A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Chicago, w/Nicole Janeway Bills

Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello friends. Today's guest is Nicole Janeway Bills. She's a very interesting person, as I'm sure you will hear. And on top of that, this turned into probably the most accidentally, additionally interesting podcast we've ever recorded. You see, it was a little while ago, we were scheduling Nicole to be on the show and she said, "Hey, I'm taking a new job with this company and I'm moving to Chicago. So can we record this after I get to Chicago and get kind of settled in?" So that's what we did. We scheduled that, and I remember at the time she said that she was taking a new job with this company and I saw the name of the company. I didn't think anything of it. I'd never really even heard of it to be perfectly honest, but it turns out that company was none other than FTX. And if you've been paying any attention at all to the news, it's pretty obvious that between the time we scheduled this podcast and the time that we recorded it, even I knew who FTX was and not for good reasons.

(00:00:57): Nicole was one of many people who had nothing to do with the malfeasance going on at FTX, no idea it was going on. And she's pretty zen-like about the impact of the whole thing on her life. While at the same time, quite humanely concerned for this scandal's impact on many other people. At the time of recording, she was still officially with FTX, might still be today but did not and does not expect to be there much longer. Well, it turns out the move to Chicago never quite went off as expected. And while she was not in any way connected to the behind the scenes shady dealings, she did have some degree of exposure to the people in question. So she is currently planning her next steps. Fortunately, she's been incubating her next steps on the side for a little while. This won't be her first career pivot, not even close.

(00:01:46): Her arc through like consulting and data science and software engineering is relatively unique, even for this show with its host of unique career arcs. And we got a little bit deeper into social issues than what we typically do on this show. I'm not really sure if Nicole and I emboldened each other or provoked each other into getting into this place, but I sensed a little bit of a kindred spirit. You're going to hear more profanity from me than you probably have heard in all other episodes combined. And you'll also hear me absolutely lose it on Samuel Jackson. That's not how you expected that sentence to end, was it? Even just sitting here recording this intro, I am becoming giddy, just positively giddy about re-listening to this one. I hope you experience similar feelings of giddiness as you listen as well. So let's get into it.

Announcer (00:02:35): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please?

Announcer (00:02:39): This is the Raw Data By P3 Adaptive Podcast, with your host Rob Collie and your co-host Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Raw Data By P3 Adaptive is data with the human element.

Rob Collie (00:03:05): Welcome to the show, Nicole Janeway Bills. How are you today?

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:03:08): Great. Thank you so much for having me on.

Rob Collie (00:03:11): Oh, thanks so much for being here. So we've already started talking about this a little bit backstage. You're walking, perpetually walking towards the camera as we talk here and you're not getting any closer. I'm thinking that maybe there's a treadmill desk type of setup. Is that correct?

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:03:26): Yes. I'm pretty excited about being able to be productive and get work done and also get some steps in at the same time. I find it to be very relaxing to be on the desk.

Rob Collie (00:03:37): It is. I've done this. I'll explain why I don't do it anymore. But how long have you had your treadmill desk?

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:03:45): It was a pandemic purchase.

Rob Collie (00:03:45): Okay.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:03:45): I've gone through a couple treadmills. They do burnout.

Rob Collie (00:03:47): They do. Have you found that it actually helps in terms of your physical condition? It didn't help me.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:03:56): I'm not sure. I'm a big runner. I'm a serious amateur athlete.

Rob Collie (00:04:01): Serious amateur athlete. Okay.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:04:03): I'm not very fast, but I do very much enjoy participating. My high school cross-country coach would tell me, he was like, "Well, the worse you are, the more you get to participate."

Rob Collie (00:04:14): That's true.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:04:16): So I enjoy that about running.

Rob Collie (00:04:17): The object of golf is to play the least golf.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:04:20): That's true. Same with running.

Rob Collie (00:04:22): If you're slower, you're running longer. You're getting to enjoy it, participate more. You have a higher participation score.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:04:27): Yep. So I definitely get the participation trophies, and coming back from a run and then getting on the desk and walking is a nice cool down. And you don't feel like there's quite as much of a harsh separation between the various aspects of yourself.

Rob Collie (00:04:42): I used to do eight hours a day sometimes on my walking treadmill, and I did burn them out. Every time I burned one out, there's a decision to make, do I get another one? No one would repair them, so silly. The other two things that ultimately led me to not renew my subscription to walking treadmill desk was, it wasn't doing anything for my physical condition. If you do it and run a lot, I'm sure that that's great, but if it's all you do, that low intensity didn't do anything for me. It just made me eat more. I ate to offset any calories burned during those eight hours.

(00:05:18): The other thing I noticed, and maybe this was a poor analysis on my part, it might have been a confounding variable problem because I was also getting older at the same time and heavier, was that I felt like it had shortened my calf muscles, the short stride. And so then when I would go running, I would invariably pull a calf muscle. Those two things were kind of like the deal breaker. But I'll tell you, I loved working on the treadmill desk. It turned out the walking the movement just sort of calms my ADD.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:05:49): Yes, that resonates.

Rob Collie (00:05:52): So much more focused.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:05:54): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:05:54): I'm jealous. I actually kind of want mine back.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:05:57): Yeah. I'm not a doctor or a physical therapist or anything like that. But if I can try to troubleshoot this with you, one thing I might suggest is get a treadmill desk, another one. It is annoying because like you're saying, you have to toss the entire machine when the motor burns out, because there's not replacement parts available and no one will service them. I've also experienced that. Use it for Pomodoros.

Rob Collie (00:06:21): I don't know what a Pomodoro is.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:06:23): Oh.

Rob Collie (00:06:23): It's a new word for me.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:06:24): It's a working technique that involves an interval timer. So the classic Pomodoro is you work for 25 minutes and then you break for five minutes.

Rob Collie (00:06:33): Okay.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:06:34): And then repeat. You could also do 50 minutes of work followed by a 10-minute break or 32 minutes of work followed by an eight-minute break.

Rob Collie (00:06:43): It's the ratio.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:06:43): Some other ratio that you make up, it is whatever you want it to be, but it can be overused. I started to get foot problems. That's the thing that comes after me, is the front part of my foot doesn't really love the pounding from walking, coupled with running as my major activity. So forcing yourself to take breaks, as silly as that sounds.

Rob Collie (00:07:05): Breaks from walking, yeah.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:07:07): Yeah. But it could be a way to bring it back into your life in a more structured way that you don't get injured. And I'm also giving this advice for myself, because going from being in an office where I couldn't have a treadmill desk to now, I will be working for myself, then I need to do it in a way that's constructive and healthy.

Rob Collie (00:07:27): Yeah. I don't know that I could do that. I have the treadmill desk, I'm going to be using it. It's very binary. I mean, I need to give my future self some credit, maybe I could pull it off. Obvious first place to start our conversation.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:07:42): Well, it sounds like we're very similar in this regard.

Rob Collie (00:07:43): Yeah, yeah. For sure.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:07:44): Yeah. The attitude towards the treadmill desk is aligned.

Rob Collie (00:07:47): Yeah. Again, the focus, I've never been as focused. You mentioned that you're going to be working for yourself. I was telling you a little bit backstage that this is both a feature and a bug. It's more a characteristic of me rather than a strength or a weakness, that I don't really know much about you but here's what I do know. Somewhere along the way, my sort of intuitive recording system in my brain came across some things that you had said or written on social media and said, "Oh, this is an interesting person. This is someone that we should have on the show. I don't even remember what it was. I'm very efficient with my storage, right.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:08:22): That's awesome.

Rob Collie (00:08:23): The brain just records this person, good. Let's invite them on the show. Why waste the bites on the content of why? Just flag them.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:08:32): That's right. It makes for more exciting podcast [inaudible 00:08:35].

Rob Collie (00:08:34): It certainly does. It certainly-

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:08:36): I have that uncertainty. Okay, here's hypothesis is she's good. Is this actually the case? Let's test that.

Rob Collie (00:08:41): Yeah, we're going to find out. 20 question, grilling of death. No, we don't because again, we're not that structured.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:08:46): We've used several questions on the treadmill setup, so I think it's going well so far.

Rob Collie (00:08:50): Yeah, you're killing it. We're both aligned on the same side of the table here. If this isn't a good podcast, it's my fault. So I'm committed. The person who sponsors a traditional seven figure data project, the person who signs that check is committed to saying, "It's a success regardless of whether it's a success." So what are you up to professionally right now? And again, this is not one of those usual leading questions where I already know the answer. I actually don't.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:09:16): Well, I am a software engineer, formerly a data scientist. I currently work for a company that you may have heard of, called FTX.

Rob Collie (00:09:26): Fantastic.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:09:27): At the time of recording, I am still employed by FTX. However, that may not be the case by the time this podcast is released, because FTX is in Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.

Rob Collie (00:09:42): They're having some issues.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:09:42): I would say so.

Rob Collie (00:09:42): And you had just moved to Chicago, right? I think this was job related.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:09:46): Yep. So I moved for the job, and then this is something that I haven't really heard covered in the whole news around the FTX debacle. But on September 27th, Sam Bankman-Fried released a Google Doc internally, that basically demanded all the staff move to Miami. Yeah, he actually was like, "Okay, move to The Bahamas."

Rob Collie (00:10:10): Well.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:10:10): "And I'll accept Miami as a secondary location, if you don't feel like you can go to the Bahamas."

Rob Collie (00:10:15): Well, you want your leaders to be reasonable.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:10:17): Yeah. He was like, "We're closing all the offices. Chicago's office will be closed within the next three weeks." And I was like, "What? I just got here."

Rob Collie (00:10:27): How old is this guy again? He's like 20 something, right?

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:10:29): He's about seven. No, he's 31. So for a while, he was the youngest billionaire, allegedly right?

Rob Collie (00:10:37): Right.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:10:37): Because it turns out, if you make up your own currency, you can say you have as much of it as you want.

Rob Collie (00:10:43): That's right. There's only so many opportunities in human history to become a legitimized counterfeiter. You got to pick your spots.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:10:48): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:10:49): That's so funny. I'm so sorry. It's funny and terrible at the same time. So you uproot, move across the country to work for this company who has an office in Chicago, and they're like, "No, you've got to be in Chicago." And then they say, "Oh you know? On second thought, we're thinking The Bahamas."

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:11:05): Yep. CTO immediately starts pinging me over Slack, "Okay, when are you coming to Nassau?" I was like, "Well, let me check out Miami first. Let me see how that goes." So my stuff physically left Chicago, went to Miami. I had a pre-planned trip actually to run a race. So I did Richmond Half Marathon, and the week that I was out of pocket visiting friends and stuff, is the week that all of the FTX stuff went down. So my physical belongings went to Miami and then, loaded them onto a different truck and then brought them back to another location.

Rob Collie (00:11:41): Wow.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:11:41): And then I met up with my stuff after the race was over.

Rob Collie (00:11:45): FTX corporate executed this plan with your stuff.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:11:49): Yeah. The whole process of moving is the most traumatic thing we do as adults. It's the most traumatic thing that no one will tell you I'm sorry about.

Rob Collie (00:11:58): Oh, interesting. Yeah, they'll tell you they're sorry if you lose a loved one. They'll tell you they're sorry if you get divorced. They'll tell you sorry if you lose a job. But you're right. No one says that they're sorry when you move. Interesting.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:12:12): And theoretically, it is really exciting. I mean, I loved Chicago, such a dynamic city. Little chilly, but everybody's super friendly and smart, which is a unique combination. You don't get that on the coast. You don't get that.

Rob Collie (00:12:26): No, not at all. I agree. Chicago would not be a bad place to live at all. I would welcome that. Did you move from Richmond?

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:12:34): No. So I spent most of my young adulthood in Washington DC. So that's where I moved after college, and Richmond is just a quick hop, skip and away from-

Rob Collie (00:12:44): Yeah. Gotcha, gotcha. Okay.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:12:44): DC, so that's why the location of the race. Now I'm in Atlanta, that's where I'm from.

Rob Collie (00:12:49): Okay. Now you're in Atlanta?

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:12:51): Mm-hmm.

Rob Collie (00:12:54): I thought I was talking to you and you're in Chicago.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:12:57): mm-mm.

Rob Collie (00:12:57): Okay.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:12:58): No.

Rob Collie (00:12:59): All right. Can you explain the further step in the sequence of events there? This is in a short period of time.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:13:06): Yes, exactly. I am doing a world tour right now, sponsored by FTX. The Chicago portion of it was, I never made it to Miami, just all of my furniture did. Right now, it's kind of posted up in a storage unit/kind of in my childhood bedroom. So I've been going through it.

Rob Collie (00:13:25): You didn't buy a house or a condo in Chicago. You didn't sign some unbreakable lease in Chicago. Huh, fantastic.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:13:33): Yeah, I will say that a theme of this unfolding situation is, I come out of it feeling fine. I am very furious and very sad for all the people who will lose money and will lose their credibility, because of the situation and their credence in cryptocurrency.

Rob Collie (00:13:49): It's always an interesting perspective. Are you feeling any sort of survivor's guilt that you're going to be okay, but you're seeing so many people who aren't going to be? Does that get to you at all in that way?

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:13:59): Yeah. I mean, it's just a random coincidence. So I was the primary developer on FTX US Stocks. Because of the US regulation around securities, the product that essentially precipitated the FTX implosion was the FTT Token, and that was illegal in the US. Selling it would've been considered securities fraud. So really, the US business was completely, as far as I know, it's whole. There was no impropriety on the US side. All of the US leaders were in the dark, but at the end of the day, it is kind of all one empire. So they'll sell off the things that I worked on for parts, to try to cover the debt.

Rob Collie (00:14:42): You're probably not expecting to be there for the rest of your career.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:14:47): I would say no.

Rob Collie (00:14:48): Okay. Wow. Let's talk about that data scientist to software engineer. First of all, how did you find yourself as a data scientist? How did you come to that role even originally?

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:14:58): That's a great question. So I started my career at Deloitte. I was a consultant, so I was traveling Monday to Thursday, and I realized that the only thing that I was super enjoying about that job was doing analytics. So I'd meet up with my colleagues in the office on Friday and they'd be like, "Oh, I'm so bummed. I had to work on this Excel Workbook, instead of going to a meeting with a client." And I was like, "Are you kidding me? That's backwards."

Rob Collie (00:15:26): Yeah, yeah.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:15:27): I was like, "I'm so excited. I get to skip this client meeting and just sit here with Excel." And so, when I had enough of those conversations, I was really starting to realize, "Okay, I need to shift my role, so that I can do this more full-time." My last project at Deloitte, I was fortunate to be in a data science world, so we were just doing an implementation of various data science projects to improve manufacturing capabilities. And that really gave me the confidence to leave my job at Deloitte and rescale as a data scientist full-time. So I had been teaching myself Python on the side, and I did a bootcamp, which was very fun. I had a very positive experience doing that in Washington, DC. Then after graduating from bootcamp, I started as a data scientist. So I was doing the same kind of consulting work, but in the federal space. So no travel, that was a major perk. I finally got to settle down and enjoy DC.

Rob Collie (00:16:30): As you can sit down at home with your spreadsheets, right?

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:16:34): More like stand up at my treadmill, back with my spreadsheets but-

Rob Collie (00:16:38): Walk, walk with your ... Okay, fine, fine. Yes.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:16:40): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:16:40): Fair. Who sits?

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:16:44): My first week was actually the week of the shutdowns, because of the pandemic.

Rob Collie (00:16:48): So that's a pretty courageous move. So many people straight out of college, getting a job with someone like Deloitte, they're expecting to be there for at least the five years. When I was interviewing for jobs, it came down to Anderson Consulting and Microsoft. Microsoft one, because Microsoft is so cool, right. But I was really starting to try on the idea of working for what is now Accenture. Very, very easy to imagine that that had been my path instead and-

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:17:14): You know why they changed their name, right?

Rob Collie (00:17:16): Yes, I do, because of another scandal.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:17:17): Okay.

Rob Collie (00:17:20): Malfeasance at the highest levels. It never gets old.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:17:23): This is not exactly unprecedented, but at the same time it's like-

Rob Collie (00:17:27): It's just different flavor when it's ... I guess even Enron was kind of, at the time, it was pretty groundbreaking. Again, it's this financialization too good to be true type of thing, that turned out ... It was too good to be true. And we also have the recent conviction of the Theranos leaders. The thing I was going to say was, you discover spreadsheets. Not discovered them, but you discover that you love them disproportionately relative to your peers. And this comes up on this show every single episode. We call it the data gene, and it cuts across all demographics and it's about one out of 16 people maximum.

(00:18:01): We're joking earlier about how no one says they're sorry when you move. Strangely, spreadsheets are one of the most enjoyable things you can do, that when you tell them that's what you do for bulk of your day, they tell you they're sorry. "Oh, I'm so sorry." And you're like, "Oh why? No, I don't want your pity. This is awesome."

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:18:21): That's how I felt.

Rob Collie (00:18:22): If you just randomly picked 10 episodes of this show, you would hear a story where the bones of the story is similar. But how did you do that? You said taking Python classes. You did a bootcamp, okay. Then you just sort of hang out a shingle as they say? You just declare yourself a data scientist and go looking for a job? I can imagine taking the classes, but actually making the career switch and landing somewhere, that's easier said than done.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:18:47): Yeah. So I had a very unfair advantage, which is that I reached out to my first boss and he was a consultant, and I was like, "I'm going to do this data science thing. Are you guys hiring?" And he was like, "Oh yeah, we're definitely hiring for consultants." And I was like, "Yeah, that's awesome. I don't know if you heard me." I was like, "Let me say it again. I would love to come onto your team as a data scientist." And he's like, "Okay, well let me talk to the guys who are more technical than I am, and I'll see what we can come back to you with." And it just turns out that that company that he worked for was looking to start their data science practice.

(00:19:26): So they were actually trying to start up a small community of practice for data science, and then go after these federal contracts in the data science space. And they had just won a text analytics project and they needed more boots on the ground. So it was just unfairly lucky that I was starting right after bootcamp in my dream job, doing an implementation of Burt, which is this groundbreaking natural language processing tool. Yeah, it all just worked out exceptionally well.

Rob Collie (00:19:58): I appreciate that you say that it's an unfair advantage. That's good humility. I read a book one time, it was a silly book, a science fiction comedy written for 13-year olds, and I was 13 at the time, so it was age appropriate material for me to consume. But there's this rich figure, this guy in the story who comes from money, leading this ragtag band of soldiers on some alien planet and he keeps using his monetary resources to the benefit of their effort. And people are picking on him for, "Oh, a rich kid." And he turns around and says, "Look, life is hard enough as it is, if you don't lean into the set of advantages that you've been given. You've got all kinds of things that you weren't given. You've got all kinds of detriments and disadvantages and all of that. At least make the most of your advantages."

(00:20:42): I didn't come from money, but I can certainly say, "Look, you've got to make the most of the hand you were dealt." I don't think you're actually feeling down on yourself when you say it was unfair. I know the spirit in which you meant it. So it's really cool. So you get to actually do the job almost immediately now. I remember when I interviewed at Anderson, aka Accenture, there were three tracks that I could have been assigned to out of college. There was management consulting, process consulting and technology consulting. Those were the three tracks. Was there anything similar going on at Deloitte? What I'm really getting at though is, what was the job you were supposed to be doing at Deloitte where the one part of it was spreadsheets that you liked. There was clearly something else you were doing as well. What was that other role?

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:21:28): My official job title was strategy and operations consultant. So they make it maximally broad, because you can really be doing whatever the client needs.

Rob Collie (00:21:39): That's right. That's right.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:21:40): So in one case, I was pushing case carts around the basement of a hospital. That was my full-time day job basically from 9:00 to 5:00. And then after hours, that's when the Excel work started. So that was the part that I was looking forward to all day. My time at Deloitte was really great. You learn a lot of awesome client skills and I still use a lot of the things that I learned to this day, about how to write a good email, how to pay attention when someone important walks into the room. A lot of really excellent client management skills are required for that. So they do keep the job titles very broad, because you never know what you'll be doing.

Rob Collie (00:22:19): Is there anything special to paying attention when someone important walks in the room? Or is it merely just the binary of someone important walks in the room, stop what you're doing and greet them? Just that simple?

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:22:30): I think that that sounds about right.

Rob Collie (00:22:32): When I first started this consulting business, a friend of mine, Donald Farmer, bought me a book, 90 Days to Success in Consulting, which was written by a friend of his. The things that stick with me from this book are the most trivial things, but the fact that he thought they were important enough to put them in the book, that's the thing that sticks with me. You want to wear accessories, like wear a watch. I don't care if you like wearing a watch. If you need a watch, you have a phone, wear a watch. If you're married, wear the ring because again, it's some sort of extra, you don't look so plain. And then he goes and says, "Never be more than 24 hours removed ... If you're a guy. Never be more than 24 hours removed from your previous shave." And then the one that really sticks with me, this is hilarious is, "Under no circumstances should anything be sticking out of your nose."

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:23:22): Oh gosh.

Rob Collie (00:23:22): I think he's mostly talking about hair. I think he's mostly talking about hair. This is a book full of very, very practical planning advice and everything. And then there's like this section, which is the only section that my brain snap-shotted.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:23:34): I would say that it is just an incredibly performative career. Your main job is to be Ken or Barbie. You bring the analytics second, but your main job is to show up in a certain way. I remember the first time I was told, "Hey, your email wasn't good." I was like, "Okay, what's wrong with the email?" And they were like, "Well, look at the two line." And they were like, "You put everybody's names in here in any random order." And I was like, "Okay." They were like, "You need to ..."

Rob Collie (00:24:07): Oh wow.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:24:08): "You put the client first, but you put the partner at the end. Never do that." They were like, "You put the partner before everyone else, except for the client." And I was like, "This is the level we're going to. I understand now." That was a major unlock for me.

Rob Collie (00:24:22): This is a very complicated sort by column in this data [inaudible 00:24:27]. The Deloitte partner, do they come before junior employees at the client? Or after all the clients.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:24:32): No.

Rob Collie (00:24:32): But they're just the first of Deloitte.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:24:34): Yes. I think you have to put all the people who are on the side that's paying you first.

Rob Collie (00:24:39): Okay.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:24:40): Yeah. So we'll make that concession, but then the partner goes at the top.

Rob Collie (00:24:43): Well, it's really big of the partner to allow themself to come after all that.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:24:51): Yeah, that's right.

Rob Collie (00:24:51): All the little people on the planet-

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:24:51): It's a real sacrifice.

Rob Collie (00:24:51): Yeah.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:24:52): A real dent to their personal ego.

Rob Collie (00:24:54): Oh yeah. Yeah you know? That's how they make the big bucks, is that humility.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:25:02): I mean, I feel like all the things that I learned at Deloitte, I had to unlearn as a software engineer, because if the president of FTX US walked into the office and I stick straight up from my desk paying attention, hanging on his every word. He's like, "What's wrong? Did you just get electrocuted? Do you need something? Did GitHub go down? Why are you not working?" As a software engineer, you eat during the meetings because it shows that you're working very hard the rest of the time.

Rob Collie (00:25:30): Oh yes.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:25:31): Whereas as a consultant, that would've been completely inappropriate. So it's really like the flip flopped 180 degrees.

Rob Collie (00:25:39): Everything's theater in the end. Like the famous example where the director of FEMA during the Katrina disaster, when everything's just absolutely going to hell, someone gave him the advice, "Okay, next time you appear on camera, roll up your shirt sleeves."

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:25:52): Oh yes.

Rob Collie (00:25:53): "It'll make it look like you're working hard." And it worked, it totally worked. Even if you know the trick and you watch the videos of before and after, you're like, "Oh yeah, that second version."

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:26:04): Having your sleeves rolled up doesn't necessarily make you a better leader. It only helps if you're in an actual physical work scenario.

Rob Collie (00:26:12): He probably didn't even roll his own sleeves. He probably had ... They're like, "Oh, no, no, no, that's not crinkled enough. Make it look a little crinkled."

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:26:19): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:26:20): The makeup department.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:26:21): That's right.

Rob Collie (00:26:23): All right, so that was the environment that I dodged, without knowing it. You did the data science thing, you land a gig. At what point did the transition to software engineering start?

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:26:37): Yes. So I'm just sort of that way, where I have a lot of things that I'm curious about. When we had finished implementing this text analytics project, we had built them a tool for named entity recognition, which is a subset of natural language processing. It was basically a text highlighter to help support speed reading. I was like, "This is cool. Let's put it up online in a way that the people could theoretically interact with this prototype." So we were trying to support a specific job function, so I was like, "They can't really access the model, unless we deploy it." And through that process, I realized I really loved deployment. And I thought that doing something that was user interfacing was a lot more exciting even than doing analytics and spreadsheets.

Rob Collie (00:27:29): No.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:27:31): So thus began ... Yeah. So I really loved doing data science and in some ways, it's way more intellectually stimulating. I would say, being a software engineer is way more being a carpenter versus being a data scientist, which is in fact very intellectual and very much about all the different choices that are available to you, and kind of making the best choices, staying on top of research and all the stuff. Versus being a front-end engineer is like, "Okay, you see the thing. You make the thing. You put it out there." It's a totally different mode of thinking, where you're just trying to-

Rob Collie (00:28:05): Visceral, I don't know.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:28:07): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:28:08): I worked construction in the summers and I come from a construction family, both hands-on construction as well as construction management. I did not go into construction as a career. Then I got into software and I realized, "Oh wow. All the problems that we saw in construction, we have those in software as well. It's just that in software, there's absolutely no physical constraint. You just simply can't build a building that unfolds in 17 dimensions. Sorry, there's only three dimensions you can build in construction, but in software we can do whatever we want." And so chaos. And this is really nerdy, but the second law of thermodynamics. There's a law in physics that dictates that chaos is always increasing. In fact, believe it or not, this t-shirt I'm wearing right now is meant to symbolize chaos, how things want to come unglued.

(00:28:53): So I witnessed this in the construction industry, where they be building a building for the first time. They never built a building just like this. Most buildings are unique and there's so much unanticipated information essentially. It turns out, "Oh no, we designed it this way." But you can't actually put it together in that order, and you don't discover this until you're actually out in the field with the plumbers, the electricians and the concrete pourers and like, "Oh no, we just simply can't build this as efficiently as what the architect thought." And it's an information problem, it's a modeling problem essentially. But at that moment, someone's going to have to eat the bill for this mistake.

(00:29:30): 90% of being a successful construction firm is being able to properly argue and defend yourself at those moments, and make it the other person's problem. Even though it was really kind of no one's fault, someone has to eat it. In software, it was like that times a 1000. It's just that you all happen to be working for the same company, most of the time. I'm not saying zero, but you don't have as much arm wrestling over whose fault it is. You're still definitely an element of that, especially the larger the company gets and the more collaboration across teams and things. But that's the downside of software engineering. You were talking about the upside.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:30:04): Well, I think it's true that we take these metaphors from the physical world, and then try to find ways to make them make sense for the digital world. In some ways, it does play by different rules, but the planning policy still holds.

Rob Collie (00:30:18): Like the plans, the blueprints, whatever you want to call it. For a Boeing 777, they just cover acres and acres and acres of real estate, if you were able to print them all out. Famously like tens or hundreds of miles of cabling, maybe thousands of miles, I have no idea, but there's some ridiculous order of magnitude just of cables in one of those airplanes. This is held up as one of the most complicated machines humanity is ever assembled. But then, something like Microsoft Excel dwarfs that. You don't even see the Boeing plans on a scale map, right? It's just a dot. The 777 is a dot next to this map of Excel. Fascinating that something like that can still work. I got to see firsthand what that process was like.

(00:31:01): So I'm going the other way. I was in the software engineering world, working at Microsoft. Now, I wasn't a programmer. I was CS trained in college, but that doesn't mean that I actually was paying attention during programming classes or really enjoying them. I had the same sort of experience with Excel at Microsoft that you had at Deloitte. It's just that I had it while I was working on Excel, ended up being far more fascinated with using these tools than I was building them. There you go. So we're not so similar after all, are we?

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:31:30): Well, isn't it a beautiful thing that we can follow our curiosity and it still turns out okay?

Rob Collie (00:31:36): We like high fived in the hallway as we were passing each other, going opposite directions. There was a moment when we were in exactly the same place.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:31:42): I like it. Well, I'm circling back now.

Rob Collie (00:31:45): Oh, okay. Let's do that.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:31:47): At least, data will be the topic area for some of my software engineering projects, I guess, although I'm kind of pausing on the engineering side for now. What I will be doing after FTX is, working on a data strategy business. We do training for non-technical data practitioners to help them, mostly ACE Certifications, saving them time with better study materials.

Rob Collie (00:32:17): You said we.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:32:17): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:32:17): Is that A, just really good practice? Or is there actually already plural?

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:32:23): No, it's the royal way.

Rob Collie (00:32:24): Okay, okay. Well that's good, because when I started P3, it was very much an I. It was just me. In my blog posts, everything, all communication, I and the company we're somewhat publicly facing were synonymous. And then when I decided that it was time to scale, I had a lot of people tell me, "Well, you're never going to pull this off. You're never going to pull off the I to the We transition." It wasn't as hard as they thought. I mean it just, if you get good enough people, it's pretty easy, it turns out. But I think you're wise to already be embracing the We at the beginning even if you never turn out scaling, there's still some value in that We.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:33:03): Well, thank you. That's very encouraging.

Rob Collie (00:33:05): Okay, so what kind of certifications? I get spammed. I cannot believe the volume of spam that I receive. Every morning I wake up and my work email, most of the subject lines that I see start with the word Re: that are not replying to anything I've ever received before. And sometimes, the spams are, "Hey, we'll help you pass your certifications." But it's very clear that this is a sweatshop type of operation. It's almost like, "Wait, are you going to be feeding me answers during the exam?" Somehow it feels a little shady. That doesn't seem like the kind of business model you'd be pursuing. So what kinds of certifications in particular? What's the number one certification that the royal We will be helping with?

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:33:45): Yes. Well if I can, I just want to validate that to start off with and say, I do see a lot of exam dumps, where people are trying to sell something that's close to the exact exam experience. And as we all know, that is not a good way to learn. It's not a good measure of what you can learn.

Rob Collie (00:34:02): The emails might as well start with the sentence, "Please read between the lines of what we're about to say."

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:34:08): So in answer to your question, my company which is called Data Strategy Professionals, we mainly teach to this exam that's called, The Certified Data Management Practitioner, CDMP Exam. I took this test back in October 2020, so it was actually on the advice of that boss who gave me my first shot as a data scientist. I think the exam is really awesome. So it covers 14 areas of data strategy, everything from data collection through data quality, data governance, a little bit on security and analytics. And the test itself is open book. That's really nice because it mirrors the real world conditions of just you're working, you have access to resources, but you've got to find things quickly, and you've got to make sure that you know what you're talking about. So you can't just be like dilly-dallying all day looking stuff up. You have to know the content, but at the same time, you don't have to have the little details memorized.

Rob Collie (00:35:08): I still have the language reference available to me in real life. Is it case sensitive or not? I don't remember. That's fine, look that up.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:35:15): 100%.

Rob Collie (00:35:16): It sounds like it might be pretty agnostic about tech stack. Is it pretty general? Or in the end, after all of those high level practices, does it come down to, "Okay, now here's the Python part?"

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:35:28): Yeah, so this particular exam, which is one of many that we cover, but it is the major suite of products, it does have its gaps, right? It's not going to teach you technical skills, and it's not going to say which cloud provider is best. So you do have to do that on your own. I also recommend that everybody take at least one cloud certification. So pick one of the major providers and learn that. A lot of our customers and community members are non-technical. So they may not be practicing data analysts. They may not be the ones working in Excel every day, but they need to be writing data governance and explaining to their leadership, "Okay, we need to get these resources for the data engineers, so they can do what needs to be done to create a data model and set up the data warehouse and things like that."

Rob Collie (00:36:17): That's fascinating.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:36:18): It is an interesting audience.

Rob Collie (00:36:20): So what I thought you were going to say with a non-technical thing is that, you're targeting people who have a similar origin story to yourself. You didn't leave college thinking of yourself as a technical engineering type. You discovered your way into it. In my experience, this is the best way. The professionals who come, aka from the real world or the business world first and then come to the technical stuff, these hybrids that can span both worlds. The future of everything in data is the hybrids. It's not the ivory tower minted at MIT, like very linear career path people. I really don't think that's the case at all.

(00:36:59): This has become Microsoft's strategy as well, is to embrace what they call the citizen developer and then give them an uncapped skill level, so that the tech stack that they targeted these people, you can climb that mountain as high as you want, as high as you can, as high as you need to. The celebrities in this space are using the same tools you are. They're better at them, in some cases a lot better. But it's the same tool, so you're using the same languages and all that kind of stuff. And this is very difficult thing to pull off in terms of a software strategy at Microsoft. They're doing very well with it. I'm not saying you're not talking about that, but you're talking about something additional at least, which is this idea of people who lack the data gene, but they still need to know process and governance and strategy around it. Between those two audiences, I'll make you pick one. Which one is a bigger audience?

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:37:48): I think a lot of people see themselves as being on the leadership track, where they really want to be making strategic decisions. And even if they do have that love of Excel, that's what they want to be doing. They don't want to be crunching the numbers all day. That I would say, constitutes the majority audience for this particular certification. I mean, I would love it if everybody just wanted to learn data science all day. Something that I think is really interesting, and obviously making huge strides recently in terms of technical capabilities. But right now, a lot of people are also interested in this, the leadership side.

Rob Collie (00:38:24): Everyone's always interested in leadership. This is something that doesn't go out of style. Data is very much having a moment. When we talk to people who have spent a lot of time in IT, that's not typically common. The people we have on the show, typically aren't lifers from the IT side in our business when we talk to them. IT has traditionally had an incredibly thankless job, where they only get noticed when they fail. There's a very defensive job, keep the lights on and don't cost a lot of money. Really kind of awful. That takes a tremendous toll on human beings. You keep starving us of money. We mess up once, something bad happens once that isn't even our fault in two years time. What about all the other days that nothing did go wrong? No one remembers those, right? But then they come to data and data is a place where, if IT thinks about it the right way, it's an opportunity to actually play offense and become a contributor to the business and not just notice if you fail type of thing.

(00:39:25): So it makes sense to me. It seems very just that people from the data world should be moving into leadership roles. In fact, having the data gene has had an inverse correlation historically with being in positions of leadership. I've heard many anecdotal stories of people being told, "Listen, if you want to keep moving up, you're going to have to stop talking about spreadsheets so much. You're going to have to stop talking about data. You're going to have to not be seen as that person, because you're not going to advance if you're seen as that person." It's so backwards. That culture that thinks that way, it needs to die.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:40:03): Absolutely, it needs to die.

Rob Collie (00:40:05): It can't die soon enough. Okay, so this FTX thing, you kind of had to come up with a pivot, but is this something that you'd sort of had in the back of your brain for a while?

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:40:15): Yeah, I've been working on this on a nights and weekend basis for two years.

Rob Collie (00:40:18): Okay.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:40:19): This isn't brand to do totally, but the working for myself has been a dream. If there's any silver lining that comes of this fiasco, then perhaps for me, it is getting to make this transition to going full-time on this, making the community even better.

Rob Collie (00:40:36): Very cool. So has this already been a paying side gig?

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:40:40): Yeah, it's only ever been profitable. So I can talk a bit about that, if it's of interest.

Rob Collie (00:40:46): Sure.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:40:46): The way that I went about this, I think is highly replicable. Basically, while I was a data scientist, I started writing for Medium. So every couple weeks, I'd come out with a blog post, and Medium has a huge readership for people who are interested in data. There's a lot of techy people and people giving great feedback like, "Oh, we want to learn about this." Or like, "Thanks so much for contributing to the community, whatever." And Medium pays you. Maybe pizza money, it's not nothing. So I was just reaping in the kudos and one of the articles that I wrote, the one about this certification did really well. And then I started building a community around it, because the organization that runs the exam, they don't really have the time I think, to have a social media presence that's very accessible.

(00:41:33): So I was like, "Okay, well I'll just see if I can help bring these people together, who are also studying for it." Eventually sold a study plan and practice questions and sampled notes. I mean, I think the major benefit of it is the community aspect. People just want to come together and we all celebrate together when somebody else passes. People ask questions and kind of learn from each other about the exam. So it's just been really positive and has given a lot back to me. And yeah, any sort of cost of running the business has come out of my Medium earnings, in terms of bootstrapping it bit by bit. If you have a core audience and a little bit of seed funding like that, it's just really easy to grow incrementally. So that's how it's been.

Rob Collie (00:42:16): Yeah. There's some similarities in my story for sure. This company was a blog long before it was a company. There were three plus years, where there was such a blog, no business, no monetization at all. It didn't really cost much. It cost a lot of time, tremendous amount of time. The blog was all about Microsoft's first foray into this citizen developer space with Power Pivot, which then became Power BI over time. I had seen the promise of this and it had surprised me, even though I had worked on it. In spite of the fact that I had worked on it, I was surprised at how good it was. So I started writing about it and using it as sort of a forcing function for learning it. You can work on Excel forever and not know how to do it. You really shouldn't be that way, but that is the truth.

(00:43:00): Famously, it took me a year and a half of working on the Excel team to stop coming up with ideas of things we could add with the product, and having someone tell me, "Yeah, we've already got that." It was 18 months of embarrassment. So when the market finally kind of woke up to, "Okay, this is a respectable technology and we're going to start betting on it." People just started coming to me. So similarly, that business was always profitable. It was profitable from the first day. As long as you discount the opportunity cost on my time, incredibly profitable. It was only when we decided to scale, that things became dangerous. It's amazing how dangerous scaling a business is. I completely underestimated it. We're on the other side of those white-waters. There was a very treacherous section of the river, multiple years in the rear view mirror now. But boy, that was some scary times.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:43:46): There are lots of ways that I can go wrong and only one way that keep the business alive.

Rob Collie (00:43:51): Which Russian author?

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:43:52): Ah yes, Anna Karenina.

Rob Collie (00:43:55): All unhappy families are unique in their unhappiness, but happy families are identical, because what makes them happy is that they dodged all of the million different ways you can be unhappy. The combinations of which bits got flipped to make you unhappy. There's all kinds of uniqueness in those sequences.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:44:12): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:44:12): If you're all zeros on the unhappiness bits, you're identical.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:44:17): Yes, it's true. It's truly spooky, when you run across one of those families.

Rob Collie (00:44:21): They really shake me. They shake me to my core when I encounter them, because I'm very much invested in the idea that brokenness generates talent.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:44:34): You got to be.

Rob Collie (00:44:34): I'm kind of committed to this idea. So you meet the completely flawless of walking a big 360 around them, inspecting them going, "Okay, where's the weakness? What are you hiding?" And sometimes, they are hiding something, but every now and then, one of those bastards just is perfect.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:44:56): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:44:56): Oh, it's so frustrating.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:44:58): Perhaps they have that tortured genius that you're talking about here.

Rob Collie (00:45:02): No, they've just been good and disciplined and high energy and-

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:45:06): And they enjoy spending time with each other.

Rob Collie (00:45:08): Yeah, just like, oh my God.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:45:13): Not sure. I like your theory that it is sort of the chaos from which we can draw energy to rise above.

Rob Collie (00:45:22): So here's a metaphor that I don't think I've ever used on the show. Have you ever seen those 1970s tabletop football simulating games? All it would do is the surface would just vibrate. You turn it on, just the surface would vibrate and all these little plastic players that you've laid out in rough football formations, as soon as the vibration starts, they start to move. The vibration is completely random. It has no directional preference like left or right, but the tabs, there's tabs on the bottom of these players that you tune before the play. The tabs are angled. The pieces rest on these tabs. And so, those tabs favor a particular direction, even though the actual force being applied is completely not lateral and it's completely random.

(00:46:11): I think there's something about that in life, this chaos thing, everything's being shaken all the time. FTX is going to go under. You didn't do that, right? If you have your tabs on the bottom of your shoes, if you have them sort of angled in the right way, you eventually find yourself in the end zone.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:46:25): I can tell you're a writer, because your metaphors are very good.

Rob Collie (00:46:29): I'm actually a writer because of my metaphors. Before memes were a thing, I was the meme person before memes were a thing, and now I feel really like, "Oh no, no. My thing has now been taken by everyone. What?" It's disappointing. "That was my thing."

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:46:43): Yeah, you made it happen perhaps.

Rob Collie (00:46:46): Doubt it. I'm pretty sure it was probably like, I can hash cheeseburger cats and stuff. They have probably a lot more to do with it.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:46:55): The deep philosopher, "I can has cheeseburger."

Rob Collie (00:46:58): Yes, all the great philosophers from Aristotle to Leibniz, and eventually that leads to, "I can has Cheeseburger cat." So what about the software engineering itch? Are you scratching that itch as you develop your website and your system and your properties? It just sounds like that kind of thing that you probably can't put down. Got any outlets for that?

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:47:19): This upcoming month, I am looking forward to a data conference and just trying to reengage in the data community. I totally paused on machine learning when I was switching gears and becoming a front-end web developer. So I think it'll be nice to just read some papers, kind of look at different statistical techniques, and reengage in the data science and then best practices in data strategy. Truth is, once you are in that leadership role, then the best use of your time is leveraging existing tools, not building things from scratch. I'm very proud of our website.

(00:47:59): I think it's really fun and a great way for me to learn, react. I was very motivated to make it, but now I'm like, "Okay, how do I simplify? If I wanted to sell the business one day, what if I wanted to sell it to a non-technical person? I mean, am I going to make the whole thing again in WordPress one day?" Maybe, 'cause the core of this particular business is not the software engineering or the design. It's the community and the data strategy, data science, best practices that I'm helping to instill. So anyway, so that's the near term plan, I guess. I've been listening to different podcasts about doing SaaS startups or something like that, but that feels a long way away.

Rob Collie (00:48:42): It's a short distance if you want it to be. But yeah, developing the motivation for it, I don't know. It's a tough world, both because it seems like money is so easy to get. Funding seems ridiculously ... It's probably drying up a little bit, but it's easier to get than it should be.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:48:57): Yep.

Rob Collie (00:48:58): Because of that, things come back to bite. Even the people who are giving out this money, oftentimes aren't savvy enough to help guide their portfolios. I don't know.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:49:09): If the FTX collapse revealed anything, there's no smart money. You're fooled. The smartest people in the room, that book about Enron, we just see that over and over again. And if you do accept funding, it shortens your time scale. It makes things much more dangerous. It's more exciting. Your chance of success goes down.

Rob Collie (00:49:29): Yeah. It's exciting in large part because it feeds the ego, and as it feeds the ego, your chances of success go down. I'm not going to name the company I'm talking about. I was having an internal discussion just yesterday about founders I used to really admire. But at the same time, it's pretty clear that their track record of success, eventually deprived them of some of the things that had made them successful in the first place. Their personalities evolved over time in the face of their unbroken success chain, and then they were asleep at the switch and something bad happened. Oh, so dangerous. Confidence and complacency and hubris is very hard to tell them apart when you're living them. It's something that sort of gives me night sweats as a founder, as a CEO is, you never really know where you're developing your own blind spots. I'll just get therapy.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:50:24): Well, yeah. I mean, I think you're thinking about it in the right way. There's no proven practices for how to continually disrupt yourself. It's easier to be the innovator that one time and you have a breakout success. But then sustaining it is the real challenge, and it's like you have to just continuously struggle, I think

Rob Collie (00:50:45): I have a tendency sometimes to seek comfort. You got to give yourself some comfort, even just to stay healthy. You say you're a, was it rabid amateur athlete? Or was it ... I forget.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:50:57): Yes. A serious.

Rob Collie (00:50:59): Serious amateur athlete.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:51:01): Something like that, yeah.

Rob Collie (00:51:02): There was an interview that I watched. I didn't expect to watch the whole thing, but I watched the whole thing. It's one of those videos, you start watching it and the next thing you know, I'm in for the 90 minutes. Some ex NFL players interviewing Coach Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and his interview exemplifies this concept so clearly. That phrase, seeking comfort, I got it from that interview, and he's just talking about over and over again, that's the trap. He clearly won't do it, even when they're telling him that he's one of the greatest coaches of all time, which he is. He absolutely is. He won't allow the compliment to land. He just brushes it off and they're like, "Why won't you accept it?" He's like, "Because you're trying to take from me the thing that made me, the thing that you said I am, right. Don't do that."

(00:51:51): I just came away from this thinking, this is one of the greatest leaders of all time. Can't recommend that interview enough, even if you don't care about football, because it isn't about football. It's about leadership and development of your people, changing your techniques to accommodate the diversity of the people that you're working with. You don't really necessarily think of professional athletes. The personalities are always different. It's amazing. He's had some real interesting characters on his team over the years.

(00:52:20): So you go to an average software engineering conference. While this is changing, it's changing slowly, the software engineering conference is going to be ... There's going to be a lot more men there than women. Go to a data science conference though, not the same. I would expect much more 50-50 at a data science conference, just for example. Both certainly technical fields, right? You can use Python for both. What are your personal theories as to why the data field seems to dodge whatever the filter is, that's experienced in the software engineering field?

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:52:53): A lot of my professional experience took place during the pandemic. So my experience of working was me interacting with people on Microsoft Teams. Remote work does remove some of the gendered nature of people's work experience. There is literally physically no men's locker room for locker room talk to take place. So there's just less of it in general. Really, I feel again very fortunate. I don't think I, to my face, experienced much bias or anything like that. I've definitely had people say one off things where I'm like, "Oh, you wouldn't have said that to me if I was a guy." A lot of comments at FTX about like, "Oh, you're a dev. You don't look like a dev."

Rob Collie (00:53:41): Yeah.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:53:42): I heard that a number of times, but I think it has less to do with being a woman than the way that I present. And it's also because, all of the devs came on primarily as back-end devs, because that's more important. back-end devs, they occupy a superior rank compared to front-end devs, because all we do is just do the-

Rob Collie (00:54:02): Oh yeah, just pixels.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:54:03): Yeah, we just do the pixels. But if you're a back-end dev, you can lose money.

Rob Collie (00:54:08): I had a manager at Microsoft, who non ironically referred to that stuff, design and front-end as pixel fucking.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:54:15): Pixel fucking. I'm going to borrow that.

Rob Collie (00:54:19): Oh, you mean the place where the humans interact.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:54:21): Interact. That is how they treated it at FTX, and then they started spending some of their discretionary spending, to bring in designers to make the front-ends look a little bit better. But mostly they just expected the back-end devs would just put things on the screen, irrespective of how it actually looked or whether it facilitated a smooth user interface. And so, I think that was a lot of the feedback. People were like, "Yeah, I enjoy using FTX. The functionality is nice, but man, you can tell the entire front-end was done by backend engineers." Anyway, all that to say, I feel like there's more of that in my career. I've noticed more friction because of my identity as somebody who cares about that user interface stuff, versus the people who don't care. It has been more of a point of contention.

Rob Collie (00:55:09): That cuts across gender lines too.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:55:11): It does, definitely.

Rob Collie (00:55:13): I've found myself in similar situations, when I went to work on Power Pivot. I was joining an engine team who was building their first ever user experience. They had only ever been an API, and they were very disappointed in me. They thought of me as a ringer they were bringing in. And they were disappointed in me when I decided that I needed to not work on their back-end stuff, but I needed to go work on their front-end, because it was such a mess. At that moment, I lost status. I never got it back, and then I railed against it and became a very difficult person to manage and it was not a fun time. They've gotten better about that. They've still got a ways to go, I think, but they've gotten much, much better.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:55:51): The designer who I worked with at FTX was a guy and he was just incredibly talented. I'm so sad that some of his stuff won't see the light of day now, because it was so fun to work with him. He clearly was very good at his job. But yes, it did feel like it was us against the world, in a way. So that was kind of fun too. Just like, "Okay, how fast can I work to take what's already existing and make it easier to interact with?" But yeah, the back-end engineers were great and super nice and friendly, but definitely that sort of status discrepancy, it played out in interesting ways.

(00:56:27): Last thing I was going to say about, this is my other software engineering role before FTX was at Coinbase. FTX was more balanced with a good number of female devs, who were like Sam's friends from MIT and Jane Street, and then some of the devs girlfriends who were also devs. Anyway, so there was a good representation of females who were in strong dev roles at FTX. But then at Coinbase, after the layoffs that occurred in the middle of the summer, I was the only girl on the team, just me and a bunch of dads, but they were so nice.

(00:57:05): This thing of maybe there's this reputation in crypto of people who are into crypto being toxic or standoffish, toxic at the most negative end of the spectrum or standoffish, but that was not my experience at all. In fact, I loved my team there. They made me believe in cryptocurrency and feel like it could be a force for good, if people would just stop being so greedy and doing the rug pull.

Rob Collie (00:57:32): We've talked a little bit about crypto on this show. We had a non-toxic crypto advocate on the show, but we mostly talked about ... Well, I guess we didn't talk about crypto most of the show. I mostly just look back at that interview and go, "Oh, that was the interview where I should have prepared."

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:57:48): Oh, how so?

Rob Collie (00:57:48): But there was this fascinating topic to talk about, just really, really deep into that stuff and also very human and humane. But instead, we just did the usual format. I had to do it over again. I'd actually prepared a very structured set of questions about the future of crypto, et cetera.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:58:02): Yes, we need the pushback Rob. We need some people to ask the good skeptical questions.

Rob Collie (00:58:08): Yeah. I'm not all that skeptical. I'm not an advocate for crypto, but I've taken a pass on all investing, in a way. I've got so jaded about all of that through the 2008 crisis, and personal net worth is largely this company. That's the investment. I understand it, right? Build something that's good for the world, it's good for our customers, it's good for our employees and that's a good trade with the world for generating money for me. I don't understand why I should be entitled to more money just because I have money. That's the whole game. I have money, so I should have more. I deserve more, because I have money. I'm going to put my money here and it is going to grow, but I'm not going to do anything.

(00:58:49): I understand that investment eventually funds things. It funds growth and all that kind of stuff. Once you've been financialized and engineered so much, you're so far away from actually influencing anything with your investments, that all you are is the big toxic shareholders that make physical therapy $800 an hour at the Cleveland Clinic, if you're not on insurance. $800 an hour. I got quoted that and I was just like, "Oh, there's something really rotten here." We've financialized health. We've financialized sickness. I gave them the finger and didn't use their physical therapy.

Nicole Janeway Bills (00:59:29): I'm sorry. It resonates definitely. We've made these choices. We do need some financial engine to power society, but it doesn't need to be derivative stacked on derivative, stacked on cryptocurrency technology, the whole suite of Web3 technologies. One of the central failings is, there hasn't been a use case that people are like, "Oh, this helps me in my real life." It's fun to speculate about NFTs perhaps, but that's what we were working on at Coinbase. So I was on the Coinbase Commerce Team and it was basically PayPal, but allowing merchants to accept cryptocurrency. And so then the goal is to remove the intermediary of the credit card and the extractive merchant fees that are leveraged, and that really hurt small businesses. So it's like, what if we could just have peer-to-peer transactions, simple like cash, but native to the digital world?

(01:00:29): So yeah, I mean they really made me believe in cryptocurrency. The core of Coinbase is all about increasing economic freedom. I know I sound like a show right now, but it'd be cool if we could really do that and make it less of a financialized thing, because I agree with you. That was a bit ironic. I was the primary developer on the FTX US Stocks Platform, but I don't own any stocks. And then the stocks that I do plan to buy, I plan to buy them largely, because of the tax implications for when you donate them. So it's actually better to donate appreciated assets, than it is to just give cash from a tax advantage standpoint. So then, you can maximize your contributions if you just take your winnings from tax dodging and then put that back into more donations. That is one way to be a more effective altruist.

Rob Collie (01:01:25): I like it. I like it. I really want to note something you said there, which is that we haven't had the feel good use case that's been publicized. There's an old movie called Speechless, two speechwriters working for opposing campaigns that are sort having a not quite romantic tension, and one of them calls it a, you see Timmy, moment. I think at the end of every Lassie episode, the uncle or the grandfather would say, "You see Timmy." And then they would be like this moral delivered. He gives this advice to his opposing speechwriter friend saying, "This is what your candidate lacks." And then, the other speechwriter goes and executes this strategy so epically, that the other speechwriter who gave the advice is sitting there watching the TV, when this comes on and he just drops his drink. He's like, "Oh no."

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:02:16): Nice.

Rob Collie (01:02:19): Yeah.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:02:20): Crypto needs its, you see Timmy, moment.

(01:02:22): Totally.

Rob Collie (01:02:23): Freaking bored apes. It's ridiculous. It's like this is what you would choose, if you wanted people to think it was a scam.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:02:31): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:02:32): It's these freaking smoking monkeys and it's just a picture and it costs like 1000,000. If you wanted to tank crypto in the public eye, you couldn't design a more effective PR campaign.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:02:49): Yeah, and you can imagine much more impactful implementations of NFTs to showcase membership, kind of buying a timeshare or something like that, where you would be a member of a club. The NFT is a proof of that. We have proof of attendance, tokens and things. So time will tell if these more useful implementations catch on. They're not as much fun to talk about on late night TV shows.

Rob Collie (01:03:16): No.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:03:16): But I do really think it's an interesting technology. It's just been not used for good yet in a widespread way.

Rob Collie (01:03:24): Your example about credit card fees, et cetera, I just don't think most people even think about these problems. These stupid Capital One commercials, right? We give you 3% cash back or whatever percentage cash back. Do you know why you're getting that cash back? Where's this money coming from? It's coming from you. They're jacking up the cost of every transaction on every merchant by 5% or whatever the percentage is. I don't know what the spread is on this, what the margin is. They jack a percentage onto every transaction, so all the prices you pay are higher, and then they so graciously give you half of your own money back.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:04:00): Yeah, and it's just built into the fabric of how we're meant to understand what it is to be an adult. And you pay your credit card every month or you don't. It's interesting that you bring up Capital One as your example. Capital One specifically built their business model on providing credit to the riskiest borrowers, people who previously didn't have access to the credit system. Capital One figured out a way to offer products to those riskiest subprime borrowers basically since the nineties. They've done it profitably and they came up and rose into the ranks of those giant companies.

Rob Collie (01:04:40): Like Chase and ... Yeah.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:04:42): Yeah, like Visa and MasterCard and Amex that they previously, they didn't have the granular data that Capital One was able to leverage, and then create this product that very extractive. They're in business, because they have these ridiculous high APR credit cards that they tell people like, "Oh yeah, you can afford that. Treat yourself." That's the whole promise of getting a credit card. And then that's how-

Rob Collie (01:05:10): Live your best life. Yeah.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:05:12): Yeah. So it is really unfortunate, and some debt is good debt, but-

Rob Collie (01:05:17): Let's trash some celebrities while we're at it. Samuel L. Jackson has a felony arrest on his record from some sort of act of fight the power, grassroots social protest in college. I think he participated in the kidnapping of a college dean or something, right? And this was a radical.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:05:38): Yes. They held members of the Morehouse College Board of Trustees hostage.

Rob Collie (01:05:44): Yes. Okay, a radical.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:05:46): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:05:47): Now he shills for Capital One, "What's in your wallet?" Get fucked Samuel L. Jackson, just get fucked. I used to you. What the fuck are you doing? You don't have enough money, you fucker.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:06:00): Quite bad.

Rob Collie (01:06:01): Oh God, it just drives me bananas.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:06:04): Yeah, it does make you wonder what kind of environment he was in before, where he felt like he could throw the stone of protest, versus now he's stepping up to the window for Capital One.

Rob Collie (01:06:19): You've heard the old story or the old say which is, "Show me a young person who isn't a liberal and I'll show you someone with no heart. And then show me an old person who isn't a conservative and I'll show you someone who has no sense." Or something like that. What percentage of the 1968 free love hippie crowd is now a mutual fund owning start shirt? People lose their childhood, they lose their souls, and the system's designed to beat that out of you. This isn't some courageous personal choice that I've made. It's really just the only way I can be. I tried to play that role of being that serious adult, the one that does things right, and I just was never any good at it.

(01:06:59): So it's not like I can claim the moral high ground. So instead, I've conducted myself as a professional, sort with the inner child intact, try not to apologize for it too much. It turns out, if you've got the right team around you, it's actually awesome. It works. I had a lot of trouble getting people to believe, precisely for this reason. Essentially, it boiled down to their inner child was no longer functioning, but the core reason was this mismatch and they had to go, sooner or later. Personally, I think that's what we see with someone like Samuel L. Jackson.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:07:36): Yeah, that idealistic part.

Rob Collie (01:07:37): Yeah, it's just gone.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:07:38): Yeah. I really appreciate the spirit of levity that you bring to these podcasts. And I think it helps people open up about their challenges and breaks down silos, and that's really important in our business, because that authenticity is key to getting stuff done.

Rob Collie (01:07:57): I appreciate you saying that. It goes back to that same thing, make the most of your strengths. I can't fake the other stuff. There's a path of success. I lived across the street for a little while from a guy, who was just climbing the ladder. Actually, I lived in a neighborhood of ladder climbers, and this was back when it was just me and my wife at the company. Even though it was a much smaller company, all the money was ours. We decided to scale. We had to actually cut back quite a bit on our personal budget. There's not nearly the same amount of money going around, but for a little while that we were in this high riser, upwardly mobile professional neighborhood, I was just in awe of these people that I was surrounded by. Very clearly being groomed for one of a handful of sea level positions like at Cummins, massive international company, moving this person around the country in various one-step remove from the C-suite jobs.

(01:08:49): You can see them being groomed. They're being trained to be the next CEO or at least to be on that bench, the list of candidates for the next CEO. At the same time, I would talk with this person, simultaneously impressed and intimidated and not impressed at the same time. There's no doubt that I can't do what he does, just could never succeed in that environment and that's not sour grapes. Literally, I just lack that capability. I wish I had it. I'm going to be honest and say, yeah that chip didn't get installed at the factory. I would have really liked it. Why wouldn't I? But at the same time, on anything real, I didn't feel inferior, quite the contrary. Anyway, it's just make the most of your strengths, right?

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:09:29): Yes. We live at a very fortunate time, where it's never been easier to try something. You end up being a solo entrepreneur or just having a little side hustle or something like that. That money is proof that you are helping someone, enough that they're willing to pay you something. And yeah, I think that that's a really positive thing.

Rob Collie (01:09:50): Right, the barriers to entry for starting a business. We don't have a physical office. At the time of recording, we're about a 60-person company. We very well might be a 100-person company at the same time next year, maybe even bigger. We're growing fast. We've never had a physical office, never had that expense. To start a business 40 years ago, the first thing you had to go do is get a storefront of some sort. That's expensive. My wife looked into starting a retail store. Oh my God, the fixed costs. It's just like, "Oh God, let's back pedal out of this story as fast as we possibly can. This is the wrong turn."

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:10:25): Yeah. I think we have this incredible opportunity now to take on projects that are fulfilling, and may also help people and may also increase our own financial position. So that to me is way cooler than climbing the corporate ladder, although that's also something that many people find to be fulfilling, different ways [inaudible 01:10:47] now.

Rob Collie (01:10:47): Certainly pays well.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:10:48): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:10:49): Without WordPress frankly, that thing you mentioned earlier, we debated putting ... Luke, do you remember if we put WordPress in the software hall of fame? We had the goal to invent the software hall of fame, because there wasn't one. We did an episode on it. We have a website. Do you have any pieces of software that you think should be in the software hall of fame? But it's got to be a product. Python doesn't count, it's a language. So for example, Excel's in there as is VisiCalc, the OG of the spreadsheet genre. I don't know if you put WordPress in or not. I was thinking WordPress was close.

Luke (01:11:18): All right, so WordPress is one of our four stars, along with SharePoint, Doom and Lotus but-

Rob Collie (01:11:25): Oh no, they're in. Four stars is in.

Luke (01:11:27): It's four stars is in? Okay.

Rob Collie (01:11:28): It's four and above. It's a six-point scale and four points required for ... Luke, please try to keep up.

Luke (01:11:34): Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's software. What do I know?

Rob Collie (01:11:37): You helped create this thing.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:11:39): Yeah. It'd be pretty ironic if it was a world-class site.

Rob Collie (01:11:46): Oh, I bet it uses React and Node.js and Angular. It uses all of those things. I have no idea.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:11:53): Well you know, you got a play fair.

Rob Collie (01:11:55): Alex and Aubria on our team made that site for us, and Kylie designed it for us. I realized 48 hours before the podcast went live, "Oh, we should have a site." They pulled that together fast.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:12:07): Fun.

Rob Collie (01:12:07): It might be WordPress. Without WordPress, without the internet, without this sort of ability to project a voice, there'd be no P3 and there'd be no data strategy professionals.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:12:19): Yep, that's right, data strategy professionals.

Rob Collie (01:12:20): God damn, I'm good. All right.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:12:23): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:12:23): You see, look at that. You put the S on the end already, because of the royal We. You're savvy.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:12:28): Well, I like to think that's the community, is the data strategy professionals.

Rob Collie (01:12:33): I see. I see.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:12:34): Yeah. We had one of our community members who's not even a customer. I just know him from the groups and stuff, but he said he never bought anything from me. And he said, "Every certification is helpful in its own way. The real learning comes from how you apply it." So I was like, "That's pretty good. I should use that as a tagline."

Rob Collie (01:12:55): Yeah. We teach two levels of Power BI, like the DAX Language in Power BI. Someone on our team described it was, is that foundations was level one, real world is level two, and then our advanced class is level three. You should never take our two classes back to back, and you don't even need to take the second class. You got real world, and everyone we hire has already been applying this in the real world. That's sort of like a necessary ingredient. And by the way, our interview is open book.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:13:27): Oh, I love it. That's useful.

Rob Collie (01:13:29): We're not even looking over your shoulders. It's not in a room. There's no time limit. Go ahead and, "Cheat." Just like you would in real life.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:13:38): Yes. I mean, I studied for this. I read up all about Samuel L. Jackson's background.

Rob Collie (01:13:43): Sweet.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:13:44): So I just knew that was going to come up. It's very important.

Rob Collie (01:13:47): Yeah, you were ready. Yeah, I didn't know that we had a Samuel L. Jackson scholar.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:13:52): Specifically his Morehouse college hostage taking phase.

Rob Collie (01:14:00): Can you believe it?

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:14:00): I mean yeah, people change. It's hard. It's hard to watch.

Rob Collie (01:14:04): At some point in the '90s or around year 2000, someone told me that transcendental wealth occurred at $100,00,000 of net worth. And beyond that, there was really nothing additional that money ever got you.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:14:18): Yeah, that seems reasonable.

Rob Collie (01:14:20): Jules Winnfield of Pulp Fiction fame, a character near and dear to my heart.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:14:26): Sure.

Rob Collie (01:14:27): Has more than a hundred million to his name.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:14:29): Right.

Rob Collie (01:14:29): Yeah, but maybe he got over the hump by doing the Capital One ads.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:14:33): Out there living hand to mouth.

Rob Collie (01:14:36): Oh, poor guy.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:14:38): The real tough celebrity lifestyle.

Rob Collie (01:14:39): For a guy yep, had to downgrade his private jet.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:14:42): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:14:42): I don't even know the models, but I hear the G6 is very popular and maybe he had to go down to a G5. He lost a whole G. Well Nicole, this has been a real pleasure. It's another validation of my intuitive recorder, my social media intuitive recorder of who would be a good guest.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:15:00): Do you want to hear the story of how you found out about me? 'Cause I remember it.

Rob Collie (01:15:05): Oh, you do?

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:15:05): Well, yeah.

Rob Collie (01:15:05): Okay, let's do it.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:15:06): I had tweeted a quote of yours from when you were on the Data Engineering Podcast, another excellent podcast.

Rob Collie (01:15:14): What?

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:15:15): Not as funny as Raw Data.

Rob Collie (01:15:17): I enjoyed doing that podcast. That was a good one.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:15:19): Yeah. Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:15:19): Yeah.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:15:20): And so I think you had come across me on Twitter, which is also how I got the FTX job. So, kids stay in school and stick to Twitter. That's how you meet interesting people.

Rob Collie (01:15:33): No, I've completely forgotten that. So now it's like, "Oh God, the intuitive recorder is very self-serving."

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:15:41): It's fine.

Rob Collie (01:15:41): She tweeted a quote of mine. Mark her down.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:15:45): That's how I got the job at FTX, is I had been tweeting and I was in a Twitter war with a friend of mine from Data Science Bootcamp, and we were talking about something that was of interest to Sam Bankman-Fried, and then he started following me on Twitter. And then next thing I know, my resume's at the top of the pile.

Rob Collie (01:16:03): A star was born, and you never looked back. Yeah.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:16:05): I looked back. Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:16:07): Yeah.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:16:07): I did. I looked back starting a few weeks ago, feeling like maybe I had made some questionable choices, but we didn't know.

Rob Collie (01:16:18): You got an amazing story. And honestly, this is going to be good for you long term. I'm envious. I wanted to be working at FTX when it all came unglued. That'd be awesome.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:16:30): Yeah. I kind of wish I'd been in The Bahamas that week. It's pretty sad, what happened to the company, what happened to all the people. But anyway, I'm excited for the book. Michael Lewis will do a good job.

Rob Collie (01:16:39): Oh yeah, I can't wait. Who's going to play SBF?

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:16:42): Oh God. I don't know. I've seen lots of jokes on Twitter about this. They say Jonah Hill.

Rob Collie (01:16:49): He played a really reasonable villain in War Pigs. Edward Norton played a billionaire in the most recent Knives Out, the second Knives Out movie that just came out.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:16:59): Oh yeah.

Rob Collie (01:16:59): We all went as part of Thanksgiving. Highly recommend that movie. I enjoyed the hell out of it. And Edward Norton's a total A-list legit actor. For him to sign on for this project, it's pretty cool.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:17:10): Wow.

Rob Collie (01:17:11): It's called Glass Onion, I think. It's a Knives Out Story.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:17:15): I've only seen the first one and it's a excellent movie.

Rob Collie (01:17:18): I like the first one. I think I might have even liked the second one better. That's not something I often say about sequels.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:17:24): Okay.

Rob Collie (01:17:24): It's such a pleasure. Good luck with everything. We'll link your website. What was it? Angular? Node?

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:17:30): I'm a React developer. They're all just tools at the end of the day, right? I'm probably seriously going to have to redo the website in WordPress. I'm trying to swallow my pride here, because all the little fidgety things that I've done to make it nice, I don't want somebody to have to come up behind me and sweep up my mass of what I was doing when I was learning to code. The media queries I built in to resize component, as you change. It's nice if it's custom, but it's better if it's functional.

Rob Collie (01:17:59): I just signed on for that principle. It's better if it's functional.

Nicole Janeway Bills (01:18:02): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:18:03): 100%.

Luke (01:18:04): Thanks for listening to The Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast. Let the experts at P3 Adaptive help your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Have a day today.