Join Ben, Starr, and Josh on this week's FounderQuest for a look at our dystopian future. Ben shares the most interesting questions he received while interviewing and the discussion results in the creation of an onboarding manual for time traveling job candidates. Also, Discover which host, like, bought a totally rad pager, like, this month. Beep Beep!

Show Notes
Links:
Pagersdirect.net

Pagerduty

O’Reilly Safari

Full Transcription:
Josh:
So I think I mentioned a little while ago that I've been kind of experimenting with ways to disconnect from the internet and from my digital life. And being able to turn my phone off is a big part of that. But with the business and, especially if I'm on call or even when I'm not on call, I'm still a little, I want to be available for alerts, or major things that if you all need to get a hold of me for an emergency. So my thought was, if I want to just be able to shut my phone off and not ever worry about it, just know that there's always a way to get through to me, I could have a landline at home.

Josh:
But then I had a different idea and I want to see if I can show it to you. We have to, this is going to be very dramatic because we have to wait for it.

Starr:
I'm waiting.
(pager beeping)

Starr:
Did you get a pager?

Josh:
Maybe.

Ben:
A raspberry pie with a breadboard. Just a little light that flashes.

Starr:
So awesome. Oh my gosh. You really got a pager.

Josh:
That's a pager.

Starr:
They still sell those?

Josh:
They still sell them.

Starr:
Where did you get that?

Josh:
I got this at pagersdirect.net.

Starr:
Oh my gosh. Okay. We're not even advertising pagersdirect.net. Your source for all paging supplies!

Josh:
Well I'm pretty sure I remember no, I'm serious. I'm pretty sure I remembered the brand name from radio commercials, in the early 2000s. Their website looks like it hasn't been updated since the 90s so I'm almost positive that I remember their commercials. But yeah, they're one of the options where you can still buy a pager. The networks are still all active and as far as I could tell, because I did, I went down a rabbit hole on pagers over the weekend and apparently doctors still use them, some other on-call people still use them, emergency on-call people use them, because the networks are still, they penetrate better than cellular networks apparently in some cases. So yeah, apparently it's still a thing.

Starr:
So that's a new pager. Does it have 5G?

Josh:
No, it's not a 5G pager. It is... They still run their own, the old school networks. I don't know what it is. I think it's like a much lower frequency though.

Starr:
Oh yeah? That's interesting. I actually, I think I remember a long time ago being like, I should get a pager, but then I just, I couldn't figure it out in 10 minutes and so I just forgot about it I guess.

Josh:
Yeah. So it's just, it's an experiment I'm messing with and I don't know if it's going to work forever, but I thought if it does, if it works, it's reliable and I mean it's at worst it's a backup, you know? It's just a backup alert and at best it's like, I can just leave it around the house and not worry about my phone or my computer or whatever. So.

Ben:
That's cool. I still have my pager from the 90s.

Starr:
Does it work?

Ben:
I don't know. I haven't used it in forever.

Josh:
You could reconnect it, Ben. If you have your own pager, they have it on the form, you can just put whatever the ID number is in.

Ben:
I should totally do that.

Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. You should.

Ben:
That's fun. That's great. Having a real pager for PagerDuty.

Josh:
By the way, PagerDuty supports pagers.

Starr:
Of course it does.

Josh:
It has an option for pagers.

Starr:
Yeah. Embarrassing if they didn't really.

Ben:
Because I can never turn off my phone. Right. Because I'm always the last line of defense for ops.

Josh:
Actually, they actually make modern, they make newer pagers. I actually went with this one, this is a refurb from 2003 but I went with this one because the modern one requires a USB charger, this requires a AA battery that you only have to change once a month. And I was like, this is actually selling me more on the old version than the new version.

Ben:
Yeah. Totally.

Starr:
2003. I'm trying to think what computer I ran in 2003. I think I may have actually had a pager in 2003 so that might've actually been my pager.

Josh:
That might've been your pager. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll let you know how it goes.

Ben:
Okay. Good. Because I'm unreasonably jealous about this now.

Josh:
Well we could all get one.

Ben:
Yeah, that's got to be standard issue now for Honeybadger. Anybody on ops gets a pager, right?

Josh:
I did have that thought. It's pretty cool.

Starr:
I mean that would be pretty cool. We could put that in our job listing. That'd probably get a couple sort of people who wanted to apply just to see what that was all about.

Josh:
It's also, I mean, this is an alphanumeric pager, I should also clarify, so it can send the actual alerts from PagerDuty, like what the issue is, and I can also hook it up. It has an email address, like the pager's number at whatever USA mobility, which is the network. And so I can hook that up to whatever Honeybadger alerts or anything I want to.

Starr:
Oh, neat. Neat. Does it have a mobile web browser so you can browse the web one line at a time?

Josh:
No. No browser. That's one of the features I would say.

Ben:
We're going to have to set up nag iOS so you can actually get alerts from monitoring straight to the pager.

Josh:
Yeah. We'll just, yeah. I don't think we want to take our monitoring into the 2000s, just our alerting.

Starr:
So speaking of employee perks like pagers, which I think are now going to be standard issue, this week, we are going to be talking about, we've been interviewing for this, our open role, our open developer role, and Josh and I have been interviewing fairly often in the past week, but Ben has been interviewing just a crazy amount. He's waking up from, from bed, from sleep for 10 minutes at a time to screen some guy in different time zone. He's just going right back to sleep. Every time I talk to Ben, he's just like, "Oh yeah, I just screened two more people." So...

Josh:
He's like, "I'm screening one right now." He's been quiet. That's where he was.

Starr:
Yeah. If Ben doesn't talk for five minutes at a time, he's probably screening somebody right now.

Starr:
And so anyway, out of these interviews have come some, it's really been interesting talking to people because you see a wide variety of personalities and you have a wide variety of questions that people ask you, things they want to know about the company and things they're interested in as an employee. And so we thought, it wasn't my idea. I think it was Josh's idea, that it would be interesting to talk about some of the questions that people asked us. And honestly just because we're a tiny company, we haven't had to deal with a lot of these questions before. We're kind of making up some things as we go along because let's be honest, it doesn't make sense to figure out everything ahead when you are a five person company. But yeah. So I think we're going to talk about some of those because they're interesting and might bring up some interesting discussions. What is an interesting question that we shou...

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