Is Software Good Enough?

0:00 We also had a moment where software engineers were either like superstars and the Elon Musk and even I don't know, Zuckerberg was looked at as this like cool, funny, weird geek and these you had these geeks who are all those billionaires and kind of did all this amazing stuff, but then you didn't look at kind of the other side of it, of the darkness and the or even not even the not only in the darkness, the good enoughness, the sort of it's non flashy, it's not amazing, that's not great. Welcome to the santhral life, the place where curiosity meets depth and discussions that matter today. I'm thrilled to have Paula Biowski joined me with the years spent dissecting the nuances of software culture. In Brilliant, Paula brings an unparalleled insight into good enoughness that shapes technology and work life. This is the cause of people, are you familiar with? What's interesting is that Paula's research challenges the false narratives that we get from Silicon Valley that technology is just this relentless pursuit of innovation, and it invites us to explore the values of things like maintenance care and the human element in our high speed, in a high schech world, so stationed for conversation that's bound to shift your perceptions. Paul. It really excited to have you on the podcast. I enjoyed envoid your work and enjoyed your book and middleware, and then also excited to talk with you about all things around software development and good enoughness and good enough culture. But just starting off by saying, thanks for joining me on the podcast, Yeah, no problem, my pleasure. And you said middleware. But my tech and my

1:33 book is called middle tech, which is kind of important. But it's important because middleware. It is a little bit about middleware. So that's not like it's not about that. But yeah, yeah, that's true. My brain just kept going to the word middleware for some reason. Yeah, maybe it should be called middleware. We should stop the press, we should tell the publishers. Yeah wait, you know. But that's an interesting point though, because it's like obviously a middle tech company that's working on software development, you know, so obviously where the tech and the where kind of come together there. But I think, you know, it's really compelling about this. I mean, across that there's a ton of things I want to dive into. But obviously there is this like main idea around good enoughness right yes, as a kind of overarching theme, and this is something that for the deep audience deep listeners, I guess you know. I did a conversation with David gray Waiter and don nappis you a few months ago that was about kind of software modularity and like the at the end of the production process, and that was interesting. That's one of the things that David, who was a computer scientist and now was doing is his graduate work in anthropology, was kind of talking about and reflecting on this idea of you know, when software engineers are working, especially in bigger organizations, if they're doing kind of an agile process or even old school waterfall, that they are, you know, each individually kind of responsible for a part of the software, but they don't necessarily see what happens downstream. And this argument was kind of about this question of responsibility, like, you know, I don't know what it's doing later, not that I don't care if it does hardware good, but you know, so folks

3:05 don't have to listen to that episode to go here. But that's kind of one of the places I was thinking about with this, like because obviously this theme of good enoughness is really interesting of like software is good enough to do to get out, to get shipped, and so I was thinking about that in relationship to this question of responsibility of what happens when it goes out. That's a bigger question, you know, I'm gonna ask that. But then I also want to kind of think about what is what is good enoughness in the first place, you know, for folks that they're trying to get a sense of what's happening here. Yeah, okay, well there's I guess my book touches upon two worlds of good enoughness, and that is the tricky thing to maybe for myself to try to organize my own field work. I know, I spent two years at this software company in Berlin, and after a while I noticed that so too good enoughness. One at play is the goodness enoughness of software. That software is patchy, kind of shipped out at not a perfect stage, but it's good enough to go right and it kind of have bugs, but those bugs can be fixed later. And I could talk about that good enoughness, and I'd love to talk about that to good enoughness but another, good enoughness is about really a work culture, so kind of in the whole anthropology of work, sociology of work, sociology of corporations.

4:09 That's it's kind of like that situated of a technography of what it means to push back against a narrative of excellence at a company, right that or narrative of excellence that we all work under under the this like capitalist machine that being perfect being great. You know how many times a lot of our students come up to us and are super sad about like a bare minimum of the sort of like or a median grade or something, and you're like, hey, this is good enough, It's fine, right, But so we're all living under that, whether that's our students or us or everyone, Yeah, just just in our society. And I think that this this is also an example of how good enoughness can be stabilized as a culture of doing. It's not even doing the better minimal, it's doing so yeah, it's a good and enough. I think those two words quite seriously. So do you see.

4:58 So there's these two forks, and I talk about them too, sometimes simultaneously. Sometimes one is an example of the other, and sometimes you could take a few chapters and speak to one and speak to the other form of good enoughness. Yeah, yeah, no cool. I think it's it's such an interesting theme and I appreciate the way that that you split those up over it. It is like part of it is the software itself, the other part is the work culture, which I think is really important, right, especially because yeah, you know, and you mentioned this a few times in the book too, but just we are reeling, i think societally from the Facebook mantra of like move fast and break things, right, that's like been the Silicon Valley tech borrow totally be demon innovation at all costs kind of kind of thought process, and so good enough is a nice interesting foil to that.

5:40 Yeah you know, did you notice that? Is that something that you've seen as kind of a reflection response because you're you're working in Germany, right, so we're kind of we're not in the US Silicon Valley. So it's like, is there is there kind of a European difference there? I mean, I don't like attribute purely to culture, but maybe it is, you know, is it like what this is happening here in terms of like why that differences seems so pronounced totally. So maybe I'll even back up Adam and talk about my fieldwork happened in kind of twenty sixteen, seventeen eighteen and these years for those of us who don't remember through some COVID fog brain or something. Then before you know, we were living in a tech environment where there was only a bit of skepticism starting to bubble up, but you still had these like the superheroes of tech, the Silicon Valley mecha of like as you said, move that fast and break things. We had sort of I would think it was the peak at the time of a lot of social networks that we were using. It kind of was just starting to be formed. There was forms of sex skepticism which we still we already have around data privacy, around social media and what they're doing to us, what they're doing to young people, blah blah blah. We get that whole, you know, the critique that we are living in now, But that was only starting to trickle up at the beginning, right when I was doing my field work. And another thing is that we also had a moment where software engineers were either like superstars and the Elon Musk and even I don't know, Zuckerberg was looked at as this like cool, funny, weird geek and these you had these geeks who are all those billionaires and kind of did all this amazing stuff. But then

7:15 you didn't look at kind of the other side of it, of the the darkness and the or even not even the not only the darkness, the good enoughness, the sort of it's non flashy, it's not amazing and it's not great. So but also I did my field work for at first I went to the Silicon Valley, right I went, and I was I was there for a summer, and I was just interviewing a bunch of people on a different project that I was working on, and I kind of felt for those of us who did field work in the Silicon Valley. We know it's a very weird and very specific place that is very technologically solutionists. They love technology, they believe in technology. They also America, in my opinion as a non American I'm a Canadian, is also has a culture, a work culture that is about really excellence and drive and you can do anything, and about meritocracy and all these things that a lot of I think European work cultures don't have. And it also reflects itself in even the labor laws in Germany and in a lot of countries in Europe. So I mean I lived in different countries in Europe. I did my field work in Berlin, and I met some expad Americans even who used to be in San Francisco and kind of were saying, I just can't handle it anymore. Or you had Brazilians who lived in San Francisco and then also moved to Berlin because they really thought this work culture is not for me. I can't take doing this, you know, working from morning to evening or even just trying to really fully believe in our technology and you constantly have to like repeat slogans of the company and wear company

8:48 hoodies and be excited about the like company culture, and it's not work is not everything in a European maybe context. And I know that's a very big stereotype, but I know noticed the stereopot type of a little bit at play in my field. So I'm jumping different topics out of it. But I hope I answered your question that I think there was a good enough environment. I think in an European environment and work environment that lend itself to good enoughness. So yeah, did I answer some of your question today? It definitely yes. Yeah, you know, you know you're great because like you know, we'll rab it hole around different different ideas. Yeah, exactly. But another I think that's a really important point. And yeah, and it's like I'm not trying to draw to to stark of a contrast there, but I think it's like, you know, for for the the US oriented audience, right, just kind of pointing out in the myth of Silicon valid that we've heard global here. We know, it's like this global mythical place totally, and to your point, it is this very unique cultural kind of kind of zone. And so there's that again I'm saying because this is kind of when I was coming into your work, like that's where I was thinking about from from this idea of the Silicon Valley perspective. And so uh, I also felt a lot of resis with this idea of good enoughness as a form of resistance almost right in terms of you know, to manage aerial practices and to and but also to bringing forward things like care, you know. And so I appreciate it the way that your work both kind of brings us into like science and technology studies, but then also into like work practices and ethics of

10:20 care and how people navigate those those different parts of the world. And so I want to make sure we spend some time on the software development itself because I I love all these the bigger questions too as part of this, you know, because that doesn't else. But like, so let's let's just walk through a little bit of like how good enough happens in middle tech, right? And so in this case of like both, some areas that stood out to me was thinking about software as a social process, right, And this also links to the like I think about the conversation I had with with David and Don before about the idea of modularity and software development, but you approached this actually in a quite different way, which I like. And so think about the like the social dynamics that how this impacts the way that that people do software in the programming team but also amongst managers. So let's kind of start there, and like, what does it mean that software is a social like a kind of a social process, constract practice, whatever, sociotechnical object, whatever your terms buzzwords you like to use. Yeah, yeah. So basically we have a few things that make it quite a social object that people who don't know much about software don't know, and I didn't know going into it. One is that software gets old. There's something called legacy code.

11:31 And if you're not building a new startup from scratch, and you're just like, you know, an older company like middle Tech, which built mapping and navigation technology, you are sometimes ten twenty thirty years old. And what does that mean. That means that you have code that is old and is aging with you as a company. So the people who are building code are building on top of other people's code. So you have to imagine like an old like Google doc that you're just kind of liked to, but you have to make sure that the other sentences and that Google doc are also like somehow making sense. And sometimes they don't make sense. You have to kind of what is called refactor them. You have to like update them to use the language that you want to use or whatever. But you still have to work with those sentences. You can't just throw them away. I mean, sometimes you can throw them away, but that is very shaky. Sometimes your system crashes because you throw away a bunch of paragraphs in your Google doc. Let's just use that metaphor, right, So that's one way where you can imagine.

12:31 You could even see that Adam wrote this line, Paula wrote this other line, and you can actually look into the like kind of history of the code and see that someone who's not even working at the office anymore has written that section. So this poses a challenge because suddenly you have to work with somebody who's not there, sort of these ghosts of software past as like sometimes I like to call it, and if you can imagine, sometimes you have to be like, ah, okay, I don't get this good enough. I'm just going to like, finally, how work with this? I don't fully know what it means, or I don't think you know fully what it does. Let's just like build on top of this and let's just run this code and see if it crashes like fingers crossed it doesn't, you see what I mean? So you can't really fully understand what the layers are underneath you, and as our companies age, which they are, and we're using them constantly, and these softwares that are embedded within our system, our whole infrastructure of everything from transport to ticketing systems to you name it. Then you can imagine all the years and years of all these ghosts we're working with. So that's the one layer of good enoughness, of the sort of of the legacy of good enoughness. You have to work with something and you can't be perfect because a lot of complexities are coming into play. Does that make sense? Am I not going too fast? Okay? So that's one way of good enough.

13:46 Another way is simply that you have teams working on things simultaneously and you have to constantly review each other. I don't know, people don't know that you're kind of code reviewing each other. Again, back to this Google doc example, you constantly have to review other people's paragraph sentences before pushing out the code. And sometimes, you know how it is like you just want to go get a beer with your friends, or you have to pick up your kids from school, and you just go like, oh whatever, I'm just gonna review it. Plus you give them a plus two. Plus two is like the best review. Plus one is like you need to fix something, and minus one you need to like ditch it, et cetera. So there's like a review system and sometimes you just go act good enough I'm just gonna so that way. It's also very social because it's like a peer review, constant peer review of each other's code, and we know as academics also peer review is someone is good enough, we're just like, yeah, this could fly, this could be at a journal. Right, So that's also so there's many other ways. I'm not gonna get into all of the ways, but you can start seeing that software is extremely social. And I think in social relations are not about excellence. They're about messiness, and they're about like making things work and constantly negotiating, constantly compromising, just like you do with your friends or your neighbors, your parents, right, that we don't have perfect relations. So I think once we start looking at that relational aspect of yeah, of software, then you start seeing okay, well no, it is good enough. Yeah yeah, yeah. I mean that's a really interesting point too, because it's like, uh, and you touched on this in

15:16 the book too, but like there we have this kind of false idea that software is this pristine thing. It's like, oh, it is beautiful architecture and it's like thought out and fully crafted, right, yeah, but your work kind of says actually, when we dive into it actually is. It's quite as social as a conversation that's kind of being made as we go, built on other languages that we're drawing from, you know, totally. Yeah, And if I could just add to that, Adam, another thing that I really learned, and this is where it's the term good enoughness came from the field because in engineering there's a term this good enoughness, and software engineers have written about good enough software. And also the whole I mean cloud computing and update culture within the software industry that Internet has brought means that software isn't packaged into the little CD that we put into our hardware and then it's finished right before you finish software product, and then you have it. You shipped it in a CD the way we do a book, right, and it's quite static as an object. But here now you can constantly update, and you are constantly getting pings, pings, pings on your phone or on your computer where software is being updated. It's because you're always in a state of good enoughness as an engineer. You're always just going like, this is good enough for now, let's ship it and then we'll see what happens in the real world. And how it reacts to the software or how software our legacy code or many layers react with the actual real world, and then we're going to update it. Right, so that even principle of building software is almost

16:47 build into the logic of how we build software today. You see what I mean? So that good enoughness. If you talk to any engineer, they're like, yeah, obviously everything's good enough. But if you kind of talk to a manager who wants to get a client, be like, no, no, our software is going to be really great, really robust. We're going to deliver a great product at week whatever, forty four. We're doing it, We're pushing it out. You see what I mean. So this is the the also in congruency, and I think, yeah, that's also that was also a tricky thing about my research with engineers versus my research with management. That's maybe another yeah did you see your topic? Yeah, yeah, No, I think let's dive into that, because that doesn't the interesting and important point where it's like developers encoders that don't and are not working directly with customers, right, they there's a different level of pressure, right, or a different level of kind of awareness of they are maybe thinking more sociality or social socially within their organization, yeah, or with their manager. Right.

17:41 But then it's like an external facing person and I've worked, you know, on client success side of businesses, I've worked on like internal sides, and it's like and they're very different, right, because you have to your language does change your thoughts of like how do I interact with my teammates in a relationship with the consumer customer wants versus I'm just working with my internal team, So like, yeah, that's an interesting tension there of like, yeah, how does that play out? We're good enough? This doesn't feel like it's good enough to the manager sometimes, yeah, or at least they're not spoken about that way. Yeah, exactly. So there's so many layers that I it's hard for me to organize this in my mind, but I'm gonna try. Is that So one thing is that we're thinking, let's let's even just talk about like engineers themselves. There's all sorts of different engineers. And the engineers I worked with are quite privileged. Their meat privileged, meaning that they a lot of them are research and development engineers and they're working at like a nice stable company. Their research and development engineers oftentimes like don't have this pressure to push something out at a certain time, and even if they did, there were also other groups that had to of course have deadlines. They oftentimes had Basically, their their product is has years and years of history and it hasn't there's it's an asset for a lot of let's say it's mainly companies, but it was a navigation system, so basically it's an asset that has been around for a long time. So it's almost like the client needs them versus they need the client, if you know what I mean. They kind of already have a stable market that there there is not much of a huge

19:15 pressure. I mean they would have to really mess up to really like be fired. They they're quite embedded in a lot of systems, so they have to keep it running at good enough speed. Now going back to the engineers, there's other engineers in Kiev are now not in Kiev anymore, but Kiev, Krakhov, Bangalore is Global Seals, which were actually doing a lot of the let's call it dirty work or the fast coding, and they did not have this luxury of good enoughness. So good enoughness can be is a luxury. It's a freedom in many ways to say this is good enough. I'm going for a beer, you see that moment. A lot of people think good enough is just about mediocrity and nobody wants to be good enough. But actually a lot of these engineers are so happy to google work in a good enough company because they can say no beer time, No, I'm picking up my kid from school, No I'm going to my kids recital or whatever.

20:07 I'm finishing work. Work is not, you know, they're able to do that. They have the freedom to say that someone in Bangalore who needs to finish their code reviews or whatever it is that they're doing as an outsourcing company, has to finish at a certain time, you see what I mean? So that the good enough has a privilege, and there's different layers of privilege of depending on what engineer you are, of how much good enoughness you can allow yourself at work. Yeah, and then the manager question, which is another work and they don't like the term. Of course, they don't like the term good enough. And also a few managers who I spoke to were also I don't really felt kind of hurt by the term good enough or they they thought they look they saw themselves as like kind of just I don't know, taking any advantage of their workers, or like pressuring their workers and not really caring about them. And that's really not what I wanted to get across.

21:00 But it's I think it's a tricky thing because the logic of excellence and the logic of I don't know, a corporate work that runs on key performance indicators for those of us who know that term, or you know, you have to have metrics that make sure that you have enough bugs being squashed and enough productivity that's happening. All of that logic is there and you and as a manager have to work under that logic, whether you sit down and listen to your engineers and see what do you really want? What are you good at? Of course they do that, but then that logic is still in bubbling up from underneath, you know what I mean. So I think that's yeah, that was tricky. That was very tricky to like say, hey, good enough is great and they were like, no, no, it's not great, and that you're making me look stupid, you know. So yeah, that was hard. No, that's it's interesting too because it's like there's this is often that question too, I mean in any kind of like power differential in higher case, especially at workplaces like this, right, Like I mean even like the entire rise of the managerial class. Right, Yeah, there's kind of this this like built in resentment a little bit from the worker class that's you know, usually under the managerial class. Yeah, as a question of why do I need to be managed? On the one hand, right, and it's like, you know, and scrum is like is one of the methods that we see often in software development, right, yes, of that you could have the interesting tensions you kind of noted in the book tour This, like the the managers saw that as a great way to be able to know what's going on. But then like you know, you had uh, programmers being like scrum is stupid, Like yeah, basically actually help us get anything done, you know, And it's like we have to just either have a daily stand up or whatever it is. And it's like this interesting back and forth that's also on one hand, like an interesting kind

22:32 of forced sociality also, right of, like let's be seen and kind of share the work that we have coming up. Not that it's saying scrum is bad, but just like there's an in intension that we do see like different different individuals like finding it more or less valuable. Yeah, where managers kind of more uniformly find something like that helpful because that's actually what their work is is how do we see what's happening? Yeah, theory, how do we make things transparent? That's a huge Yeah, definitely, that was the huge issue here is how to make we make something transparent? And we have a methodology for that. And for those who don't work in the kind of corporate software, there's these methodologies that help, you know, managers organize their tech workers, and one of them is called scrum or agile. There's other forms and other ways of doing things. But a lot of engineers would tell you they were like, I don't need scrum, I don't need stand ups, I don't need this. This is all for the manager, whereas the manager would say, yeah, that's just like the big headedness of our engineers talking.

23:25 They actually do need this because without this they'll just be completely lost. So it's really trying to show your legitimacy of as a worker that I'm okay without this. And there's this tension that's not a software engineering tension, is attention and any sort of work struggle, of a power struggle of who has the freedom to choose right, who has the freedom to work in a certain way? Yeah, and what is the manager worker relation? And you can go back to Marx, you can go back to I don't know even yeah, sort of tailorism, et cetera, and just kind of like app map all these tensions. I'm not somebody who's expert amount of doing that fully in this book, but you can see that tensions, especially in one of my chapters play out on I think it's the one on managing software engineers. Yeah, it's yeah, managing good enoughness. It's the chapter four. Yeah, got to manage that good enoughness, you know. Yeah. But I think that's an interesting point too, because it's like the whenever we're kind of working with a workplace hierarchy, of the different kinds of like micro politics that can come in there, you know, it's like that ultimately also shapes the quality of the software, right. Yeah. And it's like this interesting idea because since we have a you know today, it's like nobody's surprised when it's like, oh, you open your computer and it says, oh, want to download a update? For some software. Great, you open your your cell phone and ask you the same thing, or it just does it in the background, you know, to the point we don't even notice it sometimes that that's just like part of what we do now. Yes, I mean I remember getting the AOL CDs in the mail, yes, as a kid,

24:56 you know, and it's like this this you know, I don't. It's like that transition is so common now. It's like it's it's feels archaic to even think about that. But it's like a crazy idea to think that the software is printed on a CD and then just passed out And honestly, like, I know this is not related to the work, but just like it had me thinking about both the making of books which we have and like DVDs in like film that we do. Like these are also like produced works that do not get continually updated. I mean they can't. You can have a second, third edition of your book, you know, but it's yeah, not anywhere as fast as a yeah sprint, you know, for good reasons, or a TikTok or whatever it is. Yet you're you're, yeah, you don't have this flow, this constant waterfall of information that you're constantly updating yet. But even like when you're finishing writing writing a book, to write dissertation or thesis or anything, or even a paper for your class, if you're doing that, it's like they're also still like you. You probably recognize the good enough feeling, right, It's like, Okay, well I got to turn it in. Yeah, yeah, you know, no, but I think good enough this. It's funny because when you're writing a book, and I'm sure the authors you've spoke to in the past have had identified with this, and we we identified this. We write about what we know and we care about. And this is a bit bizarre, but I kind of realized that just after even just finishing the book. I thought, oh man, my life is very much like lives to the like logic of good enoughness.

26:11 And it's something I deeply, deeply believe in. And I you know, I mentioned this earlier. I don't know this was off off record or on record, but that I'm also a musician and I published albums, et cetera, and I tour and that was a very tricky thing to juggle being a professional musician and an academic at the same time. And it was always this constant like this is good enough. I have to this is done. I have to run onto something else. And that's not just original. If your parent and you work at the same time, these are two jobs. These are huge jobs that you're doing at the same time, and you always have to go, no, this is good enough for now, I have to pick my kids off from school or whatever. Right, So you're constantly in this tension of this has to be good enough, right, this, this has to be enough. There is a deadline, it needs to be finished. So I think that it's really important to remember that that we're not all excellent, we're not all awesome. And the term good enoughness, by the way, comes from actually sort of pediatrics, and there's the few people in medicine who've actually wrote a paper around the good enough mother and writing about like what it means to be not perfect, and it's actually very healthy to actually talk to mothers as doctors. It was kind of a plea to doctors to really highlight that mothers should not be looked at as excellent, because once you look at yourself as good enough, you're kind of there's less stress, there's just tension, there's more understanding of yourself, and that's also plays very

27:41 well on your relationship with your child, you see what I mean. So that understanding I'm good enough, that's okay is very freeing and it is very relaxing, I guess, and I think that. Yeah, But again it's tricky because it's also comes from a space of privilege to do that, right. A lot of people can't do that. They'll lose their jobs, they'll whatever, it will happen. You know, if you say I'm just good enough, so I can easy somebody, because that's a critique that comes to me. Okay, I could say that as a professor sitting in Switzerland, you know, doing some research in Berlin among like R and D tech workers. Fine, but like go to yeah, a coding a farm in I don't know wherever Krakhoof or something and or not crackwoof maybe anymore, but somewhere else, and then you'll see that that's exactly and you'll see where what happens there. You can't just say like, ah, this is good enough, I'm leaving. No, you're gonna lose your job and someone else take your spot. Right, So so yeah, so that's that's tough. That's the tough thing. And that's the critique I do get, and I understand that.

28:45 I just I want to paint it as it is a reality that I think also is there that we don't talk about even in the in our privileged, very privileged societies, you know, Yeah, No, I think it's it's important, iportant, and like in general, it's I think that oftentimes social scientists we can get or as social scientists, we can get kind of caught up in the in the privilege critique where it's like, well, we shouldn't be talking about something because it's only for a privileged group. But it's like, well, no, we have to. We have if we're here to dissect society, we do have to. It's totally fine to talk about that. And like that doesn't make it, to your point, not real or not valid, right, It just means that it's it's for a certain group. Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know so yeah, so totally find there. But just like, but I think it's an interesting point because I do, I do. We have interesting work too, I think as social scientists to to kind of give ourselves permissions sometimes to to like both do research in places that are that can be spots of like stated privilege or where you know, awareness of privilege because I feel like we're not supposed to somehow, And honestly, I think that, on one hand, also might play into a bit of uh, I don't know if it's a common I don't want to say neuro seas of social science scientists, but just like this, this concern that we're either not good enough also for the research, right and or that like as good enough research is like in like the hardest places, right. Yeah, you know this also falls narrative that we have, which it's interesting kind of think about the way that like good enoughness when you say it and think about in any profession like it kind of you see where it chips at you either if you have it or privilege to be able to do it or don't you kind of say, well, what am I doing right or wrong in my own area? You know? As

30:15 I think about that, that's interesting way it kind of like seeps into you. Yes, And it's that's also the I think that's the like I don't know, it has to do with capitalism. It has to do with like this, you know, Nancy Fraser talks about the crisis of care in capitalism and that like care. When you start caring, you're not working hard enough. You're stopping and slowing down. Right, this is like the notion of slowing down is somehow, it's a it's doesn't work well in our logic that we are living in. And I think that that's that's difficult. That is the difficulty. And I think that's that's something that we should definitely remember. And I do this work, and I wrote this book just for people to also look beyond just learning about how software works, but also to understand a little bit of understand themselves in the world. And I once I did touch somehow my students who I I you know, I teach it this very elite business school that I sometimes have a huge problem with is being here at full disclosure because it's it's people who are living this like non good it's just about Excellence's about being perfectly the best, but going to a consultancy firm and like winning, winning when you have to be the best of the best. And and just to say, actually, guys, you know, to say the first year, just beginning, first day, students, good enoughness is still good, and you you there is other spaces you know that you will find yourself and you don't have to be excellent. And yeah, and that's that's

31:47 I think, really really important. But one last thing I want to say. Maybe I don't know if we have to slowly wrap up or you have a few more questions, but the second but a thing about also, I have this little anecdote in my conclusion about you know, one of this good pie goodbye party to a few of the engineers who are leaving to like, you know, the non good enough companies. You know, they left for the big huge tech companies, the Googles and the Microsoft's and the facebooks, and they were leaving, and then I kind of met a bunch of engineers who were saying goodbye to them. This was all like a beer guarden in Berlin, and even I they asked me what my book was about, and I said, well, it's you know, it's about the greatness of middle tech because it's really like this space of good enoughness and how good enoughness works.

32:32 And they their hearts sank. They really were like, what good enoughness? Oh no? And you know, like kind of this comparison of these these people who are celebrated who are leaving, you know, these other workers. Yeah, they're going to Microsoft, They're going to Google. Wow, so wonderful. But I'm staying behind, right, I'm working here for another fifteen years already and I'm still here. You know, this is my good enough job, and so in some ways it's it does eat at these tech workers. I want to just say that that I'm not painting this sort of story of everyone be like, yeah, we have such a good job because we could just coast around and freeload and like be good enough all the time. It is a tension within them. It's exactly the tension that you're talking about, Adam, that affects all sorts of different placepople and different workforces that they are also struggling with this term that this is hard for them, that they want to be at Microsoft sometimes because this logic, you know, these forces of post industrial capitalism work against this logic. So they and they're part of this logic where we all feel that, you know. So I just want to say that I felt that among my engineers very much so too, that the struggle. That's a really important point and I appreciate you bringing that up too, because you can you can totally see on the one hand, how the idea can feel uncomfortable because because even like on the one hand, like if you're in a certain working environment socioeconomic class, you will lose your job if you're not if you don't do work, that's good. Yeah, But then also if you're in a more a more privileged class or even just more like you know, entrenched middle class, it feels like you're not doing enough. The enough part ironic if you if you're just good enough, like you feel like I should be more excellent and more better. So it just

34:02 show us. It's always kind of pulling us upwards regardless. And that's like an interesting challenge point that like I think why it's such an effective kind of lens through which to think about, Yeah, you know, software development, but I think to this point, like the bigger question about how we do work in like late in post capras, well post industrial capra es not post capitalis are not there yet? Yes? Exactly? Not? Yeah? What the future of like labor is and how this? Yeah, how is this? Like what potential for emancipation is there? Is there any? And is this one form of sort of micro emancipation outside of it? I don't know, it's you're still that's really I don't have an answer really unfortunately that I don't know, if you know, I also know that middle tech is going to be replaced. It's not going to stay forever. And I think middle tech will be subsumed by these different challenges and of you know, different experiences.

34:57 I think even in an example, not that I've studied Twitter or X, but another example when like you know, Elon Musk comes in and like swoops in and kind of fires hundreds and hundreds of tech workers. That's a total example of like, wait, why is Twitter still working or why is X still working after all these hundreds of workers were fired. Well, it has a lot too with like time and ways in which season engineers were embedded, and of course a good enough culture. I think that comes out in different companies and it doesn't have to just be a medium sized company in Berlin. There's also good enough culture exists, as I also write at the Google's, at the Facebook's, at the Ex's, et cetera. But then there are the Elon Musk to come in, like what were these people doing out with them? Right? So, and I think that it could be it will middletech be either bought out by another company. Yeah, and then yeah, somehow and we see also this is also another maybe looking at the future.

35:51 My next project is on how engineers are dealing with different tools AI tools like CHATSBT but also like co pilot, et cetera, and these are or so this is going to be a huge wave but already starting to really affect how engineers do their work and how software engineers organized. So there'll be a lot of redundancies. People will be fired because you know, the AI can do their job. So that also is going to be tricky of how good enoughness will be challenged and stabilized through the like kind of yeah production. I've even been hired to try or tried that. Someone tried to hire me. This is so funny. They didn't read my book. They like wrote me an email Adam last week. That was so funny. They were like, Hi, we're from a large software coming I'm not going to say their name, and we would love it if you could do some work on how to up the efficiency of our workers given chatt I mean they read they read like that idea some work on AI, and they're like, because we could we heard that AI can like really up the efficiency of our software production. And I was like, man, did you not read my book? I guess you did it. Yeah exactly. Anyways, Yeah, well congratulations on getting I get pitched pitched for work. But that is a that's a that's a funny point that we're like, uh, you missed the entire human side of the work. Yeah, I'm not going to help you be more efficient.

37:10 No, I want you to be good enough. Yeah, you know. Yeah, but I think that that's that's a really interesting point because and I I was curious, and I mean I am curious about like that, because I know, because you're you're doing this research eighteen you know. And but obviously like AI is now yeah, mainstream, like you know, Gethub has their co pilot like you mentioned, Microsoft also ironically has titled co pilot. Yeah, lazy titling guys. I wanted code pilot. I always thought it was going to be good, right, code pilot, Like, come on, guys, put on words. And I thought, really, gosh, okay, yeah, where's the developer puny. Yeah that's a great point. Yes, sorry, but these things, yes, you're right, No, not at all, but like that, like how that also adds to like the challenge of redundancies of a kind of work, you know, but then shifting the nature of work itself. And I do think that's a that's a fundamentally important question. Yeah, because it's it's you know, I've been thinking about this too, because it's like the first at least consumer side applications of of AI, you know, came I think for like the the kind of weird areas, right, Like it helps with creative writing, it helps with image generation, it can do music stuff, and it can do coding.

38:19 And it's like, why are we targeting like not on purpose, not you know, consumer facing things that are like creative enterprises versus like let's automate traffic stops to be more efficient. You know. It's like this interesting idea of like what what the consumer uses of AI were like pitched towards you know, versus like actually we talked about it's going to help remove drudgery. It's like, I mean, all of us, who probably you know, many of us have used some sort of generative AI to like either help us put a paragraph together or correct as sentence versus few ideas, and then like everything comes out like I would say, yeah, mediocre, definitely, definitely, you know, because it's the hours of the internet, so it's like it's not not going to be great. But like, so, yeah, I guess I'm curious like your thoughts on this too, both as a musician and as as a researcher. It's like, isn't that it's curious to me, like what the what the consumer applications are or the enterprise applications because it's also this is like how do we help improve efficiency across like the development of pipeline And it's like it's funny because it's like a technological solution to to something that's a social problem. Yeah, and actually you do say that, you say this summerre too, like that's part of the part of the point of your work is to help us be like we stopped try. We can't be using new technology to solve old technology problems because they don't do that. Yeah, that's not that's not how these work, especially when they're they're social problems. So what does that bring up? Gosh, yeah, it's hard to say.

39:37 And also why these creative realms are being tackled, Like I think that I don't know, maybe this is just me thinking that this is like non creative people trying to try to capture forms of creativity and like hone them for themselves so that they can be creative maybe because and once you see, like engineers, once I did, I did a little pilot study and I looked at how engineers are using copilot and which is for those who don't know, like the AI owned by Microsoft on one of the main AI tools, encoding, and it really was in the non it's always in the non creative moments are the very like let's even not call them non creative, like the very mundane and very mechanical things that that actually it's good at. But the creativity of really like fully like designing something well or trying to understand how to refactor a whole section of your whatever your piece of software that you're building, you kind of have to like be a bit yeah, you have to be a bit creative, and you have to There is a human aspect that's about planning, right about trying to figure out how the repercussion of what you're building will look like in the future and look at all sorts of different contingencies that an AI sometimes doesn't at ye at least yet doesn't understand how to do that. And it's a little bit with also music when you come to understand when you start listening to AI generated music. I find musicians do see the difference. A

41:09 lot of non musicians kind of are like, ah, no, I don't. I don't see the difference to this. But I think in a long run, the sort of the way in which music stays with you and the way in which it becomes part of your sort of soul and you sing the lyric and you you know you want it to be with you for a long, long pot time. When you when you hear a good, good piece of music that you really like, then that has to be created by somebody that touches you some way, I think. So I feel more that when stuff needs to stay for a longer period of time and be there with us and kind of touch us in some way. That could also be robust software that makes sense for all sorts of systems and whatever, all sorts of hardware and whatever it is you're building. You have to have a way on which you can plan that and understand its longevity. Does that make any sense?

42:01 So I would say that like that ability to like make something stay is not really yet there with AI and I don't think it could be. Yeah, I don't know if that madey sense. Yeah, I love. I mean it's it's like it speaks a bit to the idea of stickiness, what's going to make something stay. There's actually there's a quote I want to read from your book, Oh to get to as part of that fancies having, because it really stood out to me because it's it like speaks to these and it actually this is the now it was in my head because this is where it has the idea of like new and old technology, but it speaks to a lot of the ideas that we've been talking about so far. That and this comes like right right before you're afterward and basically you know, you say so.

42:43 While our past was rooted in expansion, in the demand for bigger, better, and greater, it is my hope that the skills and tactics of good enoughness will be necessary to build a livable future. Resistance to narratives capitalism can include care, compromise, balance, safety, contentment, and collegiality. And knowing how to be good enough give us the skill to maintain our infrastructures and keep them running and stable. Accepting a good enough work culture can be productive as it leaves time for the realignment of power relations, the reconfiguration of what is important at a given moment. And you know, while while I aim to illustrate the overarching need for managers, workers and software users to accept the inherent bugginess and lethargy of working in technical systems, it's really my hope to get us out of the mindset that traps us into thinking that new technology will save us from the old one, and doing so it can help us embrace endurance over newness and maintenance over repair over quick innovation, and prepare us for a highly adversarial world that is to come. A ton of good stuff in there. So thank you because that encapsulated thinks such such the import of this work and so something else you're saying that there's the stickiness from the AI that's not quite there, but also this idea of like we're we're so obsessed by the shiny object that like we we are roads or crumbling. Yeah, you know, it's like we don't actually think there's no value, don't We don't place sexiness on maintenance and endurance, but like that's really what makes the world work. Yes, definitely, I can go to work, yes, to invent the new thing exactly. Yeah, definitely. I think I don't know if I could add anything that I think that was. I tried to.

44:09 It's one of my last sentences was that, like the last the last part of my right before the afterwards. It's it's, it's it towards the end. Yeah, so I really tried to like craft this, you know, this conclusion, conclusions of the conclusion, and yeah, I think I can't. I don't know how to add to that basically because which is good. Well, I wrote that. That's nice when you read to me like, oh that's cool. Actually, maybe I'll ringe in five years, but I'm still not cringing. I guess I hope not. No, I mean no, because I think I was beautifully written and like that's I mean, it stuck out it up that I wanted to. I wanted to read it because I think there's there's so much here in terms of like to our point we're talking about, there is this dialogue between care versus speed. Right, you're like working versus care and like that that's the Nancy Fraser moment that you mentioned before, the tension between those ideas. But then also I like this idea that good enough this because we've been talking a lot about it, how it's like it feels little, it feels a little cringey to the software developers or managers. But here you're kind of saying it's actually a skill, you know, work environment to think about like and how we think about operating and setting up our world. And you know, you point out again here the value of that is that because it access helps us think about things like endurance, maintenance and keeping things going right yes, versus just like what's next, what's new? Yes? And AI I think has that exact problem, right, It's always about what's next and what's new, and not like let's make sure things actually work. That's true, that's interesting. I would be another people who are interested in this area. You could look into Andy Russell's and leave Vinzel's work on maintenance and repair. There's this like group of people called

45:40 them maintainers. That's a kind of a network of Yeah, I don't know what you've probably had experience, did you, Yeah, the maintainers, and they're like researchers and advocates for people that care about a whale well maintained world. I guess that's their like mission statement. So it's cool you could look out their their work, and I think that there are a lot of people just really trying to put our focus away from the shiny and new. You can look about like the deep growth movement and sustainability studies and like just trying to Yeah, it's it is quite hopefully about sustainability is really this idea, although good enoughness can come off as like sloppiness too. That's another And that's the thing that I haven't really I guess I haven't really I see that there's there's a problem in that notion, and I still haven't figured it out because on one hand, it's about care and about maintenance. But it's when I talk about it sometimes about compromise, right, saying like I can't care enough about this anymore. I have to go right, I need to compromise on the quality of this because I have to do something else. So the well maintained well maintenance also about slowness and slowing down. And sometimes good enoughness is about moving fast, But it's not about moving fast because you want to like build the newest, shiniest app It's like really about made moving fast because you don't fully have time to care about this. You have to care about something else, and that could be about your own well being. You're being of good friend, doing a big good mother, being a good boyfriend, whatever

47:12 it is that you want to also care about, you see what I mean. So it's about like, yeah, that shift that we're constantly doing. That's not only about work. We are a multiple of things, right, So yeah, anyways, so I hope that that kind of makes sense. Yeah, well totally. I mean it's like it encapsulates that idea that like, you know, the original use of the word economics like Greek or costs is actually for managing one's home, right, And so it's like reminds us that work is like it's the work life balance, you know, fake idea, right that like they're somehow separate, and it's like, no, we have to always manage all of them, yes, and life of course. Yeah. So I think that that's a great point too, where it's like, so it's also a good question that you raised there too. So if listeners watchers, if anything jumps to your mind in terms of this idea of like is there attention or challenge with this idea that good enoughness also feels slow.

48:00 How do we think about that? Right, because I think you're you're right where it's like it can be moving quickly, it can be moving slowly. It can be moving with care for one thing or with care for a lot of things. And that then, like you know, and depending on how you're looking at it, right, that could feel sloppy, but you can also feel like super efficient depending on you know. So it's like it is about a point of view too, I think in terms of both an intent of what's one trying to accomplish and also you know, what does someone else seeing said person trying to accomplish, you know, in that moment. So I think there's it's always a three D moving piece, right, It's like always going to be kind of you know, one person's one person sloppy is another person's efficiency. But I hear you in terms of like, is there is there a way to talk about what's happening here that captures like but the that still also feels good because it seems like good enough. As people have we have to like get to the point of saying, oh it is a good enough sexually okay, good enough is good because you feel like it's like that. So there's an interesting, interesting tension there. Yeah, exactly of what that is. Because you're right, because overall is actually a positive thing. Yes, but for a lot of people it's and yeah, and a lot of people it's not positive. It's not enough. You know this, this tent should between the term good good, the word good and the good word enough, and it's constantly isn't enough. No, it's not enough for some people. It is enough for me, it's good enough. For others it's not enough. You know. This is funny, Yeah, and it's yeah, I don't have an answer that I think you're We're constantly going to be like jumping between unless we like, yeah, anythink really slowed slowed down? Maybe I don't know, or really I don't know. I don't have I think this is like moves into also like sort of self help territory.

49:32 And Abram Albert wrote a book also called good Enough that's more about like the good enough term and from as a philosopher. He wrote a book. It's also out with Princeton University Press. So I also recommend checking that out if you're interested in the term good enough in our life as a sort of philosophy and as yeah, so it's not an ethnography, it's not he's not an anthropology, but also maybe worth checking out totally. Yeah, we're okay with all sorts of thinkers on this other shoe good. It's I've trained more in sociology, So am I really through? I don't know, but yeah, my partner's an anthropologists and he he told me that there's it's a joke if you spend like two weeks in a field. So I really learned the beauty of very long term field work where you kind of very much fueled your whole body within the field. And I really found my hat to like all anthropologists who who spend a long time in the field. Oh yeah, I mean it's funny because I will say on the flip side that like, I both like that, but also I really value people that are able to do Rabbi ethnography and like they're able to do it quickly because it's like because we the work demands, like they both are valuable and they both we both have we have to do both, right, Yeah, that's true, that's true.

50:45 And some people, yeah, some anthropologis can't say okay, this is good enough. They keep going, but I think, yeah, yeah, it's true, so true that there's something for one to each your own and one has a purpose in the other as well, and the one can uncover a lot that others can't. So that's also interesting too. Yeah for sure, no, hey, holdism, it all works together, you know, it's like, yeah, I mean I would say fifty percent of the time on the show, I'm not only the anthropologist, and that that's on purpose. Actually this is like, so it's because the point is like, how do we get how do we get other thought leaders and folks interested in social sciences, and so that's so anthropologists of social scientists, like sometimes I guess sometimes I have the after life is your anthro life? Sometimes Adams your Yeah, Adam's cash, she has a title. I guess Adam's after life Adam nice? Exactly Cool. Cool, I mean that's there's there's always more.

51:44 You know that too. Yeah, it's work, who knows, but cool. Paula, this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate you hopping on and I'm excited to get the book into the the eyes and ears of audience members. So we'll have a link to it in the show. Notes and yeah, so I'm excited to see what you'll come up with, obviously in the AI space after this and see how that goes. It's kind of scary, but I think interesting. No, it was really nice talking to you, and you're such a great listener and I really like listening your podcast because you really read our books, which is crazy and a lot of people don't do that. And it's really a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much. Awesome cool. Well, many thanks and we'll we'll see ye, take care, happy reading. Let's a wrap on today's discussion with Paula Biowski on the nuances of good enough and software development and beyond. Thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today, paul I've really enjoyed the conversation with you. Yeah, we journeyed through the complexities of maintaining balance, care, and compromise in the fast paced world of technology and development. This conversation not only sheds light on the tangible aspects of coding culture and workplace dynamics, but also invites us to rethink our relationship with a never ending pursuit of excellence.

52:49 As we close this episode, let's carry forward the idea that sometimes being good enough doesn't signify mediocrity, but a mindful acknowledgment of our limits and priorities, both in our professional and personal lives. So thank you for tuning in out. This has sparks of reflections on how we can navigate these demands of our increasingly digital world. Stay curious and we'll see you in the next episode. I'm Adam Getwell and you're watching this Anthra Life.