The Subversive Structure of the World's Best-Performing Dev Teams w/ A Radical Enterprise Author Matt K. Parker

**Matt K. Parker** (0:00)
So much of the pain that we feel in the world of software development with processes like waterfall are really an attempt to take a paradigm of mass production and apply it to a world of knowledge work that it was never meant for and can't possibly satisfy.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:17)
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**Stan Lines** (0:36)
Hey, what's up everyone? Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Stan Lines, and today I'm joined by Matt Parker, author of the book A Radical Enterprise, Pioneering the Future of High-Performing Organizations.
It takes a scientific look at how the fastest growing and most competitive organizations in the world have no bureaucracies, no bosses, and no bullshit, which is why I wanted to have him on the pod the moment that this book crossed my desk. So, Matt, thank you so much for joining us.

**Matt K. Parker** (1:09)
Yeah, thanks for having me, Dan. I really appreciate being here.

**Stan Lines** (1:13)
I'm super excited to talk to you about the book, but of course, let's start out by giving our audience an opportunity to get to know you a little bit better.
I know you are a third-generation programmer, so that's quite the lineage there. I don't know if I know anyone whose grandmother or grandfather was a programmer. So, man, it's just like in your blood. Tell me about that.

**Matt K. Parker** (1:40)
Yeah, yeah. So my dad's a programmer or was anyways, and his dad was also a programmer. Yeah, you know, my grandfather, after coming back from the fighting in the Korean War in the 50s, wound his way into an insurance company, which was one of the largest in Texas, and also one of the first sort of companies buying those new-fangled machines called computers, and putting out open calls into the workforce, like who wants to learn how to do something with this, right?
And my grandfather was very interested in the idea and raised his hand, and really dove into it and became among those first groups of programmers out there in the world.
And then my father sort of followed in his footsteps, and then I've sort of followed in both their footsteps. And so I grew up doing, and sort of immersed in this world of computers. I didn't actually start programming until I was in high school, but I was always sort of around it and knew about it. My grandfather would show me his old punch card programs that he had kept just for nostalgia. And tell me funny stories about taking 500 punch cards to the operator, but dropping them on the way there and like scattering them, you know, like horrible horror stories like that. So, yeah, I just sort of grew up in that world and I sort of idolized it too. And I know we'll get into it, but certainly the idea I had of that world didn't match the reality of that world after I started actually doing work in industry.

**Stan Lines** (3:09)
Actually, I was going to ask you, what programming language did your grandfather code it?

**Matt K. Parker** (3:17)
Yeah, I know at some point it was Fortran and then eventually later in the late 70s and 80s and into the 90s he did nothing but COBOL for like three decades. But yeah, in the very early days, even those first computers, what language even was it? I don't know and I didn't ask him before he died.
And I don't know if we would even recognize it, right? Like what programming language that was. But yeah, at some point it became Fortran and then COBOL.

**Stan Lines** (3:44)
My mother is visiting this week and we went out to dinner. She's also a programmer and she was programming in COBOL. So I guess that was totally a popular language. And I've heard right now COBOL developers are actually in high demand.
You can get some high paying jobs because there's all these older systems that nobody knows that need updating. So I was like, yeah, mom, you got to get back into the industry. Now's the time.

**Matt K. Parker** (4:14)
And that was even true two or three decades ago, like the last decade my grandfather spent programming.
He programmed for about four months out of the year as a consultant, got paid top dollar to do it, right? Diving into these nasty old COBOL systems and then spent the rest of the months living on a lake and fishing.