:30):
That’s the only, yeah, it’s people. That’s like my number one answer. If any person on the street were to ask me like, how did you learn programming? And she said, well, necessity. That’s it. That’s the only way to really get the, the real motivation to learn. So yeah, I think even if you’re thinking like, yeah, what do I need to learn to get a job somewhere? Well, I think if you were to make any kind of cool little web app or mobile app, then there’s your job application. You know, I made this myself.

Ellen (11:00):
Well, this is the, like this is the thing in tech, right? Someone in our community, they’ll be like, should I get a degree? Well, what do you need? But what do you actually need to get a job in tech? You have to demonstrate your skills. That’s it. And I have a computer science degree and I can count on my hand how many times in my tech career, whether in UX design or in development, I’ve met people who had computer science degrees. It’s gotta be so rare, almost nobody does. It’s much more effective. And I think my degree was helpful. But what really, like when I wanted to learn Ruby on rails, I didn’t learn Ruby on rails. I got a client, had a deadline, had a project that I absolutely had to get done and I was like, Ruby on Rails is my vehicle to do that and I will do whatever it takes to get that, and it was like it was this commitment

Ellen (11:54):
level that I never had in school or in consulting. It was just a totally different level. And then that’s what I teach. So in my coaching program, the first thing I say is take a self-selected project and then stick with it and then half the time, Derek, all I’m doing is saying don’t change your mind. My advice is to go back to your original project. My advice is that your project is amazing. Around week three, you’re going to feel like you’ve selected the wrong project. Indeed, you have not. Go back and finish the project. That’s literally what I say because what happens, we hit a roadblock and then we think, oh, oh, I must need a different project. But really when you see it through til the end, I think that’s when you really see the fruits of your labor. That’s when you really learn what you need to learn.

Derek (12:42):
Yeah. Yeah. I think I hadn’t thought about this tool, until you were speaking, that when you know what you need to complete, it acts as a wonderful filter to filter out like the 90% of the information you don’t need. You know, like I’ve been programming in Ruby for 16 years. I’ve been programming in Ruby still, if I look at like the Ruby manual, they’re huge sections that I’ve never learned. I will never learn. I’ve never needed it. If I ever do a project someday that needs that, then I’ll learn it. But no, I just learned everything out of necessity and I knew what I needed, you know, and it’s usually 10% of the possibility if you don’t want to learn everything Python can do or everything CSS can do, you just learn what you need to know. It acts as a great filter. I think that’s so insightful.

Ellen (13:37):
I think this is one of the major challenges of a newbie developer because I have a blog entitled Stop Learning Everything because any time you go down one path, it’ll lead you to all these other paths. And so if you, if you realize and you understand that developers don’t just pull stuff out of their brain and have it all memorized, you know, like that’s not what happens, I think, but that’s what, that’s what a, a new developer wants to do. Right? They think, well, once I know all this stuff, then I’ll just be able to pull it off my brain and insert it. Right. Okay. So what do you think was the hardest thing about learning to be a developer and do you have a strategy to overcome that? Because I think that when we hit roadblocks and then people think, I must not be good at this or, but it just, that hard. It is just that hard every, every time you go to do something, there’s a challenge. What do you think was hardest for you about learning? 

Derek

Procrastination. Because sometimes your brain just hurts. Like when you’re trying to figure out an error,

Derek (14:52):
you just like what unknown character would wear. No. What? She’s still, and you have no idea why something’s not working. And so you end up doing is you switch browser tabs, you read the news, you go, you read email, you get something to eat. Either call a friend, you need to get a distraction. You go back. Do you go to Reddit? You go to look at hacker news and then now in like an hour and a half has passed and you go back to it. And it’s like, even though your brain hurts probably 15 or 30 unpleasant minutes of concentration and just trying lots of things, try this, try that, try this, try that. Finally, you know, you tinker, you’re like, okay, put a dairy here. What if I deliberately make it crash here? Okay. What do I do that, you know, 20 minutes would have solved it instead of an hour of procrastination.

Derek (15:38):
So for me, that’s the hardest thing is to push through the pain. Yeah. Continue trying without procrastinating. But I mean that’s it. I mean, I, sorry, I gave kind of a trick answer to your question, but I don’t think any particular thing was hard. Yeah. Just because, you know what, because I had this website to run, I just learned a little pieces at a time. I mean I kind of felt like I would just pick up like a few tips per day and I did things like, I set up my own Linux server, when I think I was like doing a managed hosting thing and then like way back in, we’re talking like 1998, like my early, early days, somebody hacked into my server. Apparently I was using like, it’s kind of the equivalent of somebody just installing like the default WordPress.

Derek (16:33):
Like I was just using a very common pre-packaged thing back in the day and somebody hacked it and suddenly the homepage of my website was replaced with their obnoxious message. I was like, ah. So I was like, Oh no, I need to learn how to set up my own web server so this doesn’t happen again and I need to learn about firewalls. And again, it was like, so now out of necessity I have to learn how to administer my own Apache web server on my own Linux server. You know…

Ellen (16:59):
That is, I think, excellent advice. I think that’s really hard for me to learn a little bit. I want to learn it all. And I think in doing a little bit is so much more effective, but it’s hard to like, you know, if you have 10 problems, isn’t it hard to not, well, I’ll just solve these 10 problems today, one for the next 10 days.

Derek

Right. But you know, if you’ve ever tried to learn a foreign language, you can’t learn a hundred Spanish words per day. You have to learn 20 per day for five days. You know, you have to pace yourself, otherwise your brain and you know Fritz’s yeah.

Ellen

I, I love, oh, a lot of that, but specifically; the repetition that’s required. It’s really another, in learning we’ll say daily, like you really have to have, whether it, whether it’s literally every day or just frequently. That is what makes the brain calm and refreshing it. And then I love how you said how to apply it. I mean that’s, that goes back to this issue where a lot of newbies come in and they want to know the code or like you were saying, learn, you know, learn Python. It’s not as helpful to learn Python as it is to solve a problem using Python. Yeah, right. Super interesting. Yeah, it’s fun. It’s fun. It’s super interesting. Okay, so you, you’re calling your, can you just define yourself as a nerd? Here’s the thing. What, was there a certain point in time that you were like, I’m learning to code or I’m learning to be a developer and now I’m a developer. Was there like one point or one time period?

Derek (18:46):
Ellen, I have a trick answer for you. Okay. Uh, I was about to say no, that it’s just gradual. Like I told you, you know, you learn a tip or two a day and it just adds up. But yeah, you know, when I started calling myself a programmer when I didn’t want strangers to talk to me, but if you’re sitting next to somebody on the airplane, you gotta understand. For 15 years, I was a professional musician. So you know, somebody sees the guitar on my shoulder and they say, Oh, your’e a musician. I go, yeah. And I go, I like kind of music. Do you do anything I can hear on the radio? So I got new and my brother was in a band. I said, well, when can I hear you play? I was like, I don’t want to have this conversation. So I found that when a stranger next to me on the airplane says, what do you do? I say programmer and they go, Oh, no more talking. That’s when I started calling myself a programmer is when I didn’t want strangers to talk to me further.

Ellen (19:47):
I love that answer. I bet it is. Uh, definitely insightful. Good, good. That’s a creative answer. Okay. So I, this is not, I realized that this might not be interesting for you, but I cannot tell you. I think that this is going to be a super interesting. Well, your answer will be super interesting to the audience because what does your life look like today and why have you structured it that way?

Derek (20:19):
Okay. Oh, I wake up early and I write all day long. Basically I’m typing or talking most hours I’m awake. I’m okay. I write for at least an hour a day in my journal, usually just with going over my thoughts on things, or questioning my thoughts on things, or thinking how I could think differently about this thing. And this thing could be anything from what I’m programming to where I live to what I’m going to do about my travel plans now that I can’t travel anymore. Yeah. Or all of these things. I really loved to ask myself questions and then question my answers. I love to push past my first answer to anything and get beyond it too. Kind of ask myself if there are other ways to look at this thing. So, I’ll just spend hours a day sometimes just in my journal thinking out loud and I like to keep a record of these things. So, I used to only write in daily diary format, like I’ve just kind of, whatever today is, I would just open up that file with today’s date and just dump everything in my head today.

Derek (21:52):
But there were, then there were some subjects that I kept coming back to over and over and over again. Like for example, I have thought for an unreasonable number of hours about which operating system I use, because I’ve bounced back and forth between Linux free BSD and open BSD and the pros and cons of each. And I’ve thought way too long about this. So after a while I created a, a file . dot TXT where any time I want to think again about my choice of operating system, I open up that file and I think about it further because then I can see all my past thoughts on this subject. And same thing with my choice of whether to get a dog or not. Same thing with my choice of where to live or you know, should I, what new skills should I learn that’s in like skills dot TXT file.

Derek (22:41):
So I just have these journals where I do all of my thinking and yeah, sometimes I, sometimes it’ll be like four hours a day I’ll spend in there just dumping all my thoughts and looking at them reflecting. It just really helps to, okay, to have them sorted and categorized like that, you know?

Ellen (23:00):
Yeah. I think that, so I was given the advice to journal every day. By a coach. So I tried to hire her, I was having some challenges, my startup, and she’s like, no, no you’re not going to hire me. You don’t need to hire anyone. You know how to do this. Just journal every day. And I think just because I respected her so much and the kind of, her telling me, no, you don’t need someone, I offer the service and no, you can’t have that. I did it. I did it every day. I’ve done it every day since then. And the, and I already like blogging and writing about things that I, it wasn’t like I wasn’t writing, I was writing, but I wasn’t journaling every day.  I actually, I write, I write in a, I think it’s 29 cents from Walmart, like a, like a notebook and I entitle it, Do the Work. And I got that from, from Brooke Castillo because I think what happens, and I don’t know, I don’t know if this is a gender thing, I don’t know if this is a mom thing, but it almost felt like luxurious or, or fun or not, I dunno about frivolous, but like, like it wasn’t, it was just kind of this, the thing I wanted to do as opposed to really essential to living my best life or being the best entrepreneur or whatever. So I call it Doing the Work and you might think, well, no, that’s going to make it not so, you know, fun to do, but it’s not really about fun.

Ellen (24:53):
It’s like I don’t want to go a day without spending time with my thoughts in that way. And I do do it daily, but I would say that I have, my system is not exactly like yours and I do use Evernote, but I love going back to my previous thoughts. I can’t believe how much I love going back to those previous thoughts and to know that the time I had put the time in to think it through, but now I might have new information, right? Like I might have a totally different perspective and I just don’t, I’m not sure anything has been so impactful in my life. And I think that it’s, it just can’t be understated. Here’s where this manifests with the women in my community, especially when they’re going interviews. They, so even just like my friends locally, they’ll call me and they’re like, Oh, we have an interview tomorrow.

Ellen (25:55):
I have an interview, let’s do a mock interview. And I think mock interviews are great, but I think if you only say the answer, here’s what happens. They say the answer. And I know that they’re brilliant, intelligent people, but when they’re talking the clarity of thought is missing. So they might not address the problem specifically, the answer specifically, they might not give a clear answer, give enough detail without too much. And I just feel like this is my advice. I just feel like if you write down your answer, so you do practice it saying it out loud, but if you write it down you can see things that you can’t see when they’re in your head. Yup. Yeah. And I think that’s hard to know until you kind of make a practice of it. But I write in that I journal for 10 minutes every day. Cool. I make it really, really small. Like the commitment. Yeah, I know. I do it.

Derek (26:53):
Yeah.

Ellen (26:55):
If it goes longer than that then that’s great. Or if I get up early and I can do more then that’s great.

Derek (27:01):
Yeah.

Ellen (27:01):
But I love the one to four hours. I think that’s

Derek (27:04):
It’s luxurious. But you know, it’s funny is you’re talking about like going on a job interview and here you and I are in an interview right now and yeah, I spent almost two hours preparing for this interview. You sent over, you emailed some topics in advance and I spent about two hours kind of thinking through them, thinking through my first answer thinking now like that’s a boring answer. What would be a more interesting answer to that? Like what’s, what is an interesting, point what’s really important for me to mention? What’s, you know, what do I want to make sure to communicate here? And so yeah, I’m really, really into preparing and thinking things through. Even if then, you know, if I, if I, I wasn’t even looking at my notes but just the fact that I’ve thought this through before the, the heat of the moment, you know, so you’re prepared. It’s important.

Ellen (27:56):
It is. And I appreciate all the time you spent on it. And I know our audience will too. Let’s, I just want to make sure, cause I do have this question is what’s one topic that you’re dying to talk about, but I know you said you had to talk about tech. Is there anything in tech that we didn’t cover that you’re like, no, I really think this is important. You know, people need to hear this. I want them to know.

Derek (28:17):
Yeah, two things. For one, it’s a tiny point, but I think it helps, is I highly, highly recommend if you’re, especially if you’re kind of starting this journey, okay. To make an alias, to not use your real name online. Ideally even like, so you can kind of ignore the gender thing, like pick a genderless name, you know, like the name of a place or a mineral and make your avatar a geometric design or something. And then just join Stack Exchange and just ask away. You can ask dumb questions. Make a git hub account in that in that same name and share your dumb code that you don’t know what you’re doing. And ask for critique. And this is why an alias is so important is because people are probably going to insult your alias for writing bad code.

Derek (29:15):
And they’ll insult your alias for asking a dumb question. But they can’t insult you because nobody knows who you are. And I think that this has a psychological effect. Like, if people criticize your real name, it hurts. Even if you know that like they don’t really know you, but just seeing somebody criticize you with your real name. It, it’s confusing. It hurts. Yeah, it hurts. I had a specific moment I was about, I think I was 37 when I kind of, I detached from my public self and I realized something. It’s a long story but it’s just aye. I did post some thing online about Ruby on Rails actually. And when I woke up in the morning like I felt like the entire internet was attacking it and they were like immense insulting me. And you know, people saying things like, oh, this guy’s a mouth breathing idiot that couldn’t code his way out of a paper bag.

Derek (30:11):
And it hurt my feelings for about 10 minutes until I realized like, wait, they don’t know me.  They’re criticizing this blog post that some dude they don’t know wrote, this isn’t actually me, but it can be really confusing. I think not using your real name really helps that. So always use an alias online and not even because of the gender. Like I just recommend this to everyone. In fact, I make it a requirement for my kid when he was doing his very first account, I think he was creating an account from Minecraft or something. And it was like the first time he’s about to do anything to like create an account anywhere online. I’m like, okay, time to pick your internet name. He was five and he goes, internet name, what’s that? And I was like, well, you can’t use your real name on the internet.

Derek (30:59):
You always have to pick an internet name. It was fun. I just, we picked an internet name and how cool, especially for kids, you know, cause then you can just abandon it. You know, you can be the sole top of the destroyer for a couple of years, abandon that one and then you can be, you know, Oak Tree Willy for a couple of years and abandoned that one. And you know, you don’t have to have people digging through your past and insulting it. So yeah, if I could do it all over again for myself, I would have chosen the stage name and internet name. We kept my real name secret. Love it. And you said too. Yes. Thank you. Okay. So my main thing that I would love to geek out with you about independence, because did you see the movie Wall- E, the Pixar movie?

Ellen (31:48):
Several times.

Derek (31:50)

Okay. So you know the people on the spaceship, they were told here’s a comfortable chair. Yeah, you need to walk. And then within a few generations they don’t know how to walk anymore. They can’t walk anymore. So I think like Apple, Google, Instagram, Facebook, and Amazon tell you here we’ll take care of all of your photos and all of your needs. You know what, anything you want, just tell us. Just speak into this microphone. We own no need to do any of that yourself. We’ll do everything. So of course it’s to your benefit. So I mean, sorry, it’s to their benefit to lock you in and make you dependent on them. But then now you don’t even know how to stand on your own two feet anymore. So, you know, I have this little snarky saying that clouds disappear by nature.

Derek (32:41):
You will outlive a lot of these companies. So, don’t give companies anything that matters to you. They don’t care as much as you do. And I had this tragic story that a good friend of mine in Singapore, he’s even like a tech savvy VC and investor guy in Singapore, guy in his mid forties. Been there, done that. He had a 10 year old kid and because he was tech savvy and when Google launched Picasso or one of their kind of photo collection things, and his kid was born, they just made this family decision that all of their family photos were going to be in Google. Picasso that was just their thing to store all of their photos. You can imagine where I’m going with the story is because later he started a company and he decided to do the Google apps for business and merged his personal Gmail account with his Google apps account.

Derek (33:38):
And, you know, there’s, you know, there’s just a prompt along the way, I guess when you’re signing up for Google apps, they say, do you want us to merge such and such? And he said yes. And then a day or two later, his wife was like, honey, where are all of our photos? And he said, Oh, they’re in Picasso. And she said, no, they’re not. He said yeah, they are. And he looked in there. He goes, Oh, Oh my God, they’re all gone. Where did they go? What do you mean new photos? What’s going on? He contacted the customer support and they said, Oh, well when you merged your two accounts, we told you that this would eliminate your photos. And she’s like, well, where did you back them up? He goes, I didn’t, it’s Google. They’re supposed to, she’s like, you mean all of our photos are gone? What have you done?

Derek (34:20):
Yeah, it’s the cloud idiot. I mean, sorry, I don’t, I’m not calling anybody in particular an idiot. But like it’s the cloud. It’s a cloud. It disappears. They don’t care. Like don’t put anything that matters to you in the cloud. Another tech friend of mine calls it the clown. He said, no, don’t give the keys to your life to the clown. But anyway, uh, I think that if I could do my little, you know, time traveler thing and if I wish that I had a way that I could influence history more. I think like back in the nineties, it was more common to host things yourself on your own website. Okay. You can still do that. Like most people don’t, but you can and it’s really dead easy. Like a simple little private $5 a month Linux server. You can host your photos, your files, your contacts, your calendars, your email, your everything. You don’t need Dropbox, you don’t need MailChimp, you don’t need Instagram. You don’t need any of this stuff. A little tiny private $5 a month Linux server can do all of it. Learning to set this up yourself doesn’t take that long. It’s like a few hours of your life and he gives you like such a powerful feeling of self-reliance.

Derek (35:36):
Lastly, I think, you know, part of what attracted me to the internet in the first place, cause I got into it early, like had my first website up in 1994. I really liked it’s decentralized nature. I think that centralization, it’s both sad and dangerous. And so it makes me really sad each day when I check email and like, you know, 40 emails come into my inbox and like 95% of them are all @gmail.com at gmail.com or dot com@gmail.com. It’s like, it’s sad to me how many people are dependent on Gmail and Google and Facebook.

Ellen (36:13)

Okay, well I have a theory that’s going to help you. Thank you. My theory is the pendulum. I don’t know if I read it somewhere stolen, but I really believe that trends swing one way until people get bad enough and then they swing the other way completely and they end up somewhere in the middle.

Ellen (36:32):
So I really think if you, it’s super interesting. I mean, I, this is no one else is talking about this that I’m talking to. Mmm. I do get super mad at Facebook. Like I, I think that it’s like, I’ll try to run an ad. They’re like, no, you can’t ask a question because you’re, you’re, you know, leeching on your customers or trying to like trick people. I’m like, are you kidding? Like, that’s the best way to define what I’m doing. And they’re saying, well, we can just cut out spam by not allowing you to ask a question that’s just insane. I cannot, so that is a major problem that I have and, and I think that. So this is interesting. I really think, I don’t think people are, yeah, they just, it’s easy. It’s convenient. It’s right there. And they don’t think that setting up a Linux server is available to them.

Ellen (37:36):
Yeah. You know what I mean? Like they don’t, that doesn’t occur to them as an idea. So, yeah, I like it. It’s, it’s really, it’s really interesting. Did you write about this? Do you have any?

Derek (37:45)

Not yet, no. Well, you know, not publicly, but it’s funny whenever it comes up I get on a soap box and I just notice, you know how mad I’m getting about it. And I think, yeah, I need to do something about this. Even if it’s just maybe sharing simple instructions, like really simple, like dot, dot, dot. Here’s how to, here’s how to set up your own context. Cause you know, even something like your contacts and calendars. I don’t like the idea of like Google having my contacts. No, no, no, no, no, no way. Anyway. And it’s very interesting.

Ellen (38:19)

No, it’s, it’s super interesting. Well, if you write about it, I will link to it.

Ellen (38:24):
I think that it’s, I think it’s super interesting. I think that it is challenging. I think there’s something bubbling up because we just don’t like the control. I’m not sure the conceptualization of understanding how they can go away or that all your stuff can be lost is out there, but frustration about how you have to work and how it changes, the decisions you can make in your career and business in life. I think that might be, people might be starting to get mad enough about that. So it’s interesting. I like it. Super fun. Okay. So I want to just say thank you so, so much for being here. I knew it would be an interesting conversation. I am excited to share you with my audience. I think that, they might not, they might not know you, which blows my mind cause I’ve been a fan of yours for a long time and I knew this would be interesting and it was even more interesting then I thought it would be. So just thank you for being here and spending time with me and talking about tech.

Derek (39:28):
Well, thank you for indulging me in my favorite subjects and that the reason that I do these interviews, as you can tell, I’m not here to promote anything. I just love thinking about these subjects. But I also really like connecting with people. So if you go to sivers.org my email address is right out there in the open. And it’s one of my favorite things to hear from strangers every day. So even if you don’t have a question, just email and say hello and introduce yourself.

Ellen (39:58):
Thanks so much, Derek. I really appreciate your time.

Derek (40:01):
Thanks, Ellen.

Ellen (40:07):
Hey, if you enjoyed listening to this podcast, you have to sign up for the You are techY email list. Imagine being in the tech job of your dreams. Join me to get the strategies, training and never ending support to get hired. Sign up at youaretechy.com that’s Y-O-U-A-R-E-T-E-C-H-Y dot com. I’ll see you next time