Chuck
Appearances
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
But then when you scale up to 100 to 1,000 to 10,000, it becomes less manageable. And you're... infrastructure cost also is scaling up fairly proportionally.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
So the issue that I've seen is when a microservice stops becoming a microservice and it becomes a monolith service. to where you have now these 20 different or 40 different microservices that just have grown and grown and grown.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
And now you have 40 separate full-fledged Ruby on Rails applications that are so highly coupled and dependent on each other that would it have been better to just have built it into one beautiful, majestic monolith?
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
I think that's where Netflix is at. I don't know how many they have, but I've seen their data map of their microservices and communications. It looks like a whole globe of just jumbled spaghetti mess.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
The infrastructure scaling pricing that I was referring to is more on the database side. Because on a small tier database, that's really all the application needs. But because you have scaled it up to 50 or 100 microservices, you're not going to be able to connect to that same database instance.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
with the lower tier plan because of the number of max connections that's available on those various plans. You would have to either spin up multiple database servers, in which case you incur scaling costs there, or have one really large database server where you have multiple databases within there. And then you still incur a higher cost just for that max number of connections.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
Now, AWS may have something different now where you can allow more connections, but each microservice would need at least its one own dedicated connection to the database instance.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
Yeah, and the whole container idea instead of the virtual machines, I really do like. And I think that especially, even if you stick with a monolith version of your application to do auto scaling, you can more instantaneously respond to the demand coming in, opposed to provisioning a whole new virtual machine. So I'm really with you on there with using Docker containers and stuff like that.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
Because I think that's... the proper way to do auto-scaling because you get instant reaction to your users instead of having to wait. Okay, we're at a 50% CPU usage load across all our VMs. We need to hurry up and add more servers, all automatically, of course. But then 15 minutes later, the server's provisioned and now it's ready. Well, that traffic's all said and done now.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
Until you get half the developers using ARM, the other half using x86 platforms.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
Yeah. I couldn't have said it better myself. I have an 8-core Mac Pro, 192 gigs of RAM. Thing is a monster. Then I have a 13-inch MacBook Pro M1 with 16 gigs of RAM, whatever it comes with. I can't tell a difference in performance. On my day-to-day tasks, I really cannot tell. The difference there is a huge price tag difference. It's insane.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
So the M1, the whole arm movement that Apple is doing, I think is amazing. And if they can keep it cost effective, then it's going to really make a huge difference in how we approach things.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
So I basically have a general rule of thumb when it comes to microservices. If this feature, so let's give a real world example. Let's say if I'm in the business of PDFs and whether I'm a government or whomever, and I want to have the ability to take in a PDF and then have it automatically do the form fill out based on the parameters that are coming in.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
So this is a very useful feature for one of the applications I'm developing. Within our same organization, this feature is also very useful for five other applications that we're developing. So because this feature can provide a lot of usefulness to these five different applications. And we can come to some kind of compromise or agreement on its API of how it should look.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
It should be taking a form post with a list of parameters. It should have an ID of a PDF that is stored on the database or wherever it's stored. Then we can have one code base that serves five applications. So I think that's a good use case of a microservice. It does one thing. It does it really well. And it is highly reusable, not only in my application, but in multiple other applications.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
Yeah. So I have a little story that I'll try to make tangible to this. So I've had a number of dogs growing up and one of the dogs, you know, was a Border Collie. So the nature of the Border Collie is a herding animal.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
And if we had installed an invisible fence around our yard, it really would have confused the dog because that dog is meant to be more free and it would have hurt its nature, essentially. So we got a chain link fence, which was a physical, visible boundary around the yard. And I had another dog who was not a herding dog. They're more of a guard dog.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
So that dog wanted to be around me all the time. It was a Rottweiler Doberman mix, which I named her Kitty. But that's a different story. And I could let that dog... out of the yard, you know, into a open backyard and run free. And we never had to worry about her because she always quickly came right back to us because she wanted to be right there next to us.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
She wasn't interested in hunting or herding. So the idea of, in translating this back over to what we're talking about with microservices versus monoliths, I think that the monolith is more like that big open backyard without any boundaries.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
And if you're not careful, it's not a matter of if, but just a matter of when are you going to have an accident or a mistake on your hands because you have now gotten too much cross-contamination within your application. You weren't careful with the boundaries and And you broke a lot of single responsibility principles.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
And now things are too tightly coupled and intertwined in together and you have a mess. Whereas the fenced-in backyard is more like the microservices where you are forced to stay within this confined area. Which means you are forced to... think about and write the single responsibility principles because you don't have access to the outside world beyond your gated fence.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
And I think that if we are talking about a single application, that its code base is never reused anywhere else. So I think that we can train ourselves as developers to have more responsibility in how we are writing our code to not introduce a lot of this cross-contamination of logic, which really should be separated out.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
And by doing that, like Chuck said, with the lib or app services or interactors, whatever kind of naming you want to call it, but these plain old Ruby objects where you're encapsulating and building these virtual fences around that bit of logic, then you're able to create the idea of the microservices without breaking up the majestic monolith.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
I mean, let's face it. If you have a really pro team that follows wonderful practices, they're very consistent. And there's no hidden surprises. And if you create a monolith, then it's going to be very maintainable. It's going to be well-tested. And you're not going to have any problems. Take that and compare it to a team that is not very well-versed. They...
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
are not consistent and they're creating microservices, now you have an application which consists of 100 microservices and each one is its own nightmare. And it can go either way. You can have a team that's great with microservices, they're great with practices, and everything is consistent and isolated in these microservices, and this could be a great application.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
But then you have a team that's not as well-versed, and they are just creating an insane monolith that is just unmaintainable. So it's a healthy balance of choosing the right tool for the job and making sure that you have the team and budget to match as well as the infrastructure budget to host, because as we said, there could be differences in which direction you go.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
So overall, I think that because I work primarily on Ruby on Rails applications,
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
microservices doesn't really have a fit in my world because i think the convention over configuration that rails has provided me plus the practices that i have developed over the past 10 12 years has really negated the need for microservices in my world but that could be a different story for someone else where microservices is the answer for them yeah i also just want to uh
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
Yeah, sure. So my first pick is a Pack Tool Gecko Gauge. If you've ever had to work with hardy board, which is the cement fiber boards that you put on the side of houses, then this tool is amazing. It allows you to just clamp on to the previous fiber board that you installed and then set the new one just right on top. It'll be completely leveled to the other one.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
It is a life-saving tool for working with hardy board. And the whole reason why I picked this up is because I'm building a shed underneath our deck. And I'm now getting around to the part where I'm doing the siding to make it look like the rest of the house. I was not going to be able to do this job without that tool. So it's amazing. And on the date of recording this podcast, today is April 1st.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
I launched a new tutorial site. So I've been doing Drift and Ruby for many, many years, over 280 episodes I've recorded on Ruby and Ruby on Rails. And so today I've launched a new training site and that is Drifting Cobalt. So you can go to driftingcobalt.com and you'll see that it's a completely satire site for April 1st. But...
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
Hey, if it picks up one subscriber, that's like 10% of the entire Cobalt user base. So I'd say that's when.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
Nice. It's not a real punch card. The real punch cards were more like the... This is... This looks like a copybook description.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
And so just because I can, I want to push back just a little bit and just to get some more clarification. So when we deploy a now isolated bit of code as a microservice,
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
infrastructure speaking what is that going to look like as far as the database level is concerned are we going to spin up an additional database so now we have a whole new database server with a new database on there or would we just create a new database within a server and
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
So if we're running Postgres, we have one instance of Postgres or a cluster, and then we have a new database for this microservice, and that microservice only communicates to the one database, or do they all share the same global database?
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
Yeah, so kind of where I'm going with the whole database side of things, because I agree, if you do have a microservices environment, then you should have a separate database for each microservice. But the issue kind of comes into play is when you start off with just a few microservices, it's fine. It's easy to manage.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Yeah, I've never understood this whole thing of rewriting stuff that does the exact same thing, but in a new stack. I'm like, what's the point? It's just wasted effort. So yeah, if it works, just leave it, let it work.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Yeah, the simplicity side of things is huge for me. And I also have an allergy for dependencies. I hate pulling dependencies. I will need to have a really, really good reason before I add something to my gem file. it would be like, literally, I do not want to solve this problem by myself. And that's when I'll pull in a gym.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Because I think most of the time, you could just spend two or three hours and build something yourself that specifically solves your problem. And it'll save you so much time in the long run, because you don't have an external dependency that you don't control.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Yeah, just pulling on this dependency thread a little bit more, like going back to your authentication example, I do my own auth. I don't like devices. I don't like pulling in anything for that, but the way I see it,
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Once I've built it once, I can then, I know this is blasphemous to some people, but just copy paste the code into other apps and then tweak it as necessary because sometimes you need to just tweak things a little bit for the use case at hand is, And once you have something working, if you've written it well, that code should be reusable, I think.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
And that's something I kind of think about a lot is that trying to maximize the reusability of code. That's not necessarily... in a way that it can be extracted to a library because it's different when you've got code living in your app and when you're kind of extracting something because when you put it in the gem, it's more of a black box. But yeah, copy paste code.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Once you've solved the problem of authentication on your own, you know everything about how that code works and you can just copy it into other projects. I don't know what you think about that kind of approach.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Feels like it maybe should. There's going to be something in Rails 8, some kind of generator, I think, that gives you a skeleton of authentication. And I think I remember seeing a tweet from DHH a couple of years ago that they might do something similar to has secure password, but for one-time pass keys. There's an authenticator app. What's it called? TOTP, I think, the time-based ones. Yeah.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
I think there's some, I saw some chatter about like a has secure password flavor of that kind of thing. I don't think anything's actually gone in, but yeah, it'd be good to have for sure.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Yeah, most apps are crud apps. I think it's just something people don't like saying. My client at the moment is actually is a startup and we're completely rails. So there is at least one startup. And I had briefly spoken to another startup a couple of months ago about working with them and they were going to be completely Rails as well.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
The way I see it, if there's something that you can't really do in Ruby or in Rails, it's usually something with quite a small footprint and you can just extract that into its own service and build it using something else. Like the PDF thing you said, you can't do that in Ruby. Build that one tiny thing using something else and then just call it.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Yeah, I think boot camps have just kind of generally moved away from teaching web fundamentals. It'd be good just to have them go back to teaching literally the basics of web development, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and obviously I'm biased, but Ruby and Rails. Because last year I helped out with the Rails World website because the Rails Foundation wanted a junior developer to build it.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
And they wanted someone to mentor the juniors. I helped out with the mentoring. And she was a boot camp graduate. She graduated from LeWagon quite recently. And they had a little bit of Rails and quite a lot of React in the curriculum, if I remember correctly. And I remember showing her what you could do with just a custom element in JavaScript. And it was like, whoa, this is so easy.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
And it's like, yeah, I just wish boot camps would teach that kind of stuff a bit more. Yeah.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Yeah, it's also adding a little bit of just short-term versus long-term. Like, yeah, learning React will get you a job in the short-term, but then when React goes out of vogue, you won't have that foundation of basics to kind of fall back on and then learn something else. But that's a different discussion, I think.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Yeah, I'm a customer and I just love it because I'm completely technical. This bookkeeping accounting stuff is just so alien to me and I can just click around and learn stuff from free agents. So it's been a boon for me as a freelancer to have that. So what was the motivation behind going to the cloud? Because obviously with 37signals, all the rage is going the other way.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
then it would that's it it's kind of like it's almost game over at that point i think but yep i'm a big fan of render.com they're a bit expensive but uh in terms of like ease of deployment i just uh i find it to be heroku but for 2024 right yeah seems to be pretty popular
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Yeah, easy one this week. Haggis Ruby, new conference in Edinburgh on the 24th of October. Both Oli and I are speaking, so come for his talk, stay for mine. what else is there anything else I'm about to re-watch the big short with my friend this evening so non-tech big short if you haven't seen it go watch it yeah I think don't think about anything else today awesome Valentino what are your picks
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Now that's very, very thorough. And so yeah, you left in 2022, and then did you go immediately to 37signals after that?
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
The reason I asked about the timing was because I was curious about, did you just help free agent get onto the cloud, then switch jobs and help another company get off the cloud?
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Fair enough. So I'm not saying this just to blow smoke up your ass, but FreeAgent has one of the best web UIs of modern software as a service app that I've used. And I was chatting with some of the FreeAgent guys at Brighton Ruby a couple of months ago, and I said this to them as well. I'm curious from your point of view as a leader, because you grew the company through the 2010s.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
How did you avoid this whole hype cycle of React and stuff? Because the way I see it, most web UIs are shit because people use React and shoved it where it has no business being. It's a great tool for the right job. But obviously, I'll avoid the rant right now. But how did you avoid the hype cycle? Just keep things simple. And as such, it's got a very snappy UI.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
Sounds like it was a people problem because they snoozed the alert.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
Yeah, I think we've all been there before where we get an alert from whatever monitoring that we're doing and the error looks serious, but you kind of read it and like, oh, you know what, this is probably just a one-off situation. And then turns out it is actually a big deal that needs to be addressed as soon as possible. So I know I've been there before and
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
And, you know, the hard times to really track this, I use Sentry for my error tracking. And so I get email text notifications with that. And one of the nice things about it is that it'll show the number of occurrences, whether they are unique or not. So I can see if, okay, this particular error is only coming from one user.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
Or I could see we're getting 100 errors that's coming from 100 different users. So there's a more widespread problem. So I think definitely getting the notifications, but then having proper analytics on your errors so you can actually see the scope of how big this is can really kind of weigh in on the importance.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
I think it all depends on what you're doing. So if you have a heavy JavaScript front end kind of deal, and if you also have a lot of Ruby backend code, I know Sentry can handle both of those situations. Other people will go with another solution. So I personally found Sentry to be my flavor of choice, but mileage will vary based on what other people have.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
And if you're going to use Slack for your error notification, I'm not dissing that at all. I have a few applications that actually do that. It just triggers a Slack notification. But if you're only capturing the error message and not a stack trace along with it, then that error message is pretty much useless.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
Because it tells you you have a problem somewhere in your millions of lines of code, but we're not going to tell you where it's at.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
There's a little off topic, but you know what issue I found with that is I use my cell phone for everything. It's where I have my email, get my text messages, phone calls, and all that stuff. And so I would like to keep it on full volume late at night when I'm sleeping. So if a critical does arrive, then I can get notified.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
But my issue is that I would never get any sleep because my phone would just go off. So I need to figure out some way that I can set up for a particular phone number or something to override any kind of sleep mode or whatever that I have on my phone right now or get a different phone for that purpose. That seems a bit overkill.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
All right. I need to quit being lazy then and just do that.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
Well, that's no fun.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
Yeah, that should work well for my use case because no one ever calls me.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
Now, I have the Verizon call filter, which actually works pretty well. It's reduced the 15, 20 phone calls I would get a day down to like one.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
Yeah, I got burned by that pretty bad one time. My wife was over at the pool. She had forgotten her phone or she had lost it. And so she borrowed someone's phone there. And because that random person wasn't in my contacts, I never got her phone call. My phone just stayed silent. So I had to disable that pretty quick. That'll teach you.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
Yeah, sure. So went to the doctor the other week and they said I had high blood pressure, which I attribute to raising kids and them stressing me out. So I got this blood pressure monitor that syncs up with my iPhone. So it keeps a historical track of it. And it's been really nice. And I guess it's accurate. I don't know. It says it's high. So I guess it's doing something.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
So it is the Withings and it's a wireless rechargeable blood pressure monitor.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
No, it's just like the doctor's one where they put it, roll up your sleeve, put it on your arm and, you know, it starts to squeeze your arm. It's not like a wristwatch or anything. So I do it a couple of times a day. That'll raise your blood pressure.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
And so was this something that could have been caught by automated tests?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
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Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Yeah, for sure. If you look at the current use of the term, as we know and love it, it came about in the 18th century, pretty late in 18, well, I guess kind of mid. In 1853, that's when they were talking about feed and starve as far as cold and fever go.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Yeah. You know, that is proof to me that people back then were dumb. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Yeah, I guess they were basing it on if you have a fever, then you don't want to eat hot food. I guess they didn't eat a lot of cold foods back then.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
And if you're cold, you want to warm yourself up because there was only hot food available.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Hey, everybody, we want to talk to you about our old friends at Squarespace, which is probably the best way you can make your own website, especially if you're running a business, because Squarespace payments is the easiest way to manage your payments in one place.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
That's right. Squarespace also makes it really easy to sell access to content on the website that you build, like online courses, blogs, videos, and memberships.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
S-Y-Y-Y-Y-S-K-S-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K Okay, so people have basically always said that this was a bad idea. There was a writer in Gentleman's Magazine in 1785 that said it was perhaps more destructive to mankind than the plague itself, this advice, which is definitely overstating things. But – People these days say, no, that's not good advice.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
That's right. Call it old wives tale edition because this is about feeding a cold and starving a fever, which is the old wives tale that when you have a cold, you should, and originally started out as stuff a cold, like eat as much as you can. And then if you have a fever, you should try and not eat very much at all.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
First of all, if you have a cold, you may not want to eat very much. You may not be very hungry. So, like, for God's sake, don't just make someone stuff themselves full just because they're sick with a cold. It's not going to do anything for you.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Yeah, if your metabolism is kicking in in a substantial way, it's going to, you know, if you're just laying around in bed, that'll make you eat up more of your calories and nutrients than you that you have in your body. So you're going to want as much as you can. So if you're hungry, cold, fever or whatever, by God, eat something or drink something.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
You definitely need to stay hydrated, even if you're not hungry. There are plenty of ways to get, you know, nutrients and liquid into you.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Yeah. Pretty neat. Fevers are no fun, but I love when I'm sick and the fever happens, I'm like, okay, this is my body doing its thing, so I feel good about it.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Exactly. It didn't feel great, but there's no better feeling than like breaking that fever, you know?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Yeah, that same article from Gentleman's Magazine from way back when suggested some other things of the time. Barley water, which sounds not too bad. Small beer. You ever seen those little baby beers that are like eight ounces or whatever?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Well, I don't know, but that makes sense.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
We called, me and my friends, Eddie and Allison, called those tiny beers queets. I don't know. I think Allison made up the word, and it just kind of stuck. And the fun thing about drinking those is you look like Andre the Giant.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
What else? Apple water, linseed tea, toast in water. That may be the toast in water. Remember that?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
That's right. They starved. Well, I guess fasted. Same thing. Sure. For both groups for 24 hours. And then the cold feeders, they gave a meal replacement drink. So not hot food in this case. And so after they had this sustenance, I guess, their blood levels of an immune protein called interferon gamma increased. Went really, really sky high. Average increase of 450 percent.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
And interferon plays a role in regulating our response to infections in our immune system. So you would think like, hey, eating is like exactly what you want to do.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Yeah, by an average of almost 400 percent compared to the 450 for the other. And I think there was one patient whose fasting levels rose more than 1100 percent.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
And this is also an important part of our immune response, but it's different kinds of immune responses. So if you're thinking like – Well, hey, if I starve myself, then this one's going to go up. You don't know which cells you need. So it's not sort of a roulette game you should try and play by starving yourself.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Yeah, because what you want is a little bit of both and ideally more of both, but not a whole lot of one and a lot less of the other.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Yeah, I'm not sure about this one. He said the most exquisitely slender diet you should have when the disease is very sharp. So I'm not quite sure what disease he's talking about there. So I'm not sure if that counts.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
Can you believe that? I mean, they're venomous, they're giant, and they are invading, but come on.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
Yeah, for sure. So the scientific name of these beautiful, beautiful spiders are Nephila clavata. And they are from East Asia. And they got over here like a lot of things get over here, which is in like shipping containers and stuff. A lot of times it's like lumber. That's how you get a lot of insects coming in.
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Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
And they came over from East Asia and really made a home here in the southeast since I think 2013 is when they first spotted them in Georgia.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
Well, you're also seeing a lot of them now because the adults come out and spin their webs in August, September, October.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
Yeah, I mean, they're big, they're orb weavers, so they're going to weave those big, beautiful webs that, I mean, their webs can be 10 feet wide. The one I almost walked into the other day, like face first, was probably about four feet wide and strung between two outdoor umbrellas that were not close to each other. So I don't know if that part counts as the width or not.
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Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
If that does, it was more like eight feet wide. But if you've seen these things and you said like, oh, that's just a garden spider. We have those when I was growing up. What are you talking about, guys? Not the same spider. The garden spider looks a lot like it, but there are some differences because they're, well, different spiders. Garden spiders, the females are bigger than the males.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
And as far as the markings go, the garden spiders have yellow and black basically only. And the Joros have yellow and dark blue with a little bit of red on their belly.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
Um, I mean, I've walked through some some spider webs in my day. Like you do that a lot when you're like backup backpacking because you don't see him on the trail. So that happens a lot. And here that like I walked through one earlier just kind of on my arms. But it wasn't, you know, the nightmare scene where it's you realize it three inches from the spider being on your face kind of thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
That is. Is that a good time for a break? I think so. All right. We'll take a break and we'll be right back after I go take a quick shower.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
That's right. And if you think, you know, how far north are they going to get right now? And I read an article, I think, from June 24 that said West Virginia is about as far north as they've gone so far, except for a satellite population in Baltimore. So they, I guess, got on a container, went to Baltimore, and were like, this isn't so bad.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
I think one of the things we didn't mention that, you know, since they're so native to Georgia especially, or not native, I guess, but invaded in Georgia first, the University of Georgia has done a lot of studying on them. And they found that it turns out these guys can live in a lot colder weather than they previously thought they could. So they'll be to you soon, New Jersey, New York, and beyond.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
You know, I just saw a Joro spider today eating, either eating a bee or fighting a bee. I don't know what was going on, but it was tangling with a bee.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
I think a lot of people have that reaction. There's something. And not only that, but the phrase, take a lover, it's just like. Yes. It's so gross to me.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
Oh, goodness me. You need some of that. Eye bleach. Studio 54 joke.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
Oh, goodness. How did this get so dirty all of a sudden? All right. So they live close to each other. The males are trying to get the attention. They may float on little cobwebby type things and just be like, hey, look over here. And the reason they don't just jump up in a web and say, let's get this thing over with. is because the female will probably kill the male and eat it.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
So they're walking a very fine line trying to get some attention without being eaten. So the University of Georgia professor said, you know, a lot of times, like while the female is eating something, they might just walk up and say, hey, are you enjoying that? What do you think of me?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
But, my friend, should people be killing these things because they're invasive?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
No. I think they're basically saying, hey, there's plenty of stink bugs, so that's fine. It's not like they're killing off the honeybees. And if they do bite you, you might get a little local reaction, but it's not the kind of venom that's going to do any kind of harm to you, really.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
You should reach into all the hidey holes with those things on.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah. No, I just feel like I'm the one that's like 45 minutes and you're like, no, let's make it three hours.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
That's right. In this anecdote that he sort of preached around as if it were real, he said, then I did this. It worked so great. Schmidt was so happy and rolling in dough.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
I got all of his coworkers to jump aboard because I showed them what a Mr. Big Boy pants look like. And everybody wanted big boy pants. And so everybody, as long as you just do what your boss says, then you're going to make more dough. And forget the fact that I'm choosing, you know, the very strongest workers to set the standard for everyone. And then in 1911, a U.S.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
House committee said, yeah, but we can't just forget that because you can't just pick the strongest worker and say that's the standard for everyone. And so he got into a bit of a tit for tat in that process. committee meeting, I guess, with Chairman William Balshop Wilson. And he said, you know, what about if you don't have big boy pants men on your staff and like or all big boy pants men?
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And he said, well, it has no place for a bird that can sing, but won't. And he kind of got smacked down for that because he was just lifting lines out of books that he had written.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
That's right. The long and short with Bethlehem Steel, at least, was that they fired him. They quit the Taylorism methods that he had brought in. And he said, all right, pay me $100,000 and we'll call it even. Yeah. Which is about three and a half million bucks today. And that's probably a good time for a break, eh? Agreed. All right.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
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Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Big thanks to Livia because she pushed out another banger here. Thanks in part by this great, great article in The New Yorker from Jill Lepore, who Livia calls a genius. Absolute genius, in fact, is a quote.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, for sure. And two of their kids wrote that book in 1948. And, you know, it was fun. It's a classic for a reason. They remade it for a reason. For sure. To make money. Frank was a bricklayer in his earlier life, and he was one of these people that thought, including too, but not limited to cat skinning, that there was one best way to do any task.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And so he was one of those guys where he was like, hey, that scaffold for laying bricks is kind of great. But what if there was a shelf on the scaffold for those bricks and mortar? You don't got to bend over and pick that stuff up. And what if you had some really low paid laborers that would stack the bricks on the frames for them positioned in the right direction?
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
So they don't even have to turn the bricks like really drilling down on these efficiencies.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Do you think when they met Taylor initially, they were just like, oh, my God, you're into efficiency and so are we. And Taylor said, I think you mean a fish. And they just like fainted.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, Thurbligs. So they were also big into Rich Hall and Sniglets. Not to date myself, but yeah, they made up a word and they said, any action you can take is a Thurblig. And we want to get rid of as many Thurbligs as possible to make efficiency the most, to maximize it as much as one possibly can.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Great article anyway. I think the setup that Livia gave is kind of worthy of going over a little bit, because when you look at the, you know, 1900 through the 1920s and 30s, you looked at an America that was really changing in that these huge industrial revolution born industries were all of a sudden like, hey, now we're.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah. I mean, Taylor, you kind of talked about a little bit early on, but he did think it was a win-win. He was like, this is great because it'll run more efficiently and it'll trickle down, essentially.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
They didn't call it that yet, but that's sort of the same notion that it'll just trickle down to the worker, all this efficiency, and they'll get better wages and stuff will be cheaper and stuff like that. Management will never, ever take advantage of that and make you work harder just to increase profits. Exactly. And of course, that's exactly what happened in every case. But Um, I don't know.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Like, I'm kind of wondering about Taylor's heart and like what was in there, you know?
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
I don't know. I think he's one of those guys that was so brain obsessed on efficiency. I don't know that he had like, I don't know if he thought that part through such that he was like some evil person set out to exploit a worker.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
I wonder if he might have been in an age where there weren't certain diagnoses available for what he, you know, may have had going on.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
It'll be interesting. You mean like there's no perfect person and everyone has an issue that they're dealing with?
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I don't know. I think sometimes that thing empowers people.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
I'll tell you all fair. Okay. Ironically, it was a Supreme Court justice who we've talked about, I feel like, quite a bit on this show, who kind of bumped Taylor up to celebrity status. Yeah. How did we pronounce his name the first 25 times we said it? It's Brandeis. Okay, that sounds right.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Now we're kind of corporations and now we have middle managers and CEOs and things. It's a little different than it used to be.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
What does it do with that? Ice brewed? What even was that?
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Oh, okay. All right. Anyway, back to 1910. Brandeis, Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice, called a meeting with the Gilbreths. And the Taylorites, Taylor couldn't come, but he sent his representatives and said, I want to talk about what I'm calling scientific management. And I am concerned because I see what's happening with big business. And I think it's getting out of hand.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
I want to break up these monopolies. And I think the consumer and the worker should be served. And I think I called one couple here who's probably interested in that and another group of people who sounds like they probably aren't.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And so we need to start kind of really thinking about how to squeeze every dime out of this company we can and make these workers. We'll call it efficiency. But between us, let's say let's call it working them to the bone until they're near exhaustion so we can maximize profits.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, and there was a lot of press coverage on this, and this is really what pushed Taylor over the edge as far as becoming kind of famous for what he was doing. And that is the year – I'm sorry, the next year is when he put out The Principles of Scientific Management, which was –
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Probably easily the biggest business book, maybe at the 20th century, but at least the first half of the 20th century.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
That's right. And one thing about Taylorism that we would learn soon enough, and I guess Gilbreathism, did they even call it that?
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Well, I'm going to call it that. Gilbreathism was that it didn't have to be kept to the workforce because Lillian Gilbreath found herself alone for the last 48 years of her life when Frank died of a heart attack at the age of 55 in 1924. And she said, all right, Don't tell anybody. I'm no homemaker myself. Not into it at all. I don't even do the cooking in my house.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
But I think I can shift these efficiency ideas to the house and make the home place a more efficient workplace for getting everything done from like vacuuming to baking biscuits.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, and eventually you could even find Taylorism in public schools. And it's interesting to think of it this way. There was a Massachusetts superintendent who told the National Education Association that educators needed to analyze the returns of their investment rationally. We ought to purchase no more Greek instruction at the rate of 5.9 pupil recitations for a dollar.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
The price must go down or we shall invest in something else. And it sounds silly, but I get that. It just sounds like a funny way to talk about it. Right. But it's basically like we need to invest in these kids the things that really matter and not necessarily reciting a Greek poem or something like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Shop, yeah. Yeah. I had shop. We didn't have auto shop, though. Did you guys have that?
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
It felt like something that was in generations previous to us. We just had shop class where you made lamps and stuff like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
That's right. Like your secret holiday helper, DoorDash has you covered on gifts, groceries, and dinner for tonight. DoorDash makes it so easy, you may even feel a little guilty. But, you know, no one needs to know your pie was really store-bought or that that thoughtful gift arrived just minutes before your guests did.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
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Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Okay, we're back. By the way, I think the kitchen triangle is probably the fridge and not the dishwasher would be my guess.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Thank you. I bet you're right, though. I bet it's sink, stove, oven, and fridge would be my guess.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
All right, so we're going to talk a little bit about just sort of what did Taylorism accomplish ultimately. There is a lot of irony in that, you know, a lot of it was so scientific supposedly, but a lot of the stuff was made up or just sort of, you know. Yeah. Made up or kind of a sham. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
This wasn't new stuff like timing people on tasks and teaching people to do more specific things had been around for a long time. But one of the effects of Taylorism is definitely like. You know, de-skilling a worker, making them feel and not that working is all about emotions, but you don't want to make your employee feel like a robot that can be replaced by a robot.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
You want to give them a little bit of agency, ideally, in a job and not just say, move your body this way, move your hand that way, punch that thing and then return back to position one.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah. Another effect. I mean, I guess we've kind of said it in several different ways from the beginning. But, you know, the idea that the Gilbreths had that there would be a happiness quotient involved and where you could do work more efficiently so you could just have more time and better wages to spend with your family.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
That's right. And a lot of the work being done on efficiency can be laid at the feet of a person and then some other people. But initially, at least this guy that you mentioned, Frederick Winslow Taylor, who was from Philadelphia, born in 1856, had an attorney father, an abolitionist mother, a very smart guy and was all set to take Harvard by storm before his eyesight started to fail. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
It just, you know, it didn't work out that way, even though the whole idea of Taylorism and it's at its base isn't. inherently anti-worker, it sort of ends up being that way when the profits are being spread around the top tier and all they want is more and more of those profits.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, for sure. I mean, probably the most, you know, the biggest contribution was it just raised the awareness and an obsession with productivity and productivity is great. It's not like that's a bad thing. But again, like when you're dealing with human beings to feel like a cog and to feel completely replaceable.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
There's no way like you're not serving your own purpose as a as a business owner because you're not going to have good and happy employees ultimately and replacing employee after employee, even if you're just training them to put the oven door on. That's still an inefficiency, you know.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, for sure. And it created the management consultant industry. I think we should do one on that. I don't I'm sure you remember. And I won't be very specific here, but because we've been owned by a lot of companies over the years. But one of one time, one of the companies that just hired a dude that came in and we're like, who's this guy?
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
After that got better, he may not have gone to Harvard, but he was still a really smart guy and ended up studying engineering at night and became a chief engineer for the Enterprise Hydraulic Works in Philly and then Midvale Steel Company.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And I can't remember someone who knows how these things work took us aside and they were like, he's, I guess, I don't know if he was a management consultant or what his official job was, but they're like, his job is to come in here and fire people and rip this place apart and then probably get a nice exit and move on to another job where he'll do that exact same thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
I know Jerry is like screaming his name off air right now.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
That wouldn't have worked with the other guy that I mentioned. He was unflappable.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
This is just a nice thank you. Hey, guys. Heartfelt thank you. Started listening in 2012, and although my time spent listening to podcasts has fluctuated, yours has been one of the constants.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Started listening to keep my mind occupied when I had hours of mundane tasks in the lab where I worked after college, and I've continued to listen through a career change, relationship changes, getting my first dog, Luna. He sent a picture of Luna this week. And becoming a homeowner. I'm listening still as I'm planning a second career change and going through a little lonelier stretch of my life.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And your podcast has kept me laughing and feeling connected to the world through challenging times. And I sometimes feel like there isn't the right combination of words to express my gratitude completely.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
I feel like you're right. Some of my favorite moments in recent shows have been Chuck's throwaway line about a fairy hoax confession happening at a Men Without Hats concert. I got Josh chuckled not once, twice, but three times.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And in the 15th annual SYSK Halloween Spooktacular, the curious sound like laughter, yet not laughter that Josh made, which sounded like it had Chuck literally crying with laughter, which is absolutely true. That may be the... Most I've ever laughed at something that you did. I think it is, man.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
I hope that you know for some of your listeners, your podcast has been as meaningful to us as The Simpsons or Peanuts may have been to you.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Stanley knows how to drive it home. He signs it all the best. Stanley, a hayseed.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, I think this is a certain kind of brain because I am on that spectrum a little bit in trying to weed out inefficiencies with certain things. But I'm on the side of the spectrum that is also it comes from laziness. So I'll try and do that because I'm inherently kind of lazy, I think. So I'm like, I look for ways to cut corners to still get the job done.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And I've had people compliment me in the old days, like on film sets. Like, hey, you know, I see what you're doing there and you're the kid I would hire twice. Whereas the guy next to you who's just like, no, man, let's just make eight trips and just hump it and do it.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
He's like, I know he thinks he's getting it done just the old fashioned way. He's like, but you're the guy we would hire a second time.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
But that was always my aim. But it's interesting that, you know, I had that a little bit in my brain. But not like this guy did. Like he was obsessed with efficiencies such that he thought and he's kind of right in some ways that one of the biggest threats to getting something done in a productive, efficient way was slacking off and what he called systematic soldiering.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah. And to be clear, because I think it seems like I might have been mischaracterized here. The film set thing, I was I wasn't like, let's just do the minimum. I was I was in a situation in this specific incident where I was trying to do a little extra work by getting a cart loaded rather than just making a ton of trips. And the guys and he was like, no, don't mess with getting that card out.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Let's just hump all this stuff back and forth. Right. And they were like, hey, guys, or to me, hey, guy. And I said, my name's Chuck.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And they said, hey, Chuck, you're the guy I would hire twice because you were taking the time to do it more efficiently. Not like, hey, I admire like the lazy side of you. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Right. But it was lazy and that I didn't want to do all those trips. That's where it initially sprang from was I don't want to have to tote all that stuff eight times. Does that make sense?
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, but you only do that if you've got a little laziness in you.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Uh, well, I'm going to look it up. Go ahead. We'll do a rare, uh, a rare look. Okay.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Oh, well, no, that doesn't make any sense either. Like soldiering on. Right. Persevering. Yeah, I don't, doesn't make any sense to me officially as well.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
That's right. So he was at Midvale and he sort of started breaking down the operations of the jobs that they had there at Midvale. And he was like, you know, there are some elementary operations that happen here. So we're going to form an estimating department where we're going to sit around and do time studies, which he got from class at Phillips Exeter.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And we're going to time workers doing all these little small tasks. We're going to add that up to the to the whole. And kind of average it out and say, hey, you should be able to do this in that amount of time. And we'll adjust accordingly. We'll incentivize accordingly. And he said, and you know what else? This is now a new career. I'm going to be a consulting engineer in management.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And I'm going to charge you to tell you how bad you're doing things.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah. And you know what? We should we should give a good example here, because what he was really most or not most well known for, but something he became very well known for was his work at Bethlehem Steel.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And he started looking at the process of loading iron onto rail cars, pig iron, and said, all right, we need to figure out how much of this stuff is reasonable for one of these men to load onto a rail car. The average right now is 12 and a half tons a day. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to get 10 large, powerful Hungarian workers to and say, hey, load as much as you can, as fast as you can.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
16 and a half tons is your goal. And they did that in 14 minutes, whereas 12 and a half tons was the daily rate for their average worker. So that's 71 tons in a 10-hour day. He rounds it up to 75 and then said, yeah, but you know what? People get tired and they need breaks. So let's whack off 40% of that.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And we'll just call it even at 47.5 tons per day, which is four times as much as you've usually been doing. That's the new expectation.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
All right. So when this happened, some people said, I ain't doing this. They quit. They got fired. Some people tried and couldn't do it. Some people were so tired from trying to load that much or that they couldn't come back the next day. And things got really heated. He needed he hired armed guards to walk him home at night. Taylor did because he was so worried.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And then he said, all right, I'm going to create a new fake scenario. And this is something that I've seen businesses do that I hate when they create like, you know, here's our worker, Todd. And Todd, you know, and it's all just made up BS. And that's what he did with Schmidt.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Was that me or Jerry? That was Jerry. Okay. I'm usually the timekeeper.