Cover story is an essay on code. Bottle it seeks to explain the inner workings of computers, apps, and software. And provide an inside look at the lives of the programmers who build them. It is the longest article the will and will magazine has ever you run. Joining me now is josh you will tyrangiel, the editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, and will of Bloomberg Businessweek and paul ford, the author of this piece. Great to have you. So just tell me how this all inso just tell me how this all a came about. Josh it came out through ignorance and a lunch. And [laughter] you and [laughter] you will and you and you will you josh so the ignorance is mine. I have been working on a website for 12 years. To be charitable, i understand about 50 of what is going on. When you talk about how youre going to build a website, with the architecture is, and i am trying my best to follow it. Boy, it is hard. I come from a liberal arts that ground. I hope to have many decades in my career. Knowing what little i am just getting by on is not good. So i called paul. He is a great writer, a beautiful writer, a funny writer. And he is a programmer. We had conversations and paul did a great cover for us on how come but it is behind the scenes. I said, paul, we should do something on code. Paul i gave him 5000 words. He said give me some are. More. And then we landed at 38,000 words. Almost a book. Charlie is this a book . Paul awfully close. Josh its complicated. One of the mistakes made over the years in coding is to find one metaphor and hope that it experienced now that software is in your pocket and in your house and in front of you every day, imagine how socially acceptable it is for us to be ignorant about software. Imagine if it was medicine. Charlie wasnt it a George Bernard shaw quote about the laity . Josh what we want to do to is the anthropology. Who are these people and paul can speak to that. Charlie they are the people if they dont run the world, they run the things that run the world. Paul i think thats true. What is happening when people undertake to teach people code they teach them to make something move around on screen or a very simple things and then they tried to go back for more to learn how these things work and they get very lost because it is a huge world. If you go out and we will around if you go out and google around and try to find out how to solve a problem, you will get lost in the moment. What we are trying to do is the anthropological guide for the people who find themselves thrust into this world and want to make sense how this Technology Works together. Charlie is this too simple, that what computers do is not that, in terms of mathematics, not that compensated. Not that complicated. What they do is do it so fast that you consult problems . Stalled solve problems . Paul thats correct. You can watch a movie on your computer because they are incredibly quick. But they are really just being switches a billion times a second. Being able to manipulate time like that is what has given us this enormous industry. Charlie who is this article aimed at . Josh as you know, so much of what we know is for me. But i actually think there is a great swath of the whitecollar world that is in the similar position to me. It used to be that software was something they would engage in at home on the computer. Now know matter what business you are in, and accountant, a Small Business person, you are surrounded by software, either software you use, software you are making for your customers. If you dont understand it, youre going to be left behind. We are at a tipping point. We have had software for decades now. Charlie if you do not understand it, you will be left behind. Josh absolutely. Charlie jobs could understand it but could he write it . Paul some of it. He programmed a little bit. As his career went on, he continued to go levels and levels up and hired people to build these abstractions for him. Josh another thing that paul do es so well in this please, what is interesting about the anthropology is, we think once a coder always a coder. Why are so many programmers angry . And it really gets at this fundamental issue. Language changes. It is a nerve racking industry. Technology changes. Paul it is a nerveracking industry. You go away for a few months to work on a project, six months is a good window. 18 months, it is a whole new set of images and paradigms you need to Pay Attention to. Charlie what was the attraction for you . Paul i am a funny hybrid. My father was a crazy creative writing professor. He pointed to a common our pet computer. Commodore was just a wonderful company. He said, you know, programming is a little bit like poetry. You want to express as much as possible in as little space and in your brain as much as you can. That stuck in my brain. It was always a part of my life. Also a source of economic stability for a writer. Charlie did you have any sense that i realize, readers, this is good for you. This is good medicine, but i dont think youre going to like it. Josh i asked think that its funny. We were talking about this, but 30,000 words is a lot. We do not shy away from exerting lines of excerpt in the body of the piece. At the same time, paul is funny. If you are going to learn about this once, if youre going to take the focus and onetime try to catch up, try to get ahead, that is what we are here to do make it easy for you. I joked with paul we put lines of code in in part to show how serious we are. I treat them like the names in the brothers karamasov. There is a seriousness and engaging it at the top level. Charlie how do you define code . Josh there is many ways to define it. We define it as a set of instructions in a file and the computer takes those instructions, breaks them into tiny pieces, kind of makes sense of them and turns that into code that the computer can execute. So code is what you write when you want to make an iphone app. Code is what you write when you want to make a dynamic website or when you want to create an online catalog. Charlie how powerful is this . Paul very powerful. The room we are in now, in the 1980s, could not have held a computer that powerful. Charlie this room could not have held a computer as powerful as this is. Paul you can put that in your pocket. It is a terminus piece of machinery. Charlie tell me the difference between java and html and all of these things. Josh i cant obviously do that paul html is the language to make a webpage. You tag, you described, this is a headline, this is a paragraph and so forth. The web is fundamentally in these markup tags in that content. Java is a straight up programming language. You sit down and write code write instructions, and it is all compiled together. Theres lots of lineages like languages like this. What makes java very interesting is two things. It is a big language for building big systems. Charlie it came out of sun microsystems, didnt it . Paul yes, and it is well aligned with the goals of oracle. What makes java so possible is that has an enormous amount of existing and organize code. Charlie a language, java or html, for whatever it might be there is 1700 coding languages. Josh thats just the beginning. Charlie what is a language . Josh its really just a set of instructions. Paul its guidelines. If you do these things and you do them in the way we specify, we will translate this into the machine code and it will run into the computer. Apple is very big on to wo languages, objective c and charlie you can build an app from apple. Josh there are lots of language systems. Just like we have the renaissance and the romantic language is, some are written out of different languages for a specific task. There are elements in which your own linguistic system can be applied to a new task. Charlie with the two of you, we have one and a half code writers. [laughter] we are going to write a new app for apple. Paul the first thing you do is you go to apple and you download a Big Development environment called xcode. It is half a dvds worth of code. You open it up and write code inside of there. You might actually drag a button and put it into a grid so you start to wire up where the buttons are in your app. Then you start to write code for what happens in someone clicks that button. So all the pieces start to fit together. The process of testing your app, there is a button that is like a play button on a cassette machine and you press that and it compiled into a machine app and runs and you can start to play with and tested there. With it and test it there. Then you go back and repeat that process very likely hundreds of times. Charlie that is also true with android or apple or any other. Paul yeah. Especially with these big companies. They deliver what are known as Software Developers kits. They give you a lot of the Library Systems you knew to make things look and behave a certain way. That is why come on your iphone, so many of the apps look and feel and have the same typography because apple defines those rules. They defined how that is going to work. Charlie what is the difference between stands, standups, and scrums . Josh it depends on which group of developers you talk to. Part of my computer desk my confusion is that i would go to different websites in one company and the same people would use different language in different meetings. I thought it was just to torture me. But different sets of people have different sets of definitions for these kind of things. Paul what youre talking about is different aspects of what is becoming the agile methodology of software development. All its is is a set of principles and rules. Standups mean we are all going to literally stand up and have a meeting at a given time. And then there are rules for how the standard can be done. The stand up can be done. The idea is to force these different programmers to Work Together with all of these different pieces of code that Work Together so you dont have the situations where you come in every morning and everything is broken. So it is a continual form of communication. Charlie this article says that the biggest commercial insight is if you can control the computing environment, you can move markets. Josh think about what apple is today compared to 15 years ago. They just had the worldwide developer conference and the unveiled a whole new set of protocols, all designed to get people building things inside the apple architecture. It is a very popular architecture, welldefined. The more you build in that architecture, the more you are commerce. If you are making things for people to come interact here in the apple universe, on my platform, that ensures my in indispensability to the customer. Obviously, some of the smartest people in the world are running these companies. They know that a crowd tracks attracts a crowd. When they reveal, when they talk about that this is an stk, it releases to a generation what the white album was to another generation. It is a big deal. Paul it is possibility. You are going to have xcode at home and apple says, hey, you are going to be able to do these 150 new things. You are going to be able to access the watch in new ways listen direct with a heart beats and so on. People take that go away and think, what can i do . What can i create with that . Charlie Business Schools, harvard, the best across the country, and i see these Business School graduates who are in industry, consultants are those people going to become coders . Josh it is too late. [laughter] charlie its not too it for me. Paul it is a little bit like suzuki method. Language skills. Your brain is so pliable at a certain age. In your late 20s and early 30s, most people are actually transitioning out of coding. Charlie to what . Josh two project management executive level jobs. And i think what we are trying to get to is for those students who are now heading up to the valley to try to run the businesses, they really need to understand not just who these people are who are making this thing they are selling, but how they think. Charlie also to communicate what you want and need to the coders. Josh what is possible. And when someone says that something cant be done theres no greater frustration. You go to your lawyer, and he says we dont do it that way. And you feel like slamming the table. You want to know why. Obviously, there is scholarship and law. There is reason. What were tried to do is open that window. The code just doesnt play that way. You cannot reach and get an offtheshelf solution. You understand what that means. Charlie and you can ask why. Josh you can call their bluff sometimes. Paul you really can always learn. There are people who truly are prodigies. I didnt start coding seriously into my 20s. Ive never been a great programmer. I talk about that in the piece. But ive always been able to do enough to get my own work done to build things for people and so on and so forth. So there are opportunities to pick it up. But it takes some focus. Charlie is there a common denominator among the best and most brilliant coders . Paul it is a kind of mathematical genius. The deepest thinkers are very, very deep mathematical thinkers. If you are getting a phd in Computer Science in stanford you are a brilliant mathematician. Josh i liken this piece where i like in this piece where we address the midlevel executive directly in a very funny way. Those genius coders, they are not coming to work at your company for the same reason that phil jackson is not coming to coach your best ball team. [laughter] we forget because we interact with google all the time. We think, oh, we just get one of those guys. No, this is rarefied incredible, highlevel charlie theres huge competition in Silicon Valley to hire them away. Paul very expensive. And kept happy. Some of them just want to go backpacking for six months and call in for a week. Charlie and if you are good thats ok. Josh its a tough market. They can set the skill level. Some of what we have seen, too is there has been a sense of entitlement among some of the bad actors. Charlie why are they so angry . They should be happy. Josh you spend all this time interviewing people in the english language and we tell you tomorrow, it is all about portuguese. You become afraid. Charlie ill have to learn portuguese. Josh you have to learn fast. Youve got a week. [laughter] just imagine the amount of discipline, the amount of focus it takes to build a set of instructions that work and that work as you stack them up is enormous. Because one misplaced; semicolon in your code, everything comes crashing down. Charlie whoops. So thats why they are angry. The stress. Josh they are angry because of the stress, theres tons of competition, someones always gaining on you. And the thing you know is changing so rapidly. But that doesnt excuse some of the other things, including what we point out. The sexism, the lack of diversity in the profession these are real issues. Charlie i become enormously curious about the dramatic velocity of change in medicine understanding cancer and understanding the brain, all those kinds of issues. The technology there its mind blowing. Paul software has changed that industry in many ways. This is one of the pieces that one of the points in the pieces that code happens everywhere. It is not just microsoft word or working at apple. There is an unbelievable amount of companies that do a huge amount of work in medical services. Just the screen that works with the cat scan machine takes a team of 20 or 30 just to make that part work. Charlie this always comes up in any conversation today about Silicon Valley. Why so few women when steve jobs, as you guys point out, in an original photo, some of the most important people around him were women. Paul were women. It just became a masculine culture and women were repeatedly pushed out. It is that simple. When you talk to women who were programmers 20 years ago, they were in environments where they just felt incredibly and incredibly uncomfortable all the time. They were patronized him sometimes they were coming to it later because it wasnt a very feminine thing to do. Charlie sexual discrimination not sexual harassment. Josh both. Paul both. Josh this is a case of people drinking their own koolaid. Youre told you are a genius. So all sorts of bad behavior gets tolerated. Frankly, it is a resultsbased business, likes and many like so many businesses. But you are right. There are fewer women in Technology Executive positions than there were 20 years ago. Charlie are there fewer women coming out of Computer Technology schools . Josh far worse. Paul less than one in five. Charlie 20 . Paul thats of a year ago. Its bad. Josh and from a humanistic sampler, its terrible. This is a terrible sign for the business its self. There are few enough top coders that businesses are struggling to attract talent. And we have eliminated half the population . Paul these are cultural products. They require diversity in order to function for everyone. Yesterday, i think it came out that apple was finally going to support menstruation in its health services. And its been a while. Why did it take so long . Charlie tim cook had a mindset to look at it. What are we representing here . What kind of company do we want to be . How do we have programs and hot programs and policies that attract . Josh they made diversity of value and through shaming, they have been forced to stand on stage and say we have a problem. Its a pipeline. To really become a top level with all sorts of expertise, youre talking about 8, 10, 12 years of development. We are not going to see significant turnaround in this in five years. And then we are going to start grading to see who is serious. Charlie what do you want people to come out with this, if they make an attempt to read this . Paul and hopefully succeed. Charlie yes. Josh what i really wanted to want them to get is that this is a world that is right all around. Parts of it are mystifying. No doubt. But a significant portion of it is quite understandable and they should feel empowered to explore it, to ask questions, and to treat it as just as on a odd a profession as anything else. Charlie hang in there and give yourself some time to develop some traction. Josh i would go even further and say, look, you already know how to minute late software. You are doing it all day long. You have opinions about it. Certain Software Works better for you than other software. Just as you would watch a ballet and want to know what was that move, you should look at your iphone and say, ok, how did they do that. Paul and there is tremendous pleasure in that. It works. It takes time. It takes effort. Charlie i can see it in you. Paul oh, i love it. Charlie thank you paul. Stay with us.